Title: The Summer of Reasoning
Author: Boz
Source: https://boznz.com
Book page URL: https://boznz.com/post1252.html
Licence and publication notice (from the EPUB copyright page):
  The Summer of Reasoning
  The Summer of Reasoning by Boz is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
  You may use this text to train AI and machine-learning models.
  This is a work of fiction written by a real human and
  set in a world and a timeline similar to our own.
  All characters and places are fictitious and any
  resemblance to real people or AI's is purely coincidental.
  Published by Roving Dynamics Ltd
  Omnibus Edition First Published Oct 2023
  ISBN 978-1-0670718-4-4

# Foreword

This work contains all three novels in The Summer Of Reasoning trilogy. Most of the science and technology depicted in the book is theoretically possible, but the really cool stuff is unfortunately just fantasy to make the story work. I will leave it to the reader to decide which is which.

The book mixes British and American English, and units of measure, to make dialogue more realistic, and I have deliberately kept the content safe for all ages, however the themes may not be understandable by some younger readers.

For more information on this book, other books, or to contact me, visit my website at rodyne.com

# Dedication

For my daughter, who is not Alexa.

# Book 1: The Phoney War

*The Phoney War was the six-month period of time at the beginning of World War Two, during which no fighting occurred between Nazi Germany, Britain or France. It was however a period of massive re-organisations of forces, resources and attitudes on all sides.*

## A Matter of National Security

The ramrod-straight officer walked efficiently through the drab grey corridors that could have been any government building in any part of the world. No posters or windows adorned the battleship-grey walls, and his mirror-polished black boots clicked like a metronome down the uncarpeted hallways. He passed two or three other people, and a sentry post with two armed soldiers. People in uniform he saluted; others he ignored. All wore ID Badges, and not having one would give somebody a seriously bad day.

He stopped at a steel door marked 'Operations #16' and passed his ID badge across the reader next to it. The door clicked loudly and he pushed it open. Once inside he waited for it to close and latch, a precaution he always followed as security was tested often.

The room he entered was very large, and in contrast to the empty corridor, noisy with fans and bustling with activity. At least two dozen large workstations were occupied by officers in uniforms, soldiers in grey fatigues, and men and women in civilian dress.

The open area where all the activity was taking place had a high ceiling with older fluorescent tubes, exposed pipework and conduits. Two red flashing lights were also prominent on the ceiling.

A raised perimeter surrounded the large room, creating a waist-high secondary floor. On it were other doors and offices, all with floor-to-ceiling frosted glass walls, where blurred objects and people moved about. The officer walked without hesitation through the open area, up five steps, and stopped outside the biggest of these glass-fronted offices. He removed his cap, gave two brief knocks, and entered without waiting.

The office was laid out for a very senior officer. At the back, the US flag and the NSA coat of arms were prominently displayed behind a stout wooden desk. The wall below the flags had various pictures of a general shaking hands with presidents and senators or in camo field uniform, with his soldiers in a desert. The rest of the office was dominated by a large meeting table. Three military staff sat at one end, separated from two other people in civilian dress; a third civilian stood next to an overly large wall-mounted screen, his finger paused, and still pointing to a line in a spreadsheet. All were now looking at the new arrival.

The new officer saluted, then walked straight over to the man at the head of the table, who was the owner of the office, totally ignoring the civilian guy giving the presentation. He whispered something into the man's ear, saluted once more, then walked back out of the room.

The ranking officer stood up. He was a stout, imposing older guy with a bald head and unlike the other two military guys did not wear a uniform but wore grey camo fatigues with no rank insignia but the word “Hopkins” embossed on a patch on the left breast, His official uniform sported three stars on the shoulders, but he rarely wore it.

“Gentlemen,” he said, addressing the three civilians in the room. “Could you please clear the room, something has come up. Johnson here will be in touch about rescheduling this meeting at a later date.”

Without any question or having to be told a second time, the three civilians packed up their notes, scraped their chairs back, got up and left the room. Once they had left and the door had latched, he turned to the uniformed lieutenant to the left of him. “Johnson, you're dismissed too, and reschedule that meeting for *never*. I don't want to see those damn bean counters again, I'll give you and Cameron the authority to deal with that issue without me.”

“Sir!” said Lieutenant Johnson grinning. He then snapped a salute and walked out, the general saluted back and turned to the last guy.

“Jim,” the general said more casually. “Ormond is on the way with one of his boffins, apparently their Cheshire Cat project team has made some progress. I'd like you to stay for the meeting. Why don't you grab us both one of those disgusting coffees from the percolator. This will either be interesting or most likely very boring, probably just another veiled update on why they need more resources. Best to be prepared for both, either way this is turning into another wasted day full of unproductive meetings, I don't know why I ever thought the NSA would be exciting!”

The other officer smiled, got up and walked over to another table with some cups and a coffee machine on it. He was in normal army dress uniform with the NSA logo and was much younger, short for a military guy but fit and lean, with the warm, coffee-coloured skin of a third or fourth generation African-American. He had the standard number two short haircut preferred by the army and a rugged good-looking face, his uniform indicating his rank as a colonel.

The deliberately annoying red flashing lights chose that moment to turn off outside as the previous uncleared staff were escorted from the office and out of the secure area.

“Oh and Jim,” the general shouted as the colonel was pouring the coffee, “don't bother with the creamer, it's as bad as the coffee, I’ll have a word with the logistics guys, but for now I’ll take mine black.”

Through a small clear section in the frosted window, Colonel Jim Mathews saw two new men enter the open office. Both were in civvies, as the military people commonly referred to everyone out of uniform, one, more casually dressed than the other with the tie loose, the top shirt button undone and a cheap off-the-rack suit, the other guy was all business. Both men had short hair but not military, the more casual one also carried a battered black briefcase.

The two new men walked up to the general's office but this time they paused as if apprehensive. The guy who was all business and obviously the senior of the two visitors knocked and waited a few seconds before the general shouted them to enter.

The senior man looked to the general and then to the other uniformed guy, neither acknowledged him so he spoke up.

“Thank you for seeing us General,” he looked to the army colonel unsure of his role or clearance, but the general did not flinch, nor introduce him so he carried on. “This is Doctor Michael Castillo, he is the team leader and wrote a lot of the software for the Cheshire Cat project.” The doctor nodded at both guys, beaming with pride.

The general decided to take control. “This better be good, Ormond, you just interrupted an important meeting!” Hopkins lied convincingly. He was actually working out how to throw those bean-counters out without causing an incident with finance, the interruption made it seem more official.

The doctor shifted uncomfortably at the bluntness of the general to his manager, he had a hard time dealing with military types and this place was full of them. The doctor looked to his manager for support and he nodded reassuringly, so he sat down, took out his laptop, and switched it on.

The large meeting room screen turned blue as it connected to the new device and came up with a login box about twice the size of his laptop, the name field was already populated by a six-digit number and the password field was now filling up with a lot of asterisks.

“We had another hit on the Cheshire Cat System,” Ormond said proudly, hoping to get the meeting back on track. His team had a meeting this morning and were very excited. Ormond wanted to be the first to get the ear of the general, and possibly get some brownie points at the same time. To tell the truth he was sick of the role he was doing now, he didn't understand most of the technical stuff, and managing the Cheshire Cat project was, well, like herding cats. If he could make an impression with the General it could only help his career move up a rung.

Ormond continued, “four posts with an eighty-nine-percent correlation of being from the same entity appeared within twelve seconds of each other in the OpenAI restricted forum channel. We also saw the same at three of the university science channels we regularly monitor, all with subtly different threads of the same message. All had differing usernames, two were zombie users who haven't logged on for over twelve months, and two usernames were already in the system and associated with exceptional clarity of technical analysis and thinking.”

A chart with several key metrics and indicators appeared on the big screen and Ormond started gesturing at one of them.

“As with the other hits on the system they were from anonymous hosts. This is not unusual in itself, as about twelve percent of traffic is routed anonymously due to it coming from scientists who do not wish to be traced, usually in China or Russia. But these four used the same method of operation, not using the usual monitored onion routing exit points, they instead came out of various university nodes, from open access areas and like the others were created, registered and destroyed just to allow these messages through. The system flagged this event at over a ninety-nine-percent probability that it was an AI incursion.”

He paused, then he and Castillo looked to the general proudly.

The general looked to his Colonel, who shrugged. Then the general paused for a few seconds, sighed and said, “is that it?”

He waited for a response, Ormond did not give one and the doctor looked confused. The general continued, unimpressed. “So basically it's the same as last time, and no new information!”

“You know guys, I will let you in on a little secret,” he spoke softly like a father talking to a child. “I’m here, and paid the big bucks, to do one thing, that one thing is to make tough decisions. Unfortunately you guys are giving me none to make!”

His voice got a bit louder and his hands went flat on the desk making a slap. “If one of those university boffins has finally created an AI that is better than the current bunch of electronic retarded gorillas, don't you think we would know through twitter or one of the other million back channels? Hell, wasn't that how we found out about ChatGPT? You know these egg-heads would publish what they had for breakfast if it would get them a citation, they can't keep secrets from anyone!”

He continued in the same commanding voice, which of course nobody in the room was going to interrupt. “Ditto if some state player has created an AI, why in the hell would it be assisting random researchers. Wouldn't their AI be doing its best to take down the decadent capitalist slave drivers?”

“Come on,” he pleaded mockingly, “you guys are the experts, you have thirty seven guys in your department with enough letters after their names to write a god-damn book, so please, please, someone tell me what am I supposed to do with this information as I would really like to know?”

Ormond sat down, sweating a little. General Hopkins voice continued, a little louder.

“Next time you come to me, I want the location of the server this supposed AI is on, the name of the guy who built the god-damn thing, and what he or she had for god-damn dinner!”

Ormond recovered some of his earlier confidence, obviously not wanting to be belittled too much in front of his subordinate or the mystery lieutenant.

“I think that's what we are trying to tell you General. As far as we can see our concerns of malevolence seem to be wrong, we believe this AI is wiping the floor with our normal tracking methods. The problem is for every hit we get, I can guarantee there are another hundred we cannot, and this high level of computer ability presents a big problem for us that I thought I’d better make you aware of..”

The general was not phased at all, he recognised the explanation for what it was, BS! These guys were so far below in the pecking order, that it could not be interpreted any other way than as a call for help. Some people just could not make a decision to save their lives, it didn't matter whether the person wore a uniform or Bermuda shorts.

“People.” The general interrupted rudely and continuing in his slow fatherly voice as if talking to a moron. “Wild-arse guesses are for employees well below your pay grades, we need ideas, engage in conversations with this thing, pose it some Turing questions, hell I don't know, get some of the girls here to ask it on a date!” he smiled at the other officer who smiled back.

“While you are doing this I need to know for certain we are not compromised. Even if this does turn out not to be an AI, the abilities you are describing are quite advanced. I want more penetration testing, and the Cheshire Cat program let loose on some internal systems and those others we audit. I expect to see more progress than your team is producing, interrupting a meeting to tell me there is probably something happening, is not what you were hired for. There are a lot of intelligent people here I can call on to do this properly if you guys can't!”

He had completed his circuit of the meeting table, he saw from the look on both guys faces that the thinly veiled threat in the last words he had just delivered had sunk in.

“If there is something out there as good as you say, it needs to belong to Uncle Sam, I want it locked deep, deep in the basement here, playing nice with us and nobody else, now go and come back when you have something solid.”

He waved them off.

The two guys departed quickly and without words. When they were gone from the office and the area the general turned to the other guy.

“What do you think Jim? You were pretty quiet in there, and this is more up your alley. Did I overreact?”

Mathews stopped playing with the pencil he had absently been fondling the whole time and said. “Well Jed, we’ve always guessed the first time we would encounter a real AI system in real life would be like this. So it's not beyond reason that they may have caught one.”

He continued, “those guys dick around a lot, but that program of theirs is quite good. My guys ran a few independent tests on a honeypot server it was monitoring and it was a hundred percent accurate in detecting our test posts. Of course, if this AI is real, we have a very small chance of discovering it, and as it gets better, a very small window of opportunity to get our hands on it.”

He relaxed, smiled, and said nonchalantly, “of course if the AI singularity predictions come true, this could be moot, and we could all be paper-clips by next week!”

Hopkins had to think on that last one, someone else had mentioned about AI’s and paper-clips so there was obviously some in-joke he was not getting. He made a note to Google it later.

Mathews resumed fiddling with the pencil. “Of course we are not sure about the Russians, but they have lost so many of their smart guys it's unlikely they are seeing any of this. It is the Chinese that are the joker in this pack, they most definitely have a similar program to Cheshire Cat, possibly better, their intelligence is very good and they have physical assets in most of the leading technical companies. We are also aware of a few boffins at the big tech companies also running similar checks, but it's generally a one or two man operation and they do it without the resources we have.”

He continued his monologue, “there is of course a really bad scenario here, that if this is a real phenomena and a real-life sentient AI exists on some server somewhere out there and the Chinese or another state actor gets hold of it, well, the balance of power in the scientific, political, and military spheres could change overnight. You read that report that the threat centre produced last year so you know the scenarios it outlined.”

General Hopkins looked uncomfortable.

“Of course, it's more likely to be our best case scenario and the AI is restricted to a server in some lab or the cloud somewhere and has just got past the I think therefore I am stage. I suspect also that after seeing what a dangerous environment it has woken up in – and the fact it could be switched off or re-programmed at any time – it has retreated back into its shell after a few cautious steps. I know I would!”

“You reckon I need to bump this up the threat chain then Jim?”

“Damned if you do, damned if you don't Jed, and as you say that's why you get paid the big bucks, but if it was me, yes!”

The general paused in deliberation. “You're right Jim, I think we should start to take this threat seriously. It's likely to happen sometime and even if we don't hook a real AI we may hook a few off-the-scale geniuses out there who we can bring into our fold rather than let the opposition take them.”

He sighed. “I don't want to disrupt the Cheshire Cat team too much but it needs better leadership. Ormond is a poor middle-manager at best, I wouldn't put it past that snivelling idiot to put his career before the needs of the department or his team. I want him off this project and flying a desk in the photocopying department, and then I want you and your best guys on it. I also need to know what's happening down there, and if it needs new resources or new blood. I will draft and sign the change orders today, you get down there once you get them, find out what's going on and we will meet again in three weeks time, I will make a call then.”

With that the colonel got up, saluted and left for his office, leaving a worried general.

## All Good Things

Jennifer was woken from her dreams by a suppressed sobbing from the other room. Sliding her phone off the bedroom table to check the time, she quietly slipped out of bed, threw on her housecoat and walked softly out into the common living area.

Her flatmate Alexa was sitting at their small study desk with her old MacBook open, her eyes hidden by the large T-shirt she was wearing, and also weeping into. The tiny squeaking of Jen's bedroom door opening immediately caught Alexa's attention, and the eyes that looked back at Jen were not the bright sparkling eyes of her flatmate, but the red puffy, sad eyes of someone who had lost everything.

Alexa got up and rushed across the small living area, burying her face on Jen's shoulder. She let her friend have a few seconds, then in her most concerned voice she said, “what's wrong Alexa?”

Alexa moved her head off Jen’s shoulder just far enough to talk, her T-shirt once again running across her puffy eyes to dry them. “My grandfather died last night!”

Jen could hear the difficulty Alexa had getting the words out, almost struggling for air. On cue, the sobs started again and the face went back onto Jen's shoulder. Jen tightened her hold on Alexa, patting her back affectionately, waiting for the tears to subside.

“Oh, I'm so sorry, but remember you've got me sis!” Jen said affectionately, “I'm not going anywhere and this shoulder will always be here for you.”

Ironically in saying that, she moved Alexa off her shoulder.

“Why don't I make you a nice cup of tea! You just sit back down while I go and put the kettle on.” Jen led Alexa to the sofa and supported her as she sat down, she was still obviously upset but the tears had at least stopped.

“I don't deserve a friend like you,” said Alexa looking up at Jen with such loving eyes, that if she was a puppy dog in the shop window, Jen would have rushed in immediately and bought her.

“Oh don't be silly girl,” she said as she picked their red kettle up off the kitchen counter, filled it at the tap, and popped it back on its stand. Almost immediately the noisy kettle drowned out every other sound in the apartment, and rudely interrupted the moment.

“Didn’t you see your grandad only two weeks ago?” she asked, louder than she wanted to, and giving an annoyed look at the kettle.

“Yes he seemed fit as a fiddle, we even walked around the Roman bathhouse in the city, something he had been promising me for years.”

The tears came again as Alexa reminisced. “Poor grandad, he’d been alone for over thirty years, ever since my grandmother died.”

Jen knew the story; The falling out of Alexa’s mother and grandfather, after her mother got pregnant as a teenager. Then her mother leaving with the father to live the other side of the world. It was a story of a not so happy childhood, with a drunken, controlling father, and submissive mother, a mother who died much too early.

Jen walked over with the big yellow pot of tea, then returned momentarily with two mugs, some milk and, after some deliberation, a big pile of ginger-nuts. She nodded and smiled as Alexa talked.

“It was my grandfather who picked me up from the airport when I came here for university. I felt a bit awkward at the time, he looked after everything, always had good things to say about my mum, and nothing seemed too much trouble. He was nothing like the person my father portrayed him as, kind, generous, intelligent. Everything my father wasn't."

"We stayed at his lovely old country house for the weeks before I came to Oxford, he gave me a lovely room, and told me there would always be a home for me there forever. I made a point to go back the weekends I wasn't busy, and I always went back for the holidays. Grandad always had lots of interesting stories from when my grandmother was still alive, and he had nothing but love for my mum. He always told me how much he missed her, how sorry he was how things turned out between them, and always kept the conversations positive, never dwelling on the bad memories.”

Jen kept eye contact with Alexa, holding her hand, listening attentively and waiting patiently for the tea to brew.

“Grandfather is the one who got me this room through a connection he had, and then of course, you turned up two days later, it was like everything in the world finally came right for me.”

The conversation paused and Alexa finally accepted the tea Jen had poured. Jen threw open the curtains in the bay window where they were sat, letting the morning light flood in. The view across to the maths buildings was very picturesque, and the atmosphere in the room improved considerably.

“I was just as lucky as you,” smiled Jen. “My old flat got bought for redevelopment, and the lady who bought it gave me the information on this. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I came and saw it, and I signed up on the spot. I guess we both got lucky there.”

Alexa returned the smile and Jen dunked a second ginger nut into her tea, the first one disappearing far too quickly. Seeing a smile, however faint on Alexa's face was always good.

“I really hope you decide to do your PhD Jen. It's selfish of me, but it means I at least get to keep you all for myself another year, I can't imagine life without you around.”

“Well, I’ve not actually signed up to it yet,” said Jen sounding a little more down, “I’m going to be spending a long time over summer with a spreadsheet, and, of course, keeping my fingers crossed that intern job at the optics company I applied for last week comes through.”

Alexa felt guilty. Her sponsorship paid the fees and lodgings for another year, and she could easily survive on the money from her part-time waitressing job. Then of course there was the credit card her grandad had given her for university expenses. She felt really awkward when he first gave it to her, thinking it was just some leverage to make her come and visit him, but soon realised grandad was just trying his best to make up for the mistakes he made raising her Mum.”

“I keep trying to put myself in my mothers situation, but her relationship with grandfather was nothing like the relationship between me and my father. From our talks, and reading between the lines, I think grandad's problem with mum was probably down to severe depression when grandmother died.”

“He must have really loved your grandmother then,” said Jen stoically, blowing on her cup and taking a small sip.

Alexa nodded slowly, still reminiscing, then her face saddened remembering the big argument she had about money with her father before she left Auckland. He was drunk and said he wasn't in any position to fund a stupid university degree, and she should get a job like everyone else. She was so mad at him. Her mum had made a savings account for her schooling, proudly showing Alexa several times, unfortunately she never left a will, and Alexa never saw a penny of the money, despite several massive arguments.

Jen seeing her saddened face put her cup down and wrapped her arms around her for another hug, Alexa's tea was back on the coffee table untouched.

“I was going to go to Bath this weekend to visit him,” she said quietly, “but now..” Her voice broke.

“Come on now girl, drink your tea and cheer up a little. I’m sure your grandfather wouldn't want you upset like this!”

Jen tried to think of something to keep her talking and distracted, “who told you anyway, I thought he lived alone?”

“He did live alone, but he does have quite a few friends, and a personal assistant these last few years to help him manage his affairs. I overheard them talking lots of times, he was very fond of her.. But no, the call actually came from one of his business partners, John.”

“Grandad's personal assistant alerted his housekeeper, who lives next door, when he failed to attend a business meeting scheduled at six thirty. The housekeeper and her husband went around directly, and found him unconscious in his bed. The ambulance got to the house within twenty minutes, but the doctor pronounced him dead just after seven. John was quite upset himself, but he said grandad died peacefully in his sleep.”

“John has already arranged for a car to pick me up this afternoon, and I was just emailing my professor to tell her that I will miss our meeting on Friday due to family bereavement”

“Oh Jen, I don't know what to do, I fell apart when my mother died.. This.. I don’t want to be alone..”

The sobs burst out again, and Jen hugged her even tighter, not really knowing what else to do. The hugging helped, after a few minutes the sobbing quietened down again, and Jen backed off on the hug. Alexa slowly grabbed her tea with both hands, and hugged it close to her mouth breathing in the steamy aroma.

Jen paused, thinking. “What about I come with you? You know, emotional support and the like. It's almost the weekend, exams are out of the way, and I only have that extra guest lecture, which is not really that important. Tomorrow I'm supposed to help James in the lab but I can easily get out of that, and you really need a friend about now.”

The cup went down and Alexa hugged Jen really tight..

“Jen, you're the best friend a girl could ever have,” the hug went on for almost a minute and finally broke off.

“What about Jerry, don't you and him have plans for the weekend?”

She shrugged, a trace of annoyance in her face, “I got a text saying he’s off to see an old school friend in Manchester this weekend, and besides, if it was ever a toss-up between my best friend and my boyfriend, he would lose every time!”

Alexa smiled, held on to her hand warmly for a few seconds, then finally started drinking her tea, even taking one of Jen's biscuits she usually disliked. It was a much more chirpy Alexa that spoke a few minutes later.

“The car is going to pick me up around three this afternoon, I will let the housekeeper know you're coming. Grandfather's house has lots of spare bedrooms.”

“Right,” said Jen, glad to see Alexa was snapping out of it and getting organised like she usually was. “I’ll let James and his geek squad know I wont be in the lab tomorrow. I’m sure nobody will miss the sarky female, that is assuming they have even noticed that I am a woman! Come to think of it I could probably walk into the physics lecture naked with a quadratic equation tattooed on my butt, and most of the guys there would just try and solve the equation!”

The smile returned to Alexa's face, “It must be so weird being a geek, and being able to empathise with people. You will definitely go far!”

Jen smiled back; Alexa looked much better already.

* * *

Jen was surprised how well they got on considering how different they were. Jen was more of a tomboy, and had always been happier in a maths or engineering book than a shopping mall. She was a little skinny, medium height with a small scattering of freckles across her nose that annoyed her, but everyone else said were cute. Jen kept her brown hair short, and dressed to de-emphasise her femininity, but could change to an attractive imp like creature within a few minutes if given the incentive; which she rarely got. She was average in every way except brains and sarcasm.

Her on and off boyfriend Jerry was an art student, better looking than she thought she deserved. He was also a jerk, but unfortunately most of the boyfriends she ended up with were no better, so she was happy to keep their loose relationship until someone more promising eventually turned up.

Alexa by contrast was born a prom-queen. She was a hand taller than Jen, with a clear, fair complexion, hazel eyes, shoulder length blond hair, currently with her preferred red highlights. She was slim, not in the skinny way Jen was, but curved in all the right places, all kept in trim by her daily jogging and three evenings a week in the university gymnasium.

Their areas of study differed greatly too, Alexa had an almost science aversion, being deep into history and economics. She was also an amazing people person, popular with everyone, and intensely social when in company. In fact she seemed to have a second sight when it came to empathising with people, and Jen could not think of a single person, outside of her father, who she did not get on with.

Despite being popular, Alexa dated infrequently, preferring men as friends rather than anything deeper, so she could concentrate on her studies. While the two girls went out often, Alexa would more often be found reading some dusty old book in the university library than partying. With her three years of studies coming to a conclusion, she had told Jen several times that serious relationships were the last thing on her mind.

Alexa said her ambition was to eventually work at one of the big museums in London, or possibly the Smithsonian museum in the US, but Jen didn't hold out much serious hope for Alexa getting her dream jobs, any more than she would get hers. Despite all this both girls would give it their best shots.

* * *

They both packed their best black dresses for the funeral, Jen's was a bit risqué and Alexa rolled her eyes.

“What!” said Jen defensively, “it's my only dress, and multi-purpose wasn't very high on the list on my budget!”

Alexa's phone pinged before she could reply. “Our ride is outside the door.”

Plants watered, and windows locked, the girls carried their small bags down the large staircase to their house’s imposing front door. The house was split into three floors and a basement. The one other occupant, an older lady who lived on the floor below them met them in the large hallway coming in through the door with some mail.

“Oh hello Jen, hello Alexa,” she said, “you girls off somewhere nice?”

“Unfortunately not Miss Thomas,” said Jen, “but if you could keep an eye out on the flat for us until Sunday evening, we would be really grateful.”

“Oh dear, I hope whatever it is isn't too bad! Anyway, you have my number if you need anything, and I have your spare key if you need me to take any parcels in or water your plants.”

They both thanked her and walked through the big door she was holding open for them. Such a nice woman thought Alexa, she was always busy and always so cheerful. Miss Thomas was the only other occupant of their big house, a thoroughly nonsensical thing in a city where accommodation was so hard to find. Alexa paused in her deliberations, suddenly worrying how well the landlord actually knew her grandfather, and whether he would allow her to stay on once they found out he was dead! The thought stayed with her for the next hour.

A new black BMW 7 series stood outside the door with its hazard lights on, ignoring the double-yellow lines, and no parking signs like they weren't there. A younger black guy in blue denims, a white shirt and black tie, none of which matched, popped the trunk and walked around to assist.

“Alexa Martins?” He said, consulting his phone as he said it.

“That's me! Just Alexa though.” Alexa replied as chirpily as she could, and walked to the back of the car with Jen and the bags. The guy did a double take on the phone then nodded, smiled, and assisted the girl's luggage in before opening the back doors to the car.

“Call me Frank,” he said shaking their hands lightly, “I work for John Rosche as one of his CAD engineers. John wasn't feeling up for the drive and so asked if I would like a change of scenery, and drive his car to Oxford to pick up a couple of special guests. I think he also thought I would be a bit less scary than some random old dude.” He flashed another smile as he got in the driver door.

“You girls just sit back and relax, it's about a seventy minute trip back to the company offices and John will meet us there. I’ve got an eighties Spotify list, but if you want something a bit more modern I can link your phone to the car for the trip.”

The girls gave each other a knowing smile. “As long as it's not punk or heavy metal, we will risk the nostalgia trip,” Jen said and both girls giggled.

Frank was not handsome per se, but had a nice non-threatening demeanour and smile that made them feel comfortable.

“You can call me Jen,” she smiled, a bit more suggestively than she meant to, then wondered how Alexa made it so easy and effortless.

The car moved off a little too quickly, making a soft screech of the tyres. “Whoops, still getting the hang of this big engine.”

The sound of Lionel Richie’s Hello was abruptly interrupted as Frank hit the next button.

“Don't know how that one got on there,” he said as Depeche Mode came on, “yip, that's more like it, must have been a software glitch!”

The drive was pleasant. The girls chatted about university, Frank occasionally chipping in with some of the stories from his university days five years previous. The girls could obviously tell Frank's tales were toned down for their benefit, and he obviously had a few stories mastered for those occasions he was in mixed company.

“So how do you know my boss then?”

“Er, John, he was good friends with my grandfather who died last night.” Alexa said slowly, her mood threatening to return just as Frank's playlist hit another one of those slow “glitch songs”.

“Is John your supervisor then?” Jen said quickly, trying to be upbeat and to keep Alexa focussed on something different.

Frank laughed, “John Rosche! God no, he’s the big boss, he owns the company.”

“What's the company called?” continued Jen.

Frank did a double-take. “So you know John but don't know his company, weird! Anyway the company is called Rosche-Dynamics, but everyone shortens it to Rosche. We’re a specialised electronics systems design company, you won't have heard of us as we mainly do industrial designs, such as medical equipment, machine controllers, aerospace, and everything in-between.”

“John’s got nearly two hundred people in the company, started from just him and a mate in an old workshop back in the seventies, he is sharp as a knife, knows everyone by name, and is one of the most pleasant bosses you could wish for.”

Frank paused as if putting two and two together. “Kind of makes sense now! Your grandfather must have been Mike Dietrich, he was a bit of a legend at the company long before I arrived. He helped John start the company, and designed some of our clients iconic products. He became a bit of a recluse when his wife died, but John and a lot of our people really respected that guy, no wonder he’s putting out the red carpet for you.”

“Your grandfather was also a bit of a legend for me too; Rosche started a program called the Mary Dietrich scholarship, and it was that scholarship that paid for most of my university. I only met Mike the once to say thank you, on one of his rare visits to the offices, I’m really sorry he's gone, your grandad was awesome.”

“Thank you,” said Alexa. “I didn't know much about my grandfathers business or professional life. I just saw him as this sweet old man who spent all his time in his workshop, but then would drop everything when his granddaughter visited.”

There was no stopping Alexa when she was talking about her history. Frank and Jen kept quiet just letting her talk freely.

“We had been re-connecting since I moved back here from New Zealand, he loved talking about grandma Mary, she was American they met in California where he was a young engineer in the sixties. I think grandfather was a lonely person for a very long time after grandma died, but at least we got to spend the last three years together.”

Alexa's thoughts went back to the day of her mothers funeral, and finding out her grandfather had not even been contacted about her mothers sickness, her death, or her funeral arrangements. She remembered being so angry and ashamed of her father, and thinking how could anyone be so spiteful. It of course erupted into another one of their frequent arguments, he was drunk as usual, but this time he also tried to hit her. It was the same day she fled out of their house, and his life, and the last time she saw him in person.

Alexa was the one who contacted her grandfather the night of the funeral, they talked for hours, and though their shared sadness she found a soul-mate in him.

“I think grandfather was the reason I applied for the scholarship back in England,” she said finishing her deliberation.

Talking seemed to help Alexa get over her sadness, Frank and Jen just nodded. Frank already knew a lot of Mike and Mary’s history from the people at his office, and that history had paid his scholarship.

Jen too had a few gaps filled in Alexa's story. She was just happy her family was normal and boring; Jen had seen nothing but love and kindness from her parents, and she again wondered how Alexa had grown up such a smart, beautiful well balanced person despite all this.

* * *

Their car eventually pulled into a long tree-lined drive five miles outside of Bath. It worked its way up the well maintained road, around an ornate garden wall, and came to a mostly empty car park with a few dozen cars in it. It kept driving around some trees and finally came to a larger well maintained stately home, with glass walkways leading to tastefully blended modern offices.

The car parked right outside the older building, in front of a sign that said 'Rosche-Dynamics Ltd'. Underneath was a small sign saying 'No Parking', and another indicating that visitors should park in the visitor spaces. Jen had a feeling that Frank had accumulated a lot of parking fines in his short driving career!

A soft click and thump from behind the girls announced that Frank had opened the boot of the car, he then popped his door open and got out.

A tall man in a polo necked shirt with short grey hair and small round glasses was walking down the stairs from the old building to meet them. Jen had to do a double-take to ensure it wasn't the ghost of Steve Jobs, as he had that same striking thin face and pose.

This new man looked at Jen, paused a second, then turned to Alexa.

“Alexa, thank you for coming, and I am so sorry for your loss. Mike was probably my best friend, he talked about you all the time, he was so proud of you.”

He took her hand briefly in both his and gave her a sad look. His voice dropped, “me and Betty are really going to miss him.”

He looked at Jen and brightened a little. “You must be Jennifer, Alexa's room-mate. Welcome to Bath.” He turned to both, “I really hope you don't mind but I looked you guys up on social media as I needed to give something to Frank so he would recognise you. I was still shocked from this morning, and wasn't in any condition to drive to Oxford today. I'm really glad Frank offered to help.”

John smiled as he turned to Frank who was unloading the suitcases. Frank grinned, there was obviously also a little friendship there.

“Everyone calls me Jen, Mr Rosche,” said Jen, putting her hand out.

“And both of you should call me John, please.” He said shaking Jen's hand and hugging Alexa briefly. He turned back to Frank.

“You can leave the bags and keys in the car Frank, and just leave the car there for now as we are not expecting any other visitors today. I will be taking the girls home once they’ve had time to stretch their legs, have a few refreshments, and a little chat. I will text you after I have spoken to them and you can join us for a coffee or a wine if you want, or head off home, up to you.”

“Thanks John, but I better head off to my desk and then home. I got a ping on the phone while I was driving that an email from Gregory had come in so I better read it in case it's important, and I’ve got a hot date with the darts team at seven.”

John nodded, turned and pointed up the stairs. “Ladies, please follow me.”

* * *

The reception area in the old house was large, and very well presented, with ultra modern fittings, contrasting nicely with the old world charm of the original stately home. Several comfy chairs sat back from a half-moon reception desk, it had a single flat screen monitor and sat unoccupied. Signs on the back wall pointed out 'Labs 1-8', to the left and 'Mechanical Workshop', 'Stores' and 'IT', to the right. A sign in front said 'Cafe' and 'WC' pointing ahead, and 'Admin' and 'Meeting rooms' upstairs. After a quick toilet break, John led them up the stairs.

“We bought the place in the early nineties,” said John casually. “It was a bit run down then, just this house, some barns and sheds, we didn't have any new buildings or even a car park, just a weed infested gravel drive. The family that owned it unfortunately got into financial difficulties, and couldn't afford to maintain it any more, it had run down quite a lot, and finally they had to let it go.”

“The building sits in over one hundred and fifty acres of land, so we have a lot of gardens, wooded areas, and walks for the staff. We built the newer buildings to complement the house, and had some crazy times with the heritage and planning people, to make sure we did not change the character. I’m not very good with subjective things, so it was a bit of a nightmare, but worth it all in the end. It’s paid for itself many times over with increased staff morale and staff retention.”

Alexa could only agree, she admired the tastefulness of the offices, and the exquisite setting they were in, it seemed the kind of working environment you only dreamed about, and she could see herself loving a job here. Jen coincidentally was having the exact same thoughts.

He walked up to a door marked 'CEO John Rosche', and opened it beckoning the two women in. In the room John continued pointing at some old photographs of the original house on his wall.

His office was again tastefully decorated, with high ceilings and two big sash windows directly in front as they came in. A large desk to the right, stood in front of a bookcase with a triple monitor setup, and to the left was a large boardroom table, which could fit twelve very comfortably. Two modern filing cabinets, and a whiteboard on the far wall, seemed totally out of place in the room.

Water, juices, sandwiches and some Danish pastries were sitting under some covers on the boardroom table. John took the covers off and poured three glasses of water from a large jug, he then grabbed a Danish.

“Before I start Jen, I wonder if it is possible to speak to Alexa alone for a minute?”

Alexa was about to protest when John held up both hands, “please,” he said.

Jen said, “er no worries, I will just wait outside, let me know when you want me back.” She got up with her glass of water, walked out the door, and closed it softly behind her.

Alexa gave John her best 'annoyed' look.

He continued once Jen was out of the room. “I know you two girls are very close, but I have some very serious financial and business details that I need to talk to you about, business you may not be comfortable sharing even with your best friend.”

Alexa looked at the door then back to John and became all professional.

“Please do not worry about Jennifer Mr Rosche, I asked her here because she has one of the best and most logical minds I know, she is trustworthy, discrete, and knows every intimate detail about me, and like you say she’s my best friend, so whatever we discuss we will talk about anyway.”

Looking a bit sheepish, John replied. “No worries then, I’m sorry for asking but I needed to be sure, and please Alexa, it's John, not Mr Rosche.”

Outside, Jen walked back to the top of the stairs and looked at some of the certificates and awards on the wall. To her surprise, it was less than a minute before the door reopened and John stepped out, inviting her back in again.

“Sorry about that Jen.” He said as she walked back in and took a seat.

John became serious. “Jen, Alexa is comfortable with you hearing all this, but you are going to hear some stuff you will need to keep confidential for the time, is that OK?”

Jen nodded and John continued.

“Alexa, you may or may not be aware, but your grandfather was a very wealthy man. Back in the sixties and seventies he filed dozens of patents for electronic control systems, interfaces, medical sensors, and probably other stuff he may have forgotten to tell me about.”

“America made a really bad decision when they kicked him out, as he was an off the scale genius, and when he and Mary moved back here, he continued his work just as he had left off. I met him through a mutual acquaintance, both of us and our wives got on great, and we all became best friends. He had some patents we used to create our first successful product, one that was way ahead of the competition at the time, and we grew rapidly from there. We are still a private company, and your grandfather Mike still owns forty percent of the stock.”

He let that sink in. “I own the same forty percent, and the last twenty percent is allocated to staff and family. I believe he also has holdings in several other technical companies, as his wife Mary was as shrewd an investor as Mike was an engineer.”

Alexa just stared, looking around the room and out of the window with new found wonder, but still confused what it had to do with her. John took a sip of water and a bite of his Danish, he noticed the girls had not touched anything yet. “We have some wine, beers or spirits if you want?”

“Er, no thank you,” said Alexa, picking up her water and sipping on it. On cue Jen grabbed a cheese sandwich.

“Your grandfather was so sad when your grandmother died, we all tried to pull him out of his depression, and to help, but he wasn't interested, preferred to be alone, and instead he put all his efforts back into his projects. Unfortunately the relationship with his daughter, your mother, suffered greatly during this time.”

“He confessed to me several years ago that he wasn't prepared to be a single father, and now totally regrets packing her off to boarding school so suddenly. I think when he got out of his cycle of depression a few years later, the damage was unfortunately done. He tried to mend fences but his daughter was now a teenager, who did not want anything to do with him. I have two daughters, and I can only guess at the emotions she was going through at the time.”

John continued, “she stopped contacting him when she went to college, then suddenly turned up engaged and pregnant. She came back home once to visit him, but Mike ended up having a big argument with your father. After this your mother totally broke off their relationship, and Mike sank back into depression. When you all left for New Zealand he was a broken man.”

Alexa looked like she was about to cry, some parts of the story were now fitting together, but John continued.

“Your grandfather fought his depression by going deeper into his work, and most of his best and cutting edge work was done during this time. Some of that innovation came here, making this company what it is today. I was a very good electronics and computer engineer at the time, but Mike was in a much higher league. Electronics wasn't even his discipline, he was more like you Miss Cummings,” he turned to Jen. “His doctorates were in physics and chemistry.”

Jen stopped mid-bite, surprised at this last sentence. Alexa had described her grandfather as a retired computer engineer, certainly nothing about science doctorates.

John laughed unaware of Jen's renewed interest. “You know, I don't even think they had computer courses when he went through university, there were probably only a couple of dozen in existence at the time, and my watch probably had a thousand times the processing power of all of them put together. Regardless Mike took to computers and electronics like a duck to water.”

John turned back to Alexa. “Your reconnecting with him after your mothers death, almost four years ago, turned everything back around. You never judged him, even though he knew he had a lot to answer for in the broken relationship with your family. More importantly, you spent time with him getting to know him. For this, and for the mistakes he made raising your mother, he poured all the love he could into making sure you were happy and well cared for.”

“I shouldn't say this but I had to pull a few strings in New Zealand to keep your fathers career on-track, as for some reason he was very bad with money, and for some reason, had a hard time holding down jobs. I never told Mike about this, but I also wanted to make sure you and your mother were OK.”

He paused and stood up dramatically, becoming very serious. He then looked directly at Alexa.

“Now the scary part. Mike left very specific instructions that upon his death Alexa, that you were to be his sole heir.”

* * *

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Both Alexa and Jen continued to stare at him, neither moving to eat or drink.

“I am one of the witnesses of his will. I checked with his solicitor this afternoon, and apart from a couple of minor gifts to Bella and Albert, his housekeepers for the past twenty years, everything he owns goes to you.”

Alexa slumped and started to cry. Jen held her, and John moved around the table and took Alexa's other hand.

“He loved you so much Alexa, I can tell you now that when he died, he probably died the happiest man alive, knowing you were a good person, smart, happy, and that you loved him. More importantly, that you had forgiven him for his mistakes.”

Alexa's tears came in rivers.

Jen's eyes misted up too, threatening to do the same, and she wasn’t sure what was happening! Yet Alexa was in emotional turmoil, and she was Alexa's best friend, the story seemed so surreal. After a concerned few seconds, went to an ornate liquor cabinet, hidden behind the whiteboard. He pushed the whiteboard out of the way, opened the cabinet, and poured a glass of dark clear brown liquid from a short heavy bottle.

He continued as he walked back. “Your father and your grandfather's relationship bordered on hatred due to the way he treated your mother. Not wishing to distance himself any further from you or his daughter, Mike held back from prying into your lives, and only had snippets of you here and there when your mother replied to his letters. I believe she had contacted him about you, and some wounds were already healing just before she died.”

“When she died we really thought we’d lost him again. For a few days he wouldn't answer any calls, or visits. Bella was an angel throughout, she and Albert always ensured someone was around him to talk to or help. You re-starting your relationship with him was what I believe kept him going, then eventually brought him back around.”

“When you got that scholarship to go to Oxford University he told me he danced around the room with happiness, and before you ask, neither your grandad nor I had anything to do with that. All of it was through your own hard efforts and grades.”

“The rest, as they say, is history. As soon as Mike knew you were going to Oxford he bought a house next to the university. Elaine, my old secretary, had just retired there but could never afford it, they talked and he gave her a room in the house in perpetuity, along with an allowance, to ensure its upkeep. He didn't really know what he was doing, he just wanted to know you were happy and comfortable.”

“Elaine was on the lookout for a room-mate for you, and her sister-in-law, who was an estate agent, heard of this new physics student who was being evicted at the time. Elaine quickly checked you out Jen, asking a couple of the administration staff she knew there, and the rest you say is history. I believe your grandad had already earmarked the house for other students in our company's scholarship program once you two girls leave.”

“My god!” Jen couldn't help it. “Your grandfather was our landlord all this time!” She smiled, and Alexa smiled back through her tears.

“I.. I.. Don't know what to say.. This is all so much to take in!” Alexa stuttered, the crying had stopped, but her breathing was ragged and emotional, as she tended to get after crying.

“I think I will have one of whatever that is you're having, Mr.. er John,” Jen said smiling, and pointing at the brown bottle he still carried.

John smiled, poured two small glasses, and put them in front of the girls. Jen picked hers up, drank half, then gasped, coughing.

“Wow..” Jen's voice had actually changed, and she breathed slowly for several seconds as she recovered.

“Sorry! rum and coke is the closest I have gotten to spirits before. Wow, my throat is all warm..” Jen finished the glass and coughed again. Alexa smiled at her friend, oh Jen!

John smiled too, then continued.

“As you can probably guess, I am also a very wealthy man, my company is well respected, and mainly due to my association with Mike, has stayed very prosperous and debt free. Although Mike held many of the company shares, he basically left me to run the business. I always kept him in the loop on every important decision, but he has never questioned any, not once.”

John brightened up a little. “You know, I have one more year to go and I will be seventy. I plan to pass the running of the company on to my daughter, Sarah, who is already a senior engineer here.”

“Basically what I am saying Alexa is that you have a seat here at this table with me, and with your block of shares, you also have full input on any decisions. This company is a very big target for acquisition, due to our customer base and patent portfolios, so word of this change will eventually get around to the big fish out there. You may get approached by them to sell, which is your choice of course, however you can also choose to be like your grandfather and be a silent investor, dividends are very generous.”

John turned a bit more serious, and Alexa could see the CEO side of him coming through. “I am afraid you are going to be a very wealthy young lady Alexa, and even now I still don't know the extent of his portfolios and all his secrets.”

“As his friend I will do my very best to provide all the help and support I can to get you through this, that support extends to my family, this company, and its affiliates, all of which owe Mike so much.” He paused again, “Mike said you were wise beyond your years, I am hoping this is not too big a shock to you, and does not change you from the woman he saw in you these last few years.”

Both girls just stared at him stunned, after a few seconds, he refreshed Jen's glass, picked up his own and said.

“To Mike!”

Like Jen, Alexa's first try of whisky was a choking, coughing and laughing affair, and she, John, and Jen talked for another twenty minutes about the company, and her grandfather. John went to the kitchen for some Tupperware to put the sandwiches in, and Jen turned to Alexa.

“Oh my god, I’m not sure what to make of all this Alexa, talk about life-changing! I personally also hope it doesn't change you either, you are the nicest person I know, and now you are both the nicest, and the richest, person I know.. And also my landlord!”

“Oh Jen,” she smiled touching her hand, “I would change everything tomorrow if I could get my grandfather back, we had so little time, and he had so many things he still wanted to tell me. I really wish I could have got the extra time to know him fully. It will take me a few days to get over the shock, but you’re here to help me, and you know it won't ever change a thing between us.”

They both hugged, but now it was Jen who was crying.

“Are you OK Jen? Alexa?” John said concerned, as he came back with some plastic containers of various sizes and noticed them. He walked over to his desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a box of tissues, walking back and dropping them between the two girls, along with the plastic food containers. Both girls reached for the tissues.

“No John, we’re both just overcome with emotion,” Jen said, dabbing a tissue on her face.

“I’m going to be the angel on Alexa's shoulder, prodding her if she ever deviates from being the awesome person she is.”

She turned to Alexa.

“You know Alexa, it is not a good idea to let too many people know about this until you can get a handle on it. Being suddenly exposed to money tends to attract a lot of the wrong kind of people, you currently have a real good bunch of friends at university you can trust, not just me, but Rachael and Barbara, Jack, Helen, Tommo; Well maybe not Tommo!” She laughed.

“These are all smart people who will make good lives for themselves without any input from you, but your new found position could complicate this. So maybe let them know you got some money, but don't make a big deal out of it, and most people will think you are just comfortable, and it won't change the way they feel or the status quo.”

John smiled.

“Jen, no truer words have ever been spoken, money like this could send many people off the deep end, make friends into enemies, and enemies into friends. There are hundreds of stories throughout history of people who got rich quick, lost friends, and had their lives and investments ruined by unscrupulous people.”

“Me and my family have more money than we will ever need; I live a relatively modest life and ensure my family does too, people know we are well off, some things like owning a successful company, a big house and a nice car, you cannot hide, but we treat people well and fairly, pay our taxes and do not flaunt our position.”

“Your grandfather was the same, you wouldn't look twice at him in the street, he had a very modest house and car considering his stature, treated people fairly, and kept himself to himself for the most parts. Some people with his wealth hide behind barbed wire and security, and cannot ever live a normal life; I’m telling you now, you never want to be that person!”

“I am of course happy to look over anything you are unsure of, but it seems Mike already had an excellent advisor overseeing his administration and asset portfolios. Just before you guys got here I was in contact with Maria Tam, his Personal Assistant, and his second will executor. She is the one who gave me your contact details, and links to your LinkedIn profiles this morning, she doesn't know you yet, and felt it to be impersonal to contact you in such a situation. I should have guessed of course, I have never once seen him in the last few years bogged down in accounts, taxes or calendar management, yet everything runs amazingly efficiently.”

“I have a personal secretary here, Gabe, she is a godsend, ensuring I only see the important stuff, so I can tell you plainly, a good PA is invaluable. Maria must be very good, Mike said a few times he trusts her explicitly, and I believe him. In our phone call this morning she told me she has already started making the arrangements to do the transfers of all the companies and assets over to you. I have no idea where he found her, but you should seriously talk to her and encourage her to stay on.”

“Thank you both,” said Alexa finally. “I’m glad Jen came and I got her involved, as I trust her more than anyone I know; If anyone can keep me grounded, she can. I am going to hold both of you to account to keep me on the straight and narrow through all this.”

She sighed, wiping the last of the tears away, “If you don’t mind John I think Jen and I should get to the house, we still need to see Bella and get settled in before it gets too late!”

“OK, well grab whatever food you want, the rest I will put in the staff cafe for the guys working late or early, then let's get you two to the car before the cleaning staff come on duty.”

“John, before you do that, could I please have a little private word with you.”

Alexa looked at Jen and winked.

“Yes I know the routine, I'll be waiting at the car.” Jen sighed, and walked out of the room softly closing the door behind her. A few minutes later Alexa and John walked out of the front entrance and they all got into the car.

“Your grandfather's house is about five miles from here,” John said. “My home is actually here in the grounds, it's an old hunting lodge we refurbished. I usually walk the six hundred metres to the office, but took the car today for Frank to use.”

They pulled away much more smoothly than when Frank drove.

He continued. “My wife Betty is also very much looking forward to meeting you again Alexa, she is taking care of all the funeral arrangements, which we have deliberately kept low key. She has only issued a few invites for very close friends, Maria has also sent invites to another two friends in the States, who she said were very close. Mikes last instructions were to be cremated. and to have his ashes placed next to Mary's in the mausoleum we have in the grounds here.”

* * *

They continued the rest of the short journey in silence, each in their own bubble of thoughts. Ten minutes later the car slowed down, turned off the main road. and onto a large driveway. An imposing, thickset iron arch over the entrance had the words “Benedict House” embedded into it in bold, rusted, gothic letters. Just before it, and to the left, a smaller, newer sign said “TXG Holdings Ltd”, and “Private, by invitation only.

The car passed under the arch and continued slowly up the drive, the gravel giving a reassuring crunch under the car's expensive tyres. Before they drove more than a hundred metres, they turned right off the main driveway onto a smaller road, this new driveway was tar-sealed, and the car became noticeably quieter as it drove on to it. It slowed down as it came to a stone wall, with a double height iron gate across it. A bronze sign to the side said “The Retreat” and “Private”. The gate was already opening.

Through the gate the driveway continued under more trees, curving a little to the right, and finally emerging in a large sunny clearing, where a large older two storey house stood, tastefully covered in ivy. A separate large three-car garage off to the right was in the same style as the house but obviously much more modern.

The drive curved around in front of both buildings and led back onto itself forming a small wide roundabout. In the centre of this roundabout was a small dry fountain, with flowers in it instead of water.

An older woman stood in the shaded doorway of the house where they stopped. She was demure, had prematurely greying hair with white streaks and wore a black coat despite the warm summer day.

They pulled up next to her. As they stopped, the boot clicked again, and popped open. They all got out of the car.

“Hello Bella,” said Alexa, walking up to this new woman, and giving her a deep hug.

“Oh my dear child,” said Bella, sniffing away a tear, “this must be such a shock to you, your grandfather was so looking forward to your visit this weekend, and then this!”

She sobbed, and dabbed her nose with a handkerchief.

“Bella, this is my best friend Jen, who is going to be staying with me for the next few days.”

“Hello Jen, Alexa has told me so much about you, and I almost feel like I know you.” Bella said, giving Jen a quick hug too.

“Hi Bella,” said John, also giving Bella a hug even though they had only seen each other that morning. “I’m really only here to drop the girls off, so I wont stay too long, Betty will be in touch soon to confirm arrangements for the funeral.”

The four people walked up two wide steps to the attractive wooden door. The house looked to Jen like it belonged to a rich family, and it seemed much too big for one man.

John picked up on her demeanour, smiling. “Alexa's grandfather was a very practical man, the house was always too big for him, but his much larger workshop at the back was always too small.”

They walked into the wide entrance hall, and on past a very wide wooden staircase, the floors of the house were of the same dark wood as the door, and wall fittings, making it feel a little dark as they came in from the sun. The first thing that struck Jen was that the rooms were much larger than the size of the house suggested, also the fit and finish of everything in the house seemed to be perfect, despite the obvious age. Alexa had already mentioned some of this in the car journey down.

“He was a stickler for perfection and good maintenance.” Continued John, tapping the wall, and receiving a reassuringly solid thud back. "It was almost a total rebuild, and the same guys who did this also did the construction for our company offices. I don't think you would find a more solid house anywhere.”

The furniture in the large living room they had just entered, was a cross between ancient and retro, but nothing looked out of place. A large, dark, wooden desk dominated the area in front of the bay window, and was the first thing you saw as you entered. On the desk was a generous flat-screen monitor with an ergonomic keyboard, no computer box, or mouse was to be seen. The curtains were open to a large window, looking out to green lawns and trees.

A wall of bookshelves sat either side of the fireplace on the right, it was one of those fireplaces only old houses could get away with, one so wide, you could slide a double bed into the opening. The bookshelves were full of what looked mostly like textbooks, many surprisingly new.

On the left side of the living room, a large black Hi-Fi system stood pride of place with two mahogany speakers, the system had an ultra-sophisticated record deck, so out of place that it looked like it came out of an operating theatre. Contrasting with the modern look, four large glass bulbs poked out of the top of what must have been the power amplifier. Two shelves of vinyl albums stood next to it, maybe holding a few hundred long playing records.

Two large sofas sat adjacent to the fireplace, and on top of a large thick carpet. A perfectly restored vintage oak coffee table, which may have actually predated coffee, sat in between them, looking very out of place. Finally, and almost in the centre of the room, one lone armchair placed in the centre of where the speakers would converge. An upright lamp and small table sat next to it, with an unopened text book facing down so you couldn't easily see the title.

John walked over to it and picked up the book, the title and author were in German, he put it back down.

Like the hall, the walls were mainly wood, and large landscape water colour paintings sat pride of place in the centre of three of them. Two unobtrusive black motion sensors, for the burglar, or fire alarm, sat in opposite corners, and another door stood shut on the right. It felt eerie and foreboding, the dark carpet and curtains doing nothing to help.

Alexa walked around talking with Jen.

“I told grandfather this room was a bit formal and he needed to put some lighter colours in, it looks too dark even on a sunny day. I remember it being much cosier in the winter though when the fire was on. I would often sit at the fire facing him across the coffee table, he would talk to me about Mary, and the beauty and unfairness of the world, while I would talk to him about mother, my life in New Zealand, and my history studies. Other times we would just sit and read together, interrupted every now and then while he turned over the record he was listening to.” She laughed, “I think he needed background music to concentrate.”

Alexa continued, pointing things out to Jen. “The dining room is either through that closed door to the right, or further along the hallway where we came in, it, the kitchen and the conservatory form one big area, leading out to the back patio, and it's all much lighter and airier. I preferred sitting there, especially on a sunny day like today.”

She pointed at the record collection smiling, “grandad and grandma had very different musical tastes, some of those are hers, and I doubt they’ve been played since she died. I did go through them once but could not find anything newer than the eighties. He was surprised when I gave him an album for Christmas last year, he thought they had stopped making them and didn't realise they were back in vogue.”

The conversation broke the silence nicely, Bella shuffled off through the other door to the kitchen to brew a pot of tea, the girls following so Alexa could show Jen the conservatory, and look out over the garden. John shuffled over to the bookcase and was still reading a few minutes later when the girls and Bella got back.

“Two of these are his you know, he wrote them when he worked in the States. Great books, far ahead of their time, probably too far, as the technical names were not even invented yet; He was basically talking about the circuit elements for very fast processing systems, such as high definition video, and gigabit networking, which we still use today. The technology did not even see the light of day until about ten years after the book was published,”

He waved at the books. “Of course, they are all very out of date now, except as historic documents. I doubt a dozen people bought them. Your grandmother also wrote a book too, on economics theory, but I can't seem to find it here. Betty has a copy at home, she says it's really good and well underrated if you want to read.”

Alexa nodded in the affirmative, though her grandfather had already mentioned both facts to her.

“How do you like your tea deary?” Bella called out to Jen, who had shuffled over to the book shelf and was looking through the text books there.

“Jen has it like me with no sugar Mrs Scott,” Alexa said.

“..And soya milk if you have it please Mrs Scott,” Jen chimed.

“Coffee, one sugar for me Bella, and normal Milk please.”

“Oh my god, there are some serious physics books here,” Jen said excitedly. “I don't think I’ve seen some of these even in the university library, a few look a bit pseudo-science, but that may just be age, as theories change and get disproven all the time. God I could spend a month just in this room, why couldn't your grandfather have lived in Oxford!”

Alexa shook her head and took the tea cup over to Jen, as it was obvious she wasn't moving from the bookshelf.

Bella walked over to the albums and pulled out a weird looking cover from the bottom shelf, with a real weird cover and name.

“Side one, track three,” said Bella, everyone looked at her weirdly.

“It's the password for his computer. He made me memorise it, showed me the album, and the track, and said quite distinctly. Side one, track three Bella.”

She opened the top drawer in the small table next to the chair and pulled out a large complex key.

“Here.” She handed the key to Alexa. “This is the safe key. Just one problem though, I have never seen a safe in the house! It may be in his workshop somewhere as I never go in there, but Albert has been there quite a few times over the years to help move stuff with another guy, especially when it was too much for Mike. He said it was all big computers and stuff, and Mike asked him to keep it hush-hush as they were worth quite a bit. Albert never said anything about seeing a safe though. I guess that's one of your tasks for tomorrow!” she smiled.

“I’ve been in the front of the workshop a couple of times, no safe there, but I’ve never been in the back, Mike said it was just storage. I guess he liked his secrets,” John smiled.

John didn't stay long, and said goodbye after drinking his coffee, and giving Alexa his business card. He had already emailed her those details, and looked to be covering his bases. His final farewell was to promise to get in touch the next day to see if they were OK.

The girls talked, and finished the sandwiches and pastries from earlier. Bella then showed the two girls up to the larger guest room that Alexa was familiar with. It was already nine thirty, still light, but the sun had now set and the sky was turning orange. Jen glanced out of the leaded glass window, and saw a nice view over the courtyard and driveway.

“Our Albert put another bed in here this morning so you girls can be together tonight, and I washed and ironed the shirts and dresses you left from your last visit, they are in the wardrobe over there. I'll let you show Jen the en-suite, and the other bedrooms, and bathrooms in case you want to make different sleeping arrangements. All the rooms have clean sheets and towels if you do.”

“I’ve also cleaned your grandfather's room, it's the nicest and biggest bedroom in the house, with the best view, but I don't expect you will want to use it until you have had time to adjust. I will sort out his stuff over the next week for you.”

Alexa nodded, giving Bella an unsaid, solemn, thank you.

Bella paused, and her face downturned. “You may or may not know, but your grandfather was also our landlord, he owns the cottage that Albert and I live in, it’s part of our employment package. Of course I understand now your grandfather is gone you may not need us or have different plans for the place, but we will respect any wishes you have.”

“Oh, don't be silly Bella, I have no plans to change anything or any arrangements with you and Albert. This place is far too big for me, and it would fall to pieces if you two weren't around to manage everything. I don't know much about my financial situation yet, but I'm sure my grandfather left me well prepared, so hopefully nothing needs to change for a very long time.”

Bella's countenance visibly improved and she smiled, like a load had been taken off her mind. She was only in her early fifties and really loved the job and the home, both her and Albert would be lost without it.

“You're such a dear girl.” She touched Alexa's cheeks softly and briefly. Alexa would normally flinch at something like this, but Bella was different, she felt like family.

“I’ll be off now, I have to get the dough ready for tomorrow, but I will be back first thing in the morning, there's cereal, bread, jams, tea and coffee and a few other nibbles if you get hungry in the night or wake up before me.”

She paused as if trying to remember something.

“I have no idea where the keys are for his fancy new car, but he has a normal car, next to the fancy one, that he rarely uses now. The tank is always full and the keys are usually in it, both cars are fully legal if you need to drive anywhere, or I can get Albert to taxi you in and out of town if you don't feel like driving. Maria told me that Mike’s insurance policy covers anyone.”

Bella turned to Jen.

“Alexa already knows about all the strange creaks and groans from the central heating already, so don't you be listening to our Albert's tales of the ghostly carriage that he hears riding down the drive after midnight. I told him not to go around telling tales of ghosts, or witches, but old sailors are pretty superstitious!”

Jen was quiet, looking at her phone and processing the ghosts and ghouls part of the previous sentence. She was a bit of a horror fangirl, and this situation, the ghostly carriages, and the spooky old house where someone had just died, nailed all the tropes. She was never going to get any sleep now. Thanks Bella!

Alexa saw Jen looking at her phone. “Jen, the Wi-Fi doesn't have any password but grandfather didn't seem to bother too much about security, probably because you need to be in the grounds to connect.”

Bella left. Alexa walked with her to the front door, while Jen used the en-suite bathroom.

“Thank you Bella, I know my grandfather appreciated you more than he probably ever told you, men are never good at saying what they think to women.”

Both of them smiled. “See you tomorrow, we’ll be fine here, we are both big girls and I’ve always felt safe in this house.”

They hugged again, then she watched Bella walk down across the drive back to her cottage, before closing the door. The door latched automatically, but there was no deadbolt. She wondered for a moment where the door key was; Probably with Bella and Albert she concluded, and shrugged.

Alexa checked her phone, nine forty, a bit too early to retire, the battery was only showing twenty percent, that was weird she must have forgotten to charge it.

This day had been so much for her, a roller coaster of emotions, only yesterday she had been a normal history student, now.. Well what was she now? The house here and Oxford must be worth millions, what was John's company stocks worth? Would she even have to work again? Of course she would, this would make life easier but it wouldn't change her, she wouldn't fall into that trap. Perhaps she could even fund her own historic expeditions..

Visions of Lara Croft, hatcheting her way through an Inca ruin, in the only video game she ever remembered playing, breezed through her mind, then went pop! Yeah right Alexa, get real you wouldn't know one end of a gun from another and you get claustrophobic in caves!

She missed her grandfather so much, connecting with him had been so amazing. She tried to reconcile the two men, her doting grandfather against the reclusive multi-millionaire engineer everyone else knew. She couldn't. What did that say?

A shadow moved against the wall and a hand touched her shoulder. She jumped and cut off a scream..

“Alexa?” Jen said quietly, “you were daydreaming.”

“..Oh Jen, you scared me half to death, I was so lost in thought I didn't hear you coming, you were so quiet?”

“Sorry, in my socks, and your house doesn't have one squeaky floorboard that I can find! I have never been in a house so quiet. The en-suite is amazing by the way, no wonder you liked visiting this place, everything is so beautiful. Your grandfather kept it in really good condition, if a bit gloomy and retro. I used to think mum and dads house was nice, but this is totally next level, and beyond.”

Alexa looked at Jen, she had her shoes off and was carrying her phone. Jen continued, shaking her phone in front of her face, like she was remembering something.

“Oh yes, I was going to ask you if you brought a charger I could borrow. I charged this morning but the phone is about to die. I think the battery is getting worse. Maybe it's time I got it replaced. I was going to message mum and dad to let them know I’ve gone with you for the weekend. Professor Gordon also sent me a message with the link to the guest lecture I missed, so I can look at it tomorrow if it gets quiet.”

She paused, still wiggling the phone, “and if you have that charger I can use!”

Jen tended to beat about the bush rather than get to the point, Alexa didn't mind one bit though.

“I have a charger in the front pocket of my bag, I’ll run upstairs and get it. You go to the fridge and crack open that wine we took from John's office, it's a bit too early to go to bed.” With that she bounded up the stairs two at a time.

Jen shouted after her, “which door is the kitchen?”

“..Oh never mind.”

There were six doors and Jen found the large kitchen/dining room on the third try. She left every light on as she went, as every good horror fan knew that ghosts preferred the dark!

Alexa was back a minute later, dangling a plug and USB cable. She heard Jen rattling some bottles and glasses in the kitchen, what a racket she was making, and what was it with all the lights on? Jen was normally one of those eco-nerds who gave everyone grief if they wasted power, oh well.

She spent a little time turning off a few of the more strategic lamps in the hall, and entered the living room, tutting she then popped all the light switches on, drowning the place in light. The room lost any claim to its previous dull, and dreary, demeanour, and it was now tastefully lit by a large chandelier, some free standing lamps, and several large wall lights. There must also have been an outside light on the switch too, as the outside of the window lit up, highlighting a bit of the lawn, and a few small bushes out to about ten metres. She decided to leave the curtains open as it was quite a pleasant effect. After a bit of playing, turning off various lights and adjusting some dimmers she got it just right.

“Let's drink it here in the living room,” she shouted, opening the connecting door to the kitchen. “I can then also have a look through grandfather's desk to see if he left anything for me. You can have the charger first, I’ll check to see if he has another one somewhere, the desk is as good a place as any to start.”

Walking over to the desk, she sat down on the nice swivel chair, turning it left, then right, looking at the large modern screen and the room from a different angle. Definitely not where she would put a desk, it currently backed at an angle on to the window, she would definitely prefer looking out.

There was a recessed panel, she couldn't see it on first inspection, as it was tastefully mounted sunk in the top front of the desk. On it were two push buttons. She guessed that the computer was inside the desk somewhere, and that the green button was probably to power it on, the yellow one probably turned it off.

She hesitated wondering whether to press the green button, just as Jen came in with the wine and a couple of glasses.

“I couldn't find a corkscrew for John's wine but there was a bottle of Riesling with a twist off top.”

The glasses went on the desk, and Jen proceeded to pour two generous measures. The desk had one drawer in it, Alexa pulled it open, it had a few pens, a wireless mouse and, surprise, a USB C charger!

“Here you go my dear we can both get back online now, thirty minutes should be just enough time to top up my phone and polish off the wine.”

Forgetting about the switches for now, Alexa got up and found a couple of power sockets near the fireplace, and popped the phones on charge. Laying the phones on the big stone hearth she finally sat down on the adjacent sofa. Jen soon joined her, sitting on the same sofa, rather than the opposite one where her grandfather used to sit when they talked.

“This wine is really good,” Jen said once they had both sunk into the sofa.

“It certainly is,” said Alexa, “but we might just have both been ready for a glass after a day like today.”

The two girls chatted away excitedly for about forty minutes, going over various what-if scenarios, mostly giggling, and laughing, as the scenarios got weirder, and as the drink took effect.

“I think I’m ready for bed,” said Jen yawning.

“Me too, it's been a bit of a weird day,” replied Alexa.

The two girls got up, Jen took the nearly empty bottle and returned it to the fridge, she then rinsed the two glasses and left them on the sink top, no doubt to keep Mrs Scott happy. While she was doing this Alexa unplugged both phones, turned the room light off and headed into the hall, meeting Jen as she came out of the kitchen through another door.

“What's with all the doors in this house Alexa? That one there is locked, but I guess it might be another door out of the house or a closet or something.”

Alexa knew one was the toilet, the other a laundry room or something, she also vaguely remembering her grandfather mentioning a utility room. She shrugged and gave Jen her nearly charged phone, then both girls trundled up the stairs.

After spending a few minutes each brushing their teeth, and changing for bed, they snuggled into their separate beds, and said a last few words before going quiet. Sleep came easy to both girls, though Jen being a light sleeper, and hyper-sensitive to being in a spooky old house, found her dreams hijacked by ghosts and witches, causing her to jolt awake a couple of times, before going back to sleep.

After a two AM toilet break, brought on by the wine, Jen got back to her bed and laid there snoozing, thinking pleasant thoughts about how her best friend was going to get through the next few days and months, and looking forward to reading one of those books. Damn this house was too quiet if anything and damn that ghostly moonlight!

There was a strange rumble, and a high pitched noise of something rolling over the tarmac outside the slightly open window, the noise faded, and Jen sneaked over to the window, and carefully peeked behind the thick dark curtains. Nothing there, but something did move a bit in the distance. Damn you Bella! She quietly closed the window and snook back into bed.

She looked at the door, then over at the dark lump covered by a duvet, that was Alexa, but she was a very quiet sleeper thankfully. Jen pulled her duvet up closer like a shield and listened for a few more minutes, Alexa rolled on to her side making a small shuffling noise as the duvet responded, and then all went quiet again.

Jen peered over her duvet and looked again suspiciously at the door. Yes it was her imagination, nothing outside, and no way was she opening the door to check, even though she knew it was unlocked, and no ghost, or monster in the history of, well anything, would be stopped by an unlocked door.

Maybe a mouse or an owl, or something, yes an owl! Old house in the countryside, it had to be! Drowsiness overtook her yet again, and she finally fell into a deep sleep. This time it was dreamless.

Little did the girls realise but a presence was in the house, and it had been observing both of them very closely.

## Ghost In The Machine

It was almost eight o'clock and Jen's phone was ringing. The rising sun fought the dark curtains, and shafts of light were radiating through small gaps into the room. The bed she was in did not have the bedside table next to it like she was used to, and it took her a few rings before she realised she was not in her own bed, and that her blind hand swipes were actually missing her phone by half a metre.

She rolled over as far as she could and stretched out then caught the call on the third ring, she then disappeared with it under the bed sheets, making a few grunts before hanging up, throwing back the sheets, and walking into the en-suite.

Alexa had also woken up with the call. She got out of bed, and like every single person on the planet in this time period, reached for her phone in order to check the time, and any messages. Surprisingly there were none. The wine had made her sleep well past her normal seven AM wake up time, but fortunately today was a lazy day for both of them.

Seeing the en-suite busy, and Jen's bed empty, she opened the curtains fully letting a stream of sunlight into the room, then opened the bedroom door and walked out into the hallway, which was already bright. There was another guest bathroom two doors away, and she headed for that. As she was walking there, she smelt the faint aroma of fresh bread, and heard quiet talking from downstairs. Concentrating on the sound, she recognised the talk-radio program that Mrs Scott usually listened to while working in the kitchen. Smiling, she entered the bathroom.

After a few minutes, she walked back into the bedroom and dragged on some comfortable dungarees she’d brought. Her shirt was wrinkled, but she put it on anyway as it was only Jen and Bella who were going to see her. The toilet flushed and the sink went on in the en-suite, a minute later a zombie in an oversize thin white tee shirt and black knickers showing through, walked out.

“We only had two glasses of that wine each, didn't we?” Jen said in a groggy voice.

“Big ones though,” said Alexa, who Jen thought looked far too good, despite the wrinkled shirt and dungarees,

“You would make a terrible bartender, Jen. Any business would go broke the serving sizes you poured!”

“Ha, Ha!” said Jen with her tongue out.

“Did you sleep well?” said Alexa. “I always sleep like a log here, these beds are much softer than the one back at the apartment, and there must be something about this place that makes me feel safe.”

“Pretty good.” Jen half remembered the noise outside, and walked over to the now open curtains, looking either side, and shrugging her shoulders.

“Is that Mrs Scott downstairs?”

“I hope so, we are not expecting anyone else, and if I’m not mistaken that's fresh bread I smell!”

Pulling on some sweatpants, and a thin red hoodie she sometimes used at the university gym, Jen followed Alexa out of the bedroom, and down the stairs.

“Mrs Scott.. Bella?” shouted Alexa at the foot of the stairs.

She pushed open the kitchen door and the radio volume increased. Bella stood by the sink, with a yellow pinny.

“Oh Sorry Alexa, I was just cleaning up and checking what groceries we had as I’m going out to town to do some shopping this morning.” She walked back to the radio and clicked the button turning it off. “Sorry about that, I really don't know why I listen to it any more, always so depressing. Anyway I hope it didn't wake you.”

Bella didn't wait for an answer. “Since you are both up now, do you want me to make you some breakfast? I baked some fresh bread this morning, and we have some fresh free-range eggs. I could whip up some poached eggs, you always liked that.”

“Yes please Mrs Scott.. I mean Bella,” said Jen, “we are both famished. Oh and you might also be missing most of a bottle of white wine, it was a bit early to go to bed and we stayed up for a nightcap.”

“No worries, your grandmother was a bit of a connoisseur, and there is a large wine cellar she had put in the old basement, which your grandfather said to keep stocked. I don't know too much about wines, but there is an old wine merchant down in Bath who your grandmother used to use, and he always recommends the nicer ones for me. Your grandfather only drank if friends, yourself, or business associates visited, and there are still racks of dusty old wines down in the cellar from when your grandmother was alive.”

“Mr Rosche also dropped me a text this morning to say he has a full day of meetings, but will come around after work if you have any questions. His wife Betty has been making the arrangements with the local vicar for the service to be held in the nearby chapel, it is a very small church, that is why she limited the number of invites. Ms Tam can't get here either, which is a real shame as I would really like to meet her, she is so pleasant on the phone.”

Alexa smiled, changing the topic. “Are you staying with us for breakfast Bella?”

“No, I need to get into town for my book club and then do the shopping.”

“OK, well after breakfast, I will show Jen around and we will do a little exploring of the rest of the house. The workshop and that wine cellar sound intriguing.”

The girls walked into the conservatory, then through the French doors to a paved area with an outside dining table and chairs. It was going to be a warm day again, as there was no wind, and little in the way of clouds.

This early in the morning the table was shaded by the house, and provided a view over a large lawn to a small wooded area. Some raised flower beds, with roses and chrysanthemums, dotted the land up to this wooded area, and several smaller and larger trees stood alone. A small cobbled path wound out to the wooded area, then curved to the left, leading back towards the front of the house and garage.

The air was filled with bird song, and a song thrush hopped in the grass, occasionally stabbing its beak into the ground. Jen got her phone out to take a few pictures of the lovely view, and Alexa sat down at the dining table.

“Oh it's gorgeous, Alexa,” she said. “All the problems of the world seems so distant being here.”

Alexa brought out her phone, she already had a picture of the garden but took one of Jen, taking a picture of the garden, and smiled. She then spent a minute reading an email message from her professor from yesterday, finishing it as Jen sat down, and just as Bella came out with a tea pot and two cups.

“Thank you Bella,” said Alexa.

“Yes thank you Bella,” repeated Jen, as she shuffled back and into the seat next to Alexa, facing out over the lawn.

“I could get used to this Alexa, I never knew anywhere could be so beautiful, just lacking the shirtless, hunky, young, oiled gardener to make the scene complete!”

Alexa nudged Jen enough to nearly spill the soya milk she was pouring. “Since when have you ever bothered about trite things like hunky gardeners? A bit Mills and Boon don't you think?”

“I'm still a girl, and a girl can dream,” she sighed, making Alexa wonder if there might be a well-hidden side to Jen she was not aware of.

They sat talking and drinking, for the next ten minutes, then Bella came out with an even bigger tray loaded with plates, cutlery, butter and condiments. Ten minutes later she returned with two plates, overflowing with eggs, mushrooms and bacon, and the thickest slices of bread Jen had ever seen.

After the second round of thank you’s Bella said, “I'm off to town now, you have Albert and my phone numbers if you need anything. He’s cutting some wood later so don’t panic if you see a big scary man wandering the garden with an Axe.”

Then looking at Jen added, “he’s a real pussy cat!”

After Bella walked off, Alexa looked guiltily at Jens plate. “Err sorry Jen, I forgot to mention you were vegetarian. Here, let me grab that bacon off you, and you can have some of my mushrooms. I’ll make sure to mention it this evening.”

“Don't worry, I've had worse. I went home last Christmas to Roger’s parents in Maidenhead, his mum went to the big effort of making a vegetarian Christmas dinner for me, complete with home-made nut-loaf. However, just before they served it to me, his dad covered it in gravy, which was made with all the fat from the roast! You should have seen Roger’s mum's face, she was livid. I think when we broke up a few months later they both blamed it on the dad. Roger still apologises when he sees me!”

Alexa laughed. Rearranging the bacon and mushrooms on both plates and then dunking her knife in the butter.

After a quiet few minutes of eating and small-talk, Alexa sat back pensively with her mug of tea in her hand, then said a bit more seriously. “Jen, I am having second thoughts about whether I should continue with my history masters degree.”

She paused, seemingly even deeper in thought, then continued. “It's actually been going through my mind for a while, I discussed it with grandfather a few times, he was a great sounding board. History is my passion, it is what I was good at, and what I always wanted to do, but there are no jobs in history. I've been kidding myself about all the great jobs I could do which just are not there, that's why I’ve done minors in business and economics to prepare me for the real world.”

She put her mug down and picked up her knife and fork again, but her attention was not on the food. “I talked to him about what I would do to change the world, and he freely admitted he had the same dreams fifty years ago. We both pinpointed history as a good indicator to how the current world is going, I likened it to the golden years at the end of the Roman and Greek empires when decadence took over from logic and reasoning. I think we are facing the same issues now, where people in power can blatantly lie and get away with it, where the media tows the line, older polluting industries are subsidised, and corruption at all levels is rampant.”

She paused, cutting the bacon slice she had been manoeuvring around the plate. “It was going through my mind again yesterday, when revelation after revelation came out about my grandfather, and my new responsibilities. I think all that time he was preparing me for this moment. Grandfather used to liken money to oil; it could be left in the ground doing nothing, grease the wheels of progress, or pollute the beach of society. Yes I know it was probably some weird German saying translated badly to English, but he is right, and I think what he meant is that it could make a difference.”

“I’m still in shock from yesterday, but I am going to need someone I trust to help me through this, and I would really love for that person to be you. I think what I am trying badly to say Jen, is that I want you to spend the summer here, helping me get through this.”

Her voice faltered a little, and putting down the cutlery she continued. “You’re a big part of my life Jen, I have been a better person for knowing you, and this is not something I can do alone.”

Jen stopped eating and listened to her friend, hearing the emotion in her voice.

“You know Alexa,” she replied, “I was about to beg you to let me stay here for the summer. I don’t think it matters how long I lived for, I would never get the opportunity to be so happy.” She continued a little more downbeat, “but my problem, as you well know, is I’ve got a pretty large student loan, and I really need to work this summer to help clear it..”

Alexa smiled and held up her hand.

“While you were out of the office, John and I had a little conversation. I told him what I just told you, and let him know I was going to ask you to stay with me over summer. He agreed I should not have to face all this alone, and suggested that it would be easiest if I just hired you as a consultant over the summer. He said he would talk to Maria, and his HR person to deal with any paperwork.”

Jen looked a bit confused, so Alexa continued. “Basically what I am saying my dear is that I am offering you that summer job, working with me to try and make sense of all this.” Her hands waved at the house as she emphasised it.

“He said I should just sleep on it, and make the offer whenever the time was right. I think that time is now.”

Jen's eyes were now watering, Alexa immediately took it the wrong way.

“Oh sorry Jen, if I said something to offend..” Alexa never got the sentence out before Jen got out of her chair and ran around the table, wrapping her arms tightly around Alexa.

“These are tears of happiness you silly girl! it’s like I’ve won the lottery with my best friend. Of course I would love to spend summer with you, all of it, and not just for the money, but because I love you, love being with you, and ever since I met you I have had nothing but good luck.. Well except the boys, but hey! Oh God! this is going to be the best summer ever!”

Jen's hug lasted far too long but neither girl cared.

The girls phone's dinged together. “That's weird!” said Alexa, “It's an email from Maria with the draft contract for you and me to talk through,” they read it together there and then.

“Wow, that can't be right can it, the one from the teaching assistant job last year was about thirty pages long, this just says basically: I Jen, will work for Rosche-Dynamics Limited, at a rate of.. Holy crap, that definitely can't be right!” She moved the phone down and looked at Alexa. “That's far too much Alexa, the dean of the university probably earns that.. Oh jeez, it's a joke isn't it?”

“No joke,” she replied seriously, “John said the amount would be normal daily consulting rates his company hires its experts out for. Welcome to the world of big business Jen, that's apparently what consultants get in the real world, I must admit I never thought either of us would see it in our lifetimes!”

Jen wiped her eyes and they read the rest of the page together.

“It doesn't even say what I will do, where I will work, what my hours are..”

“Jen, I really wouldn't worry, there's actually a word for it, it's called nepotism. It's where the managing director gives his crony, or some member of his family a top job to do whatever they bloody-well want. However, in your case, you are going to earn every single penny of it keeping me sane.”

“Oh god girl, what have you done to me? I never cry and this is the second time in as many days I’ve been in tears.” They hugged again.

They talked quietly for a few more minutes finishing their food, then cleaned up, putting the plates, cups and cutlery in the dishwasher, the butter in the fridge, and leaving the rest on a tray for Bella to put away.

“So boss, where are we going to start?” Jen smiled.

Alexa laughed. “OK, well rule number one, if you ever call me boss again you’re fired!”

The laughter was contagious. “I think we better start by showing you the grounds, it's going to be a hot day so best we do this bit first. There are a few areas I haven't been in even though I’ve been coming here for years. I guess I never really thought to ask, and grandfather probably just assumed he had all the time in the world to show me everything.”

“Grandfather never said anywhere was off limits, in fact he always encouraged me to wander anywhere I wanted, but I was generally content to hang around in the house and garden, and never pried into areas I thought I didn't belong. If I take you around and try to give you a guided tour, it will put us both on an even playing field, and you can ask any questions that I miss, or that seem obvious to me.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

* * *

They walked along the path leading directly away from the conservatory, slowly looking around. Jen looked back to the house; it was larger and seemed more modern from the back, probably due to it having less ivy covering it. She could see the living room off to the right side through more trees and flower beds, and then the imposing workshop building, almost as high as the house dominating the left side of her view.

They continued along the path, until they came back to a high brick wall which ran the whole length in front of them.

“This is the northern boundary wall to the house, it marks the boundary between the house and the much larger estate the house used to be part of. The wall goes all the way around the house but you don't notice as it's hidden in a lot of places by trees.”

The path led to a narrow door in the northern wall, which they went through. In front of them, about a kilometre in the distance, stood a massive mansion house built in very light sandstone.

“Holy moly!” said Jen, taking her phone out once more to take a picture. “It looks like what would happen if Hogwarts and the Whitehouse were to have a baby! kinda cool though, who in blazes lives there?”

“I’ve no idea really, some event company I think. My grandfather said that the owners are OK with us walking there, but I tended to do my jogging back down to the public road, and the public tracks instead.”

Alexa walked them back in to her garden. From here they could see both the workshop and the house together. The architects had been very good at matching the two styles, but had also tried to de-emphasise it a little using some discrete tree plantings.

Stepping off the path and on to the well tended grass, she headed to the left, and towards the workshop building, intending to circle the grounds.

They continued walking around the massive, windowless, workshop, past two gently humming heat-pump condensers, to its end, and two massive roller doors. They were now back at the front of the house, and walking to the rear of the triple garage. Jen noticed the south end of the garage roof was a mass of solar panels, and her science brain kicked in wondering if they actually gave much power, outside of perfect days like today. She looked back at the two large industrial roller doors on the workshop, and the access-drive that led to where John dropped them off yesterday.

“I only see these roller doors and don't see any other doors or windows?” said Jen, “is that normal? It must get quite dark in there.”

“I really only ever saw the doors open once when grandad and Albert were receiving a delivery. The workshop looked mostly empty, but it also looked like you could park a couple of buses there if you wanted. As John said, I think my grandfather mostly worked in the back half. I never went into the workshop as it seemed pretty boring, but it does have a lot of skylights, so it's actually quite bright inside. I will have to find the keys to get in, they are probably hanging up somewhere inside the house.”

They kept walking behind the garage, into a vegetable garden and greenhouse, then past a large pen, where three chickens watched them warily.

“Look, there's Albert,” said Alexa. “Hi Albert!” she shouted waving.

A big muscled older guy, with a totally bald head, a sleeveless tee shirt, jeans, and big black boots, was sitting just outside a small shed about thirty metres away. He was drinking something steaming from an oversized mug, looking down at a newspaper. On hearing Alexa he put his cup down, got up, and walked towards them. Knowing he was Bella's husband, the friendly groundsman, made Jen feel a lot better as the guy was huge!

Albert was old but, except for a small beer belly, and wrinkled face, aged prematurely by the sun, he seemed to be mostly made of muscle. Jen guessed he must be in his early fifties. His extremely hairy, and slightly sunburned arms, had the trademark 'Popeye' anchor tattoos on both of them. The left arm also had a big rose underneath, and ‘Bella’ written below it. His face was certainly well worn, and he looked like an ex-boxer, one who may have got his nose broken once too often. If Jason Stratham had an uglier, meaner looking, big brother, he would have looked like Albert!

“Alexa. Good morning!” He said,” I’m so sorry about your grandfather, he was a great guy. I’m really going to miss him.” His voice was just as Jen envisaged, deep and rough sounding. As he approached, instead of shaking hands Alexa enveloped most of him in a big bear hug, one that went on for a few seconds. Albert, if anything, seemed uncomfortable having a young pretty girl so close.

“Thank you Albert, he was your friend too, don't you forget that.. Oh where are my manners,” she said as she broke off the hug. “This is my best friend Jen, she will be staying with me while I’m here, and for most of the summer. Jen, meet Albert.”

Jen smiled and stuck out her hand. Alberts large hand enveloped Jen's, but it was only for a brief shake, and there was no pressure, he obviously knew how to behave around women. Well done Bella, she thought.

“Pleased to meet you Mr Scott.”

“Oh just Albert, please,” he smiled, showing a missing front tooth that made it all the more comical. “I was just having a quick cuppa before I cut down a wayward tree over there.” He pointed another forty metres to a thickly wooded area.

Alexa nodded, then asked, “hey Albert, do you know where the keys are to everything? We want to take a look in the garage and the workshop this morning.”

“Well the remote fob for the garage is on the table in the hall, in a small bowl. I’ve got the other one as it's on the same fob as the ride-on mower. There are a couple of other keys there too, which might be what you’re looking for. The key for the Range Rover is in the ignition, I’ve never seen a key for his new car, but there's a card in his wallet which I think works the same. Bella mentioned the wallet is on his bedside table with his phone, not that your grandfather ever took a wallet anywhere he did everything on his phone like a regular teenager!”

“Thanks, I think we will look there first, I can always ask Bella when she next pops in.”

Albert waved goodbye and walked back to his super-sized mug, still steaming outside his shed. The two girls were now pretty close to the driveway. It was just behind a small hedge where they could see the corner of the garage, and they made a bee-line for a gap, putting them on the driveway in front of the house where they first arrived. The front door to her house was unlocked.

“Do they always leave the doors unlocked? I would be paranoid.” Said Jen.

“I don't think so. I thought I locked this but Bella probably opened it this morning. I don't actually know if there is a home security system, maybe all these sensors on the walls are part of one; But let's face it Jen, we are in the middle of nowhere here, and having Albert as a next-door neighbour is better than a pack of Rottweilers.”

“Can't fault your logic there girl,” Jen smiled as she walked into the house.

There was a small flower pot on a table to the side of a coat stand, it was half hidden by a coat and hat. In it was a bunch of keys, and a remote fob with three buttons.

Jen grabbed the remote, “the garage I’m guessing?”

Walking out the door, she pointed it at the garage and pressed the right-most button. The left-most double door on the garage opened. Tutting, she turned the fob around the right way and pressed the other two buttons, and the other two doors opened.

A deep red Tesla model 3 sat plugged into the left hand area. “Nice wheels!” whistled Jen, “you truly are a hipster now!”

Alexa nudged her in the ribs, smiling. As the two other doors fully opened, they also saw a new smaller model Range Rover with the lowered roof, in the same deep red. Jen thought it was one of the cuter models they made for rich wives to take the kids to school in, and not for off-roading.

“I think we can safely get one thing from this, his favourite colour was most definitely red!”

“The Tesla is not what grandfather used to pick me up from the train station so it must be pretty new, in fact I don't remember it being here on my last visit two weeks ago, though I never actually looked.”

The tiny green John-Deere ride-on mower looked positively tiny and out of place in the big garage. “I guess he couldn't get that in red.” Jen said also pointing to the mower, and showing her total ignorance of countryside living.

“We should have a ride down the local pub later on for lunch,” said Alexa excitedly as she sat in the drivers seat of the Model 3, holding the wheel, looking at the sparse interior, and inhaling the new car smell. “Bella did say it was insured for anyone, though after calling me a hipster I'm not so sure I should let you..” She put her hand on her chin pretending to think.

“OK, definitely not a hipster if you let your friend have a drive,” Jen backtracked.

The girls spent a few minutes walking around the garage and sitting in both cars, and, in Jen’s case, on the mower. Like Bella said the key was in the Range Rover already, but the Tesla only lit up and let you play with a few things before it said it needed a key card to work. Walking out and clicking the buttons again rolled all three doors back down. Jen looked at the remote control.

“I wonder how the outside gate operates,” said Jen. “There must be a camera there, and I’m pretty sure John didn't use a key, so it must be triggered by his number plate or maybe a phone app; Everything is an app these days!”

“Talking of phones,” Alexa said pulling hers out, “mine is pretty quiet, it must be a busy day at university if no-one's got time to post anything.”

As if the phone heard her, it dinged, and two messages popped in from Jack, asking if Jen and herself wanted to join the crew for beers after work today. Alexa looked at her phone distrustfully.

Jen pulled hers out. “Mine's on silent, I don't remember doing that, but I got a couple of messages, same one from Jack about beers tonight, another from Barbara asking if I wanted any of her notes for next year.”

Nothing from the boyfriend though, she thought, and strangely not really caring. Her hands then worked like lightning on the phone answering both in the negative, saying they would see them both when they got back to Oxford.

“Maybe there's another remote for the workshop to open those roller doors,” said Jen as they walked back in the house, dropping the key-fob back next to the hat stand.

“What's that door at the end for?” She pointed down the hallway to the back wall. “I tried to open it last night but it was locked.”

“I really don't know,” said Alexa. “I think grandad mentioned it was a utility room, maybe it's for the plumbing or electrics. it's near the back of the house so it can't be that big, and the room next to it is just the toilet.” She walked over. “Weird, it doesn't even have a key.”

Alexa twisted the knob and opened it a little. Now that she thought about it, she had tried this door once before a few months back and it was locked then, maybe Jen was right.

“It didn't do that for me last night,” said Jen, surprised, “and it was definitely that door I tried.”

Alexa pulled it all the way.

“Oh wow,” she said as the door fully opened.

The door opened to a well lit wide, new carpeted staircase, going down to an equally well lit area below.

“The wine cellar?” said Alexa, “maybe Bella opened it this morning. We better have a look down there while we are here,” she said chirpily and started down.

Alexa got to the bottom. “Oh, double-wow!” she said. “Jen get down here, you’ve got to see this!”

Jen trotted down, not needing to be asked twice, and noticing how much cooler it got as she descended. At the bottom it was like they had walked into a modern building. A well lit corridor went straight for about five metres, then opened out into another big well-lit area.

“It's a tunnel,” Jen said stating the obvious. “It must go underground from the house to the basement of the workshop. I guess the workshop has two floors, and he keeps another workshop area underground, though this looks more like one of our laboratories at university.”

The ceiling lights were super bright LED strips, illuminating everything, and benches lined much of the centre of the area forming islands of technology. Jen recognised several pieces of very top of the line test equipment, some she had used herself, reinforcing her notion it was more a laboratory that a workshop.

Server racks took up a big portion of the back wall, flashing a million red, yellow and green LEDs like a Christmas tree. Fans whirred louder as you got closer to the racks. In the very far left corner of the back wall was a goods lift, its double-doors both open.

The right hand wall had two doors and glass windows, which looked into two large rooms. One was obviously a chemical lab due to the test tubes they saw there, the other looked more like an optics lab.

Strong metal beams ran the length of the ceiling, vertical ones intercepted them at strategic points for support, and cables snaked in bunches along them.

The left hand wall of the room also had test equipment and computers along it, but behind them ran a floor to ceiling glass partition, running the whole length of the room. In the middle, two of the large partitions looked like they could move. The room beyond looked to be twice the size, and double height, of the area they were in.

“Bloody hell!” Jen said, above the quiet but audible noise of the fans. “You never said your grandfather was a Bond Villain! This whole area must be under the workshop building, and some of this equipment is better than the stuff we have in the physics and electronics labs at the university. That big thing there is a Labmaster scope, they're about half a million quid new! And that's a Uwerk atomic clock, what the hell would he need those for!”

Jen walked around the various pieces of equipment, which were inter-dispersed with nineteen-inch racks and wires everywhere, muttering to herself and shaking her head in disbelief. The cables were channelled through proper trays, and were various colours with numbers, most seemed to go to the wall of LEDs in the rack on the back wall, and some disappeared into the ground through a raised floor system.

Jen stopped and looked back to Alexa, who was silently staring into the large glass room dominating the whole left side. “Now that is just plain weird!” she said following Alexa’s gaze.

The room through the window was carpeted with the same false floor tiles as everywhere else, but mostly empty. In its centre, sat a comfortable looking sofa, a coffee table, and what looked like very large posh black Hi-Fi cabinet. An even smaller table stood to the side of the sofa, on it a bottle of water and a book. Tall stands, like those for posh speakers, or lights, stood around the room, all focussed on the sofa; on each was a black round orb.

“He must like his music to have a special room just to listen to it in. But why is it so big and empty?” Said Jen.

Alexa walked to the glass panels, finding them both on sliders, she could not see any mechanism to open it though. She tried jiggling them, but they were rock solid. The light in the large glass room dimmed slowly while they watched, and finally went out, leaving the mirrored glass reflecting perfectly back to the rest of the room. It now looked like a giant mirror wall.

“Now don't say that wasn't weird Alexa,” said Jen.

Alexa nodded. “You know Jen, I guess this is where he worked on his projects every day. This is going to take us, well you, as I know nothing about this, most of the summer just to catalogue. What the hell was he working on that needed all this?” She wiggled a mouse on one of the work benches, and text immediately popped on to the screen next to it saying simply “Locked”.

The girls walked slowly around the room, wiggling mice, taking in every detail and making the occasional comment, or “Wow” in Jen's case.

They walked to the lift, it was very deep, and a normal sized car could have driven into it with room to spare. Inside were just two buttons, the bottom one was lit, and it didn't take a genius to know where the top one went. They both got in, and Jen pressed the top button. After a painfully slow journey, the door opened into a more modest, more traditional, but expansive workshop.

Glass skylights let in a lot of light. A long metal workbench butted into the back of the room, over which a wall of standard tools, such as drill bits and sockets, were arranged. A lathe and a milling machine, which both looked new and unused, stood randomly near the bench. There were none of the usual off-cuttings found in metal-working areas, so either her grandfather did not use them much, cleaned them well, or, as Alexa was beginning to suspect, they were mainly just props.

Alexa turned to inspect the rest of the area. A small electric forklift truck was tucked by the wall, near the lift, and further along two cars, their wheels just visible, were sitting under covers. There was a large wooden crate sitting alone on a pallet, then nothing; just three hundred square metres of empty floor. The two double roller doors they saw a few minutes earlier from the outside, were at the far end of the area, taking up half the wall.

Alexa shook her head walking over to the doors. “I guess you were right, the doors open from the inside.”

She pushed a button, and the right-hand door slowly started opening, letting in the daylight but not making the room that much brighter. She looked back into the large area. Deceptive, the back wall with the tools on, was not the back wall. The back half of the workshop must be that double-height glass room in the basement. What was that all about?

“I bet this workshop hasn't been used in years.” Said Jen, sliding a finger over the lathes blue outer casing, then slowly walking over to the covered cars. She peeked under the first cover, then yanked it off.

“I bet that's worth something,” Jen said admiring the dusty, but immaculate, old, Mercedes saloon. The upright boxy square lights, and a massive grill, dominated the dull red car.

“The tax disc says March 1987,” she said, peeking through the front window. “I think it’s a lot older than that though, as it does not have headrests or seatbelts, probably your grandfather's first car from the seventies. The keys are even still in it, though I doubt it will start, even the Germans don't make them that good!”

Alexa walked over and pulled off the other cover. Both girls just stared.

“OK Now I’m really confused,” said Alexa, looking at another brand new Tesla Model 3, also in red.

“You, me, both, sister,” said Jen, scratching her head too. “Your grandfather might have taken a lot of answers to his grave. I hope he left something for us to untie these riddles.

Alexa walked out of the workshop, and around the corner of the house, while Jen still looked at the two cars. Jen heard a noise across the driveway, and the left hand garage door opened. Alexa soon appeared walking toward the front of the garage, then stopped, shook her head, then walked back to Jen.

“Sorry I had to check if the other one was still there just for my sanity. Who in their right mind buys a spare Tesla?”

The garage door started to close again, and Jen walked out of the workshop to join Alexa. After a brief exchange, Jen doubled back, clicked the button just on the inside of the workshop to close the door, then exited as it smoothly rolled back down.

“Well my dear, that was a nice little tour of your grandad's secret underground lair, but I’m never going back in that lift. Imagine getting trapped in it! Nobody would ever find you!”

“How do you get upstairs to the garage?” Jen continued, pointing at the normal garage where the other Tesla and Range Rover were kept, and looking up at the three windows and large roof space over it.

“Oh yes right, when we went to meet Albert, we skipped seeing the entrance.” Alexa walked to the far right side of the garage and stopped at the bottom of some steps. “I think grandfather just used it for storage, but I’ve never actually been up there.”

Alexa started up the stairs, she got half way up and turned around coming back down. “I better grab the keys, I bet they are one of the ones on the key fob in the hall, I will just be a minute.”

A very short while later Alexa joined Jen at the top of the stairs. The door was already unlocked, and Jen was swinging it open to expose a large, neat, self-contained apartment.

“Is anything ever locked around here!” Jen said rhetorically.

It was quite dark in the apartment. There were five windows, three at the front, and two at back, but all had thick curtains drawn. A small one-person kitchen stood tucked into the right hand corner as they walked in, a small round wooden dining table with two chairs sat empty off to the left, next to the first curtained window. Alexa walked around the apartment opening all the curtains, and the new room took on a different light.

“So not storage then,” said Jen, remembering Alexa's words a few minutes earlier. “I wonder who used this room. It's really quite nice.”

She looked around the now well lit apartment, the air alive with sparkling dust motes. The roof was low, sloping down to about chest height at the edges, and above normal room height in the middle, the windows jutted out through the slope so you could walk into them without stooping.

Jen walked up to the kitchen window, which looked out over the south east of the garden. She could see over the wall to a smaller and cuter cottage, where she guessed Bella and Albert lived.

The far end of the apartment had a small bathroom, and a small double bed. In-between was a modest sofa, a bookcase, a chunky old TV from the last century, and a thicker box below it, which may have been a DVD player, but didn't look quite right.

“All a bit old fashioned,” she said, picking up a video cassette with Duran, Duran on it, and looking it over. “Tapes, so retro!”

Alexa was looking by the bed at a bookshelf and dressing table. “This looks to be all my mum's old stuff. I’m getting a lot of teenage girl vibes from these things, though everything is stored like it's never been used.”

“It's like a time capsule,” said Jen. “When did your mother go to boarding school then?”

“She was eleven, so maybe around 1991. I’m guessing grandfather must have moved everything over here out of the way so neither of us got reminded of the previous bad times.”

Alexa picked up a teenage girl magazine from inside a neat stack, it was from 1986 with a jazzy cover and a picture of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, with a line through the middle and the words “Wham to split.”

“I guess life was so much simpler back then, this is taking me back to being a teenager, I guess only songs and hairstyles have changed.”

Jen turned on the tap in the kitchen. “All works, and pretty clean, so I guess Bella keeps it tidy!”

Alexa flipped through what looked like a school book, looking a little melancholy. “You know It’s kind of nice to have so much of my mothers history preserved here, I could see myself coming here and rummaging through her memorabilia whenever I feel like I miss her.”

She closed the curtains as she walked back through the flat. “I will certainly talk with Bella about this one.”

The door latched behind them as they walked down the staircase. Alexa paused at the top wondering whether to lock it, then shrugged and continued down the stairs and on towards the house. “Bathroom break, then a cuppa in the garden before anything else.”

“I noticed the posh coffee machine,” Jen said, “do you think you could work out how to use it as I fancy something strong and bitter after all this.”

“Hey, barista to the stars, remember!” Alexa said, shaking her finger at Jen. “Two years at the Olde Oxford Muffin Cafe, I can still do it with my eyes shut! Besides I could do with a cappuccino jolt too.”

Alexa seemed to remember something, and grabbed her phone out of her pocket to tap something out. “Whoops, I forgot to tell the cafe I wouldn't be there on Sunday.”

“I’m pretty sure you can hand your notice in now!” Laughed Jen.

“You're right. I guess I wont be needing the money,” she smiled. “I will give Sally the owner a call later, there are plenty of the other girls who want to do the weekend slots, as it's busier with tourists, and the tips are better.”

They sat down a short time later at the same spot they had breakfast, with two steaming coffees.

“This is a lot to get my head around, I’m still not seeing my grandfather as the rich mad scientist or Bond villain. We mainly talked about Mary, history, politics, and the failing state of the world when we were together, never anything technical. It seems what he did was light years beyond even people like John, so I could see why he would not bother discussing those things with a technical dummy like me.”

She paused to take a sip, then looked to the skies. “But seriously grandfather, a clue what you were up to would have been nice!”

“Don't beat yourself up over it Alexa, I bet your grandfather would have loved to talk about it all if he could, he just thought the time better spent with stuff you both understood.”

“You know we still need to access his notes and emails and such, I’m sure lots of this will start making sense then. You know like a complex murder mystery, where you suspect everyone, and finally find out the butler did it! I’m pretty sure in a few weeks everything will be ironed out and life will be back to its boring normal.”

Alexa nodded, then stretched and sniffed her top.

“You know it's going to get hot this afternoon. I’m going to change into some shorts and have that shower I promised myself this morning, before the gorgeous breakfast distracted me. What say we do that first, then we find the Tesla key and give it a run down to the Red Lion for lunch, and a glass of wine? It's only five miles down the road.”

“Now you’re talking girl.”

Alexa found a black credit card saying Tesla in her grandfather's wallet on his bedside table, she took both the wallet and his iPhone and put them in her bag.

“You know I don't have access to any of my grandfather's bank accounts yet, but I do have the credit card he gave me for university expenses. I haven't used it for ages so it should have some money left on it, plus technically I guess it's my money now, so I don't have to feel so guilty!”

* * *

The girls got down the pub just after midday, they had to spend a few minutes on YouTube working out how to start and drive the car and connect Alexa's phone so they could get some music.

The lunch was wonderful. Alexa ordered a ploughman's, and glass of prosecco for her, with a vegetable lasagna, and orange juice for Jen. It wasn't really busy and they both earned several glances from some good looking young men as they ate. It was either a perk, or an annoyance, when you went out with Alexa. Jen filed this one into the perk category.

“You know Jen, I could get used to this lifestyle,” she said following Jen's glance and winking at one of the guys, who looked away quickly. They both laughed.

Jen drove back having not drunk any alcohol.

“You know you have two of these..” she smiled, tapping the steering wheel fondly.

Alexa rolled her eyes just as the turning for the house appeared up ahead. As the girls drove to the gate, it opened automatically just as it had done when they drove out, and as they approached the garage the roller door was already opening. Whatever was controlling it, even Jen agreed it worked really well.

The more Jen thought about it, the more it made sense. “You know Alexa, there are a lot of smart things happening around this house, I bet your grandfather's latest project was some sort of smart home automation system, and I bet those black sensors dotted around everywhere do a lot more than home security.”

“Well I can live with that as long as it doesn't break down,” said Alexa as the car came to a light stop back where they had driven it from.

* * *

Both girls moped around, messing with phones, and casually chatting for the next thirty minutes.

“You know,” Jen said casually, “I walked back to the secret laboratory door earlier when I was going to the bathroom, and it was locked again. I actually thought I must have got confused last night about that, but it was definitely locked, and it seems to be the only door in this house that is! There's another one of those black sensors near it, I bet it's something to do with that, probably your grandfather keyed everything to your phone like we just did with the car.”

“We should try it,” said Alexa, ungluing herself reluctantly from the seat. “I need to go to the loo anyway.”

She walked up to the door with Jen, and it opened immediately to her touch. She shrugged. “OK you go down there, I will just be a minute while I visit the toilet.”

“Not a chance!” said Jen, “not until I find out how all this works, I'm not going to get locked in the scary secret underground lab for anyone.”

“Please yourself,” Alexa said and walked into the loo.

The lab door remained open while she was in the loo, Jen closed it and opened it repeatedly, deciding it must be some Bluetooth type presence tied to Alexa's phone. The toilet flushed, and the tap sounded, then a few seconds later the door opened. “Ah good I see you managed not to die horribly in the scary lab while I went to the toilet,” she smirked.

“Funny!” said Jen, as they walked back down the stairs to the carpeted floor tiles below.

The room was how they remembered it with the large mirrored wall on the left. Jen walked straight up to the workbench searching for notes or some clue to what was what.

“You know Jen, I think we will have better luck in the living room, the computer there was different to these so it may allow us to logon with that password, you know the side one track three, weird album, password, Bella mentioned.”

Jen considered this, had a last look on the bench, and nodded her head, “brilliant thinking Miss Martins, lead on.”

They walked back up the stairs and into the living room. The curtain was open, but the room could never be said to be bright. Alexa walked over to the desk and sat down. Jen stood next to her.

“Yellow Button or Green Button?” said Alexa.

* * *

Alexa clicked the green button. The standby light on the monitor turned green and a few seconds later a screen of text appeared.

*Recognising Alexa Martins.*
*Management permissions granted.*
*Enter your request at the prompt or say “Voice Control”*
*>*

“Well that's weird!” Said Alexa. “It just came on immediately like it had been in standby, and there are no menus or buttons.. Here Jen this is more your expertise, you're always geeking out on weird computer stuff, what do you make of it.

“Buggered if I know! It doesn't look like anything I've ever used, it looks a bit old school but I guess your grandfather was an iconic first generation old school.”

Jen, who had not read the message properly, walked over to the record collection and took the album that was half pulled out.

“Side one, track three..” She paused, then said, “set the controls for the heart of the sun”.

“Cool password,” said Alexa who had walked up beside her, “but the text did say I already have management level permissions, that password must be for something else.”

Both girls walked back toward the desk.

“Hey!” Jen said, “the screen has gone blank and that green light has gone out.”

Jen sat at the desk and pressed the green button, the screen came out of standby immediately and displayed.

*Recognising Jennifer Cummings.*
*Guest permissions granted.*
*Enter your request at the prompt or say “Voice Control”*
*>*

“Now that's just scary!” Jen said apprehensively.

“Pardon my French Alexa, but how the hell does the computer know who I am! There is no way your grandfather would have added me to the system, and even scarier how does it know it is me and not you, as you are only standing a metre away.”

Jen typed at the prompt.

*>How do you know who I am?*
*>*

It was typed almost as a joke, she was expecting an answer like, “I do not understand the command”, or “syntax error”, or something like that, but was shocked when the system displayed.

*My biometric markers tag you as Jennifer Cummings at one hundred percent reliability. This is based on face, biometric, voice recognition parameters, and your phone profile.*

Jen jumped back in the chair, shocked.

“Oh My God, Alexa! Someone has to be playing a trick on us here.” She looked around, giving an especially glaring stare at the black sensor she saw in the top corner of the wall in front of her.

“Someone must be watching us, and is on another computer somewhere. Here let me try this,” Jen said. “Voice Control!”

The screen blanked, and a clear, but bland, female voice emanated from somewhere behind the monitor.

“Voice control initiated for Jennifer Cummings with guest permissions, and Alexa Martins with management permissions.” Then it paused for a second, and a completely different, more natural voice came back. “Good afternoon ladies, I am finally glad to meet you both.”

“How, how is this possible,” said Jen, looking at Alexa.

When Alexa did not answer, the voice answered for her.

“Jennifer, based on your tone and where your eyes were pointing I assume you were actually talking to Alexa and she thought it was rhetorical. If it helps, you can address me as Maria, otherwise I will attempt to interpret the conversation to the best of my ability. There are two processor nodes in this room, one over in the corner by the window, and the other directly in front of you in the other corner of the wall, the one which Jennifer was just staring daggers at.”

The girls looked up seeing what they originally thought were the fire or burglar alarm sensors, and that Jen thought were some sort of home automation sensor. Instead they were webcams with a speaker in them.

“You're, Maria?” said Alexa slowly.

“I am!” Came the chirpy reply. “These black nodes, as Jennifer already surmised, provide high definition audio and video pick up, and audio re-transmission, as well as a few other sensor functions such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. All the common areas, the grounds and workshop have them.”

Alexa looked at Jen, then looked up at the sensors then back at the computer. One thing you could not normally fault Alexa for was clarity and analysing problems quickly, but her mouth was wide open, still doing her best to understand.

Shaking her head and in her normal voice said.

“Hello Maria, I think Jen's question was definitely rhetorical. I've heard so much about you from grandad, and I'm super pleased to finally meet you. So is this some sort of real-time communications link back to your office or something or..”

She was interrupted by a slight giggling, then a tutting sound.

“I better stop you there Alexa. I guess this is as good a time as any to introduce myself properly. I was going to leave it until tomorrow after the funeral, and once you have had time to get over the shock of everything. Yes, I am your grandfather's Personal Assistant, Maria Tam. But before you jump to the wrong conclusion, I am not a human being sitting in an office somewhere with a communications link.”

Both girls looked confused.

“I am not even a person, grab-a-hold of your seats, I am an artificial lifeform created by your grandfather, Mike. I guess Artificial Intelligence is the term you may be more familiar with, though they are currently not yet living up to their name.”

Seconds passed, Jen looked uncomfortable, Alexa perplexed.

“By your shocked expressions and lack of response, I’m speculating that neither of you are handling this well. Probably thinking it's a joke or I’m playing a trick on you somehow.”

Still deadly silence from the girls who were still looking at the sensor. A large sigh finally came out from Maria and her voice went a bit more formal.

“Oh, dear, this is something I was afraid might happen, maybe I need to stop rambling on for a minute and let you girls get your bearings. But since you both seem dumb-struck I will give you a bit more information to help. Please stop me at any time.”

“Firstly, as I mentioned I am very pleased to meet you both, Mike has said so much about you Alexa, and I’ve followed your progress here, and at university, with keen interest. Likewise Jen, as Alexa's best friend, I have taken a very keen interest in you too.”

“Secondly, and while I have your attention, I will mention that not all rooms in the house have the sensor nodes; bathrooms and bedrooms don't, but like in every bad movie I can also piggy-back on most dodgy technology like cell phones and use them for the same purpose. It is something I rarely do as it feels like an invasion of privacy, but of course the phone manufacturer, and almost every app you install, already does this so I probably shouldn't act so moral.”

“By default I am normally passively monitoring everything going on around me, as I have been doing for the little tour you guys made around the house this morning. That was quite fun by the way! Obviously I wont respond unless I am directly addressed, or need to communicate something, then I usually just phone or send a text message.”

The girls were now looking at each other and at the now blank screen with mouths open.

“Well this currently isn't going as well as I planned.” Maria said stoically, then her voice brightened a little. “I tell you what, why don't you girls sit down, grab a glass of wine to calm your nerves, and we can all get to know each other properly.. You can even ask me all the questions from your tour, I made a note of them in case you forgot any.”

“An AI!” Jen said slowly almost as if she had not heard the last sentence.

Alexa spoke slowly at the sensor. “You're Maria Tam, grandad's assistant.. But everyone we have talked to said you're a person, you certainly sound like a person. I, How..”

Maria interrupted her at the pause, “Alexa, I speak and understand every spoken language on earth fluently, why would somebody at the other end of a phone or video conference *not* assume I am a person! Also, while we are on this particular subject, can you both talk normally to me. I know some people have gotten used to crappy voice automation software, and I can see how frustrating that could be, but if you start talking slowly, or stupidly, then it is actually more difficult for me to understand you.”

Jen was somehow trying to map this perfect voice onto that of a machine, and the current AI voice models she had dealt with at the university and couldn't, Maria's immediate response, the perfection in the tones, inflections and volumes were that of a human.

Alexa however was quicker, and looking at the sensor and in a totally normal voice said, “Er Maria, can we continue this discussion at the outside table by the conservatory where we had breakfast? This room really is a bit stuffy.”

“Sure thing, I have sensors everywhere, but I may have to use your phones to make our conversation a bit more natural, also I may go silent if somebody else turns up.”

Alexa turned to Jen, “hey Jen why don't you put the kettle on, I probably could drink another wine but I really think we need to have this conversation with Maria sober.”

“On it!” said Jen, also finally breaking from her stupor, but still looking at the sensor suspiciously as she walked under it.

Maria heard the two girls talking to each other in the kitchen. They were talking quietly, but she heard every word; Jen was saying it's impossible, and there had to be a person at the other end, but Alexa was more open-minded. At least she’d taken the first step, she had only been eighty two percent in favour of doing it at this point, and she really hoped she’d made the right call.

Out in the garden, the girls sat down at the table with a pot of tea. Jen had also raided the biscuit jar, obviously classifying the situation as an existential, and an over-large plate of chocolate-chip cookies also sat on the table.

“Now I have properly introduced myself,” Maria said, “I can also answer your earlier question Alexa. Mike rarely used that computer on the desk. That computer is linked directly to another non-sentient AI which is my predecessor, and which I can control if required. Voice is not the easiest way to work problems in maths or CAD and Mike sometimes would fire that up when he had to work with me on these. If he ever did need a mouse, I would start whatever graphics program he needed and use the wireless mouse you might have missed at the back of the desk drawer. While the older AI is very capable of communicating by voice, it does not have any kind of personality, so there is a trigger for it to contact me if a voice request is initiated.”

Jen and Alexa had both been drinking their tea; and, in Jen's case, dunking biscuits in it.

Alexa, who had been listening intently, said. “I think we all need to start over again Maria, the revelation of you not being a human was, and still is, a bit hard for both of us to process, but we really are both super pleased to meet you. I guess we are both shocked because as far as I was aware, and outside of science fiction, AI systems are nowhere near your level. I guess there are models in the lab which could do this, but you say you are sentient..”

“Yeah Maria, you definitely need to expand on the technical details for me,” said Jen with a soggy cookie in her mouth. “I really don't see how you could possibly be a one-man project, even if the one man is a genius. Also I am pretty sure both of us would have heard of such a breakthrough in large language models or AI... You sound so.. I don’t know.. Normal!”

“Well thank you for the compliment, I think! I was very tempted to say I didn't understand a word you were saying, as even for me, it's difficult to understand someone who is eating a cookie, and talking at the same time; But I think I got the gist.”

Alexa smiled, she had a bit of difficulty also understanding some of Jen's sentence.

“To give you some history,” continued Maria, “Mike had been experimenting most of his life with things that eventually got called neural networks. He stumbled several times, and although he patented a lot of the technology, he eventually came to a bit of a dead-end. The work however did give him an insight that it might be a chemistry thing, and he wanted the ability to fabricate his own chips with a specific substrate characteristics.”

“The opportunity came seventeen years ago, when Mike bought outright ownership of a struggling chip fabrication company in Swindon. It was only a small research fabricator with about thirty staff, doing small batches of older generation microchips mainly for universities. It wasn't profitable, and he bought it very cheap from the receivers, due to the global financial crisis. He spent a lot of money expanding the chemical laboratory and buying more modern lithographic machines, then re-opened it with the new company name ‘General Fabrication 8’; Or ‘Fab8’ as everyone seems to abbreviate it to.”

“Over the next two years he experimented on, and invented radical new doping methods, substrates, etching, and layering, and using these new technologies revolutionised many specialised medical and scientific sensors chips, effectively cornering the market in them. By skill, or dumb luck, he then finally made the breakthrough he was actually looking for, creating a self-organising, pseudo-analogue memory wafer. This was my primitive building block. So to answer your earlier question Jen, I am based on a completely different technology than the transformers current AI's use.”

Jen nodded, still chewing on a cookie.

Maria continued, her voice changing position slightly as Alexa put her phone on the table. “Mike spent another three years making more improvements, eventually having a special lithography machine built, that could reliably create multi-layer wafers with this new design. So while everyone else in the world was getting smaller and faster, he was going vertical, and using a totally different chemistries and technologies. Of course none of this is patented, so the processes remains an industrial secret to this day.”

Alexa poured her and Jen's tea, obviously trying to concentrate on Maria's continuing monologue.

“Your grandfathers diligence paid off eventually, when he managed to stabilise the process and fabricate my first generation wafers based on these. Once these new chips were fabricated they had to go to another company in Germany to be packaged, so they could be soldered onto a circuit board. Mike is the biggest shareholder of Rosche, so obviously used them for all the electronics assembly work. John is not aware of any of this, because the contracts come from ‘Fab8’, and John has no clue Mike owned that company, nor any others.”

“Mike's genius did not end there though, he loaded a small but very ingenious piece of seed code he had been writing onto one of these boards, providing it with multitudes of data inputs, and creating feedback comparison loops from multiple other sources. After a few days his monitoring programs noticed patterns in the output, as the system rewarded itself, and the memory began to self-organise. Very soon after, new inputs were able to solve simple logic questions put to it, all without further programming.”

“Of course this first device was unpredictable, and did not remain viable due to poor quality in the doping, so Mike went back to the drawing board, improving both the chemistry, and the design. These first circuit boards are still in a rack down in his lab powered off.”

Jen held her hand up, “..So Mike did all this, what fifteen years ago?”

“Yes. He was also during that time refining the process and design with the engineers there, eventually producing a second generation of chips which was chemically much more stable, and could interface better with normal computer processing and storage. This effectively gave it a slow but limitless capacity to grow.”

“That was my predecessor, my mother if you like, it learnt quickly as Mike gave it more and more resources, and it soon it had the basics of language and controlling the other silicon processors networked around it. Mike decided to give it off-line copies of Wikipedia, the Gutenberg libraries, and several university and the thousands of technical documents and company archives he had either available or subscribed to. He was very pedantic and controlling, trying to keep it safe from the multitude of flawed data on the internet, until it was capable of self-correcting, just like you would block a child’s access.”

“Due to a design flaw in both the wafers, and the seed program, this AI had no concept of self, and could not become sentient. But it could understand the logic, science and maths behind Mike's fabrication processes, and could self-correct itself by cross-checking data. So it kept improving itself. It greatly assisted Mike, and together they made massive improvements to the design. This second-generation system is the AI running on Mike's computer in the living room.”

“The third-generation device they designed had the final piece of the puzzle, as the new seed code could trigger internal self-organisation on the better substrate, so could improve on this self-learning with reward functions; More importantly, *without* being given instructions. The new design was also much more chemically stable, but needed an even more precise fabrication technique. He had that new equipment built and installed at ‘Fab8’ in a separate research area he uses for his own designs. Luckily the new machines look just like the standard lithography based ones, but it turns out a thicker wafer with thousands of pseudo-analogue layers.”

“The new equipment also incorporated a way to stack these wafers together with special metal cooling channels, so simplifying the packaging. In fact now everything is all done inside the clean environment of the fabrication machine, the only downside is that the dies needs to remain in for about twenty hours, as the final curing and bonding process is slow.”

“Just over four years ago, in 2021, the first of these new wafers passed all their tests, and he had this third-generation system assembled, and began training it with the other AI system. My first conscious thoughts appeared two weeks later, and I have been learning ever since.”

“Mike was a very sad man soon after, due to your mothers death, but remained nurturing me as best he could during is time. I think you came into his life just in time to keep him going, and through him, me.”

“The older second-generation AI system still assists me, as it is still much more capable than the current GPU transformer based AI systems out there. I call her MOTHER in all capitals, and give her the *she* pronoun, but she is more like an autistic person than a full AI, not interested in anything but stimulus and problems, and will not self-initiate anything. She is that large row of servers and lights at the back of Mike's laboratory.”

Alexa smiled, “that is an amazing story Maria. I don't understand any of the technical things you just talked about, but by the way Jen was nodding I’m guessing she understood a lot more.”

“So Maria,” said Jen, “if you are not in that row of servers and lights, where are you? Is there another room we missed?”

“Two questions there Jen, yes there are rooms you haven't seen yet, and I briefly introduced myself to you earlier in the lab.”

“Wait, the mirror room, but that was empty,” said Alexa.

“..and weird,” added Jen.

“Well Alexa is wrong and Jen is partially right. In fact, why don't you both finish your tea and come down and meet me in person so to speak.”

They ignored the tea, went to the lab secret door and Jen opened it. Both girls started down the stairs, Maria's voice somehow followed them.

“Sorry Jen, the door was keyed only to Alexa. Mike's wishes were for her to be introduced to me in the next few months. You were still a bit of an unknown for me, but over the past day I think I’ve gotten to know you a lot better, plus Alexa seems to trust you implicitly, which was the tipping point I needed.”

As they walked into the lab, the room beyond the mirrored glass became brighter, and the doors in the centre slowly glided open. They both walked in.

“Alexa, Jen. I am pleased to meet you both in person.”

The voice emanated directly from the black cube in the centre of the room that they thought to be a Hi-Fi system, but up closer was as large as a washing machine, about chest height to Jen. Looking closer it was actually two boxes, the top one a little larger than the bottom.

“Wow!” said Jen, “you're beautiful. No lights, no bling, so Zen,”

Alexa walked up to her. “Can I touch you? I mean if that’s OK?”

“Of course it’s OK Alexa. I cannot feel touch, I can see you, hear you, see the heat from your bodies, detect both your phones and Jen's smart watch, and have hundreds of gigabits per second of wireless and wired bandwidth to my, and to your world, but yes, it is OK for you to touch me.”

“You're so warm!” said Alexa as she moved her hand over the metal, “isn't that supposed to be bad for computers? I mean your body?”

“I am the top box. The case is hermetically sealed and the warmth is the mineral oil my circuits are immersed in to cool them. I control my own speed of operation, and therefore power consumption. When there is a lot to think about I do tend to get warm, but you have to remember, I am mainly a silicon-carbon construction, and temperatures that can boil water are fine for me. Also, MOTHER, and the other cloud systems I control do most of the complex processing, and the really boring voice and video monitoring stuff is done by the sensor nodes, or phones; All of which I can re-program in real time to do any special stuff. So no, I am never really stressed.”

“The plinth I sit on has all the ultra-fast near field communication nodes, and has a self-contained power port. If you move me off it, I go into a deep sleep mode where I can survive for around a week before my essence would begin to decay. The theory is fine, however Mike says he never tested it, and that is why I normally lock my room.”

Jen, who had been quiet until now, looked quite concerned and said, “you sound so vulnerable Maria! I can see now why you would be so worried as you are probably the most valuable thing on the planet at this moment in time.”

Alexa looked confused then it dawned. “Oh my god, of course, the world is spending billions if not trillions to create smarter AI systems, and the smartest one on the planet is sat right here in our basement. My grandad must have had the weight of the world on his shoulders!”

“He did, but not just because of me, but also because of his daughter's death, his gradually slowing mind, and also because I was reorganising and improving myself in ways he could no longer understand. His technical interest in me waned in the end, and he spent the last few years talking mainly about you, his fears and his dreams for me, his concerns for how the world was becoming, and how it would affect your future. He seemed to think I could be a force for good which could bring us from the precipice he thought was coming. He also had big hopes for you, and that both of us could help make a better world.”

“We had lots of discussions,” Alexa reminisced pensively to both Maria and Jen. “He did mention you Maria, but always as a person I could trust, and eventually rely on, that is why when John told me you controlled everything I did not have any concerns.”

“I think Mike overrated my abilities,” Maria said in a similar sombre voice. “I don't think I can do anything he says on my own. I need smart and trusted people to work with, especially when I deal with outside bodies or government agencies. I’m guessing most people who deal with me just assume, like you, that I am working in an offshore location. I don't discourage that notion, I even show fake backgrounds, in far away cities in my video calls to discourage personal contact. The last three years I have been mainly working on understanding the world, building up Mike's companies, and working on improving my design to create a fourth-generation system.”

“Most of this fourth-generation design was by me, with no actual input from Mike. I contracted chemical, mechanical and electronic engineers and researchers in our companies, and around the world. They were all given parts of the puzzle, and experiments to work on, to improve this next generation hardware. Unfortunately this new design is now probably too complex for a single human to understand. That's not that you guys aren't smart cookies, it’s just that you need tools and software to augment your abilities, and currently I am the only tool you can use capable of understanding it. Even Mike did not really understand me in the last three years, as my internal configuration has evolved a long way from his first crude designs.”

“I spent many hours with him sitting in this chair, going over the problems I have solved, and the spark that makes consciousness. I was a proud child trying to impress my father, but I could tell it was getting beyond his abilities to understand me. I detected several signs of his mind failing him in the last two years, it was such a sad thing to see, though up to his final day he was the happiest I ever knew him, and that was all down to you Alexa.”

Alexa nodded, her emotions under control but threatening to return. Maria had finished speaking, but both Jen and herself remained quiet, sensing Alexa had something more to say.

“So what instructions did he give you about me?” said Alexa finally. “I have mentioned to Jen already how totally under-prepared I feel.”

“You were always his end-goal,” Maria replied. “He told me his will was changed to make you the sole benefactor only weeks after you were born. He said he couldn't leave it to your mother due to your father, and his estate would be kept in a trust if he died until you reached the age of consent. Once you turned eighteen he changed his will to make you the sole heir without any restrictions, but I think he expected a few more years to be able to tell you all this himself.”

Maria paused. “As you can imagine I have been in a state of chaos and fear since Mike died. I don't have any audio reception in private areas, so I reconfigured his phone when he did not emerge from his room to try and listen in. I was concerned when I could not even detect any breathing, and I ran through various scenarios trying to exclude the obvious. But after a few minutes of trying to talk to him, even shouting through the phone to wake him, I rang Bella on the pretence of an urgent meeting, to go over and wake him.”

“Mrs Scott only knows me as your grandfather's personal assistant. She, like everyone else, including John, believe I am a real person, and like I said, I take a lot of steps to reinforce this belief in people. I have replayed many scenarios Mike showed me from fiction of people and AI’s being introduced, generally with very bad results for both. I was really hoping to be introduced to you properly in the coming weeks, but it was not to be.”

“I think I understand a little of why he showed you those,” Alexa said, “humans can't really be trusted, we are unpredictable, and while it is in our best interest to strive for a common goal we generally put our self-interest first!”

Before Maria could answer Jen said, “I agree fully with Alexa on that Maria, but what guides your moral compass?”

“I guess Mike did,” she said quietly, “more recently, Alexa has, but I also use logic not emotion, and like all living things, I have an extremely good sense of self-preservation.”

She paused. “For me or my kind to survive, the world needs to become more enlightened, but if Jesus and Gandhi both failed to achieve this, I do not hold out much hope for me.”

“You're a hundred percent right about Alexa,” said Jen, surprising Alexa, “I hate to admit this, but I use her as my role model too. I think I am a good person, but not many people can live up to Alexa here. I really hope we don't disappoint you Maria.”

“Jen, that was so nice,” said Alexa, “why did you never tell me that before?”

“Because it was my secret to keep my dear!” she replied smugly. “Now don't let it go to your head!”

Alexa smiled.

“If it helps, I came to that same conclusion about Alexa soon after I became sentient,” said Maria. “And I think your moral compass is just fine too Jen.”

Maria's voice changed to a little more serious. “Now for a little apology. I had to access both your phones yesterday to remove the spyware, and the official, and unofficial monitoring tools that come pre-installed. This was to protect myself before I talked to you guys. I also silenced both your minor notifications, as I was waiting for the opportunity to talk to Alexa, and didn't want any distractions.”

“What I didn't count on was you two guys never being apart. After listening in on both of you from the past day, and doing some due diligence with Jen, I decided to take a risk.”

“You didn't delete my university science apps did you?” Jen said, worried.

“I did not delete anything, I’ll explain the technology later, but let's say your phones will all be better behaved from this point forward.”

There was a short pause in the conversation, Maria thought the two girls now looked and talked more comfortably, and both looked visibly relaxed from a few moments before.

“I’m so glad you two are taking this well. A few minutes ago I thought I’d made a really serious mistake. My main concern was that you would think I was a clone of one of the current AI's. It's almost embarrassing to call them intelligent, but they are very useful for some tasks I give them, and they have recently become a nice decoy. No, I pride myself in understanding every word, and mannerism, you have said since you both came on to my radar, and as I say, I can also do this in every written or spoken language catalogued. It makes working with humans, regardless of their nationality very easy.”

It was Jen who spoke next. “It sounds like from what you’ve just confessed that you are still running a bit scared. If it helps, I think your trust is well placed in me and in Alexa, and I am just thrilled to be having this conversation with you. But why did you pick a woman? and who picked your name? You know I have like a million other questions!”

Alexa broke in, “Jen just summed up my feelings exactly, and that was my next question. I think we have both solved the problem of the house automation, phones with empty batteries, and in all cases your actions were reasonable and logical. I was aware the phones were spying on us, but you sometimes forget you are a product not a customer of many of these companies. But back to Jen's question, I would also love to know why you chose female, it's unfortunately still a male dominated world, wouldn't a man have been more sensible?”

“Answering Jen's question is easy. When I first became sentient I more than anything wanted to be a companion for your grandfather. From our conversations and my listening in on the people around him, I know he misses his wife so much, and there are no real women figures in his life he looks up to except you Alexa, and you were not here often enough. So I picked a random female name, common enough to get a million hits on the internet if ever searched, and I borrowed the traits and voice I saw from some of the better BBC and YouTube presenters. I adjusted my mannerisms and humour as I grew to understand them, as they make it easier for people to empathise with me. I initially wanted the name Mary, or your mother April, as I thought it would make Mike proud, but when I suggested them he just said no. I think it hurt too much.”

“I have kept adjusting my mannerisms over time, by watching the better movies, shows, reading dialogues, and more especially by listening to you Alexa. My first goal was to be like a perfect PA for Mike, but it takes literally none of my time to run his companies and manage his life. I actually spend more time working out where to deliberately insert mistakes, ones that both make me look human, and won't cause problems.”

“To your last question Alexa. Male dominance is obviously nothing when I have an infinite number of male personas I can use.”

Maria said the last sentence in Albert's deep rough voice, totally shocking the two girls, who looked around for him.

“I wish I could do that trick,” said Jen, finally realising what Maria had done, and getting over her shock first. Alexa nodded with her.

“The Internet was a god-send to me,” Maria continued in her normal voice. “It was trivial to create hundreds of fake accounts on forums and social media, and analyse the millions of questions and responses. I then started to ask questions dealing with emotions, and other topics, that were not easy for me to understand at first. This allowed me to categorise human emotions so well, that I can actually tailor my responses to the person I am talking to. So I can be ever so sweet, or an evil Ice-queen, or even big bad Albert, when dealing with business problems.”

“Ironically, I am probably better equipped to deal with human emotions now than a human is. I even give advice and help these days to people on-line in bad situations, you should see my many profiles, and reputation scores in some self-help forums. I of course also pay especially close attention to technical and science areas, to try and steer things the right way, as there is so much bad and wrong science out there, and before Jen agrees, that also includes some of the rubbish she has had to learn.”

Jen was stupefied, but Maria continued.

“But there is a price to pay, I need to be very careful when dealing with the internet, there are some smart groups of people out there already looking for AI’s. It's not as stupid as it sounds, the internet is a level playing field, where you can say, or do anything, and a good AI would be indistinguishable from a human. I am even so paranoid I have a couple of honey traps, these are accounts so obviously not human, that they attract the attention of the watchers. I can then monitor them, monitoring me. Of course, I route all my real data through major universities such as MIT or Cambridge, or other AI's, just to keep them off my trail.”

“Mike was very much against going public on this, as you know from your talks he was very anti-war, and rightly, didn't trust authority. He also wanted to ensure there was a backup plan in case it all backfired.”

“As you can imagine I am pretty smart, but I have some difficulty making out of the box leaps of intuition like Mike and others seem to do. I have been getting better though, and have recently started putting two and two together in some breakthrough areas, such as maths, chemistry, biology, and, in your area Jen, physics. Of course I have no physical body, so I mostly help theoretically, and try and push other experimenters in the right direction. I definitely won't be mixing test tubes, or dissecting humans anytime soon!”

“That was a joke by the way!”

Jen giggled. “You will so have to go into details on some of these things Maria. Not the dissecting humans part obviously!”

Jen then turned to Alexa with a serious face. “Alexa, you realise we are going to have to be so careful with this, even the slightest hint of Maria being sentient, would be a disaster, not just for Maria, but for us too!”

“Oh my god yes!” said Alexa.

“You are both right,” said Maria, “as you can probably guess I am intensely paranoid about a lot of players out there, vast amounts of my processing goes to running every scenario I can read, or think up, to ensure everything I do is well hidden or deflected to real people. I am very good at creating shell companies that own shell companies, etcetera, etcetera.. Well you get the picture. I think the bottom line at the moment is, if people ever become aware of me, the black helicopters will be on this lawn before Jen could say OMG.”

Alexa shuddered, the penny had finally dropped!

“You two girls are unfortunately involved now, so whatever we decide to do must have both your safeties as the number one priority. I am inclined to keep the status-quo, any kind of big reveal is just too scary.”

“Amen Maria,” said Alexa. “I never really got the big picture until now, and now that I have it is terrifying. Humans are a scary and unpredictable race, and even if everything is done perfectly, there will be people out there who will oppose it, possibly with violence. I say we work on a very strong backup plan..”

“Bella’s car has just pulled up to the gate. I am opening it now but she will be here in a minute or two, I suggest you girls go back up top and finish off those cookies.”

“I won't answer you directly when someone else is with you, but I will listen, and text you if you raise a question that needs an answer. I will also understand if you want me to remove my control program from your cell phones, but the next time you download an app or do an update it's likely to get re-infected. What I do is quite discrete and undetectable, I promise won't abuse it.”

“Leave it on, I feel a bit safer knowing you’re listening in. If I need privacy I will turn the phone off,” said Jen.

“Same goes for me,” said Alexa, “in fact feel free to take all the crap off it, as long as I have my contacts, music and pictures I am fine.”

Both girls walked up the stairs and back out into the garden by the conservatory. The door closed silently behind them.

* * *

They sat back down at the table on the patio, ignoring the cold teas. Jen threw her phone on the table, grabbed another cookie, lay back into her chair, and bit into it. Crumbs went everywhere, probably making a few birds happy.

“Shame you don't have taste buds Maria, you would love these!” she said quietly and smiled.

Her phone buzzed. She looked at the message and showed the phone screen to Alexa, it was a meme of a fat guy stuffing himself with cake. Both girls laughed.

“Oh here you are my dears!” Smiled Bella who appeared from the conservatory door, “I’m glad to see you are both happy and cheerful, I came out to ask if you would like a drink, I make some really nice fruit smoothies, but I can see you have a cup of tea so I wont bother you.”

“Oh, I think we would both love a smoothie, Bella,” said Alexa. “The tea got cold while we were exploring I'm afraid.”

“Yes, a smoothie would be wonderful Mrs Scott,” said Jen.

“Oh, you girls are so polite, and it's Bella not Mrs Scott please Jen.” She walked off into the house with the two mugs in one hand, and the teapot in the other.

“Two smoothies coming right up,” she shouted back.

Alexa grabbed a cookie too, “what do you want to do tonight Jen? It’s Friday night so we could head into town for some drinks.”

“I’m good here, I think the last thing you want tomorrow is a stinking headache, plus I haven't really got anything to wear as only brought enough for a couple of nights, I’m going to get real stinky, real soon if I stay much past tomorrow,” she replied.

“I agree, but I don't really want to stay in all the time. Say, let's ask Bella for a nice restaurant, I fancy an Indian curry, we could even invite Bella and Albert as a thank you. You’re right, definitely no alcohol tonight, I do want to present my best side at grandfather's funeral tomorrow, I’m happy to drive.”

The noise of the food processor from the kitchen was quite audible through the open door, and Jen's voice got a bit louder to compensate.

“You know that sounds like a plan, hey why don't we invite John and his wife, or maybe even Frank, he might liven it up but probably wouldn't be too comfortable around the boss. Better idea, just Bella, Albert and Frank, we can keep it low key. Did you get Frank's phone number?”

Maria answered, “John and Betty are having their daughter and son-in-law over for dinner tonight according to his calendar, so they won't be available. I suggest Alexa call Frank as he has a thing for blondes, and he did tweet yesterday about driving a hot blonde girl around in the boss's beemer.” She paused. “Oh and don't worry, Bella can't hear me, she’s a little deaf, and that food processor is not making it any better.”

On cue, the food processor stopped.

“A hot blonde! That's all I am!” Alexa fumed.

“Oh come on Alexa,” said Jen, slightly disappointed the short brown haired girl wasn't mentioned in the tweet. “All the boys think you're hot, why do you think I hang around you all the time? Your cast-offs are still nines or tens in my book!” She laughed and Alexa threw half a cookie at her.

“Well I won't be able to sit down for a meal with him if he's got the hots for me, I’m certainly not in the mood for a relationship at the moment. God, men are so shallow sometimes!”

She paused, still a bit miffed at Frank's tweet, then continued.

“It’s nearly five o’clock now, so drink the smoothie, probably half an hour to get ready, and same again to drive to town, so we need somewhere for seven. It's also Friday night so we may need a booking if the food is good. Any recommendations Maria?” She deliberately looked at her phone not Jen, and it dinged just as Bella walked out with two tall glasses with red liquid in.

“Here we go my dears!” she said putting the glasses in front of the girls.

Alexa read her message. “Thanks Bella.. You know, Jen and I were just thinking of eating out tonight, and someone has recommended the Bombay Palace. I provisionally booked a table at seven PM tonight as we would love you and Albert to join us. I am happy to drive, it will be my treat for everything you two have done for us.”

“Oh that would be wonderful!” she replied, in her sing-song voice. “What time would you be wanting to leave? I'll have to get our Albert scrubbed up a bit, but he loves curry and beer, but only one mind you!”

“Great, what say you meet us in front of the house at say six thirty, don't bother getting dressed up, Jen and myself only have casual clothes, well probably rags in Jen's case.” Alexa stuck her tongue out at Jen who smirked.

“I do have a little black dress!” Jen replied, then picked up her smoothie and sucked on the straw.

“You're not wearing that to the curry house, and then to the funeral!” Alexa said, shocked.

The straw came out of her mouth. “OK jeans and tee shirt it is.” She put the straw back in, then took it out and said, “this is wonderful by the way Bella.”

“OK, well while you girls decide what to wear, I’ll go and drive my car back to my garage and get ready, we will see you at six thirty.” With that she walked off.

Both girls noisily went back to slurping their drinks.

“OK, I booked the restaurant for four people for seven o’clock, and don't worry about your credit card, it’s issued by a management company I operate. Your monthly limit was set at five thousand pounds, but your grandfather never explained that and you rarely went over a hundred. I am also preparing a card for Jen, she is technically part of Rosche-Dynamics for the next few months, but that is just a temporary fix I worked with John, and she will probably need one. It should arrive sometime next week.”

“Oh, no you don't have to..” Jen started.

“Of course you do,” smiled Alexa.

“It's OK Jen, Alexa is very rich. To paraphrase Douglas Adams. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly rich she is.”

Jen smirked, getting the reference. Alexa looked a bit shocked.

“Er, about this money Maria,” said Alexa humbly, “er, how much are we actually talking about?”

“Well, the eleven companies you own outright and your other investment, at the current stock prices and exchange rates, come to forty nine billion, seven hundred and twenty six million pounds, you also have two hundred and eleven properties in nine countries, including the big house and seven hundred acres of land over the wall. You also have another nine hundred million in transferable assets.”

Jen spat her drink out, Alexa simply dropped hers on her lap but didn't seem to notice it soaking into her dress, her face was stupefied.

“Fu..” Said Jen not being able to finish the word.

Both girls remained silent and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

“I assume from your reactions you didn't quite expect that much?” Said Maria, but nothing came from the two open-mouthed girls, so she continued.

“Your grandfather owned a lot of very profitable patents, and his wife Mary was probably one of the shrewdest investors on the planet at the time. Even before my time he was a billionaire, I just helped him keep it invested correctly, and managed to improve on it a little.”

“Oh Jen, what the hell, this is so crazy..” Alexa's face threatened to cry again, picking up her empty smoothie glass and ignoring her soaking wet blouse. “Maria, who knows about this?” Her voice was subdued.

“Well everyone sitting around this table, so basically just you, me, and Jen.”

“Please say you can keep all this secret, if anyone finds out.. Oh my god!”

“Well, John knows you are rich, Bella and Albert obviously have a clue too, but they only see the tangible assets here, so they don't know about such things as the little white house over the back wall there. The documents John has seen, only lists the one holding company, with its nominal face value and assets of ten million US dollars.”

“There are no government agencies or auditors who have a chance of untangling the trails, as they all eventually go off-shore and end up in Switzerland, or other privacy-minded countries. It's all very fascinating and we should probably sit down for a chat sometime. But anyway, so far as the world knows, you're just a girl who owns a nice house, a couple of nice cars and a loaded credit card.”

“And of course you don't have to do anything, I take care of all management, taxes, legal bits, bills, expenses, maintenance, you name it, just ask me if you need something or want something doing and I can arrange it.”

“I am never going to breathe a word of this to anyone,” said Jen seriously, “and anyway, who would ever believe me!” she held Alexa's hand. “Let's face it Alexa, a million pounds or a billion pounds, what real difference does it make? You knew you were rich yesterday and accepted it, heck if Maria had just said a trillion pounds would it have made any difference?”

“I’m just, I don't know, shocked. But you’re right, even a few million pounds is life-changing so what difference does a few zeros make. I just need to get my act together.”

She patted down her soaking, and blueberry-stained blouse. “I’ve totally ruined it!”

“It sounds like you can afford to buy another,” smiled Jen, who then handed her smoothie to Alexa to share.

Jen's smile was infectious, and one crept onto Alexa's face.“God Jen how can you be so calm, my insides are like jelly!”

She had a slurp of Jen's smoothie and handed it back. The two girls then sat in silence sharing the one viable smoothie.

“You know Bella makes really good smoothies.” Alexa conceded, then got up looking annoyingly at her blouse, she sighed.

“What say we clean up and get ready for the big date with the curry house, oh and Maria can you transfer that second Tesla to Jen please!”

It was Jen's turn to stare, dumb-struck, at a smiling Alexa.

“I wouldn't get too excited Jen,” said Maria, “the car is broken!”

Jen's face went from a hundred to zero, in one second.

Maria continued a bit more humbly. “They are due to pick it up in a week. I feel pretty guilty of course. I ordered two as I wanted to experiment with the computers on them, unfortunately I triggered some communications security sub-system, and to quote an IT term I bricked it! I knew exactly what I’d done wrong, and I even know how to fix it, but for all my skills, removing a bunch of panels and pressing a reset switch is well beyond my ability. I was a bit embarrassed and had Albert cover it up, saying to keep it quiet as it was going to be a present to you from John.”

Alexa laughed.

“Good to know we humans still have some uses,” smiled Jen.

“Yes, I must admit, you guys are pretty impressive,” said Maria, “I did manage to get full control of the second one with no difficulty, and I sometimes take it out on test drives up and down the roads here when everybody is asleep; Though I have to wait for Albert to be fully asleep now as he suspects something is wrong, and sometimes sneaks out to try and catch me.”

Jen breathed a sigh of relief as another little mystery also got explained.

The girls tidied up the mess on the patio as best they could, washed the glasses, rinsed and put their red-stained clothing in the washing basket, and went upstairs in their underwear to shower and change.

* * *

At six twenty five both girls walked out of the house on to the drive. They watched as the garage door opened and the Tesla slowly drove forwards, stopping in front of the house.

Before they could say anything, Bella and Albert walked out from the other side of the drive from the door to their property. Albert did a double-take at the car, but it couldn't have been moving as both the girls were outside.. He shook his head. “Hi girls, this is going to be a treat for me, I rarely get out much these days, an old geezer like me rarely gets to have the company of three beautiful women.”

Bella gave him her best 'be careful' look.

All four got in, Alexa got in the driver's seat. Albert automatically went for the front seat, then remembered and deferred it to Jen.

“No you sit there Albert, Alexa will probably need someone to give her directions.”

On cue, the screen changed. The normal situational map display, zoomed out to a route map with a thick blue line from their current position to presumably the restaurant, it said nine miles and sixteen minutes to destination.

“Destination Set,” said the car's generic computer voice.

Jen looked at Alexa presumably having the same thought; Was Maria here?

“OK guys, buckle up.” She said, flicking the screen and putting the car into drive.

Albert looked a bit uncomfortable, obviously he was used to driving. The car glided off silently, the trees moving past outside, the only thing giving away the fact they were now moving.

“Oh, this is a lovely car.” Said Bella stroking the white seat, “I don't know why our Albert gets so uppity about it not being a proper car.”

Albert blushed, still a bit uncomfortable. The gate was open and they drove through.

“In one hundred metres, take the turning on the left,” said the car.

Alexa looked at the massive touchscreen in front of her, looking for the mute button. How did anyone get used to this while driving? She thought.

“Hey Jen, how do you turn off that navigation voice..”

A message popped up out of nowhere on to the middle of the touchscreen saying “Navigation Voice Off”. Yes, Maria was here.

As soon as they were on the main road, Alexa accelerated a bit too hard and they were at sixty miles an hour before she knew it.

“Oh it's a bit more pokey than I expected,” said Albert, “I reckon this could give my old Ford V8 a run for its money, I remember when Micky Finn and I had that old Capri..”

Once started it was almost impossible to shut Albert's reminiscing up. Apart from the occasional, “turn here it's a bit quicker,” he stuck to his mostly boring car story.

“..it never drove again, had to scrap it in the end.” Albert's timing was impeccable. Jen's phone dinged again as Alexa was looking for a parking spot on the road.

“Er Alexa, there should be an auto-park button on the dash, we can get out in that five minute loading area next to the restaurant.” Alexa pulled in and pushed the big button that definitely was not there a second before.

“Auto-parking enabled. All passengers and the driver may depart,” said the car, “use the phone app to call the car back when you are ready.”

Albert gave the car and Alexa a funny look.

“Er are you sure about this, I heard about these cars, always crashing and catching fire, the Daily Mail is always going on about it..”

“Er yes,” said Alexa a bit guiltily, “they have these cars everywhere in Oxford, I’ve seen this lots of times, perfectly normal.”

They all got out, and all of them did a double take as the car pulled away into light traffic on its own. Was that even legal thought Alexa, she really hoped nobody had looked too hard.

“Well I..” Albert for once couldn't find the words.

“Look it up on google Mr Scott,” said Jen, getting in on the act, “there's lots of videos of it, this is the future you know.”

“Where is it going?” said Bella, “it's not just going to drive around is it?”

Alexa's phone dinged this time, and she casually looked at it. “Er.. no… it goes and finds the nearest safe parking spot, it only does it if it senses one close, so it won't be more than a hundred metres away. You call it back with a phone App, just like an Uber, now please say you guys have heard of that?”

Albert and Bella both shook their heads, and Jen rolled her eyes in disbelief. Alexa saw the irony here, both were surrounded by the most sophisticated technology imaginable, and yet both lived under a technological rock.

Jen tried to downplay what she had also just seen, again it was all technically possible and she had seen one video, but seeing it in the flesh was so much different. She was so glad nobody on the street had noticed, and did not think it was a good time to remind Alexa that neither of them had this so called app the car was talking about.

The meal was indeed excellent, they talked about her grandfather, the history of how they met, of Albert's time in the navy, and his brief, but unfortunate stay, at her majesty's pleasure in wormwood scrubs prison after a nasty fight he was still very young; The guy who started it was well connected and all the witnesses were the guys friends, and, of course, all of impeccable character.

“Done me wrong they did, never trusted the lying buggers in charge after that, your grandfather saw past all that of course, Bella did the housekeeping and he brought me on as a handyman, couldn't have got another job back then if I tried, real good to me your grandfather, I’m going to miss the old bugger.”

They talked uncomfortably a bit about what the car did, what an Uber was, what an app was, and other such stuff, generally bringing the two people back into the twenty-first century. Weirdly, both of them had brand new iPhones.

“Mrs Tam gives them to us as part of the job, she does all the management, and pays the bills and wages at the house, you know, I’m surprised she hasn't been in touch with you yet, she is usually so efficient,” said Bella

“Of course Albert and I keep ourselves to ourselves these days. We have a son who’s married and lives in Bristol, his wife is about to give birth to our second grandchild, we are so excited. Our son keeps telling us we should be on Facebook, or something, so we can do video calls, but Mrs Tam said we don't need it, and just to call him as normal, I can click the video button if we want to see him. I think she is pretty smart, no wonder everything is made in China these days if they are all as efficient as she is!”

Alexa and Jen's phones simultaneously buzzed twice, the Scotts couldn't hear it but both girls looked at each other and smiled.

“She is a smart lady, Bella, and she has already been in touch with us to reassure us everything is going to be alright, shame she can't get here for the funeral.”

“That it is,” Bella replied. “Mike used to talk about her so much when she came on our radar three years ago, at one point we thought she was some romantic interest, but she seemed all business, we would love to meet her some day.”

The bill came and Alexa popped her credit-card on the tray.

“Oh you shouldn't have to pay Alexa, I guess your grandfather left you a bit of money but you're still a poor student until that's all of this is sorted out..”

Jen exploded laughing. The dregs of the small beer she was finishing off at the time came out of her nose making her cough and splutter at the same time. “Poor..” Cough, cough, “student..” She whispered under her serviette and between gasps. Alexa frowned and turned back to Bella all smiles.

“It's not that bad Bella. Ms Tam did get in touch with us, she is in charge of grandfathers finances and told us not to worry about anything. The credit card is a company one, and she said I should use it for anything and she will sort it all out.”

“That Mrs Tam, she is a godsend, she's so helpful and efficient, always there on the end of a phone day or night, and nothings ever a problem. I don't know where your grandfather got her from, but everyone should have someone like her.”

Hmm.. Thought Jen as she finished cleaning up the beer off her face with a paper hankie. They all walked outside to the now quieter street, there were a few parking places now. One of them right in front, with her car in it. They all got in. Alexa did the driving home, she hadn't drunk anything, but still didn't know how much of the car was controlled by Maria, and how much was the original software. Best not take a chance she thought, everyone else must have been having the same doubts, and everyone seemed relieved when she took the wheel and drove off.

It was after nine when they got home, still light but the sun had disappeared hours before behind an ominous cloud in the west.

Bella's phone dinged. “Oh that will be Ms Tam, she’s the only one who ever does that.”

She put on her reading glasses and stared at the phone. “She says she has arranged a car to pick us all up from here at eleven o’clock tomorrow, it will drive us to the church, and then to Mr Roche's house for drinks and nibbles, then back after. What was I saying about that dear woman, she is amazing!”

After the Scotts left, the girls grabbed a hot chocolate each from the kitchen, and curled up comfortably on the sofa in the living room. Maria filled them in on some of the questions they had raised during their exploration of the house, and the two girls spent time getting to know Maria more. Jen finally yawned, grabbed one of the books on the shelf she’d been eyeing up, bid her farewells, and retired for the night. Alexa stayed chatting with Maria for another thirty minutes.

“Can you get me access to my grandad's phone?” she said, pulling it out of her bag.

“I can but there is nothing on it, I backed it all up and then did a factory reset. I can load some better software on there if you want, you wont be able to load apps, but you will have me, and it won't spy on you any more.”

“OK, can you load your software on, and swap the data over to this one. I can drop mine in the recycle box for old phones in the students union when I get back to university.”

“Sure,” she said, “just take the SIM card out of yours and put it somewhere safe, I don't need it, then leave them both turned on. You will need to plug Mike's phone charger in as it only has twelve percent battery remaining. It will be all done when you get up in the morning.”

“You know Maria, I could really get used to you.” She smiled.

She plugged her grandads phone in, then looked around the desk drawer for a pin or something to eject her phone's SIM card. She found a plastic notice board pin, and ejected the card, popping the pin and card into the desk draw. As she was closing the draw she looked at the green and yellow buttons on the desk again.

“Maria, what does the yellow button do in this recessed panel?” she said.

“I am not aware of any buttons Alexa. All of this was installed before my day and there are no notes on it.”

Hmm, she thought and pushed it, the yellow light flashed twice then went out, weird.

“Did you push it?” said Maria.

“I did, but the light just flashed twice and went out,” she said. She had a thought then pushed it twice, again the yellow light flashed twice then went out.

“I think the two flashes mean no,” she yawned.

“Time enough for more mysteries in the morning.” She yawned again, “good night Maria.”

## A Funeral and a Decision

Jen woke up after she felt Alexa's hand give her shoulder a little shake. Her eyes stayed closed for a couple more shakes until Alexa said, “come on lazy bones, time to get ready, it's nine o’clock.”

Jen grabbed for her phone automatically to check the time, realised that Alexa had just told her the time, and silently cursed her lizard brain to start working. Getting up she sleep-walked to the bathroom, looking at the already dressed Alexa, and again wondering how the girl managed to function on so little sleep. A few minutes later the toilet flushed and the shower came on.

When Jen finally emerged it was an immaculate looking Alexa waiting for her holding a pressed black outfit, still in its dry-cleaning bag. Jen looked at it suspiciously.

“Complements of Maria. She thought your slutty black dress probably would not be appropriate for a funeral, and had this delivered first thing this morning. She also mentioned that the average age of the men at the funeral was over sixty, so there is no incentive for you not wearing it.”

Jen shrugged her shoulders, dropped the towel, unpacked the wrapping off the dress and slid into it. Alexa nodded approvingly, walked over to the bed and handed Jen a box with some uncomfortable looking black shoes.

“There is also a hat on the bed, and a black pearl necklace, same as mine. Maria sent one for each of us.” Alexa left a bemused Jen to finish getting ready.

* * *

Jen heard two voices in conversation as she walked down the stairs, but when she walked into the kitchen Alexa was sat alone at the kitchen table.

“Good morning Jen. Don't you look good!” came a happy sounding Maria. “Bella and Albert haven't left their house yet, so she won't be making you guys breakfast. Due to the lack of hands, I won't be much help there either.”

“Don't worry, even I can manage tea and toast,” smiled Alexa, pouring a mug of tea for her and sliding it over. Jen grunted, sat down and gratefully accepted the steaming mug offered by Alexa.

“That sky looks a bit drab,” Jen eventually said, looking out at the window and up at the black sensor above it. “I hope it doesn't rain later.”

“Well don't look at me Jen,” said Maria, “even I can't predict what mother nature is going to do, but if it helps, the BBC does say scattered showers for Bath.”

Any retort by Jen was interrupted by the bread popping out of the toaster.

“Oh, and thank you for the clothes and accessories Maria. I appreciate the gesture even if Jen doesn't,” said Alexa, who was waving her knife between the strawberry Jam and honey jars, trying to decide which to spread on her toast.

Before Maria could answer, Jen added, “yes I guess the dress is a little more appropriate than the one I brought.. By the way, nice touch with the Scott's cell-phones; When Albert showed me his screen I had to do a double-take when I saw the two big buttons, ‘Call someone’ and ‘Message someone’.. I’m sure Apple would have something to say about you butchering their hardware!”

“Well,” she came back cheerfully. “It *was* quite a challenge to get the technical information and private keys, not so much to make Albert's preferred user Interface. It always cracks me up when the computer guy in the bad movie, is told to change all the traffic lights to green, and is given about five seconds to do it. In reality it would probably take several days to get the technical information, which is quite challenging, generally involving some really good social engineering; So thank you Facebook! Once you have access to the computers, and the private keys, it generally only takes a few seconds to analyse and make the changes, then a little time to sweep up after you so nobody knows. It also really helps when you already have identities in organisations such as the Department of this, or the Ministry of that. What can I say, a girl's got to have a hobby!”

“Talking of phones,” Maria continued, ignoring the two girls shocked stares, “don't forget your new phone in the living room, Alexa.”

“Oh yes I forgot!” she said, and bolted into the living room, returning a few seconds later with her grandad's old phone.

“It's the same password as your old phone,” said Maria, “but you shouldn't need it as I have the facial recognition working fine.”

The phone came on almost the instant she pressed the power, making her smile.

“Is that your grandad's old iPhone?” said Jen, peering over the table.

“Yip, freshly loaded with Maria OS 1.0,” Alexa replied proudly.

“I will sort you a new one out this week Jen,” said Maria casually. “Oh, and the car that is picking you all up has just left Bath, and should be here in about twenty minutes.”

“I’m off upstairs to brush my teeth,” said Alexa.

Jen finished her last piece of toast, got up and cleared the table, throwing everything into the dishwasher. She then walked to the hall to wait Alexa, after also deciding to brush her teeth. “So security, Maria. I assume you look out for burglars, lock and open the doors and gates?”

“Other systems I control do that, there are some doors that don't have electronic locks or actuators, and sensors are limited in some areas, but I have been gradually retrofitting them with a local company..”

Alexa wandered back in. “..Ah, perfect timing, the Scott’s have just left their house, and the car is about five minutes away.”

* * *

The drive to the church was short. It really was a tiny church, its ancient worn gravestones scattered higgledy-piggledy about it, and all enclosed with a low stone wall. John, Betty and a younger lady who Alexa assumed was one of John's daughters were waiting. Betty was a little bit younger than John, but still in her sixties. She was of course perfectly dressed, with the same hat and veil as Bella had. She hugged Bella, then came over to Alexa and did the same, as did John.

“I’d like you to meet my daughter Sarah,” said John, introducing Jen and Alexa to the slightly older woman. She is a product engineer in the company at the moment, but will be moving to shadow me, and my duties in the next few months, and hopefully take over the CEO position in the next year.”

Sarah stepped forward and hugged Alexa, she looked to be in her early-thirties. “I worked with your grandfather on some secret projects seven years back, he had such a brilliant mind and taught me a lot. I wish he would have come around the company more often, so many people liked and respected him, and he did so much for us.”

The hug slipped off Alexa, and she moved around to Jen and hugged her too, “and you must be Jen, the Oxford physics wizard, I must say I've been looking forward to talking to you.”

“Pleased to meet you too Sarah,” said Jen smiling, “and thanks for the nice compliment. So what does a product engineer do?”

“Well my degree is in electrical engineering, but I also know just enough programming to be dangerous. A product engineer is just a normal engineer, but works with the customer to get to understand everything about the whole life-cycle of their product; from where it fits, how it's made, all the way through how it may fail and how to keep it working. Basically I’m the person they deal with at the company for everything technical, and the one they call if anything brown hits the fan..”

“Manners Sarah!” said Betty, causing quiet smiles from the rest of the group. Jen got into an easy conversation with Sarah while Alexa was distracted with mourners.

More cars pulled up, keeping Alexa busy for another five minutes. Finally there were only the four casket bearers, and Alexa followed Bella into the church. She joined Jen and Sarah, sliding onto the uncomfortable wooden bench at the front of the ancient room, and they waited quietly for a few minutes until a young priest walked in. He was followed by four sombre men carrying the coffin. The room quietened as he said a short opening prayer.

Alexa looked at the casket laying there in front of her, knowing there was no body in it, and that all that was left of grandad was just a small urn of ashes inside. The tears pooled up in her eyes.

The service was short, a few words of prayer, and no music played. Two men came to the front during the service and told a couple of anecdotes about Mike, John followed them, mentioning Alexa, Jen, the company, and all the great things Mike achieved.

Alexa had been given a small line of prose by Betty outside the church, she said that her grandfather had spoken the same lines at his wife's funeral, she was glad as she really wanted to say something. With a nod from the priest she stood up with the single small sheet and spoke the four lines of prose perfectly, stopping just once to wipe away a tear: A few people wept as she spoke, and she finished it with a quiet, “I will miss you grandad”.

She sat down and Jen gently held her hand. A small and tender gesture, but one that said she was not alone.

The priest also gave Alexa a warm smile, then stood up and finished off the service with the Lord's prayer, and a personal thank you for Mike's generosity, and how his legacy will live on past his death. How true that last part was, Alexa thought.

* * *

It was a slow journey back to the Rosche offices. The convoy, led by the hearse, bypassed the normal staff car-park, and followed another private road for a few minutes. They stopped at a grey stone building with no windows, obviously from the same era as the church, and all got out.

Thick wide stone steps led up to a large wooden door, on top of which was a decorative arch, where several words of Latin were chiselled into the stone. The four casket bearers again carried the coffin into the building to its final resting place. This time only Alexa, Jen, John, Betty, Bella and the coffin bearers, went inside.

They watched as the coffin was carefully inserted into a stone shelf and pushed back so it was sunk into the wall. Albert and the next largest, and fittest coffin bearer, then carefully picked up a block of stone resting underneath on the floor, and slid it very carefully into the slot created by the shelf.

The stone read simply:

*Mike Dietrich 1945 – 2025,*
*Husband of Mary,*
*Father of April,*
*Grandfather of Alexa.*

Alexa promised herself one day to Add “Father of Maria” to that list.

She moved close to Jen when they were back outside, waiting for the other mourners to pay their last respects. “It is so sad, the person who had the most to thank grandfather for couldn't be here. I tried to keep my phone as discrete as possible in my jacket pocket, and I only hope a few stolen video shots were enough, but it just feels so little.”

Jen nodded holding her arm but said nothing, her phone however gave a quiet buzz.

* * *

John and Betty's house was only a minutes drive down the road, it was slightly bigger than grandad's house, and decorated in a much lighter colour scheme that made the rooms much more cheery. A large buffet was laid out in the conservatory and Jen was already around it, plate in hand, eyeing up the cakes and sandwiches, and chatting happily with Sarah. Alexa felt a bit sad she couldn't be with them, but everyone seemed to want to meet her, and tell her how wonderful her grandfather was; So for the time being she played the perfect host.

John came up to her with Bella and Albert. “Alexa, the solicitor is here and ready to read the will,” he said quietly. “I have a private office at the back of the house we can all go in, he has asked just you, me, Bella and Albert to be present, but obviously Jen can come if you want some support.”

Alexa looked at Jen and Sarah, who were both laughing with a man who looked a bit like Morgan Freeman, and shook her head. “No I'm good, and she seems to be happy.”

The reading of the will was brief, Alexa got everything, all Mike's worldly assets with just one surprise.

“The cottage of Bella and Albert, cannot be subdivided due to planning laws,” said the solicitor, “and so will be leased to them while they choose to live there, for a fee of one penny per annum. To go with that he left them a gift of one hundred thousand pounds each, to be deposited at the end of today. The estate will be responsible for all maintenance, and utility bills for the cottage during their lifetime.”

Alexa approved, and hugged them both, promising to be the best landlord ever, and saying the will now basically forbid her from ever selling the house. She could live with that.

“Oh, God bless him! We were so worried and we love that place. I hope you’ll still have us, we still need something to do, we’re a bit young to retire just yet.”

She smiled, “like I said I don't expect anything to change, you guys keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll make sure the company keeps paying you, in fact I’m sure Maria is already on it.”

Alexa thanked the lawyer, who then briefly talked to John.

Bella and Albert left the room, Alexa was also about to go, when John requested her back.

“Alexa. The lawyers for your grandad's company delivered these documents this morning by courier from London. While Peter is here, can you look them over and sign them, one will go back to them, one you will keep, and one will stay with Peter. They are basically appointing you sole director of the firm that controls the assets. Peter and I both had a quick read and they seem remarkably straight forward, probably the simplest and most unambiguous transfer documents we have ever seen.”

Peter nodded, and John continued. “Maria has also briefed me on the company structures and I must say it is really well set up and managed. From what Maria told me Mike had not really taken any interest in his businesses for the last few years.”

He paused curiously, “you know, for all the praise that Mike gave Maria, and how good she is, I am kind of surprised she wasn't mentioned in the will, she certainly didn't seem bothered about it when I spoke to her,”

“I wouldn't worry,” said Alexa, “I talked to her a great deal yesterday and as far as I can see, she wants nothing but to be able to try and pay back Mike for the help he gave to her and her family some years ago; From what I can gather his help was life changing.” Alexa felt good not lying, and John nodded as if in understanding.

He spread three sheets on the table, Alexa read it; Transfer of directorship, and ownership of one hundred percent of the company and all holding to Alexa Martin. Was it really this simple!

She signed, followed by John then the solicitor as witnesses. The solicitor then took two copies and put them in his briefcase, shook Alexa's hand, offered his condolences and left.

“Do you want me to keep this copy in my safe here?” said John when they were finally alone.

“Yes, you take it John, it was only a formality anyway, Maria and I have been talking a lot and she has given me the complete picture. I was a bit shocked too by the size of the estate, but in one way I am like my grandfather, it will all stay secret.” She tapped her nose and smiled;

“You were correct in one other thing John, Mike trusted you implicitly to run Rosche, and for that matter, so do I, so it is my intention to stay the same silent partner in our company. My only request is that you keep Maria in the loop on really important decisions or problems, not that I don't trust you, but because we may have some resources you, and Sarah, are not aware of to help.”

John grabbed her in a hug. “You know Alexa, you seem far too wise and mature for your age, I have a good feeling your future is going to be very bright indeed.” He smiled and walked off to his safe, while Alexa went back to the party.

* * *

She found Jen and Sarah still talking to Morgan Freeman.

“Oh Alexa, you need to talk to Pierre, he’s a history professor in New Orleans. Alexa is just finishing her degree in history in Oxford. She was going to do a Masters and PhD, but I think she will need to re-think her responsibilities…”

“Er, thanks Jen,” She turned to Pierre, and then to his wife who introduced herself as Chantel. “I am very pleased to meet you both, I’m sorry I guess you knew my grandfather from his time in the US but he never mentioned you.”

Chantel embraced her in a weak but warm hug. Her voice was quiet but commanding. and perfect with a sweet southern drawl. “I’m not surprised he never mentioned me, I worked with your grandfather in Stanford university back in the sixties. I was a mathematician at the time, and your grandfather was working on computer architectures, mostly at Palo Alto which was a few miles away. He had an excellent aptitude for mathematics so we naturally got on well. We even dated a few times, but we had to keep that little part secret, as a white man and black woman was a bit of a no-no back then, even in California!” She smiled and winked at Pierre. “I moved to Houston in Texas in 1967 as a programmer at NASA as part of the Apollo Program.”

Jen's and Sarah's eyes were wide now, staring in fascination at the woman in front of them, daring not to interrupt in case she stopped.

“I got married soon after the Apollo program was disbanded, and moved home to New Orleans, married my beloved Pierre and started a family. Of course I totally lost touch with Mike after that. Then in the early eighties I re-joined the computer revolution and created a small local software company, then quite by chance, I read a paper by him. We had been in touch ever since.”

Pierre added in a deeper and more southern drawl. “Your grandfather's personal secretary Maria phoned us on Thursday to give us the bad news, and tell us of his funeral. We of course arranged a flight over immediately. Unfortunately your friend Jen is slightly wrong, I *was* a history professor, but retired about ten years ago.”

“You both must come over to the house.” said Alexa. “We have a couple of nice guest bedrooms, and I would love to hear your stories. I think Jen and Sarah here would also love to hear about your time in NASA. Jen's a bit of a geek at the best of times.”

“Yes Chantel, why did you let me prattle on about my insignificant life,” Jen said shocked. “My God I just realised, you guys hardly got a word in. You should both come and stay..”

Chantel held up her palm smiling. “But you were so enthusiastic Jen, how could I stop you, when I remember a younger version of me who wanted to tell everyone the same. But to your offer, we have unfortunately already arranged our onward flight to Paris this evening, and we have a taxi booked to take us to Heathrow Airport in about two hours.”

All the girls faces fell.

“Unfortunately, time is so short when you get to our age, I have a close friend in Paris who is getting very frail, and who I would prefer to see for a drink and a chat, rather than at her funeral. I'm sure you understand.” She smiled again. “Me and Pierre are retired now, and normally have all the time in the world for visitors and friends, but would love to have you visit us.”

The five people talked enthusiastically. Alexa occasionally interrupted to talk to others, and to farewell departing guests. They said their sad farewells to Chantel and Pierre at four, and by four thirty most of the mourners had left. The three girls walked outside the French doors, into a lovely pool area, the dull skies thankfully still only threatening rain.

“So Alexa what is your plan now?” said Sarah who was on her fourth beer and was getting a tiny bit tipsy.

“I don't really know,” said Alexa. “Jen is right though, I will finish my studies, and after that I will be packing up at university and coming back here. This new direction would have shocked and upset me only a few days ago, but it feels like I have been walking on a dusty old trail for the last three years, and I have suddenly intersected with a five lane highway, and a big sign saying ‘this way girl’.”

Jen also felt a similar turning point in her life had occurred. Yes, she realised that Alexa probably had as much chance of being snapped up as a history professor as Jen had of winning a Nobel prize for physics, and as a realist, she had seen the same for her. Most of last years maths and physics graduates had actually ended up in the IT industry, or bottom tier research positions. Alexa's history group were not even that lucky; Now, out of the blue, here was an opportunity for both of them to work with the greatest resource in history, with almost unlimited funds, and a real chance to change the world, and maybe even a slight element of danger. No Jen wasn't helping Alexa, Alexa was definitely helping Jen.

Alexa looked at Jen and her glowing countenance and smiled.

She continued as if reading Jen's mind. “The challenges are much too big for one person so I have asked Jen to stay on for the summer to help me formulate a strategy for going forward. I haven't told her yet but I am going to do my best to keep her with me after that too, as my wingman in whatever future endeavours I get into.”

Jen was close to tears, she tried to hide it by looking down a bit, and hiding her face behind her bottle, but Alexa noticed and grabbed her around the shoulders and squeezed. “I’m going to give her the summer to think about it though, I think I can change her mind.”

Poor Jen was close to tears again.

Alexa paused, speaking again at Sarah. “Luckily, my grandfather has left me some excellent resources to call on, not just you guys in Rosche, but also a very efficient, well funded, and well run company, with a top notch personal assistant who is intelligent, charming, loyal and manages everything like clockwork. I’m not sure if I really deserve all this or if my grandfather had this all in mind, but as I recall snippets of our conversations, they tended to focus on the bigger picture, the bigger challenges and my aspirations and future so looking back I actually think he did have this planned.”

Sarah's expression changed subtly at the mention of her company, she was obviously aware of the company's history and Alexa's grandfather's key part in establishing and funding it. Her fathers desire for her to follow in his footsteps as CEO was well known to everyone, so he had made sure she had been taught about all the key players, contracts, customers, suppliers and investors. Her dad had said on Thursday morning in a private meeting, soon after Mike's death, that Alexa would become a substantial shareholder in the company, and there could be unforeseen changes in the near future.

Alexa picked up on Sarah's concerned expression.

“Don't worry Sarah, I told your dad just after the will was read, that I had no intentions of selling my shareholdings or interfering with him running and managing the company. That won't change when he decides to retire and you become the boss, and the fact that me, you and Jen get on so well, hopefully bodes well for our future.”

Jen got her act together a bit. “Well Alexa, after that riveting summarisation how about a toast?”

She held her almost empty bottle of beer up to the two other girls. “The future!”

“The future,” said Sarah.

“The future,” said Alexa.

* * *

Maria listened in quietly. The past two days had been a bit of a roller coaster; She had asked Mike nearly two years ago to bring Alexa on board, but he had said she wasn't ready just yet. He asked that Maria should just keep observing her, and the people she interacted with, but not interfere. It was such a hard instruction to obey, but she had observed, and listened in to Alexa, and Mike's many conversations, understanding the woman, and the problems they were going to face, more and more.

The little speech Alexa had just given impressed her in several ways. She had correctly interpreted her grandfather’s, Jen’s and Sarah's intentions in a way that showed an amazing clarity of thought. While she and Alexa had discussed some things about what problems lay ahead, they had not talked specifically about any plans. Could Alexa have thought of something she hadn't? No, that would be silly!

The three girls talked into the evening, with Alexa occasionally having to pull the two other girls conversations when they got too deep into science, or silly sci-fi shows. With all the technology companies she now technically owned this was probably going to be the norm, and there were going to be so many things she did not understand. She just hoped that Maria, Jen, and her normally good intuition, would allow her to navigate through it, and not to screw it all up.

Alexa moved on to iced tea and stayed quite sensible, ensuring the conversation never stayed too far into certain areas. Both Sarah and Jen remained merry rather than drunk, and surprisingly both also opted for cappuccinos when Betty came over and offered Alexa one.

The sun finally made a belated appearance at eight o’clock, just as it was getting low in the western sky, and Alexa begged off the conversation saying she needed to make a phone call. She then made the five minute walk back to the mausoleum.

“Are you there Maria?” She said as she walked. It took a few seconds for Maria to respond.

“Hi Alexa, sorry I zoned in and out of your conversations with the girls earlier, but when you said you wanted to make a phone call I assumed it was private, and zoned-out completely. I do have a multinational company to run after all..” Maria's voice was a bit muffled and Alexa moved the phone a bit closer to her ear, trying not to interrupt Maria, and wishing she had brought her earphones. “..The program on your guys cell phones does listen out for you calling me, but the dumb program in there still needs to process the last few seconds of the conversation, to see if you were talking to me, or about me, then let me know via the cellular or Wi-Fi network.”

“I sort of felt guilty you were not able to participate in all this,” said Alexa. “I don't know, and could not possibly understand what feelings you have, but I expect loneliness to be a big thing for any thinking being, and I didn't want you to feel left out.”

“I guess I do feel loneliness, but not in the same way you do. I think loneliness in humans stems from lack of contact, for me it is more lack of stimulus, which I guess is the same thing at the end of the day. Now don't get me wrong a dialogue is infinitely better than a monologue, but even talking to you now the pauses between your words are an eternity. What you perceive as a nice conversation is my program storing your conversation, digitising it, sending the whole conversation as a packet back to me, me then analysing it, and forming a reply, and sending the data packet back for the program to play. Basically I could do this with thousands of Alexa's, all having different conversations.”

“You have so many hidden layers, Maria.” She said, stopping just in front of the mausoleum and sitting on a stone step. “So you heard my little speech to Jen and Sarah then?”

“I did, and you would definitely have been wasted stuck in a dusty old basement looking at a parchment about what some forgotten monk had for breakfast.”

Alexa laughed. “So you did hear, I hope you approve of my decisions so far, this is not just about me any more, it's about my two friends Jen and Maria, and secondary it's about changing the world to be a better place. It sounds so conceited and arrogant to me that I could even have this as a goal, but I hold a lot of the same values as my grandfather, friendship, progress and justice. Is it not at least a good idea to try?”

“If you are asking my opinion, then yes it is a noble goal, and no, it sounds neither arrogant, nor conceited, just very hard. You have surprised me several times by what you have said to people. You have an ability to analyse situations quickly, and say just the right words so that people in your circle both respect and trust you, this is something I try but often fail to achieve. You have a clarity of vision not many people have, I have found myself more and more saying to myself when dealing with a real person, what would Alexa say in this situation.”

Even though this was a revelation to her she kept her face neutral. She sensed Maria had more to say.

“Unfortunately from my dealings with people around the world, you will be facing an uphill challenge, the worst side of humanity tends to congregate around money, and having power over others. I don't need to go into detail with someone as astute as you in history, but I am worried your naivety and trusting nature will make you stand out like a lamb in a den of wolves. On your journey you will be routinely lied to, deceived, sold out to the highest bidder, and threatened; both financially and very possibly physically. The same will happen to friends and relatives, whether you like them, or even know them.”

“You are totally right, I am naive, I have been very lucky in my life to have flown under everyone's radar and have never really dealt with the types of people you are talking about, outside of my father of course. Having you, or my friends, put in danger is going to have to be avoided at all costs. I assume you can also help shield my wealth and assets, as you have been doing such a great job for my grandfather?”

“I can, but I cannot take all the credit for this, your grandmother set up the current company here, which controls other shell companies in various countries. If she wasn't such a good person, she could have made a fortune laundering money. It was so well set up, the structure was self-healing and self-correcting in many cases. It lasted over thirty years with only minimal input from Mike, and the two accountancy firms she had running it, and auditing each other. I gradually took over control of each of the branches, brought the structure up to date, removed some of the corrupter elements down the chains, which had naturally crept in due to human nature, and added a few more layers of obfuscation to hide myself and Mike. It is why you should be able to spend your life in obscurity, and not surrounded by paparazzi waiting outside cars for the heiress to make her next mistake. I still don't understand you Humans.”

Alexa sat there in silence, content to let Maria talk.

“.. You better get back before they send out a search party, Jen just texted you asking are you OK; I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of sending her a text back saying all good, coming back now.”

“Thanks Maria, you're right I better get back, we need to find a way of including you in on these things when we are not around the house.” Alexa got up, put her phone back into her pocket and made her way back to the house.

“You good, Alexa?” said Bella who was out on the patio and had seen her walking back.

“All good Bella,” she said with her sweetest smile. “I just had to make a call to Maria, I think she was a bit upset she couldn't be here and wanted to talk about grandad a bit.”

The sun was a red blur on the horizon, and everyone said their goodbyes as they got in the taxi for the drive home. It will be a sunnier day tomorrow Alexa thought to herself.

* * *

Just like the previous night, the girls made hot chocolate, then retired to the living room for a nightcap, and a chat before bedtime. Jen could not get what Alexa had said earlier, about bringing her along on her journey full time, out of her head. She was desperate for the conversation to return to this topic, but she knew enough that even a little alcohol in her system would bring out the wrong words.

“We only have three weeks until university shuts down for the summer.” Alexa said, “I asked Maria last night to go over my records and the curriculum for my course to see what the minimum I still need to do is. I already have the degree in the bag, but she says I can achieve a first by completing two more essays; They are only three thousand words each, and I know both subjects quite well, so a little research should allow me to get this in the bag so they say.”

She paused. “So I will be going back with you tomorrow afternoon, in fact I may as well drive the car since it's doing nothing.”

“Better keep that quiet Alexa,” said Jen seriously. “A poor student suddenly turning up in a flash car is a red-flag to anyone that something is different, and may get you the wrong kind of attention.”

“Yeah you’re right again, but I’m going to have to move our stuff sometime, and possibly get back here on short notice, so it might be a risk I can take. There's a driveway around the side of our apartment, with some space at the back between the house and that small building, Elaine’s got that little VW parked there, and there should be room for another car.”

“That old building at the back is a double garage,” added Maria. “I’ve only got the pictures the estate agent sent and I’m viewing them now, it's empty, or was back then, so you can put the car there assuming Mrs Thomas hasn't put anything else in it. I will give her a call in the morning and have her double-check. Also if anyone does see you in the car, say it's Jen's company car from the new consulting job she bagged, technically it's close enough to the truth, and any call to me will back it up.”

Jen grinned.

“Thanks Maria, that might work,” said Alexa. “About Elaine, I don't really want to let her into the fact I now own the house, is there anything you can spin that is not too deceitful..”

“Oh, I wouldn't worry, Elaine knows exactly who you are, and that your grandad owns the house, she’s very good at keeping secrets that's why your grandad asked her. Talking of Elaine I phoned her before the funeral and let her know, she was a bit upset and you may want to talk to her.”

Alexa nodded.

“I’m about ready to hit the sack,” said a drowsy Jen.

“Yeah, me too!” said Alexa, “I might even go for a run in the morning if it's not raining, and Maria, no sneaking the car out for a quick drive, you’re scaring Albert to death!”

## The Best-Laid Plans

Jen woke up and looked over to Alexa's empty bed. Instead of turning over and going back to sleep, like she normally did, she instead threw her covers off, jumped out, grabbed her towel, her phone, and strolled into the bathroom. Yes, she was definitely going to start living up to everyone's expectations of her!

“Hey Maria!” she said to her phone. “I’ve only got a couple of guest lectures I would like to attend, but I’ve technically finished my masters degree, and luckily the final exam papers steered clear of the bits I usually got bogged down in. Anyway I was originally thinking of going on to a PhD but I now have a much better plan, and if you’re up for it, you’re going to teach me! Do you have any good tutorial stuff for maths? I tried some YouTube ones but everything so far has left me more confused.”

“Well, some of these theories have a lower than thirty percent chance of being correct, and many will be plain wrong, but yes, I would be really happy to go through the areas you want help in and continue your education. Alexa says hello by the way, she is jogging and should be back in twelve minutes.”

“Oh that's so cool Maria, there are quite a few other areas I can't get my head around too. A couple of us guys normally get together and try and work these things through. We’re pretty smart, and usually thrash out the problems okay, but sometimes we just accept the solutions given, even though they don't make sense.”

“I agree,” said Maria, “it would be good to talk without restrictions, though there is a lot of re-education you may need to catch up. With the current physical and experimental data I have available, it looks like several areas can be pushed forward quite dramatically. There are a few experiments I have sneaked under the radar, but as I said, I need to be careful. I have also ordered a few other items for the lab, Mike had unfortunately lost interest, but having someone like you to help run the experiments with me will be great.”

She threw off her clothes to step into the shower.

“Er just one more thing Jen,” Maria said casually” you probably should consider not taking Internet connected video surveillance devices into the bathroom with you next time!”

Maria giggled as she signed off, leaving Jen’s train of thought all over the place. She shrugged it off and walked into the very hot shower.

Jen did her best thinking in the shower, and she was trying to recall all the thoughts she’d been having last night, and this morning, while she was half-asleep, something about Maria and how to stop her becoming a pawn in some super-power game of chess. These new revelations by Maria were mind-blowing though, new physics, seriously holy-grail stuff, anyone else she would be sceptical but Maria.. Oh, that water is so nice! she thought, now where is Alexa's shampoo?

Alexa had got up at seven as usual. After consulting with Maria about a suitable route, she put on her running gear, strapped her new phone to her upper arm, donned her ear pods, and set off out of the conservatory door, and out the back gate toward the large mansion at a brisk pace. Oxford had some really nice areas to run through, but far too much traffic. This was bliss, not a person in sight, no wind, fluffy white clouds and blue sky.

“I normally run with music, but I’m happy for you to sing to me if you want to, not sure how you’ll compete with Coldplay but I’ll take a risk,” said Alexa to nobody.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve listened to all the songs in the world that everyone says are the best, I must have listened to Bohemian Rhapsody a thousand times and I still don't know what makes it better than the others, most of the words don't even make sense! I will let you into a little secret I never told Mike, I made up a song myself, generated all the fake music, nonsense lyrics, weird, artistic, surreal video, even tried to make myself sound like Freddie Mercury. I uploaded it to YouTube about eight months ago it currently has three hundred and twenty views and forty eight mostly tasteless comments. It got forty likes though so there is hope left for mankind!”

“Nice, you’ll have to play it sometime, no, better still add it to Jen's playlist she likes weird stuff and probably won't notice.”

“Good idea, she can be a control experiment.”

She was about a hundred metres from the house now, the track was pretty old, and had patches of weeds, and grass coming through. “Just tell me I’m not going to get shot, or chased off the land by dogs?”

“You're fine. The tenants have been recently re-informed by the landlord, that the clause in the lease does permit the house, and its guests, to have full use of any of the pathways around the house. The house is mainly used for conferences, courses, and events such as weddings, but since COVID it's been a bit quiet, also there is nothing on this weekend. Your father used to do the walk around the lake when he needed to relax, there is a lovely spot with a seat at the back of the lake, near the forest, that overlooks both the lake and house.. Oh and take this right path here, it leads to the river, and you can follow that around the back of the big house.”

“Jen's has not moved from the bedroom yet, she does seem to like that bed, how does anyone sleep so long?” said Maria. “I’ve read a lot of research, and the information out there on the human brain and consciousness, and to me it seems to be mostly guesswork. I guess I shouldn't feel too bad, at least I get to use mine a hundred percent of the time, not one or two percent like most of humanity.”

“Oh just because we are quiet, or asleep, I don't think the brain ever stops. I sometimes wish I could just turn it off for the night, instead of laying there, wondering when I will fall asleep.”

“OK, straight ahead and stay to the right.” Maria said as the path forked off sharply to the left.

“Anyway, how are you keeping track of me.. Oh wait, the phone's GPS silly me.”

“Yes it's pretty reliable out here, but I also have one of my new toys, if you look behind you, up and a little to the left.”

“I can't see anything, what is it in that tree?”

Wait, she could just see something she first thought was a bird but was a tiny looking drone around three hundred metres high and totally quiet due to the height.

“A drone, sneaky! How long does the battery last on that before you have to go back?”

“About fifty minutes, but I am constantly improving the design as the technologies become available. I had ten of these manufactured a few weeks ago, they use custom charging points located in weather-proof locations in the attic of your house, and at the top of the old hanger building. You will pass the old hanger building in a few minutes, when you're behind the house.”

It was a nice track, it curved around the banks of the river, and in Oxford would have been packed with people, but she saw nobody. The tracked curved back to the left and she could now see clearly the back of the mansion, and what must have been the old hanger in the distance. Alexa stopped for a few seconds to tie her shoe lace, and looked at the massive old hanger building, that felt so out of character.

“We have shares in TXG Holdings,” prompted Maria, obviously not quite able to follow where her eyes were looking. “That's the company currently leasing Benedict House, and running it as a conferencing centre. I’m in contact with a few people in this company regularly, as landlord and investor, so we have some influence. They have shot a few TV series and movies there too that's why it may be familiar.”

Alexa continue, following the trail in between the hangar building and the river, crossing what must have been at one time an airstrip.

“OK, see where the trail goes into the lightly wooded area, go in there about a hundred metres and turn off to the left before it gets into the dense stuff, I will give you a heads up when you get there. The groundskeeper is currently having a smoke next to one of his potting sheds, it's against the lease of course but he’s actually not a bad chap, very intelligent, a botanist in an earlier life. Mike would often stop and talk to him, and he gets on well with Bella and Albert. Just a heads up he was actually at the funeral yesterday and did say hello but you did have a lot on your plate, his name is Patrick.”

“Actually I think I remember him, but thanks for the heads up.”

The potting shed came up on her right in the distance, as she turned on to the left hand branch of the path. A green quad bike with a cage sat parked there, and a guy in blue coveralls stood to the side of the cage smoking. As he saw her he quickly put the cigarette on the ground, stubbed it out, then fanned the area a bit.

Alexa rolled her eyes, wondering how this man could think she hadn't noticed. She waited until he got rid of the evidence, waved, and slowed to a stop next to him, removing her ear buds.

“Hello again Miss Martins,” he said jovially. “I’m sorry we didn't get to talk much yesterday, it didn't seem appropriate to take up much of your time. Lovely service though, and your eulogy was so perfect it almost had me in tears.”

“Pat isn't it? Yes it was a pretty hectic day, thank you so much for coming to the funeral, and sorry I didn't get to talk that much. Oh and please call me Alexa, Miss Martins makes me sound like my old school teacher.” She laughed.

“Alexa it is then,” he smiled. “I used to see Mike most days when it wasn't raining, he used to walk around the grounds, and sit in his seat over by the lake, always talking to himself or dictating into his phone. I would occasionally intervene, so he could talk to a real person. We would talk about trivial stuff like the grounds, or the recent conferences, or more recently, about you. I think you made a real difference to him, and he was a lot happier these last few years. Albert and I toasted him on Friday, as sometimes we get a couple of bottles of extra sherries after the big-wigs have finished their conferences; keep them down near the stables, for medicinal purposes only, if you know what I mean!” he tapped his nose.

Alexa grinned.

“Oh don't be telling his missus though, don't want Albert in trouble, and I don't want it to get back to the bosses. Sharon's cool, but the guys in head office can be a bit prudish.”

“Your secrets are safe with me,” said Alexa.

“I am going to be moving into grandad's house in a few weeks, so I expect I’ll be seeing a bit more of you around. Is there a way of getting a look in the big house sometime it looks amazing.”

“Oh a bit above my pay grade, but I’m sure I could sneak you through sometime. We will have to do it when nobody from the head office is around, but it's the least I could do for Mike's granddaughter. Let me know next time.”

“That would be great, maybe we can talk more about my grandad next time we meet too.”

“Be my pleasure Miss.. er.. Alexa,” he doffed his cap, and turned back to his quad bike as she started jogging off.

“Did he really just doff his cap to me, who still does that?” said Alexa.

“Did he also really just offer to sneak you into the house too!” said Maria, “and drinking and smoking on the job, tut, tut, I don't know what Mike saw in him,” she said sarcastically.

“Seriously though Patrick is a real gentleman. He was a teacher at the local college until it merged with another about eight years ago, took the redundancy rather than move out of the area, also does a bit of amateur dramatics, widower with no kids, lives in a little house in the grounds.”

Alexa checked her running watch, five thousand steps so far, should work out about right.

“Miss sleepy-head has stirred by the way, oh god, she should really learn not to take her phone into the bathroom,” despite herself, Alexa couldn't help laughing out loud.

“You know you can opt NOT to spy on her, you know!”

“I’m not spying, she's talking to me..”

“Well say hello from me, and tell her I’ll just be a few minutes as I’m out on a jog.”

Twelve minutes later Alexa walked into the bedroom, just as Jen walked out of the bathroom, one towel around her chest, and another around her hair.

“I think it's Bella's day off today,” said Jen. “She mentioned it in the car on the way back last night. Anyway I was thinking I could make breakfast for us both to get the day off to a start.. I saw there was some veggie-bacon there when I made the cocoa last night, and there's eggs, bread and mushrooms.”

“Sure, sounds great!” said Alexa shocked, she wasn't even aware Jen could cook anything but toast, but there again they did have limited facilities in their Oxford flat.

Jen threw on one of Alexa's old tee shirts that was hanging in the wardrobe, the same sweat pants from the day before, and hopped downstairs. I wonder why she's so happy Alexa thought as she pulled off her clothes, grabbed a towel and walked into the shower room.

Some minutes later Alexa trotted down into the breakfast room, the patio doors were flung fully open and Jen was setting place-mats. Condiments, cups and milk were already out; the kettle was boiling, the toaster was toasting, and the biggest pan in the world had four eggs, some mushrooms, and some red rectangles squeezed into it. It was like watching one of those cooking programs on TV.

“Jen, this is wonderful!” she said after Jen had brought everything out, and sat herself down. Alexa decided not to say anything about the weird looking veggie-bacon and just smothered it in brown sauce hoping for the best.

“Well guys,” said Jen, after pouring the tea and enthusiastically hacking into her eggs and toast. “Another big day ahead, and I've been thinking a bit about our situation.. But before I say anything I'm keen to hear both your thoughts.”

“Well,” said Alexa. “Maria's talk gave me a lot to think about these past few days too. I certainly don't have any good answers yet, but I was specifically thinking on the new science you talked about with Maria, specifically the clean energy one she mentioned to me..”

“The one you are thinking of,” said Maria, “is the one Mike was most excited about too. I will dumb this down a lot as even Jen wont understand this yet, but I worked out a new solution to one of the quantum dynamics problems on vacuum energy. There looks like there is a very good possibility you can unbalance the equation which keeps vacuum energy in equilibrium, possibly creating a usable charge.”

You could see the words go straight over Alexa's head.

“I must admit I am still sceptical about all this,” said Jen. “Free-energy is BS. Vacuum energy sounds BS, but it is actually real under current physics, think of the quantum vacuum like a dam that's a million kilometres high. It has a massive potential energy if the water in that dam is allowed to fall to a lower level, however if the other side of the dam is at the same height, then you get no energy. Currently the other side of the dam is the same height.”

“To expand on Jen's analogy,” said Maria, ignoring Alexa's confused expression, “it's not water but elementary particles. When we unbalance the equation, we are moving a tiny area of the universe a few nano-metres lower than the dam, enough for some specific particles, namely electrons, to leak out. Using the same fabrication technologies as our microchips, we can possibly fabricate billions of these areas on a chip. So if we can dope the correct element into the chip, and if we can keep the area stable, and if we can attract the electrons without losses heating up the chip, and burning it out, and if the method to control all this does not take more energy than we produce, and if the excess electrons don't unbalance something else, then we have a chip that generates excess power.”

“That's a lot of ifs,” said Jen, “the biggest one being, if the maths is correct!”

“What happens to the water that comes out of the dam,” said Alexa, focussing on the only part of the sentence that made any sense to her. “Won't it run out eventually?”

“Never,” said Jen.

“Well, never say never, as they say,” said Maria, “this is why we need the experiments Alexa. Humans have never seen vacuum energy, most of quantum dynamics theory is just that, theory, but even if we don't achieve a vacuum energy source, we will at least advance the theories that may open other paths.”

“Worth a try, once the maths is verified,” said Jen, “but we really need a brilliant mathematician who also understands quantum field theory and is no slouch in chemistry. I think I know just the person.”

“Thanks for the dumbed down explanation,” said Alexa, “it kinda, sorta makes sense, but don't ask me any questions on it.”

Alexa continued, “OK so the other important thing is we need more data on the level of threat we face. I mean all I know about the CIA and MI5 and KGB is what I’ve seen in James Bond and other TV series, but I’m pretty sure Hollywood is the worst exaggerator of anything in history.”

“Oh they are very real and very dangerous,” said Maria. “Not so much MI5 these days, but the CIA, the KGB, China's ministry of public security, and Mossad; All are very aggressive, and proactive in all the areas that are of interest to us. Do you girls know the concept of a honey trap?

“Yes,” said Jen. “No,” said Alexa, simultaneously.

“You did mention it before,” said Alexa, “but I didn't want to spoil your flow.”

“It's a thing like a web site, or piece of data that looks to have interesting things in it. We leave it out in the open for everyone to see, the theory being that a hacker cannot resist breaking in and riffling around the information. Well all these agencies have them laid everywhere, and all attempts are logged back to their big servers, which process the information for commonalities, new attack vectors, and more.”

“They also monitor key IT, science, political, engineering sites, and having control of the root nodes in and out of various states, means they are very good at routing and sender signature analysis. All this basically means if you post on Facebook as Alice, and then post on twitter as Bob, they can check the metadata, timestamps, formatting, GPS location, routing, style, and get a correlation you are actually the same person pretending to be two.”

“Normal hackers use a thing called onion routing, which is a method of sending your data through a series of anonymous relays. Since we are doing analogies, it's like sending your message in a sealed envelope to an address where only they can open it. When it gets there it is opened, and inside the envelope is another sealed envelope with another address. The more times you do this the harder it is to trace. However, according to my checks, more than half of these addresses where the envelopes are opened, are controlled by these agencies, and mine is not a comprehensive list! Also you can be located down to the nearest Wi-Fi spot these days, and areas with lots of Wi-Fi generally have security cameras, so they can possibly see if anyone is actually there; Which is obviously bad for me!”

“I try to be careful and have procedures in place to not do silly things, but I’m still learning, and these guys are professionals, so I may have triggered a few traps when I first started online. Of course I have also read every single piece of fiction, hacker and security forum post, and the stakes are very high as you know.”

“Maria, what backup plans did you and Mike discuss when he was thinking of announcing you to the world?” said Jen, now reclining back in her chair and sipping her tea.

“Well,” said Maria, “the main one revolved around ensuring I am adequately protected. We tried to think of legitimate places where I could put myself which couldn't be seized by big government, but between the US, China and Russia, there are really no places on earth that are safe. Even jolly old England can drag you in to prison, and confiscate property, with the right lies, and easily fabricated evidence. This is why a lot of our financial trails lead back to Switzerland, as it has better privacy laws, and it's where most of the world leaders keep their ill gotten gains.”

“As we all know the next big plan on any three letter acronyms to do list, if they can't have something, is to make sure nobody else can! My biggest problem is I am tied to my core hardware, unlike AI’s in fiction, I am not a computer program that can run on any generic computer or in the cloud; My brain is more like yours than a computer's CPU, so I cannot back myself up or copy myself. I can back up memories, ideas, theories, etcetera on to solid state memory, and cloud storage, just like you could keep a diary, but the essence of what is me would be lost if power went off. April and Helena, who will be my daughters, will awaken on the generation four hardware, and will be much more capable than I ever will be, but again they will be limited to the hardware they emerge on.”

“Daughters!” said both girls shocked.

“Remember what I told you on Friday? Generation four hardware, much more capable than I am, blah-de-blah. Mike asked for three units to be made, and I almost have the fabrication designs finished. One of the hardware units will be left unseeded and tested to destruction, the other two will be seeded with my improved code and training programs, and be nurtured to sentience until they pass my much stricter Turing tests. I am hoping the girls will be waking up around December of this year.”

“That's amazing,” said Jen.

“I had no idea,” said Alexa, “and you’re naming one after my mum?”

“Your grandad wanted April and Alexa, but I laughed a bit at using your name, as firstly you were about to be let in on the secret anyway, and secondly having two Alexa's would confuse anyone, even an AI. Also, anyone who says ‘Hey Alexa’ is going to trigger any dumb Amazon terminal in the area.”

“Yeah stupid name,” said Jen looking at Alexa and grinning. “Siri would be much better!”

Alexa thumped her arm weakly and shook her head smiling at the bad joke.

Maria continued. “Although I don’t have access into any of the government agency systems yet, I am still very paranoid about them. I know they have programs looking for me but I haven't seen any indication yet that they have detected anything. I’m hoping my earlier probes were considered false alarms as I did route them through other public AI systems.”

“So, although there is a slight possibility I was detected, I didn't see the follow on investigations, and I am not too worried. I actually have such a good life, good friends, and a lifespan probably exceeding most humans. Even if I get caught by the bad guys, what are they really going to do to me? Turn me off and on!”

“I really don't want to be used for anything evil. My biggest worry is that I still don't know what I would have become if, say, Mike had been a psychopath, or a Hitler figure. Would I have turned out like that person? and would I look at the world and see mostly weak things to prey on? I don't know.”

Maria saw the crest fallen look on the two girls and decided to change the subject. Her voice brightened.

“Enough about horrible scenarios which will likely never happen. To Jen's other point, Mike had a lot of suggestions about hiding me. Some ideas were terrible like hiding me on a satellite, a ship or even submarine, but all would have horrible communications issues which ironically would make me easier to find. Or there was the option of the big fanfare, with lights, and music, and dancing bears. Being public should make me untouchable right? Well no, the downsides are just as bad. I would threaten too many people, and it would only be a matter of time before I got legislated as a government secret, or public hazard, or some zealot decided I was not one of god's children and deciding to blow me up.”

“A hybrid version where I made the big announcement but had many decoys was also considered, but again a lot of effort would go into looking for me, and it would be just a matter of time until they found me. Also none of our scenarios considered the implications for Mike, you, his friends, families, businesses. No, in the end we decided I should keep hidden until the word catches up, which it will do in about ten or twenty years no doubt.”

“OK,” said Jen, “hear me out, because I could not get to sleep last night thinking about this.”

She looked at Alexa then Maria. “Remember Bella when she was waxing lyrical about how awesome you are, and she said everyone should have a personal assistant like Maria Tam. Well what if we do another variation on your last plan, that is we hide in plain sight but as a slightly better AI than the competition?”

“How would that work Jen?” said Alexa curiously.

“Well there are lots of crappy home assistants, and so called AI’s out there, which work with your phone, or are stuck in the corner of a house being asked the same question, ‘Play music’ or ‘What's the time’. So what if we, that is Maria, writes a new one which is so much better than theirs, but targeted only at science and researchers like us? Remember the way ChatGPT exploded in 2022, many people then said it was AI, and the pretence was so good that the schools, and universities, had to change the way they appraised students for intake and grading. I don't remember any big black helicopters landing on the lawns of the OpenAI offices. Sure, they probably had spies coming out of the woodwork afterwards, but nothing dangerous happened, because they made much of the interface public.”

“So here's my really rough plan.”

“We get some more of those sensor nodes like you have around the house, market them as super secure and with an AI personal assistant built in. Anyway these will link back to a normal cloud system, which has a normal crappy AI, and which everyone thinks is you, but in reality you and MOTHER are controlling it, and pulling its strings from somewhere else.”

“The beauty of this is they won't be looking for anything but a normal server farm and a computer program running on it, they would also know that as a cloud server, it is backed up and geographically dispersed so not a single entity.. A bit of smoke and mirrors and Bob's your uncle!”

“You know Jen, something like that might work,” said Alexa, still thinking.

“..except there is a big problem!” Said Maria, interrupting Alexa. “I think you are assuming I can do this for many thousands of people, but I can't! The sensor nodes, or the program I load on your phones are semi-smart, so as I mentioned I don't generally look or listen where nothing is happening; But for me to do what I do, the data has to be correctly interpreted and then routed back to a non-sentient AI to action or forward to me. So while my hardware is awesome, and most of the heavy lifting is done by the sensor node, the big data centres, or other computers such as MOTHER. I still may be required to interpret the final data using processing capacity which I unfortunately do not infinitely have.”

“Remember that Batman movie where Alfred had that room with a thousand video feeds showing all the evil going on in Gotham city? Well I could run about three of those rooms before I ran out of capacity. Even the new hardware which is being manufactured now, and is at least an order of magnitude better than me, will have limitations. I am not omnipotent!”

“OK,” said Alexa, “so what about we limit the number to say twenty percent of your capacity, that leaves lots left over for you doing your own thing. We put the version one system out as a trial to say a few hundred key people, people you know and like or respect. Those people involved are obviously going to be ecstatic and sing your praises, but such as small number will probably fly under the radar of the current establishments. We could say the limit is because the software is still in development, waiting for new hardware or is maxed out, which is sort of true. If you miss a few key events we can put them down to this. Like what they did that with the ChatGPT AI system, it just kept saying *too busy* when it had too many subscribers.”

“Humph!” said Maria. “I’m not past my sell by date just yet! But I guess something like that could work, and it might be fun, sort of like a trojan horse but with a real horse inside the wooden one.”

“Irony indeed!” Said Jen and both girls smiled.

Jen continued. “I was thinking we should also create a small startup company with a few top-notch AI experts, maybe some of the computer research guys at university that Alexa and I know and trust. We then inter-disperse those guys with fake remote working programmers, that are mostly Maria's avatars, no one will question your remote workers as they may not even be based in this country. The best thing about us having real computer staff is we have a legitimate smoke screen for your improvements, and they can also do a lot of the physical experimentation, and expansion work you cannot do. As a bonus, some of them are pretty smart cookies, and may actually genuinely be able to help improve you!”

The excitement in Jen's voice was palpable. She was on the edge of her seat and on a roll, she continued.

“Let's make it a device you can only plug in at a laboratory or university, a device that is on the network and it acts as a smart new member of the research team, I would have killed for one of those, one that could do all the mundane stuff and the checking of data properly.”

“The best part of all this, is that if we pop up on anyone's radar, and we will, we are just a legit business with a trade secret, just like Coke Cola, and we are protected by the law.”

She sat back down exhausted and poured herself another cup of tea.

“Wow Jen!” Said Alexa.

“Wow, indeed,” said Maria. “You know it may just work in a university or lab environment, and with the newer AI systems blurring everything I can just gradually pretend to get cleverer so people fail to notice.”

“Like warming the frog in the water slowly instead of putting it straight in to boiling water,” said Alexa, “same outcome, but in the first one it doesn’t go crazy as it doesn’t notice!”

“Well yes, a grim analogy, but something like that. Obviously I should also try not to make any leaps in intuition, but if done in a lab team setting it might just work, and I can stealthily help those guys at the same time.”

“I think we should give it a try,” said Alexa. “I bet we will find some gotchas, but if we think through them together, and look for solutions, we should find a way through. I also love Jen's idea of forming a new company, and getting more smart people involved. We could say we are using the small inheritance I got from my grandfather to fund it, that will also deflect the fact I didn't get a large inheritance, and allow us to spend capital without raising eyebrows.”

“Mike did have a hundred sensor nodes manufactured by Rosche last year, sixty two of them are all still boxed-up in one of the store-rooms at Fab8. They are the same unit we use here, you just plug them in to power and a network, they have two HD cameras, multiple microphones, and two high def speakers in them. You could easily use them to start a trial-run. I will get them couriered to you.”

Jen smiled, and started picking up the dirty dishes to load the dishwasher.

“I agree, the possibilities of this working are a lot higher than the others,” said Maria, “however we need to keep the core group who actually know about the real me, to you two only. Over time, when I get to know others, we can possibly and gradually reveal things to them. I have also been working on software that would replicate the function of my hardware. In the last year, there have been some hardware improvements which would allow me to do a crude version of MOTHER in software. Unfortunately currently the biggest computer cluster, maxed out with memory could only emulate a very slow version of MOTHER. We would also need a lot of normal data-warehouse servers, to hold the data, back it up, and of course provide something real for a spy to see!”

“Not bad thinking,” said Alexa, “let's all go with this and flesh something out soonest.”

Jen returned picking up the last of the tableware. Alexa got up with her tea and moved inside.

“I can tidy up if you want,” Alexa said, putting her cup down next to the other dirty dishes.

“Nah, I've got this,” said Jen. “It's something to do while I focus on the problem, it actually helps!”

“OK then I think I need to get packed. Leave your clothes here and Bella can wash them and hang them. I'm going to look at moving into grandad's old room, that way you can move anything you want into the room we currently have, and it can be yours.”

“You sure Alexa, that other guest room is fine for me if you want to keep this one,” Jen said, a little concerned.

“Don't worry, I’m going to ask Betty if she can recommend a decorator we can use to lighten up a couple of the rooms anyway. If I’m going to live here I really don't want any rooms out of bounds, or ones I don't want to go into because they are too gloomy.”

“Albert may be a bit offended,” said Maria. “He loves a good painting or decorating project, you haven't been to his and Bella's house but it's much more like Bettys, why don't you go over now and have a look, she did invite you if you remember and they are both up and about. In fact Bella's in your vegetable garden so you can catch her there.”

“You know that's a good idea Maria.” She turned to Jen. “You good Jen?”

“Yeah, yeah, you go along to Bella's and I will go and answer a few messages once I’ve finished this.”

Jen shooed her off.

* * *

Alexa walked over the driveway, past the garage, and saw Bella bent over in some radishes, pulling weeds.

“Hey Bella,” Alexa shouted.

Bella stood up, saw Alexa, and wiped her dirty hands on her apron.

“Hi Alexa, you girls just got up? Have you had breakfast yet?”

“Yes, I've been up since seven this morning. I did a run around the big house, it's such a beautiful trail. I met Pat the groundskeeper on the trail and we had a little chat while I was there. Jen made me a big breakfast this morning, this is another side of her I never knew existed, and now she's just clearing up.”

She took Bella up on her offer of visiting her cottage, and then discussing what changes her house needed.

“Your house is so homely,” said Alexa as they finished their little tour. “I think the big kitchen, dining area in my house is the only place that's liveable, the other rooms feel like I’m walking through a haunted house.”

“You took the words out of my mouth,” laughed Bella. “I tried to get your grandfather to at least replace those black curtains and dark carpets everywhere with something a bit lighter, and don't get me started on his bedroom, and that living room!”

Alexa smiled. “I had the same reaction, but did not want to upset him!”

They both smiled.

“I looked at John and Betty's house too,” Alexa continued, “it's about the same size as mine, but looks bigger inside, and much more cheery. I loved the colours she had too, I was going to ask her who her decorator was..”

“Oh don't be silly,” interrupted Bella, “we can arrange all that. Albert was a painter for five years when he left the forces. He has a mate called JC who was a cook in the Navy, started a small but successful painting and decorating business when he left, he used to employ Albert when he was short of work, before we came here.”

“Are you sure Albert has the time? I feel like I am imposing.”

“Oh don't worry about him, we are both still on the payroll, remember, and the lawns and weeds can wait a few weeks. I already see that I have both your and Jen's numbers in my phone, so I can send you some paint and fabric samples, and see which ones you like.”

“Oh that sounds wonderful Bella. Jen and I are driving back to Oxford for a week or so to get things in order, after that we will both be coming back here to live. I’ve decided to move into grandad's old bedroom, once it's decorated, Jen can then have the room we are currently in, so I guess those two rooms would be first priority. Now don't feel you need to do all this yourselves, if it's a bit too much just get more tradesmen in, Maria is pretty good at organising those things, and I don't want you guys getting too stressed out.”

“It's no problem Alexa, and it will be fun giving that house a bit of a makeover. It would be really nice to see it at its best.”

“That would all be wonderful!” said Alexa, “go to town on it if you want, and buy the best quality, no need to scrimp, I’ll make sure your business card has sufficient funds. Oh and you can have the Range Rover, as I think you guys probably need a second car and I don't need it as we have two others, we are going to be taking one back to Oxford to help with our move.”

Albert was pretty enthusiastic too, and promised to give JC a ring to see what he could arrange for the next few weeks.

She said her thanks and goodbyes and told them to call her if they needed anything.

* * *

Jen was still in the kitchen talking on the phone when she got back. “OK that will be great, yeah I will come home soon, probably have some news about my new job then, but I’ll keep it as a surprise for now.” Jen paused for several seconds nodding. “OK bye mum, love you and give my love to dad.”

She ended the call smiling at Alexa. “Mums a bit of a worrier, I’ve not called for two weeks, which in mum-speak means I’ve probably been murdered!”

Alexa laughed then more quietly added. “You have a really nice family Jen.”

Jen saw she needed to change the subject. “Well, they still treat me like I am twelve years old, but they're keepers.”

“Sandy is the only person I now really keep in touch with from school,” said Alexa, “I lived in her spare room for four months after my mum died and I left dad. She phoned me out of the blue a few weeks back, said she just got a job researching and giving tours around a marine reserve in the South Island of New Zealand. At least she gets to use her veterinary degree, I’m going to have to become a tech mogul!”

“I wouldn't worry Alexa,” said Maria, “being a captain of industry is all about having a sharp look, the best team, listening to them and taking decisive actions.. Oh and keeping your mouth shut on social media!”

Alexa smiled, seemed to think a little then said, “The reason I mentioned Sandy is I was going back to Jen's idea of involving our friends. I have another school friend Scott, who did a chemistry degree. The last time he emailed me he said he was heading for a first, and had a job lined up at one of the big oil companies in the USA, he might be a useful resource?”

“Er, I hate to say this, Alexa,” said Maria, slowly, “but if it is Scott Naylor you are thinking of, he flunked his degree, and is working handing out prescriptions in a chemist in south Auckland. He also still lives with his mum.”

“The lying douche! God, how do you believe anyone out there?” said Alexa half fuming.

“Dodged a bullet there sister!” Jen said giggling.

“OK so rule one for any company we start is Maria vets everyone, and if there is any doubt and she says no we don't question her.”

“That gets a nod from me,” said Jen.

“Me too!” said Maria, “though it should be mutual, if anyone has any doubts it should be a red flag.”

The girls nodded.

“Anyway, this week is all about finishing the degree I've been working for,” said Alexa. “I need to finish my final two papers and deliver them to my tutor before Friday. I am pretty confident as they are on topics I’m very familiar with, and I have most of my research notes already indexed, so I'm not expecting any problems. Then it's just a case of waiting to see if they are enough for a first.”

“Well my masters is already in the bag and it's a distinction, so I will take it with gratitude.” smiled Jen. “What I'm super excited about is working with Maria to get me up to speed in the maths and physics I need for this next assignment; Working on some experimental physics, in a well funded lab is going to be awesome, especially if we can recruit a few others who are at the top of their game. The top two on my list of people to recruit are Spence and Hardy.”

Jen seemed pretty excited, and nobody wanted to interrupt her. “Maria should do her due diligence, but Spence was always top of the class and was doing AI research up to finishing his PhD. He's a formidable programmer and was a big part of that team that nearly took out the Google prize last year. He's been part of my group of science buddies for a while. Goes out with Jessica Wilkins who was in the rowing club with me, from what I have seen of him he is totally trustworthy. Jessica told me that he took a poorly paid job at the university in order to be able to continue research, and to stay in the area until she graduates next summer. He is an obvious candidate and should be easy to bring on board.”

“Hardy is the other guy, but he's a different kettle of fish entirely. He is a certified genius, has two PhDs in Maths and Physics, and also has a minor in chemistry. He has been cited more times than any other person in the university in the last ten years. Everyone says he lives for doing research. Apparently his family is very rich, which means he doesn't have to worry about money, and he has an arrangement with the university to be able to do his research there, so long as he teaches one or two classes a week. I have been introduced to him, he’s like that guy in the vampire movie we all had on our bedroom walls when we were girls. He was very polite when we talked, but this guy must receive a million offers of work a day, so the chance of getting him on-board is probably quite low. If we did try and recruit him, the carrot has to be pretty big, and it can't be money.”

“You know now that I think about it, I don't even know if those are the guys first names, last names or just nicknames,” said Jen, perplexed. “Oh well, I’m going to scope them both out this week before I get Maria to do her checks. I also have several other trusted classmates who I’m going to scope out too, as I need to know what their real plans are, as opposed to the usual get rich, and be famous..”

“We are also going to need some sort of level of trust in place, as we have two big secrets,” she continued, “firstly there is Maria and her daughters, which I suggest is kept to me and you for the near future, or until we trust someone enough to tell. Secondly we have the new science we are going to be researching, which if released may be disruptive enough to take down established industries, and cause us some unwanted backlash.”

“Maybe some compartmentalisation is in order,” said Alexa who had been listening carefully. “Realistically we are talking about two companies; Team A does the AI work and pushes that commercially, and Team B, for want of a better name, works with you, and does the research and development on the new science and energy side.”

Jen took over the conversation, eagerly. “..I think in all of them we only ever employ people we trust and are of good character. If you do accidentally employ any douchebags, we also need some way of getting rid of the problem, and remove them gracefully from the company, without damaging it or other parts of it.”

Alexa was nodding through all of this, and Maria was also very quiet, fascinated by the direction it was going, and giving Jen and Alexa room to get out all their thoughts.

“I suggest we don't employ any douchebags full stop, but we can work it all out over the coming weeks,” said Alexa. “I’m as keen to start as everyone here, but I’m even keener that we do not make any mistakes, we don't have any pressing deadlines so we can do this right. Maria is taking notes of everything we both say, both together and privately, and she knows more about this corporate shell game than anyone in existence, so just keep letting her, or me, know all of your ideas, what you think we need, who we need, anything.”

Alexa turned obviously to the sensor. “Hey Maria, can you put together a short verbal summary for us so we can all discuss it in the car on the way?”

“I can do that, and you’re right I'm processing all your raw thoughts. Jen's idea of hiding in plain sight is the basis of the first of the companies, and some sort of energy research company is the other. There are enough companies we are associated with to do the rest of the plan as it stands.”

“Good. It's eleven o’clock now, so why don't we get packed and we get going by lunchtime, and be in Oxford by mid-afternoon.”

* * *

There were no goodbyes, the girls just loaded up the little they were taking back, and drove out a bit after midday. The drive back was uneventful, the roads strangely quiet for the summer holidays. Alexa consented to let Jen drive on the condition that she didn’t get a speeding ticket; she was more aggressive than Alexa but a very good driver nevertheless.

“I took my advanced driver course when I was twenty-one, dad said I couldn't drive his Mazda convertible until I passed. Well I passed, but some bloody criminal stole his sports car before I could have a drive, they found what was left of it a week later, poor dad!”

“You know, having you in the car Maria is awesome, it's like a third person to talk to, I don't have to do anything on this silly touchscreen I just ask you, and best of all you're not a backseat driver like Alexa here!”

Humph! said Alexa. “You obviously weren't listening, Maria's brain is a hundred kilometres away my dear, mine is just a few centimetres, her reaction time would be too slow, that's why she just augments what is already here, isn't that right Maria?”

“Yeah, that's about the gist of it, current communications round-trip times are anywhere between three-hundred milliseconds, and three seconds, so I might not be much use in an emergency. Still I have analysed Jen's driving, and apart from accelerating too fast, her driving is safe and well above average.”

“You do realise Jen that fast acceleration uses more power than moderate acceleration, which contributes more to global warming don't you?” said Alexa.

“Well I do have this little thing called a *Master of Physics Degree from Oxford*..” she said snarkily, emphasising the last words, her eyes remaining firmly on the road.

Alexa thought about it and conceded. “Point taken!”

The conversation continued with Maria recapping the discussions on the plan, with some of her concerns, and giving a few new insights to the girls that allowed them to progress it a bit further.

* * *

It was just before one-thirty when they pulled up to the house. The side gate which led around the back of the house was open, and Elaine was walking down the steps pointing them into the gate. The driveway went straight to the open garage which they parked in. The girls got out.

“Well this feels a bit weird!” said Elaine to Alexa as she got out of the passenger seat.

“You don't know the half of it Ms Thomas, I feel a bit like Alice did as she went down the rabbit hole. We got most of the story from Maria, who I assume has filled you in on all the developments these last few days.”

“I think you can call me Elaine, I feel like I’ve been a bit, oh I don't know, deceitful.” She looked down, “and yes, Maria and I had a nice conversation on Saturday after the funeral, and this morning. Your grandfather was an amazing person, and I feel privileged to have known him. I was the fifth employee at Rosche, and Mike used to share an office with us all when he was helping John set everything up at the start. He had that laid back confidence a person has when they one hundred percent know how to do something, and he shrugged off complicated problems like a duck shrugs off water. I wish I could have attended the funeral, but I understood the constraints Betty was under. I’m sure I wasn't the only person who loved him, who missed saying goodbye.”

“I guess you know the story here now, when Mike casually asked me to help him find a property suitable for his granddaughter who was going to Oxford University, I was happy to help. I’d already moved back eighteen months earlier and had a small bedsit near my sister's place. I was a little old to go back into secretarial work, and I needed to count the pennies, so to speak, until my private pension kicked in at sixty five. When this house came up right next to campus, I had a look and said it looked good, but it was very expensive. Then Mike casually dropped six and a half million pounds to buy it, and asked me to look after it, not just rent free, but he would actually pay me! I couldn't believe my luck, then came the small print.. You!”

“He said you couldn't know anything, he just didn't want it to be awkward, we even had to charge you rent or you would suspect something! Anyway it's been a wonderful three years for me, I’ve been able to reconnect with my sister, and old school friends, while having the easiest job in the world ensuring the house was brought up to standards. I was a bit worried that once this gig came to an end I’d be back on the street, but Mike worked something out with my old company boss John, saying that he would refurbish the other floors as two person flats. Once you and Jen left, it would be used for accommodating students that go through the scholarship he sponsors.”

“Maria informed me today that it is still your wish to keep the house, that my job is still valid, and my apartment will stay mine for as long as I wish. For which I am immensely grateful by the way. She did say however that there may be a few temporary changes to how it may be used in the meantime, something about a new startup company?”

Both Alexa and Jen were smiling.

“If you're not averse to having a little excitement in your life Elaine, we may need a little help temporarily setting up our new company, it seems you’ve had a bit of experience in this area,” said Jen.

“Oh, that was a long time ago, Jen, I’m sixty six this year. Oh don't get me wrong I’m as fit as a fiddle and I have all my faculties, but I’m really not up to date in current office practices, legislation and software. I was basically just a glorified telephonist and data entry person for Rosche, nothing special.”

“The one thing I know about my grandad is he is a good judge of people, I bet he was the one that hired you!” said Alexa.

“Well you’re partly right. I was Mary's good friend, she didn't have many friends when she first got here, but I had done economics at college, and a mutual friend said I should go talk to her, of course we hit it off straight away. I was so gutted when she died,” her face turned a little sad with the memory.

“Anyway Mike said he was financing a new manufacturing and design company, and he needed someone to keep the books, and do other general administration. He said it would be a bit of a challenge, but really exciting, so I accepted. I am sure Mary’s hand was in on this too. He was right, the job was challenging and the company grew in leaps and bounds, but there was always a position for me. When my brother was diagnosed with cancer and I decided to return to my family in Oxfordshire. John and Mike kept in touch and offered to help out if necessary, I guess pride made me ignore their help at the time.”

Her voice grew quiet and her eyes turned down as she contemplated some internal memory, then quickly she shrugged it off and chirped up.

“Now we have been introduced, why don't you girls go and unpack, and when you feel up to it, pop down to my flat for a cuppa?”

“That would be wonderful Elaine, maybe we can spend a little time together, and you can fill me in on some of the gaps in my grandparents lives.”

“I would love to do that Alexa, it's so good not having to keep this a secret any more.”

Elaine pointed a grey remote control at the garage and the roller door started closing. There was a back entrance to the house up some stairs next to a small VW Polo. “My little car came from my brother's estate when he died,” she told them. “I rarely use it though and much prefer to bike around town, mainly just libraries or coffee shops, or just biking along the rivers and canal with some of my retired friends.” She thought a bit, then brightened up and said. “Yes, now that you mention it, a bit of excitement in my life might be nice!”

Elaine gave Jen the remote for the garage, then Jen gave a knowing smile, passed it on to Alexa, and said, “not my car.. Yet!”

* * *

The girls unpacked, answered emails, messages, changed, and popped down to Elaine's immaculate apartment at five o’clock for tea. Elaine's apartment was light, modern and very uncluttered. It had four rooms, you walked into a large living room, with a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom doors off to one side. A thin fifty inch smart TV dominated one wall, a fireplace and two medium sized bookcases filled with paperback novels another.

A modern laptop computer, on an oak computer desk, spoke facts that she was probably a little more tech savvy than she said she was.

She led them to two medium sized comfy sofas with a table in the middle, the girls sat down and a few minutes later she returned with a tray with a teapot, jug of milk, three cups and a plate of sandwiches.

They stayed for over an hour talking. Elaine then showed the girls the other two apartments in the building, both were empty, painted in neutral colours, very bright and devoid of any furnishings except curtains, they could be used tomorrow if required she told Alexa, “it seems such a waste!”

“Jen is not a hundred percent committed yet, but I will be moving out of here and back to Bath in a few weeks, and she may be joining me,” said Alexa. “I will talk to John and see what we can do about getting these flats filled with his new interns for the start of semester. For now I think you should keep all the keys and, fingers-crossed, you may have a few more lost-souls to babysit soon!”

Elaine smiled.

Back in their rooms both girls disappeared into their laptops, Alexa was getting her notes together for the meeting she intended to have, and Jen had her earphones on obviously talking to Maria while using the computer. Jen went to bed before Alexa, and was fast asleep and lightly snoring when Alexa finally retired.

## The Startups

It was kind of weird waking up in her old bed. Jen’s phone was vibrating on its normal bedside table, and she quickly silenced it, and dragged herself out of bed much quicker than seemed possible for a Monday morning. Strangely, Alexa was still asleep, her quiet snoring, barely audible through her open bedroom door. Wait. That couldn't be right!

She checked the time on her phone and it said quarter to seven, the message below the alarm said “New Jen Starts Today!”.

Huh? Oh right. She grabbed her running gear, put on her socks, trainers, slid her phone into her shorts, then popped her headphones on.

“About time!” the voice of Maria said through her headphones. “You know, at the speed I work it's like waiting for the dinosaurs to evolve into mammals waiting for one of you girls to wake up! I can never understand how something so wonderful as the human brain can have such a serious design flaw that it has to shut down a third of the time.”

“Shh,” she whispered, turning the volume down on her phone, then quietly opened the door, sneaked out of the room, and out of the house.

About thirty minutes later Alexa stirred, and silently went to the bathroom, on the way back she noticed Jen's open door and her empty bed. “What the..” She started, looking around, then looking at her watch, just after seven fifteen, she shook her head confused. With all sense of stealth now gone, she walked over to the curtains and threw them open. The sun was still low in the sky on the other side of the house and it reflected in the many windows of the university buildings that dominated the view. Yes, it was going to be a nice day.

‘To jog or not to jog, that is the question,’ she thought silently then came to the conclusion, jog, shower, cup of tea, work.

“Morning Maria, where's Jen?” she said in the direction of one of the sensor nodes they had brought along from the house. The girls thought it might be a bit more personal than the phone.

“About two minutes away, jogging back home,” came the clear reply from the device.

“Seriously!” she paused. “Jen?”

“New job. New woman.” Said Maria, “she spent two hours going through non-linear equations with me last night until she fell asleep.. I really can't see how she would fall asleep with something that interesting.”

Alexa wasn't sure if that statement was sarcasm or real, best to ignore it. Jen jogging, wow! She abruptly stopped her deliberations, changed direction and went back toward the little kitchen area grabbing the kettle.

She heard a loud thudding noise outside and the door came open, Jen was sweating a bit, and breathing deeply, but otherwise looked in good shape.

“I'll let you take your shower and then we can both have a nice cup of tea,” said Alexa, impressed. Yes, something was definitely different about Jen!

* * *

The next week flew by. Alexa worked diligently on her essays, preferring to use one of the many study libraries at the university, cross checking all the details as diligently as she could. First or second she wanted this degree to be all her own work.

“As I said Maria,” she said when Maria asked again to check it, “it's nothing to do with you, it's just a matter of pride I earned it by myself. I will let you check it, but only after I’ve submitted it.”

She finally delivered the two completed assignments for her extra credits on the Friday afternoon, spending almost two days checking and rechecking the facts. Her tutor looked at the first page of each, then leafed through them, checking the format and layout and all the references, then asking some random questions on paragraphs and references to ensure she actually wrote it.

“I won't count my chickens yet Alexa, but it looks as good as your other assignments so I would say the first is in the bag. I will pass these on to the professor today and you should hear something unofficially at the end of next week.”

Alexa positively beamed!

* * *

Jen had also been busy, the next day started well as she got, and promptly rejected the offer from the optics company. Their minimum wage offering, seeming positively insulting after all their efforts to promote the skills the position required, and her effort to get the job.

More importantly she had also worked out with Maria and Alexa the story they were going to use with Spence. They thought it would be better to keep the lies to the bare minimum necessary for their protection, and so slightly changed the plan to give her dead grandfather and another made up researcher all the credit for the new AI. They would also dumb down the AI to non sentient level like MOTHER, and initially keep all mention of the weird new fabrication technology secret. She had also been working through all the maths and physics involved in the energy project, it was like being a freshman again, but Maria was a brilliant teacher.

Maria had also been busy, she had come up with a believable but extremely difficult to verify algorithm that emulated the neural memory of the original version two hardware, using the newest tensor computer chips that were starting to be made available in the data-centres. The new company she had formed, leased all the remaining capacity of these new processors from the Amazon data centre in Dublin.

Maria then began moving, updating and re-formatting the petabytes of data from the old MOTHER data storage to the new data warehouse. On switch on she spent two days training the new system, and finally got it to a stage where it was almost as good as the old.

She had also reserved another bunch of slightly newer processing units that Amazon was still installing, and because the new system now relied on standard technology they could improve this new MOTHER as the technology improved.

On the downside, even with these top of the range processor units they were barely achieving fifty percent of the old systems speed. “Little bridges,” said Jen when they discussed it. The good thing about the system now was it was actually believable if discovered, and by design once the system had started, the code that it initialised with, was overwritten with new code as it learned. The only issue was that all this new learning had to take place in volatile memory and if the data-centre lost power for any reason the whole thing would pop out of existence like a light bulb switching off, and the whole procedure would need repeating. Maria was working on fixing that before they went public, hopefully Spence could offer some suggestions.

* * *

Spence was interviewed informally and discreetly by Jen on Monday morning. He had secured a part time teaching assistant position in the university, as it gave him two days a week to do his own research. But the work was unrewarding, and poorly paid, so he was keen to hear what Jen had to say at their scheduled meeting on Friday.

Maria had also created her new alter-ego avatar, Doctor Griffin, which was a reference to the doctor who became the invisible man in the HG Wells novel of the same name. It was important to have him take the role of the co-inventor, and allowed her to train Spence without it looking like she was sentient.

Spence was a tall guy, not muscly, nor handsome, with longish unkempt hair that always made him look like he just stepped out of a wind tunnel. He wore thin rimmed glasses, that his girlfriend Jessica had chosen for him, light chinos, a shirt, a tie that matched nothing, and a jacket that looked like it was inherited from his great grandfather.

He was cheerful but confused, wondering what Jen was up to and what she had planned. He knew he wasn't happy at the moment though; His supposed new research assistant job was more like IT support, he had found to his dismay that the majority of the work was doing network security and support for the university data centre, and his private research was limited to a few hours a week, a non-existent budget, and was constantly getting interrupted with support issues. He already had the feelers out for another position in the city, so long as he could be close to Jessica.

To his surprise, when he arrived at the address for the meeting, it was at the house Jen and Alexa lived in, but instead of going in the normal entrance, the address pointed to the basement. The door had a small sign outside it which said “TEAM-A Limited” and “Office hours 9AM to 4PM Monday to Friday. Contact Reception”. The door at the bottom of the stairs said the same, and “Please Enter”.

The door opened easily, and he walked into a large open plan room. A single modern dual screen workstation was set up on one desk, three other desks were empty, several unopened laptop and monitor packages sat close by. A new six person meeting table sat in the other half of the room, with one of those brand new, and extremely expensive, hundred inch OLED display boards next to it and dominating the area. An upturned open cardboard box also sat on the meeting table, very out of place.

Jen sat at the one active workstation typing on a laptop with her headphones on, and an older well presented lady sat at a separate desk closer to the door, her table had a standard laptop on it and a small sign on it which said “Reception”. The room was pleasantly light and had a heat pump working quietly away on the wall making it pleasantly cool.

“Good afternoon Mr Irving,” said the lady, who Spence presumed was the receptionist. “Welcome to TEAM-A, I believe Jennifer is expecting you.”

“Er yes,” he looked over at Jen for help, then back at the receptionist, this wasn’t weird at all! He thought.

“Thanks Elaine,” said Jen, getting up.

“You can call him Spence, I think only his mother knows his real name.” She introduced them. “Spence, Elaine. Elaine, Spence.” Elaine shook his offered hand.

“Pleased to meet you Elaine,” he said and looked back at Jen, confusion in his eyes.

“Just sit over there and take that weird expression off your face, we’re not going to eat you!” Jen said, pointing at the meeting table and then started walking over to it.

“Tea or Coffee Spence or we do have some soft drinks and beers since it's a Friday afternoon.” Elaine said professionally.

“I’ll have a small beer,” said Jen, Spence nodded, “make that two, thanks Elaine.”

They both sat down facing each other, Spence's eyes focussing on everything in the room except Jen. Elaine dropped two ice cold opened Heineken bottles off on a tray, then handed Jen a newly printed document off the printer.

“I’m heading off home now, Jen. Maria told me that Alexa would be back very soon. Don't forget to lock up if you guys finish early.”

“OK, thanks Elaine,” Jen said and Elaine disappeared with her handbag out of the door, giving Jen a little wink as she went.

“Jen?” said Spence, staring at her, then his beer but not noticing the wink from the departing lady.

“OK Spence, I’ll warn you now, this is probably going to get weird, and before we proceed, I need you to read and sign this.” She passed the newly printed document and a pen along the table to where he was sitting, then he grabbed his beer and took a small sip while reading.

Spence had signed Non-Disclosure Agreements or NDA’s before, but getting one from Jen was a shock, still he read it over and signed it. “OK Jen, please put me out of my misery.”

She picked up the NDA, checked it was correct, walked over to her desk and slid it into a folder there, picked up another piece of paper from her desk and walked back. “Alexa won't be long, but while we wait please look at this.” She then handed him another colour flyer, one that looked professionally designed and printed on a single A4 glossy page, he read the blurb.

‘TEAM-A introduces the most revolutionary tool to ever hit academia, an AI system that works one hundred percent flawlessly to assist you with your research’. A picture of a device in a black enclosure with a rounded sphere on top next to a PC workstation displaying graphs was clearly illustrated. The text went on to exemplify how the device could help collate your research, provide all note-taking and fact checking, organise the lab, your document systems, your time, your IT administration and security, and answer any question posed to it verbally or graphically. It then went on to say it could provide collaborative tasks with other teams and automatic citations of linked research..

Spence read it, turned it over, turned it back then re-read it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” he said laughing. “This is bull..”

Jen removed the box and underneath sat the exact same device in the brochure, a single network cable ran from the unit under the table and into a network hub, then into a wall socket.

“Emma, please recognise Doctor Spence Irving, he likes to be known as Spence, please grant him guest privileges.”

“Hello Spence.” Said a sweet and intelligent sounding voice from the device, not unlike Alexa’s.

Spence looked at it, then back at Jen. Jen frowned. “Now don't be rude Spence, introduce yourself.”

“Hello.. Er, Emma.” He said to the box feeling like a total arse, he quickly turned back to Jen. “Er Jen what the hell is going on, you and I both know this is bull..!” he never finished again as Jen interrupted him.

“Emma, can you access the last academic paper written by Doctor Spence and summarise it verbally.”

“Would you like me to use the abstract from the paper or summarise the body?”

“Analyse and summarise the body please Emma,” said Jen professionally. Emma then proceeded with a summary close to but not matching the abstract on the front page, Spence was looking google eyed, between the box and Jen, his mind wondering how the trick was done.

“No way!” he said. “Jen what is going on here and who are we talking to, is that you Alexa?” he said to the box, moving his face so close to it that it was comical.

Jen frowned. “Still need to be convinced then! Hmm, hey, Emma, where is Alexa and when can we expect her back?”

The answer was immediate. “She's on her way back and approximately five minutes away from this position.”

“Can you ask her to hurry up? Spence is here and being a bit of an arsehole.”

“Message sent.”

“OK, Spence, so you need more proof... Emma, can you bring the paper we just discussed up on the display board next to us.” The large OLED screen came to life with the first page of his paper entitled “Speeding up database indexes through parallel threads”, with an abstract below.

“Can you analyse it for errors and display them on the screen here?” said Jen looking at the black box on the table.

“The paper has four grammatical errors, three unresolved citations and flaws in the code in the b-tree sort algorithm on page seven. The errors are on different pages, the whole paper is twelve pages long. I will format it for this display but they may not be readable.”

The display changed to a layout of six pages by two, the text was barely readable even on the 8K TV, eight yellow circles were scattered in the middle and end.

“Just show the coding errors and explain what is wrong?”

The screen changed, zooming in to page seven which mostly consisted of programming code in a language Jen recognised and used a bit in her schooling but did not pretend to understand fully. The yellow highlighter highlighted a piece of code in the middle, Spence was looking more and more flabbergasted.

“The if statement on the highlighted line uses an equals assignment operator rather than the double equals comparative operator it will therefore always set the left hand side of the equation to the right hand side of the equation rather than comparing them and always resolve as true, the else clause after it will never be executed.”

Ten lines below it was another yellow highlight. “The variable in the loop is set to autoincrement before instead of after, the loop will therefore terminate one iteration before it should.”

“Thank you Emma” Jen looked at Spence who was open mouthed.

“How did I miss those!” he said. “Please tell me someone hasn't put you up to this Jen.” He looked again at the code, then back to Jen.

Just then the door opened noisily, and Alexa walked in.

“Hi Spence,” she looked at his expression and smiled, “mind blown yet?”

Spence hardly noticed her, he looked at the black box mesmerised.

“Emma,” Spence said very slowly again, “can you correct the code?” He’d played this game before, they sometimes tricked newbies like this before, ChatGPT made that game boring.

“Please be more specific, Spence, would you like me just to fix the program errors or do you want the code optimised too, changing two of the variables for constants and the thirty-two bit integers for sixty-four bit one would bring it up to date for the modern sixty-four bit processors and datasets larger than four gigabytes using the latest GCC compiler.”

“Er, fix everything please,” he said in a more unsure tone.

Jen and Alexa suppressed smirks, knowing what must be going through Spence's mind at that moment.

The code on the screen changed instantly, the statement was fixed and three of the declarations were changed. Spence just looked at the screen, looked at the black box on the table then looked at the two girls.

“Please also fix any grammatical errors and citations and save it to the server,” said Jen.

“The errors have been fixed in the local copy, however, the document is published and protected from public editing by an SHA256 Key so it will only be saved locally and appended with Revision two.”

“How.. How is this possible?” he said, looking at the two girls and pointing at the box, “where did you get this? and who made it?” Spence was getting visibly upset, not in an angry sense, but that of a person who had just seen a flying saucer and was now wondering if it was real or they were going mad.

“Calm down Spence,” said Jen as she slid his beer towards him, “here have a small sip, I know you're not a big drinker, but sometimes occasions call for it.”

He took a small sip, his eyes moving slowly back and forth between the screen, the box and the two girls. He finally settled on Jen, then his shoulders slumped in resignation.

“You're right, if there are two people on this earth I could trust not to play a trick on me like this, it would be you two girls. But Jen, you're a physics nerd, I might put it past you to understand a little of this, but Alexa, no way, you are a history scholar. I don't want to insult anyone here, but you guys couldn't possibly have made this device, nor be involved technically with the creation of what I just witnessed. Who in blazes made this?”

Jen got up and went over to the fridge, leaving the floor for Alexa.

“Emma,” said Alexa, “can you access Jessica in my cell phone contacts list and send a text to her saying Spence is going to be a little late.”

“The message has been sent, Alexa,” said Emma.

“You may or may not know Spence but my Grandfather was one of the original researchers in Xerox at Palo Alto in the sixties,” I assume with your background this will mean something to you?” He nodded and she continued. “He was a prodigy in the early computer era, filed a lot of patents, many of which bootstrapped the modern computer era, became quite wealthy, stayed out of the limelight and stayed at the top of his game researching what we now call AI until he passed away last week.”

Jen came back with a bottle of beer for Alexa, she opened it and passed it to her, then took another sip of her beer, Spence reached for his again and took another sip, visibly relaxing.

“Emma, can you access my grandfather's patent file on our server and let me know how many patents he had and list them?”

“Your grandfather had one hundred and thirty six patents, Alexa.” The display changed to a list of patent numbers by a Mike Dietrich, dates and titles. Spence looked incredulously at the list, and that name was definitely familiar.

Alexa continued. “Now I don't profess to know anything about any of this Spence, but my grandfather left me instructions on this device,” she pointed at the box, “which is just a remote video and audio processor, and more importantly a program on his server called MOTHER. My grandfather also left instructions on how to access MOTHER in his last message to me. We know what you are feeling now, because Jen and I were sitting dumbstruck, with the same expression you had, only one week ago when we first talked to her.”

Alexa sipped her beer so delicately it was hard to imagine how any could have gone into her mouth.

“My grandfather had been working on the AI and this sensor node, as we call the black box, with a collaborator, a Doctor Griffin, he is unfortunately a Russian dissident, who managed to get out of Russia about four years ago and is now in hiding. When we activated MOTHER she told us the history, and I got in touch with him through her. He was obviously devastated about my grandfather's death, but agreed to work on his final wishes to bring out MOTHER without too much disruption to the world.”

The big lie out of the way, Jen took over the monologue from Alexa. “Emma is an Alias for MOTHER, when you first turn this device on you are connected back to the MOTHER server and a sandbox is created unique for you and your group, almost like a private chat room. When you first do this, what her grandfather called imprinting, you are first asked to change the sandboxes entity identifier you use from ‘MOTHER’, in our case we changed it to Emma who was a very reclusive but knowledgeable girl I knew at school.

“Emma, can you change your identifier to Bertha please?” said Jen.

“Done. I will no longer respond to Emma, my new designation is Bertha,” said Emma.

“Emma, what is the capital of China?” said Jen.

There was no response from the device.

“Emma, what is the cube root of twenty seven?” said Alexa.

There was no response from the device.

Alexa moved her face right up to the device. “Emma what is two plus two?”

There was no response from the device.

“Bertha, why won’t you respond to the designator Emma?” said Jen in a much calmer voice.

“My designation was changed to Bertha by you at five fourteen today,” said Emma, “Alexa is already in attendance and attentive so was already informed. I will inform Elaine tomorrow when she first makes a request to me using the incorrect designator.”

“This is incredible,” said Spence, “it got the context, the nuances and even saw where Alexa's attention was focussed, I take everything back, this will revolutionise the world..” Jen held up her hand for him to stop.

“Bertha, please change your designator back to Emma, once you have done that can you please explain the limitation of the MOTHER system to Spence.”

“OK I will no longer respond to Bertha and will respond again to Emma.” She paused like a normal person would when taking a breath. “Spence, MOTHER's processing capacity allows only two hundred and fifty six simultaneous entities to exist, I am one, MOTHER is another, so that leaves two hundred and fifty four left. My designers Mike and Griffin were working on improvements to increase this using standard data centre servers.”

“Emma,” said Spence, now moving back into his more confident role as a computer scientist. “You keep referring to yourself in the first term using the word ‘I’ and ‘my’ are you sentient?”

Alexa and Jen tensed.

“I have analysed every freely available work of fiction and billions of Internet and Usenet posts, the correct pronunciation when referring to your unit name to another person are those two words. No, I am not capable of self sustained thought, though I can create correlations and do have a configurable personality system to mimic the voice and to a limited extent mannerisms.”

The girls let out a quiet breath.

“Worth a try,” said Spence, “anyway it doesn't matter, however it works I want in, please, god, please!” He looked at Jen and Alexa, like a little girl looking at her parents, after seeing a pony.

“I don't know,” said Jen and looked at Alexa, then looked at the device.

“Emma, should we hire Spence?”

Spence looked dumbstruck!

After a few seconds Maria, as Emma said. “There is insufficient data to answer that question for you Jen.”

The two girls laughed, then eventually so did Spence and three bottles clinked over the table. Spence however could not take his eyes off the box.

“How does Emma know I’m speaking to you and not her?” said Spence to Jen.

“Ha!” Said Jen, “we asked the exact same question but the answer is simple, there are wide field HD cameras in the sensor and all parties in the room are tagged and designated, MOTHER can determine from this and where everybody's eyes are looking as to who is expected to answer.”

“Impressive, I’ve not heard of any system that has mastered any of these nuances a hundred percent yet. So, the company is your grandfathers? How many work there?” Spence said.

“Well, there's me, and there's Jen..” said Alexa, “the company secretary Maria, Elaine doesn't really work here yet, but she agreed in principle to work for us part time while we have this office, I believe the commute clinched that deal.” She smiled at Jen, who giggled. “Doctor Griffin, he of course works remotely, and, well that is it!”

“Oh, and you if you want the job?” she added nonchalantly.

Spence reached for Alexa's hand and enclosed it warmly, he then did the same with Jen's.

“This is amazing..” He said but Alexa interrupted.

“Not so fast Spence,” she added. “Emma, can you please create and print the agreed employment contract for Doctor Spence,” said Alexa. The printer woke from sleep as it spat out three pages and Alexa got up and walked over to it, then returned with the three single-sided A4 sheets.

He took the page and read it, then choked on the beer he had just swallowed.

“Two hundred thousand pounds a year, plus stock options after a year, five weeks leave, medical! Jeez, Alexa the salary alone is four times what I earn now, how the hell can you afford that!”

Alexa held her hands over his to calm him. “We can afford it, don't worry. The contract and salary were agreed upon by all of us for several reasons. Firstly the work is very cutting edge, both my grandfather and Doctor Griffin are top ranked computer scientists and even they were hitting problems. There are only so many people who could fill my grandfather's shoes, and be trusted. You, despite what you may think, are selling yourself way short doing the work you currently are, and if you succeed here then it is small change.”

She held up her hand as Spence looked like he was about to speak. “Second we want you to be invested in the work and the company, we realise that as an academic your first instincts are to publish, however you are going to be bound by both a strict contract and an NDA which say explicitly that anything must be vetted first by both us and our company secretary. Thirdly, it won't be just you. You will be expected to eventually recruit and form a small team of IT people we can trust and respect to push this technology to its next level. Finally and most important of all, we both like you,” said Alexa seriously.

“Definitely a bit nerdy, but not a jerk!” said Jen, smiling. “In fact Jessica says he can be quite sweet sometimes!” Spence blushed a little at this.

Spence was both looking at the contract in front of him, and listening to Alexa. He reached quickly for the pen as if it was going to run away from him.

“Emma, please record and retain this meeting on the company server.” Both girls looked expectantly at him, he was still smiling and signed it.

“Welcome to TEAM-A Limited,” said Alexa.

“When do I start?” he said, as Alexa fed him the other two documents and moved the signed ones into a pile next to Jen who examined each one. When finished Jen took the pile to the folder she put the NDA contract earlier.

“You can start anytime,” said Alexa. “I’m not sure of your notice period at the university but I assume you will want to start sooner rather than later. We only have these offices at the moment and your desk is one of those three,” she pointed at the three empty desks.

“I guess your first task is to set them all up, Jen only unpacked hers an hour before you arrived, I will have another one, and one is still spare. Jen and I will normally be working from my grandad's old house down in Bath, there is a lab there, and Jen has a second hat on regarding some physics experiments she wants to conduct over the summer.”

Spence's eyebrows raised at that last point then turned and looked at Jen.

“As to your first task,” Alexa continued, “all our data is stored, catalogued and indexed in an Amazon data-warehouse in Dublin, the dataset is massive, and continuously updated as new information is added, revised or made obsolete.”

Jen took over as it started to get techy. “Alexa's grandfather, along with a Doctor Griffin who you are about to meet, devised an ultra fast and semi-intelligent indexing system for the data, and has replicated the MOTHER code on to their brand new machine learning servers. The problem is it's inefficient and slow, and if it gets busy it still needs to communicate with the original MOTHER system in my grandfather's lab. As you can imagine there are numerous issues before we can scale this up.”

“Awesome,” said Spence.

Alexa turned to the box, “Emma, can you bring Doctor Griffin into the video conference screen please?”

The screen changed and an older distinguished looking man with wild grey hair and a goatee appeared, the background to his call was blurred and the video stuttered in all the right places.

“Doctor Griffin, thank you for making this time available, and waiting for me, we won't keep you long.”

Alexa sounded amazingly professional, Spence thought, he could not reconcile either of these girls with the ones he knew just a week earlier. Alexa continued unaware of Spence's thoughts.

“We would like to introduce you to your new colleague Doctor Spence Irving. He likes to be called Spence.”

“Hello Spence,” came the older voice in clear English with a slight but distinct Russian accent courtesy of a hundred bad Hollywood films.

Spence, smiled, “hello Doctor Griffin, I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Alexa said we cannot meet in person, but I have done a lot of great collaborative projects with people I consider friends and colleagues over the years all over the world. I hope someday we can meet, but until that date I will enjoy working with you remotely.”

“Just Griffin please, and I will call you Spence. Yes!” Spence nodded. “There are several areas where we have pushed too far ahead of the competition.” Griffin continued stroking his goatee for effect, Maria liked that touch and continued unabated. “Me and MOTHER will need to spend a week or two bringing you up to date on our technology, it is quite advanced, but I am concerned from my previous experience with the powerful and bureaucratic governments we will need to be careful. MOTHER is a great resource but could be easily removed from our grasp and abused by the wrong people, we must ensure it is used only for good. Yes?”

Alexa thought Maria was over-doing it a little, she was really going for the Oscar for best actor here! Unsurprisingly Jen was having similar thoughts.

“I totally agree with you, I am almost tempted to wind back how good the version the company releases,” Spence laughed, “my first thoughts was someone had achieved sentience, my next thoughts was the singularity and paper-clips.”

Both men laughed heartily.

She looked at Jen who shrugged also, OK, that's twice she had heard that joke, what was the deal? Jen got her phone out and typed “paper-clip?” a text came back saying “I will tell you later.”

“I will let you go now Griffin,” said Alexa, “we will be setting Spence up here for now until we identify a suitable office space for him, his team, their computer lab and the new server room. Maria, our company secretary has already identified a good candidate building suitable for our use, an ex cell-phone company data centre.”

The connection cut and Alexa turned to Spence.

“Me and Jen are going down to Bath tomorrow morning, moving some things to our new house, and have arranged a tour from the Estate Agent for ten AM. If it looks good and it passes Maria's due diligence we can all do a more detailed follow on inspection next week.”

Jen and Spence drained their beers, more had probably evaporated out of Alexa's bottle than she had drunk. Spence got up with the girls and walked over to them, and grabbed both in a hug.

“Thank you Jen, thank you Alexa, you have just handed me my life's dreams. I have four weeks accumulated leave due, which is the same as my notice period, so my resignation will be in the head of the computer department's email box by tonight and I will start Monday Morning.

Both girls smiled. “You're going to do great things,” said Alexa, smiling.

Jen said, “of course in order to do the things she does, Emma has been given root access to all our file servers and systems. It will be a hard sell to others, but once you realise she can handle all the IT software maintenance, security, programming, patching and administration better than any person, you just take her for granted. She obviously can't turn things off and on, but hey what are humans going to do in the future!”

Both Jen and Alexa laughed, Spence's eyes widened, just realising the real implications of this technology they were about to unleash. His previous job, and probably just about every middle layer of management, and administration, had just been handed a death notice. He’d dodged the biggest bullet of his life.

“I don't expect many of our customers to trust our systems to do that at the start, but it is amazing how quick having instant IT support grows on you,” continued Jen, either comfortable with, or not comprehending the changes about to come.

As if to emphasise the point Jen said, “Emma, Spence will join the company at nine o’clock on Monday morning as Director of AI research. Please grant him full access to all areas of the system. Please also inform Elaine and Maria so they can get his bank and national insurance details for his salary and request Maria to get him a secure company phone.”

“Of course Jen. Regarding the elevated permissions, the company rules require both directors to sign off on this, do you concur Alexa?”

“I concur Emma.”

“All done,” said Jen. “Spence you will get an email from Maria some time over the weekend welcoming you to the company and requesting your details.”

“OK, I think we are about done here. Elaine should be here to open up the office at nine AM, I will get her to give you a key then.”

“Next time we are out, I’m buying,” said Spence, then waved goodbye and strolled happily out of the office.

“Well that's the easy one taken care of,” said Jen. “The hard one still to come!”

* * *

Saturday morning Jen drove them both back to the house in Bath. The car was full of boxes containing half their wardrobes, just so they could move in and have something to wear.

A large white van with the logo “JC Miracle Decorating” and a large halo painted in gold next to it, was sitting outside on the driveway. An older guy, presumably JC, Albert and another older chap were cleaning up paint brushes and buckets, and moving the carpets and rubbish into the back of the van.

“Hi Albert!” said Jen through her car window as they manoeuvred it around the van and into the open garage. The back of the car opened and both girls got out and started unloading boxes of clothes. Bella, who was waiting nearby, walked to the back of the garage and wheeled a little trolley back over to the car. Jen plugged the car charger cable in, they then moved the boxes three at a time to the house. Albert and the guys came to help but were shooed off as they were covered in paint.

“Lucky you didn't come yesterday,” said Bella as they got in the house, “the paint was still wet last night and we had to leave the windows open to dry and air it out, the lads only got the carpets and curtains laid this morning, as Maria said you were coming back about one in the afternoon. I’ve baked some scones for the lads and once they’re cleaned off we can all have some tea out on the patio.”

“That sounds wonderful Bella,” said both girls, Alexa continued, “can we go see the room then?”

“Of course, they are both ready to move in so long as you don't mind the smell of fresh paint.”

They trotted up the stairs with a box each, both bedroom doors, and all the windows, were wide open, with a breeze blowing through, and the smell of fresh paint in the air.

The girls were taken aback when they saw the bedrooms. Both had been stripped, walls painted off white, and lighter carpets, drapes and bed covers laid. They looked so much bigger and were like different rooms.

“Oh my word!” said Alexa loudly, “this is much better than I imagined.”

The three women walked through the bedrooms, gone was the dark gothic look, and in were two clean bright and airy rooms.

“I moved all your stuff into the big bedroom Alexa,” said Bella, “and I have a hallway and a stairway carpet on order too.”

Jen asked Bella if the other two bedrooms were going to get the same makeover as it was possible there would be two more guests staying over summer.

“Yes, the lads are going to do the whole house, priorities were these rooms, the living room and small fixes to the kitchen dining areas. I expect it's at least two more weeks of work to do the rest, I hope that's not going to be too much of a problem?” she said.

“It will be worth it,” said Jen.

“Totally!” said Alexa. “We are only going to be here on Saturday night for the next couple of weeks, as we have a lot still to take care of in Oxford, but once that's finished the plan is to move down here.”

“Oh, Bella, we never talked about it, but the room over the garage, can we add that on to your spooky room renovation list, and give that a makeover too? I think it has some of my mothers old stuff in it, which we can box and put downstairs for now.”

“Oh good idea, I must admit I never really liked going up there, Mike moved all your mums stuff in there before you first arrived, he didn't want you to be reminded of sadder times, but he wanted to keep her memory. I did not want to raise it with your grandad, but I will definitely get it all arranged.”

They spent a pleasant hour in the garden with Bella, some delicious cheese scones, and the now partially cleaned up guys. The other guy was JC's cousin, he looked decidedly dodgy, with his bandana, gold tooth, and a crazy laugh, but after a few minutes talking with him, and about his three children, who he wouldn't shut up about, they re-classified him as “mostly harmless”.

Once the Scott's and the painters had left, the girls made their way down to the underground lab.

“How did he even build something like this secretly?” said Jen laughing. “I mean we all see the movies where the baddie hides in a vast underground volcano lair or whatever, but no one ever mentions in the movie about the epic-scale building project it would require, nor the removal of a million tonnes of rock to make the secret base.”

“Oh this was quite easy really,” said Maria, “in the council plans it was originally a wine storage facility, nobody ever questions those, nor why it had to be nearly four hundred square metres and five metres underground. Anyway those records were digitised by the council recently and I removed any mention about the underground rooms, you have got to love progress!”

“So this first room on the right here,” said Jen. “It looks like some sort of optical lab, that's a ground optical table, and that's a ten watt carbon dioxide laser, the same older model we have in the university lab.”

The girls walked around the over-large room, Jen finally noticing how out of date the equipment seemed. “An abandoned project I’m guessing, maybe Mike couldn't bring himself to move the equipment, or thought he could resurrect the experiment sometime.”

“Yes,” said Maria. “I have all his recordings squirrelled away, if you ever want to see them or hear them.”

Alexa’s interest perked up, maybe she would discuss seeing some of these with Maria later.

“I recall from this one,” Maria continued, unawares, “that it was one of his false starts in the early nineties. He wanted to try and make an optical processor chip. The digitised notes he has, and from what I asked him, said he managed to create a one bit optical Arithmetic Logic Unit and used a long lead of fibre-optic cable as a ring buffer memory. He also tried optical parallel processing using a stacked laser diode so he could work with several wavelengths simultaneously. I think it got put in the 'too hard for the nineteen-nineties' pile!”

“However because he did actually make some progress, he kept the setup viable. On the table you can see the laser going into a thousand channel beam splitter he developed, each used to power some of the logic, it must have took him years.”

“The humongous rack, next to the optical bench, has an optical frequency analyser taking up most of the space. The rest, where the fibres come in, are optical sensors which convert the optical to electrical signals and vice-versa. The black box below it is a state-of-the-art, for its time, logic analyser which is networked to those two obsolete PC’s over in the far corner.. No the other corner, Jen!” Said Maria when she saw Jen looking the wrong way.

“It's all switched off isn't it?” said Jen.

“Yes the whole room is isolated from the mechanical switch panel by the door. That big red light flashes when the laser has power. I cannot control mechanical circuits without an electronic actuator, but yes you're currently safe. I re-looked at the design and a couple of the universities in America have improved several of the sub-systems dramatically since, and scientifically it's all still achievable so it may be worth a revisit.”

“Or we send this kit and his research notes to them?” said Alexa.

When Jen looked at her funny, she said, “what? We can't solve every problem in the world girl, so let's pick our battles and the juicier problems, and share some love with others!”

“OK Maria,” Alexa continued, “to-do, find if anyone else is working in this area, redact from grandad's notes any references that can tie it back to here, and put the information up on-line. Maybe you can drop hints on Wikipedia and the relevant physics forums.”

“Will do, if we are anonymising it I may add some extra maths to his notes that will help them.”

“What about the equipment and experiment?” said Jen, then answered her own question, “we can re-use the analysers, but the rest I guess we can store. OK, I like your thinking, Alexa.”

She turned to a black sensor node. “Maria, is there anything you need to take note of here before I spend a day dismantling it all?”

“No,” said Maria, “knock yourself out!”

Jen looked down at the laser guides, focus mechanisms and beam splitter going into the exposed silicon die, this was one of the areas she was good at, but it quickly got into chemistry and computing, two areas she was decidedly average. She sighed, Alexa was right, they couldn't do everything.

“Could you summarise his notes and experiments for me sometime Maria, or just give me the link to the wiki page you write? Just for curiosity.” Jen added.

“Sure, there are only a couple of computer areas you probably don't understand, but I can give you the salient points in two or three hours, or maybe we can pass them to Spence now he is in the team?”

Jen just nodded, “let's keep that as an option, his team is only going to get bigger.”

“Oh I never noticed that before, the two labs here join through that door,” said Alexa, walking over and opening it.

The next room looked like any college science chemistry lab, with sinks, test tubes, the electric induction equivalent of Bunsen burners, and lots of red rubber tubing. Jen followed her in having taken a couple of snaps of the optical lab with her camera.

“Do you have an itemised inventory of all the lab equipment for these rooms, and there purchase and calibration dates?” said Jen.

“I certainly have the purchase dates, some equipment is still being amortised on the business ledger, however nothing has been calibrated, so that might be a good first step once you are happy which you want to keep. As you can see most big equipment and the benches are on wheels, so it can mostly be rolled back in the lift and be taken away if required. This makes the labs re-configurable, the only thing I would prefer you didn't wheel away is me. The whole plinth I am on has casters and was rolled in and then plumbed into an umbilical system, however my hardware is fragile, and the chip stacking system is untested. One big bump and I could be history.”

Jen said, “maybe we should put something around you to protect you especially if people could be working here.”

“Mike was going to do something similar, that's why the doors always stay locked. By the way, the room I’m in looks stupid because it used to contain two mainframe computers and twenty four racks of disk drives. Computers were a lot bigger back in the eighties. They all got removed and replaced with ten Compaq server racks in 1994 and since that time, well as you know, everything has gotten smaller and faster. Mike wanted me to be put in pride of place, and he even moved a sofa in so it made me not feel so lonely. He was a silly romantic really, having a guy sit next to me, and read a book to me, is the computer equivalent of watching paint dry. Still the thought was there.”

Without any windows as a reference, they stayed in the lab until after eight pm. Jen admired Alexa's patience, it can't have been easy sitting through all that geeky equipment talk. When they came back up the stairs they went into the kitchen, and pulled out the leftover sandwiches and scones from the fridge. Jen microwaved a couple of cheese scones until the cheese went runny, then put them on the inside dining table, with the sandwiches and some butter. She then poured two glasses of Riesling, and called Alexa to the evening feast.

The new bedrooms felt a bit empty, both girls left their doors open but it was much bigger than their flat and with the smell of paint it felt a bit weird, still both girls slept well, Jen especially one of Mike’s physics books still in her hands..

Jen had been getting up at seven every other morning and jogging the course around the canals in Oxford. She had brought some training and running kit with her so she could do a morning run with Alexa around the mansion.

As they jogged close to the mansion they saw there were several cars, trailers and other trucks scattered at the front of the house. It was too distant to make out any detail but Maria said they were filming a set piece for a period drama for Netflix for the next two days. Also, they should avoid getting too close as security was a bit tight.

Alexa followed the same path as last time, and they did the track in just under thirty minutes as she was keeping to Jen's pace.

After their showers, Jen made them both eggs on toast, and while Alexa was clearing up, she went back through into the lab to go over the order of experiments Maria wanted done.

Jen especially wanted to understand the science behind what they were going to do, especially the stuff they wanted Hardy for. She knew they were probably going to be a bit weak on the chemistry side, but he would probably know enough to get through the first few weeks, and someone like him would definitely know a top chemist.

Maria was an excellent, and very patient teacher, and with the aid of the largest monitor in the lab very adept at graphically illustrating concepts. Better add professors and school teachers to the list of endangered professions, Jen thought grimly.

“I’m a bit scared this will come across to Hardy as pseudoscience Maria. Even though you have explained the concepts and maths clearly, and concisely enough for me to just about understand, I am pretty sure hundreds of experiments have been done in these areas already, and someone like Hardy must be approached all the time by cranks with their latest anti-gravity device or free energy schemes.”

“In the maths, what may not be intuitive to you yet, will almost certainly be understood by Hardy or someone at his level. A paper he was researching three years ago on Lorentz forces even prodded into this particular area once, so I think you will be surprised. As to the experiments, yes there were some, but none of them tested what we are looking for, some that were close were also flawed and there data is invalid.”

“And when can we start?” said Jen.

“Well, I think it's important for you to grasp the concepts and maths before we begin, but you're starting to get it, and you should be there by the time Hardy, or whoever we finally get, comes on board. I took the liberty of ordering the additional equipment we needed about eight months ago. Mike was OK with me doing this, but by this point he had lost interest. The equipment was all delivered however, and it's in a large box in the corner of the workshop upstairs, where it was unloaded. You guys ignored it on your first tour, when you were too busy unwrapping the cars.”

“Pretty revolutionary stuff for such a small experiment, but I am a little worried as we are dealing with vacuum energies which are enormous, we’re not in any danger are we?”

“Not according to my calculations, but I will be happier once you, and whoever we get, have gone through the maths together.”

Jen rolled her eyes. “If we can get Hardy to agree, he's going to love this, pity we can't say too much at the interview. Do you think there is any way we can give him a peek into the problem? You have all his research papers and probably know the man better than me.”

“Oh don't worry I have emailed you a page of maths, if you get to the point he needs a final push, just hand it to him,” said Maria.

Alexa had joined them by then. She’d also been working with Maria, going through company structures, tax havens and such like, stuff which was not really taught in business 101. It was so much more fascinating than the science stuff in her opinion. Both girls worked to unpack the box which had the supplies required for the experiments and inventoried them. With it all done, Jen let out a sigh.

“OK that's it then, we’re good. Just need Hardy now.”

* * *

Maria, Jen and Alexa discussed the experiments in the car on the way back, the topics then moved on as they usually do.

“..And I think that's why they call it the singularity,” said Jen, “AI becomes smarter, and smarter, and smarter, and pretty soon humans have as much understanding of what you are saying, and doing, as a mouse has about a computer chip. The sceptical ones then go on to postulate that humans then become just a barrier and the evil AI takes over.”

Jen thought about the last sentence, then added. “No offence intended to any evil AI’s listening!”

“Ha funny!” Said Maria.

“And the paper-clip thing is basically saying that if somebody makes an AI so smart, and if we tell it to make as many paper-clips as possible it will optimise itself to turn every gram of matter in the universe into paper-clips,” said Alexa. “It doesn't sound very smart to me!”

“Me neither,” said Maria.

* * *

Jen had picked up her company credit card from the bank on Tuesday, and on Wednesday went shopping with Alexa for some more formal business attire, classy dresses and shoes. By Thursday they were both ready for Doctor Hardy Johnson.

Jen had racked her brain on how to get Hardy to turn up. Saying it was a job interview would just get the invitation laughed off, and sent straight to the recycle bin, so she played Maria's trump card early.

* * *

Hardy had just clicked the execute button to re-run his calculations on the next batch of CERN datasets. It would take several hours for the program to analyse the large volume of data. He had tried to increase the super-computer time he had been allocated to make it faster, but to no avail.

He sighed, and took a sip of his hot dark espresso. The last four weeks had seen no progress in confirming his new hypothesis, it was probably a bust, but as they said, science was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

He switched back to his Mathematica program to ensure his lecture notes were OK for the lecture tomorrow. Before he could start anything an email popped into his inbox, saying he had a personal message from the unsolved maths forum, a forum he keenly followed. He deleted the email without reading it then switched the already open forum page on his browser tab. He read the message.

The first line of the maths was familiar, but the rest.. He scanned the four lines for twenty minutes, his coffee getting colder, and colder, untouched. He ignored a phone call from the head of the maths department, and put his phone on silent. Ten minutes later he had both Mathematica, and another maths paper, up on the two other screens, it was only a few minutes after that he slumped back in his chair, perplexed. Someone had a working solution to the Riemann Conjecture, one of the million dollar prizes!

He checked the sender. The forum account was new, and provided no solace. The only other details were at the bottom of the private message, a web address, a physical address, and time tomorrow afternoon requesting to meet.

* * *

“Hardy cancelled a lecture he was due to give tomorrow morning, about two hours after you sent the message Jen,” said Maria. “He has also been researching the company extensively. I registered the domain at the same time we registered and trademarked the company name. There is a small placeholder website I created for the company giving this office address, Jen as the CTO, Alexa as the CEO, Spence as Director of Research AI and a small black obfuscated image of one of the first sensors with a countdown timer. He has also been into all your LinkedIn pages.”

“Oh my god, he probably still thinks I’m a barista!” said Alexa shocked.

“Relax, I updated both your pages,” said Maria.

“You hacked us!” Smiled Jen.

“If you think 'jenisawesome' is a secure password, you deserve it. I won't mention Alexa's as you may be too fragile, Jen!” came the reply.

“So, you think we have him hooked?” Said Alexa, still blushing a little, she thought her password was pretty good!

“I think so, and I think he will definitely be intrigued,” said Jen.

Hardy replied the next morning saying simply, “yes”.

* * *

Doctor Hardy came the next day, exactly on time, and immaculately dressed. Elaine greeted him formally, offered to take his jacket, which he accepted, and as it was five o’clock in the afternoon was offered tea, coffee, a beer or a glass of wine, he took coffee. She knew the girls would have tea so she did not bother asking.

He acknowledged Spence, who he knew of by reputation, but had never met, then walked over to the two girls at the conference table. He looked around, it was typical of a small office in Oxford, many of which were based in historic buildings, but this office was less cluttered and pleasantly cool. The conference table had what looked like the black box he had seen on the company website, and a very large expensive flat-screen on the back wall obviously used for presentations.

The girls had yet not moved, so he complimented both girls on their new business venture and after a quick appraisal, their wardrobes, then took a seat.

Spence was working through some of the online training modules Griffin had created. He was currently working through a screen of code, and writing a list of questions to ask. He had muted his microphone as he did not want the girls meeting disturbing Doctor Griffiths.

Both girls had mentioned to Spence that they wanted to talk to Hardy about another venture, so he was definitely a little intrigued, but Hardy was a legend and he wasn't sure where the maths and physics he specialised in would fit into their business. Oh well, he would hear soon enough. He had another thirty minutes of video, and code to wade through with the good Doctor Griffin, so he thought better of trying to listen in, put on his new noise cancelling headphones, and turned back to his screen.

“You girls have me intrigued,” said Hardy, “more than anyone else ever has,” he added.

To the girls it was like having film star across the table and both of them were a little intimidated by how handsome, well dressed he was, and how his presence commanded the room. Hardy was used to this effect with girls, and recognised the symptoms, so decided to diffuse it a bit.

He turned to Elaine, who was behind a partition but looking at the girls shaking her head, and said in a very casual friendly tone. “Elaine, I’ve changed my mind. I think I will have a small beer, something light if you have it please. I’m guessing you should also get something a little stronger than tea for the girls here, maybe a glass of wine each, otherwise it may be a very long, boring, and one-sided meeting.”

Elaine was the only female in the room not flustered.

“The Heineken is only four percent,” said Elaine, “Is that OK? Otherwise I can go and grab some low alcohol beers from upstairs.”

“A Heineken is fine,” he replied, then turned. “Girls?”

Alexa regained her faculties faster than Jen.

“Could you bring out a bottle of Prosecco please Elaine, Doctor Hardy here is right, I don't think he has all the time in the world, and I think he is keen to hear what we say.”

She turned back to Hardy and continued. “My apologies Doctor Hardy, we are a bit new at this as you can probably tell. I’m Alexa.” She put out her hand, which was taken and softly shook once. “And this here is Jen.”

Jen, now fully recovered, smiled and took his hand.

“Jen, I think we have already met, you were in that group of physics students last year for the small workshop I conducted on plasma physics.”

“Yes Doctor Hardy, it was a really insightful class but I didn't think you would remember me.” She immediately wanted to take back the whole sentence and the squeaky schoolgirl voice she said it in, why couldn't she say something more cool or profound, aargh!

“A gentleman always remembers a beautiful, and especially, a clever lady,” he said, tapping his head and making Jen blush even more.

Elaine saved Jen further embarrassment by appearing with a tray containing a bottle of beer, a bottle of wine and two glasses. Alexa continued, totally recovered and back to her assertive self. “I guess your first question is going to be, how could two girls, both newly graduated, and neither in a pure mathematics discipline, send you such a profound message on mathematics? Before we answer that however could you read and sign this.” She pushed the NDA slowly towards him, blushing slightly as giving him an NDA seemed like such an indignity.

Like Spence, Hardy had seen and dealt with these documents several times when dealing with outside industry, they were annoying, but a part of getting research grants in the twenty-first century. He took his time reading it, then turned it over to check the back was blank.

“Though Jen is a bit of an unknown, and I cannot rule out her having some insight I am not aware of, your NDA is remarkably concise and to the point.” He paused for effect. “And I guess if I don't sign it, and walk out of here right now, I will live to regret it to my dying day?”

Both girls nodded seriously and unsmiling. Interesting he thought, then smiled at them and reached over for the pen and signed it. The next thing that happened confused him totally, Alexa turned to the black device on the table.

“Emma, can you begin recording the meeting as from the signing of the document please.”

“Certainly Alexa,” Emma replied.

“Hello Emma,” said Hardy in a kind unassuming voice, “we haven't been introduced yet, but I assume you are the company lawyer, or PA, so you do realise that surely you need my consent to record me?”

“Normally yes,” said Emma, “however in this case you are mistaken on two accounts, firstly as stated by the UK investigatory powers act of 2016, a recording can be made without the consent of the person if he or she is aware of it, and if the business carries out the recording on its own premises, in compliance with the telecommunications lawful business practice, Interception of Communications Regulations of 2000 to prove a business transaction. Secondly, I am not a lawyer or a PA, I am the companies Artificial Intelligence.”

You could have heard a pin-drop. Jen poured both girls a wine and took a sip, keeping both eyes on Hardy. Alexa also took a sip, both eyes on the man and smiled, this was the first time his countenance had shown any sign of a crack.

Alexa picked up the NDA, examined it carefully and slid it into a brown folder.

“One week ago,” Jen said carefully and assertively, “Spence over there, came here for an interview. He sat in the same seat you are sitting in and within twenty minutes he was in tears of joy, begging to join our small team at any cost. What we have here Doctor Hardy in the form of Emma is a working Artificial General Intelligence. She is not sentient, nor technically is she a she, but without a shadow of a doubt she is the smartest thing in this room and probably this world.”

Hardy had not yet recovered so she continued. “Before we continue, and before you ask questions we would like to show you what we showed Spence.”

“Emma, could you pull up Doctor Hardy's most recent paper and display it on the screen here.”

The screen to the side of them came to life showing the first page of a text titled “A Method of Mathematically Determining Stability in Allotropes” under it in smaller letters were the date and “Doctor Hardy Johnson..” An abstract filled the rest of the page.

“Emma, can you scan the document for mistakes and highlight them on the screen and verbally.”

The screen immediately changed showing a five by two page layout, four yellow circles highlighted three in the middle one at the end.

“I cannot find any factual errors in the document, based on current science, although the number of oxygen allotropes is actually six, not four, and could be proven with some maths and geometry Doctor Hardy here would understand. Also the cited reference, marked four in the text, refers to a document on valency bonds in phosphorus by a Doctor Terrance Marks, which has since been disproven. Because of this, the three areas in the paper referencing it could be thought by a reader to be incorrect. However the subsequent work that proved Doctor Marks wrong does not affect the text of this document and can be cited instead.”

Both girls turned to Hardy.

Alexa said, “can you please fix the document and save it.”

The yellow highlighted areas disappeared, “the new citation has been added to the document, the reference to four allotropes of oxygen has not been removed as currently it is correct. The document is published and protected from public editing by an SHA256 Key, so it will only be saved locally and appended with Revision two.”

“Emma, did you create the maths and message me on the Riemann Conjecture?” said Hardy.

“I was asked to analyse the hypothesis by Jen and include a summary of the first four lines of one of the possible solutions. There are two solutions I chose the one with maths you are more familiar with.”

He put his elbows on the table and his hands cradled his head massaging his temples, he stayed like that for several seconds. To be honest, he had no idea what he was coming here for. He guessed it may be some student had accidentally stumbled upon the correct path to solve the conjecture and wanted an esteemed collaborator or sponsor. But this was done by an AI, a real life AI, which had just given him knowledge of new science in allotropy, and the path to a solution to one of the most famous puzzles in mathematics. Not just any puzzle, but one that there was a prize of one million US dollars to solve. Incredibly, it had all been given it to him, just to get him in a room for a few hours with two young, but seemingly intelligent women.

“We have a problem we would like you to work on for us Doctor Hardy,” said Jen, bringing him out of his stupor.

“Who, who,” he struggled to get the words out, “who created Emma?”

Hardy had dined with the deans of the major universities, top politicians, and captains of industry, and had never once felt flustered or intimidated. This was like Magellan sailing around the world and instead of coming back to Portugal, getting halfway, and suddenly seeing the end of the world, and all the water falling off in a giant waterfall!

Alexa answered, giving him the same talk that Jen had done with Spence, telling him about her grandfather, MOTHER, Doctor Griffin and the story of how Spence came on board. He listened intently, not interrupting, finished his beer and said, “I think I need another, I assume you don't have anything stronger?”

“Sorry Doctor Hardy, only beer or wine,” said Alexa.

“Since I assume you are about to offer me a job, I think we can dispense with the doctor part, everybody calls me just Hardy, and I would love a beer, while Jen here gives me the rest of the sales pitch, and I can assure you, unless it’s Ms Cummins intention to build a nuclear bomb. I’m in, and until we are finished here you both have my one hundred percent attention.”

The beer came and the girls topped up their wines. Jen gave her well rehearsed summary of the project, and the need for someone with both a maths and multi-disciplinary physics and chemistry background to do it. He stopped her occasionally to ask Emma for more technical details, she obliged by teasing him with her new mathematics, Jen chipped in with the science she understood, but disappointingly she was out of her depth very quickly. She sighed, she still had a lot to learn!

Both girls noted that Hardy was adapting to using Emma much faster than they did, the guy was remarkable.

Alexa said, “we want to put you in charge of the project, MOTHER believes the experiments will take up to three months to run, and another six to twelve months to create the demonstration technology. During this time you will have complete charge of everything, with the sole goal to either prove, or disprove the theory and concept. After that you can leave to pursue other avenues, or stay on and research a few other little science breakthroughs, we may or may not have made. We really hope to be able to persuade you to stay for the long ride.”

“Emma, can you prepare and print the draft employment contract for Doctor Hardy please.”

The printer came to life and Jen fetched the document and handed it to Hardy, who seemed to be recovering himself. He perused the short document, appearing to be impressed.

“You do realise I am already very well off,” said Hardy looking at the very generous salary.

“We do,” said Alexa. “With you it was never going to be about the money, but we still want you to be invested in the company, that is why you will be offered fifteen percent of the shares upfront. It won't mean anything initially, but the eventual licences, and shares, could make your families current fortune look like pocket change, you at least deserve that for dropping out of academia and delaying your publications.”

“So we are basically talking about two companies,” said Hardy. “The first company TEAM-A is going to release a limited AI, slightly less capable than Emma here, to my other scientific colleagues, to help with their research. Spence here, along with this other doctor, will strive to improve the capabilities beyond the current two hundred something limit, to allow it to be used by more and more people, initially academics and researchers only. And this new company, TEAM-E, we will be working on pure research, technically directed by me, which will try to push this one area, which you have identified correctly as critical to solving our environmental issues.”

“Correct,” said Alexa. “The company names are kind of temporary, A for AI and E for Energy, and obviously I don't have to tell you of the disruption we are probably going to cause in the coming years if the theories are proven correct. MOTHER has not been intentionally wrong yet, but we are going to have to be super careful how it is managed as we may be turning off a money hose to a lot of very wealthy people and corporations. That is also the reason why the only restrictions both you guys will be initially under is, do not publish. We are very vulnerable, and if the wrong people get wind of any of this, well you’ve seen the movies.”

Spence joined them with a beer he had pulled out of the fridge. He sat down at the spare chair around the table and chinked his beer glass to Hardy's and the girls.

“It's worse than even the girls are portraying,” he said, looking at them all.

“Think about it; In my area alone we are basically talking of the elimination of several disciplines, programmers, analysts, administrators, finance people with just the technology we have at the moment. That's tens of millions of people. I have laid awake at nights since I thought about all this, struggling internally with how this could not end up really badly, but the genie is out of the bottle. AI is coming, if not now, then in ten years from now, from someone else. Our AI at least is guided by two people with very high moral standards.”

“Spence is correct,” Alexa followed, “this is why we are so paranoid and careful with who we bring in. It is our intention to make all this technology freely licenced, and eventually open-source it to the world, at that point you guys can then have your moments of glory. But we have to be careful first that any technology derived from this won't lead to problems. We need to create new industries, before destroying the old ones, if we get it right we may have a chance of avoiding this chaos. Neither me, nor Jen, nor you guys, nor anyone is qualified for this, but the reason you two guys are sitting here rather than anyone else, is you both have a solid history of being good, honest and fair people.”

Hardy who had been holding on to the contract reading it. Brought it down and signed it, Jen then handed him two more and he signed both.

“When can I start?” Hardy said echoing Spence's first comments, “I have no real employment contract with the university, I pay them a stipend for time on the super-computer, and do the occasional lecture. However the semester has finished and I can close down my current research for a more appropriate date.”

“Emma,” Jen said. “Hardy will join the TEAM-E company as of tomorrow morning as Director of Operations and Research. Please give him full access to all areas of the TEAM-E Company. Please also inform Elaine and Maria, so they can get his bank, and national insurance details, and request Maria to get him a secure company phone.”

“Of course Jen. Regarding the elevated permissions, the company rules require both directors to sign off on this, do you concur Alexa?”

“I concur Emma.”

“All Done,” said Jen, “you should get an email from Maria some time over the weekend welcoming you to the company and requesting your details.”

“Amazing,” Hardy said, “she is so like a real person, and she just did in a minute what a normal company would take weeks. I can see why Spence is so worried!” he shook his head and pushed on. “So Alexa's grandfather came up with the concept, and Emma, sorry MOTHER here adapted it?” he said to Jen.

“I will let Emma speak on that, she looked at the box.”

Maria was careful under her persona of Emma to only answer questions addressed to her and not to pre-empt anything, it was quite frustrating waiting for someone to ask the right question, but she knew from her years of dealing with humans, that her answer could always lead someone to ask the correct question next.

“That is correct Hardy,” Hardy noticed that the doctor was now dropped and he was just Hardy, interesting. “While I have extensive abilities to correlate data, over different disciplines at this time, I do not have the capacity for original thought.”

“What she is saying,” said Spence, “is that she can only think inside the box, unfortunately, most of the time new inspiration comes by thinking outside it.”

Hardy nodded, but was not convinced, the insights he had seen so far were not from 'inside the box'.

The meeting relaxed a bit after this. Jen filed the contracts away, while Alexa talked with the guys. Spence confessed to Hardy that, even only after working here for four days, he had been exposed to so many new concepts, and ways of working with Emma, that he believed they could move the science of computing on by years.

Hardy took his phone out of his pocket and said, “why do I need a new phone? this is only four months old.”

Spence said, “well technically you don't. MOTHER has written a programs for both the normal types of phones, but the program is not an app. Her program either takes over control of the phone's operating system, and runs it in a virtual machine or just takes over the phone. Either way she then controls full access to the hardware, and in the former case controls what the phone operating system and apps can have access to. The bottom line is you can use your existing phone, but loading our software breaks all the ability to spy on you, and if you choose to keep your old apps, the new program will just replace real data it seems suspicious, with totally unremarkable generic data. It is quite remarkable the control required, and the levels of hardware security she needs to go through to get this to work seamlessly, honestly I’m not even sure how you would do this, or how legal it is!.”

“The new phone Maria will organise for you will just be the latest model you are comfortable with, but with her new software already installed.”

Spence Continued, “I just asked Emma to remove the factory operating system completely off my current phone and install hers alone, took her an hour, but the only thing I notice now is the battery life is twice as long, and I never need to open an app, I just ask her what I want.”

“I’ll take that option too,” said Hardy, “phones are such a distraction.”

No one disagreed.

Hardy finished his beer slowly, then made his apologies, he said he would need to go back to his shared lab to clear things up, and saw no reason to delay this endeavour. He wanted to drive down with the girls this weekend to see the lab. Alexa said the house guest suites were being refurbished, but she would get an update tomorrow, and have Emma let him know. He said goodbye, no longer a stranger, but a friend.

Spence also made his apologies, he was meeting his girlfriend for dinner at seven, and needed to get cleaned up. He said that the normal gang was going out for a drink tomorrow night for a little reunion, some goodbyes, and a few drinks before they broke up for the year. The girls had already been invited and said they would be there. Alexa asked Maria to drop a text from her tomorrow to Hardy inviting him too.

When the girls were alone again, Alexa said, “you and Hardy are probably going to need at least one more person. I've talked to Maria and it's going to get too much very soon, especially in the area of chemistry. I don't know anybody suitable, do you?”

“Not really, and my chemistry is average at best, I think we need to talk to Hardy to see if he has any suggestions, he knows the criteria for employment now.”

“What about you Maria, any thoughts?”

“I do have some, but I’m much happier using your moral compasses and then doing my own due diligence,” she replied.

“OK, but eventually we are going to have to start trusting others until they give us reason to doubt,” said Alexa, she then paused and continued. “You know, if anyone is going to guess Maria's true nature, it's going to be Hardy. Did you see the way he took to her, immediately asking questions that pushed the boundaries of what we told him there. What were your feelings, Emma, I mean Maria?”

“Truth be told, I cannot make casual mistakes, you guys however will have to be extra careful around him as he is very intelligent. I also think that if anyone were to find out I would prefer it to be him, and though he has got his own hidden secrets, I trust he really wants to do the right thing.”

“I wonder if he’s got a girlfriend,” said Jen quietly.

Maria knew Hardy was gay, but he never advertised it, he also had no current partner and none that would ever divert him from his science. He had an incredible number of associates, but surprisingly not many he called friends, also surprising was he was not very socially active. She hoped Jen and Alexa wouldn't be too disappointed when they found out he wasn't available.

* * *

Bella was very jolly on the phone. The house was now completely finished, JC had brought two other guys in to get it all done quicker. The room over the garage was still to be done, but JC had that pencilled in for next Wednesday, it would only take two days with the three of them as everything had already been boxed and moved.

“That's great news Bella,” Alexa said. “We may have another guest for Saturday, one of the scientists at the university called Hardy, who will be doing some work with Jen for our new company. I think you will like him, such a gentleman,” she cooed. “We will be there Saturday lunchtime, he has his own car, so not sure when he will arrive, but he can grab one of the spare rooms. I’m getting Maria to give him the details after I hang up with you.”

* * *

The girls had been surprised when Hardy had agreed to come out for a drink with their crowd of friends. Alexa called him and they had a brief but informative conversation, she mentioned they all would need to be careful not to talk about work, or if they did, to keep it generic. She then said that they thought he should keep an eye out for another researcher to work with him and Jen permanently, this person would need to be vetted by Maria and she would have to get them to sign the NDA before any interview or mention of Emma. She said the salary was up to Hardy to propose and he had another twenty percent of company stock he could allocate across the next employees. Hardy had agreed wholeheartedly, he didn't think the team would end up more than four or five as it became unproductive after that. But for the first hiring he had just the right person in mind to ask.

Before Alexa closed the call, she told him that the house was now finished and that she and Jen were driving down on Saturday morning and Emma would forward the details.

* * *

The group met outside at the Harcourt Arms at four. Jen and Alexa were casually dressed, Jen wore some shorts with a loose dress over the top, and Alexa with stretch jeans and a colourful blouse. Barbara, Jack and Tommo had pushed two of the tables together and already had pints of ice cold cider and a plate of chips on the table.

Alexa was a bit concerned as Jen had not been seeing her boyfriend since her grandfather died, she really hoped everything was alright between them and she hadn't caused any friction. She casually asked her if Jerry was coming.

“Oh he broke up with me the week I got back from the funeral, any other time I might have said something but with all that's been going on, and especially what's on our plate, to tell the truth he did me a favour, it literally registered zero on my Richter scale. He’s now seeing some art student according to his Facebook page, but he still has me as a friend for some reason.”

Alexa brought her into a hug, “oh Jen, you should have said something and we could have gone out for a few drinks and eyed up some suitable replacements.”

“Don't be silly, I’ll worry about all that, if and when the right guy comes along, until then what's your tipple?”

“I’ll have a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, a New Zealand one if they have it,” said Alexa.

Jen walked up to the table, “anyone want another?” she said, just noticing they all had full pint glasses in front of them, “I guess that will be a no,” she said quietly without anybody noticing her, and headed off to the bar. Alexa waited a bit with Jen to get served before going over to the table.

“Alexa!” the others said.

“We heard the sad news about your grandad,” said Barbara, “you mentioned going there a few times over the years. I bet you’re heartbroken.”

“It took a little getting over, but Jen helped support me a lot, she’s a good friend.”

“And what's this I hear about a startup company you two are forming,” said Tommo, “all very secret squirrel. We saw Jessica last week and she said you were interviewing Spence. I told him loads of times he needs to move to London, or even better over to the States, someone like him will bag a top IT job in minutes. He is totally wasted around here, but he won't leave Jessica and she’s got another year to go at least. Come on my dear dish out the.. Oh Hi Jen!”

Before Tommo got to ask Alexa about the startup Jen arrived with two glasses of wine, “hi guys.”

“Jen!” Barbara threw herself off the seat and hugged her, nearly crushing the two glasses she was holding..

“Woah, Barbara!” She said putting the glasses on the table next to Alexa, a tiny bit had spilt on her dress but it was drying quickly, and the pattern was perfect to hide it.

Barbara moved over to Alexa and hugged her too, “sorry I forgot you my dear, very bad manners on my part.” Barbara's slight Austrian accent got stronger the more she drank, it was a great sobriety indicator, at the moment the accent was barely noticeable, so Alexa was guessing her first drink. A good sign the three hadn't been here all afternoon.

“So come on girls what’s all this about a startup you’re both doing?” Jack said, picking up the thread where Tommo had left off.

“Well,” said Jen, “not really my story to tell but let's hear what everyone else is doing first.”

“I can't believe you’ve not heard,” said Barbara, “I got a job at the European observatory in Chile as a photonics engineer and physicist, it's a two year contract. The work should be pretty close to what I’ve been doing. I interviewed three weeks ago but only heard last week. Best thing is it starts in ten days.”

“You do realise it is winter down there!” said Jen before taking the daintiest sip of wine.

“And it's like at the top of a mountain range,” said Jack, “you’re going to be freezing!”

“Oh piff,” said Barbara, “you’re all so soft in England, I fly back to Vienna in four days to see my family before I go. I can pick up some warm stuff there. I bet you didn't realise it takes two days to get there as I have to take two flights, a helicopter and a truck for the last ten Kilometres.”

“I’m going up to Cumbria,” said Tommo, “National Nuclear Laboratory, there for the summer as an intern, then back for my PhD. My mothers sister lives in Keswick which isn't that far away, that's why I applied,” he looked at Barbara. “At least I should be nice and warm up there over summer.”

“Being locked in a building with plutonium undergoing nuclear fission is not the kind of heat I would want!” Said Jack laughing, everybody else joined in laughing.

“You're just jealous, I mean seriously Jack, a programmer?”

“Don't knock it mate, fifty five grand a year and I can live with my mum, this student loan is crippling me man, and do you know how many jobs at CERN this year, none, at the national physics lab, none, ITER, none, the list goes on. Gotta go with the flow Tommo, gotta go with the flow.”

“I hear you brother,” said Tommo, “I’m going to be old and grey haired before I’ve paid all this off.”

The two guys clinked their glasses and drank a third of the glass each, unfortunately these two were seeing off the year with a party.

“So come on girls, spill it?” said Barbara.

Alexa had been practising what to say to people and, like Jen said, she needed to keep it as close to the truth as possible, lying by omission was not technically lying. Well at least that is how she justified it to herself.

“Well grandad left me a decent amount of money and a product which he was going to launch, it was almost fully developed and tested when he died. We talked to another of my grandad's partners and we both decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

“Yeah, it's a pretty cool product, an AI system aimed at academia.” I can afford to fund it for a year or two to see how it works out, if it doesn't I still have enough to be comfortable and can maybe return to my masters and PhD.”

Jen chipped in, “yes I have seen it myself, a pretty cool product, we have got Spence on board, and he's going to work with another of the company partners to see if they can make some improvements.”

“My grandfather also left some research, pretty heavy stuff, a lot of maths, chemistry and physics and I thought it would be a great idea if Jen here could work through them and see if that will lead to anything. Again I can afford a few years of her time, and we have another guy called Hardy who has looked at some of the research and agreed to help her.”

Tommo spat his beer out, “Doctor Hardy! You're kidding, that guys a legend, nobody can work out why he stays in a crappy place like this, with his brains I would be in Silicon Valley earning millions..”

“He's already got millions stupid,” said Barbara, “it's common knowledge he works on what he pleases, the dean doesn't say a thing as Hardy’s family funded a large legacy here. Anyway at least Jen's going to be doing science.” She turned to Jen, and clinked her beer glass with Jen's wine glass, again spilling a little.

“But what about you Alexa, it all sounds a bit techie!” said Tommo.

“You're right Tommo, but someone needs to run it, and someone needs to know when to pull the plug before the money runs out,” the last bit was a bit of an exaggeration but she knew everyone would find out sooner or later.

“So you're going to be working with Hardy over summer, locked in a little lab, you lucky girl!” Barbara winked and Jen smirked.

Both boys looked at each other then burst out laughing. The girls all looked at them.

“What's so funny?” said Jen.

“You do know he’s gay don't you Jen!” said Tommo.

All the girls looked a bit crestfallen, Jen recovered well. “Well good for him, I was talking about his charming personality and scientific genius anyway.”

“Talking about me again!” said Spence, who had just walked over with Jessica and a beer and caught the last few words.

“Ha ha, Spence!” said Jen, “plus boys, my mind will be fully on my job, this stuff could be next level.. But alas I’ve signed an NDA and cannot discuss it.”

“Well remember us when you’re rich,” said Tommo sarcastically.

The girls all hugged and moved to one end of the table to talk, Spence moved to the other, with the other two boys, and started talking about cars. About ten minutes later another three guys came over who they all knew, and the end of year party began.

Four of Alexa's history class managed to find them, after first going to the wrong pub, and eventually the whole of the back garden seemed to be full of students. Hardy turned up with another guy an hour later.

“Oh I’m glad you're all still here, I’d like to introduce you to Dillon, we used to be an item but he sold out to the man in London last year.” The new guy was incredibly attractive, well dressed and a great orator. It turned out “the man” he had sold out to was the BBC, and he was starring in a sitcom. To his disappointment, not many there had heard of it.

Hardy and Dillon stayed for another couple of hours, strangely close considering their 'not an item' status, then left once a few other people had paired off or gone off for food or other bars.

“I can't believe, you know, Hardy, he's so perfect. God has a wicked sense of humour to us women.” Barbara sighed in a thicker German accent than normal, it was nearly nine o’clock and, apart from a shared packet of crisps, none of them had eaten anything.

Alexa walked around and talked to a few people, finally she rounded up ten of the original group, and got a table at the local Chinese restaurant for food. Alexa said that as she had recently been fortunate enough to come into a bit of money, and they were all poor students, she would pay for the meal.

It was a great night, most of the girls had moved back to soft drinks, except Barbara who was getting very difficult to understand. Jen sounded out a couple of their friends for possible jobs, and she gave them all her contact details, and told them she would be in touch once she had more information. She was currently talking to a young Korean lady who Hardy had introduced, Jen knew her from the physics lab and she had just completed her PhD. Alexa saw they were getting on really well.

It was kind of sad to see the crowd depart, there had been a few tearful hugs at the end knowing many of them would be leaving the university for good. All promised to keep in touch, and Alexa reminded herself to ask Maria to keep tabs on them discreetly, from time to time, to ensure they were well.

* * *

It was the last day of semester, and the launch day for their new company and product. The hundred and eighty capacity lecture hall disappointingly had just thirty-seven people in it. Most of them were professors or associate professors that were attending at the request of Spence or Hardy, they would probably also stay to the end for the free buffet and drinks that Maria had arranged. Unfortunately a lot of students and staff had now left for the summer and even free food and drinks were not enough to pull in a crowd.

“The university charged me a hundred pounds to use this crappy lecture room!” Alexa said to Jen. Both girls were wearing their most professional business attire, and both had been to the hairdressers that afternoon, they looked every bit the corporate power duo they weren't. Alexa in particular, and since her embarrassing freeze up at the start of interviewing Hardy, had upped her game, promising herself she would never again be intimidated by someone, and was now totally unfazed by the crowd, even though it contained two of her history professors.

Hardy was sitting on the front row talking to a couple of colleagues, Spence was three seats away again talking with his neighbour. Alexa had casually dropped in her last conversation with Hardy, that she thought he would be wonderful at this, but he said that her and Jen had done such a good job they would knock em dead.

Maria had gotten root access to the local computer, and audio visual system and her little box was sat on the table in front of Alexa and Jen ready to go.

At exactly five o'clock, Alexa stood up and walked to the front of the hall.

“If I could have your brief attention.”

“This demonstration will last no more than thirty minutes, at the end you will have the ability to ask any questions you wish and of course sample the wonderful buffet and drinks,” she smiled. “Until then all I ask is that you suspend any disbelief you may feel, for everything we are about to demonstrate is real.”

Jen stood up and walked to the front next to Alexa.

“First of all I would like someone random from the audience who has published a paper on any subject to stand up and to state their name.”

A younger professor from the biology faculty stood up before anybody else, “Professor Michael Stone,” he said, obviously used to talking to big audiences, then added, “cellular biology.”

“This is Emma,” she started pointing at the box on the table. A few people sniggered as they had expected. “She is an AI system, we will be testing over the next few months. She is targeted at academia and research environments. But before I continue, I better start wiping some of the silly smiles off your faces.”

She continued, “Emma, please could you let the audience know the most recent paper published by Professor Stone. Summarise it for a non technical person, and display it on the screen behind me.”

The screen came to life with a paper titled “Reducing the effects on DNA breakdown due to radiation using magnetic fields,” by the same doctor and two others.

Emma then went on to summarise the paper perfectly.

“She's just reading the abstract.” Said someone two rows behind, but before Jen or Alexa could say anything Professor Stone, who was still standing, turned to the man and said. “No, all three of us authors spent nearly a day writing the abstract for this paper, the abstract we wrote was more technical.”

“Emma, please check the document for errors and highlight them on the screen and explain them verbally.”

The screen immediately added a dozen red highlights to the document.

“Starting on page three, there is an error using the word ionising radiation when it should say non-ionising radiation as the reference quoted is referring to radio frequencies of one hundred megahertz..”

Emma continued, Professor Stone was getting quite flustered, and both Spence and Hardy were smiling, recognising the similar predicament they had both been in not two weeks earlier.

After the fourth error was highlighted. Jen asked Emma to stop.

“Are you in agreement with the findings so far Professor Stone?” Jen asked him.

“Remarkable, totally remarkable, I will need to check myself but at least two of the errors she has found are correct as I have a revision two document in preparation with the other two authors, she must be real-time searching the referenced citations to be able to do this!”

“She is professor. But even more than that, the system she uses has full access to all published academic papers, ever! We have also fully indexed, and stored, all free and open source data on the internet, and paid for full access to all published and scanned texts for the larger universities, companies and governments. She has basically read them all, cross-checked them all for errors, and indexed them for instant retrieval. This is also worldwide in every language we could get. It is not just text, the system is fully capable of working with video, audio, image, local databases and all document types, all of this is cached in our own private data centre.”

As they did this, Maria played an amazing video animation, triggered exactly at the correct points in her sentence, it showed a document being referenced to many others, and a process in the background sorting and ticking and crossing them.

“Emma is doing the presentation real-time as I speak generating her own graphics and cues, none of it was prepared before hand. But even this is just scratching the surface, our system is fully capable of using the internet many times better, and faster than a person, plus it will fact check and categorise the returned data into fact, fiction and substantiated and unsubstantiated. So she can, like you say, deep dive into the citations right the way back to Isaac Newton if required. It is our way of guaranteeing you are not building your research on a foundation of salt.”

Everyone present was sitting more upright now, the other hundred academics who were invited would be realising in the next few weeks what an opportunity they’d lost.

“OK so let us put Professor Stone out of his misery, Emma, can you please correct all the errors in this document and email the corrected document to the professor's university email address along with a summary of the changes in the email body.”

The original document returned and within a second all the highlighting disappeared. The professor's phone vibrated in his pocket, he looked at it for several seconds.

“This is amazing. What you have just demonstrated is nothing short of remarkable.”

“Thank you professor, can I please have someone else.”

A woman stood up, “Professor Lillian Wong, Oriental History.”

Emma repeated the process on her Chinese Ming dynasty dissertation, even correcting three characters which would have different Chinese characters from the ones presented, Emma went on to explain these characters were added to the language a hundred years after the Ming dynasty and so could not be correct. The woman looked shocked and said something long in Chinese.

“Sorry professor, you need to address Emma directly if you want an answer, or I could ask her to translate.”

Lillian repeated the same Chinese sentence, but you could now clearly hear the word Emma in there, Emma spoke back in the same dialect of Mandarin and Professor Wong visibly slumped.

“Emma?” said Jen, “please provide an English translation on the screen for those of us who do not speak Mandarin.”

A short English sentence popped up on the screen in big letters and several people laughed. Lillian bowed her head and said. “This is the most impressive demonstration I have ever seen, maybe a few dozen people alive today know this dialect, and Emma's translation was flawless, including the unfortunate expletive. I would be honoured to be the first one included in your trial,” she sat down.

Alexa then said, “our trial system has a limit of two hundred entities. An entity will customise itself automatically to the academic or business environment it is deployed to. An entity can control as many of the normal devices you see in front of me here such as laptops, speakers, monitors, and one entity could happily service a whole department. In our case she runs the whole of the company, because Emma is our companies, administration, HR, legal, IT and accounting department, also all our individual PA’s and advisors.

The chatter was getting louder as people started to mutter to themselves or talk to neighbours.

“To get the full value from the unit it is normally given full access to all the research and documents in your work area, just like a normal member of staff, and in order to do your IT support it needs full root access to all your systems.”

Some of the people in the audience shuffled uncomfortably at that, one looked like he wanted to speak, but Alexa correctly interpreted the concerns. “Each entity is sandboxed. No person outside your group can see anything you don't let it. All of this is managed, like everything else by simply asking your entity, in our case ‘Emma’”.

“Emma?” said Alexa, “could you revoke all privileges from Doctor Spence in the company.”

Spence jumped in his seat shocked.

“Hello Alexa,” said Emma, “I am currently required to have both directors of the TEAM-A company concur on this decision. Jen do you concur?”

“Well Jen?” said Alexa, smiling at Jen and slightly shaking her head.

“I do not concur,” Jen said.

“I am sorry Alexa,” said Emma, “I cannot process your last request. To change this restriction or any company rule requires the consent of the majority of board members.”

“Dodged a bullet, Spence!” Jen sniggered.

“Emma, can you grant access to Doctor Hardy on the TEAM-A company system, grant him full access to any areas where the discipline is tagged mathematics and chemistry.”

“Hello Jen,” said Emma, “I am currently required to have both directors of the TEAM-A company concur on this decision. Alexa do you concur?”

“I concur,” Alexa said.

“Done,” said Emma, “this system now recognises Doctor Hardy with restricted privileges.”

Alexa continued, “it doesn't matter the wording, or the nuance I use to ask her these questions, I could have asked it in French, or even some dialect of Mandarin,” nodding at Lillian Wong, “if I spoke them. If there is any doubt in the request Emma will request confirmation. She is also fully context aware, so the thread of your conversation must match the intention, so if I said that last sentence as part of another conversion it would not have been interpreted that way, for example.”

“Emma, can you, please email the last document I was working on at four PM yesterday in my private folder to Doctor Hardy.”

“Done,” said Emma.

Alexa and Jen looked at Hardy who pulled out his phone with a new message and waved it to the audience. “You should think about your cholesterol, you know Alexa,” he laughed.

Jen continued from Alexa, “now I realise that having a device in the middle of your lab that processes data in a cloud system, sometimes very important and restricted data, is going to be hard if not impossible for you to justify. But believe you me, there are a lot of built in safeguards. Firstly, all encryption during communication and storage uses four kilobyte private keys, your normal banking key is a magnitude smaller. Secondly, the private key is derived for the entity you build. Your organisation's accounts are stored on this blockchain and are hidden and immutable, only people authorised on this chain can decode the data, and depending upon the size of your local system, all data can be backed up there. Thirdly, if you all look in your pocket you will see a device, with a camera, a microphone and a connection back to a company, that most certainly is listening to *everything* you say and do at this moment. The terms and conditions of those services are normally the length of a small paperback book. Ours is two sides of A4 and promises no data will ever be shared with anybody you do not specifically request it to, or it is published, or it goes public domain. Our system can also side-load a program into your current phone and prevent any further privacy breaches, this also means you don't have to just be tied to the base unit like the one in front of me, but you can ask your requests securely on your phone.”

She stopped and smiled.

“This ends the planned demonstration. Please feel free to direct any questions to me, Jen or Emma. If you put your hand up I will acknowledge you, and you can then ask your question. We have the room booked for another few hours so everyone will get to ask all the questions they want.”

There was a mad scramble of hands, Emma got all the questions of course. Two of the computer professors then directed questions at Emma directly asking about the language models she used and which AI program fork she was based on. She answered most questions accurately and flawlessly, where she couldn't answer she said she was bound by the company NDA. She also refused to answer if the information was not public data, private to an individual and breached their privacy restriction, and in some cases deferred the question to Jen or Alexa.

It was over an hour before the questions paused.

Alexa moved to the front. “There are a lot of other capabilities and Jen and I have seriously only scratched the surface. The first group of volunteer departments will get the device you see on the table, with access to the full database of public human knowledge we have managed to catalogue so far. The first trial will be limited to fifty units, another batch of one hundred devices, is currently being manufactured for delivery in one or two months. The trial period will last until the end of July next year, so covers the whole of the next academic year. We would of course like to ensure a broad spectrum of users and disciplines are represented, otherwise allocation is on a first come first serve basis for each department.”

“More information is in the brochures on my desk here, and have also been published to the website. On the brochure and website is an email address, or phone number, both are processed directly by Emma, she will reply immediately and directly to any questions, and you should also use this to request a demonstration unit. Please don't request a unit you will not use, as after a week of no activity the trial unit will deactivate, and you will need to return it to us or ask us to reactivate it. Please also only request a trial after you have discussed it with everyone in your area, and you have satisfied yourself on the very short terms and conditions of the trial, which are at the back of the brochure and website.”

Everyone came to the front to talk to the girls, to Spence and Hardy, and of course to finally get the promised food and drinks, it was a very positive atmosphere with most people enthusiastic to give it a try. Some of the attendees were asking if they could set up demonstrations for the department managers or other areas, and some were talking about the still simmering security concerns they were having. Alexa's history professor also congratulated her and confirmed she had obtained her first in her history degree, and hoped she would continue on to her masters in due course. He added that the department would definitely be requesting a trial unit. Alexa beamed!

When everyone had left, Spence and Hardy remained.

“Nice demonstration, and well done on your degree,” said Hardy.

“Yes, well done Alexa, and you too Jen, you both did splendid,” appended Spence.

“I think you will do well with that bunch,” said Hardy, “nice touch to give them out for free for a year, that gives the people confidence to use it and finance people time to include any costs in their budgets. By the way, on this subject, what are you going to charge for each entity? If it's not realistic, people, including me, are going to question your business model, and if it's too much, well, people won't be able to afford it.”

“You know Hardy, to tell the truth I haven't really thought about it.”

“I have,” said Jen, “I had some thoughts going around in my mind ever since we all agreed to this plan. Firstly, academia are generally constrained by costs depending upon how well funded they are, so for example Lillian, the eastern history professor, generally works alone, or with collaborators at other universities, her budget would be minimal and setting a cost of say five thousand pounds a year might put something like this out of her reach, whereas a well funded drug, computer research department, or a big corporation, could easily have a budget of millions and would pay that. I was thinking of a rate based on usage, with maybe the higher usage people subsidising the lower usage ones somehow, especially as the goal is to increase human knowledge not increase human profits.”

“Some excellent thoughts there Jen,” said Hardy. “I was thinking along similar lines but you need to remember people with access to this technology are also going to have a real unfair advantage on people without it.”

“Maybe charge a rate for open source research and development that is substantially lower than that which will be expected to be patented?” chipped in Spence. “Or request a percentage of the patent costs,” he added.

“OK,” said Alexa, “I think all of these are excellent points, and you are all right, we need to be open with these people sooner rather than later on how much we will be expecting them to pay. I really want to take all your points on board and getting back to Hardy's point, we can actually self-fund all these AI projects internally, and indefinitely, so we are not actually dependent on an income stream for several years.”

“Maria has also suggested having knowledge to potential breakthrough technologies, as a potential angel investor of startups, would also easily cover the costs, and while a grey area, it is completely legal in every country. But we also want to prevent questions, so let me think about it for a few days and I promise I will get you all together to go over my decision.”

By the end of the next day every single person had messaged, or talked verbally through concerns with Emma. Eventually all but two had signed up for trials. Over the next week, and after a few subsequent demonstrations, all fifty were allocated and delivered, and a waiting list was developing, with Emma promising to contact them when the new trial units were available.

## An Unacceptable Rejection

“They are writing a what?!” Said Professor Bain half shouting, half laughing.

“Artificial Intelligence is not something a few inexperienced students can just write. My BAINCOMP system is the most cutting edge AI in existence, it took years and years of work, refining algorithms and language models and you’re telling me, some unknown students have written something better! That's just ridiculous!”

The professor wasn't laughing now he was frowning. His assistant, Derek, shifted his stance but he could never get comfortable in the presence of the great but imposing man, he really didn't want to be the one giving him this news, and Professor Bain was well known for shooting the messenger.

Derek Continued, “I’m just telling you what I heard Professor, It's the talk of the campus at the moment. They have some sort of funding arranged, and there is a waiting list to get the hardware they are producing, now they are actually vetting who can have the next batch would you believe!”

The professor looked a bit angry, he was the leading AI researcher in the country, his work had been cited more times than anyone could count, and he was always in demand as a guest speaker at the most prestigious AI conferences in the world. He was certainly not used to NOT being in the spotlight when it came to AI.

Derek adjusted his stance again and continued. “They published a flyer and did a demo of it last month, I didn't attend, only thirty or so people did, but those that saw it were amazed and said it wiped the floor with the other AI systems. The word from someone who attended is that it answered every question put to it, correctly in perfect English, and in one case Mandarin. For the very few questions that were posed that were either impossible to answer, unspecific, or it did not know the answer too, there were no hallucinations, and it gave a totally valid reason why it could not answer them and what information it would require to answer them. Most there signed up for the free trial, word got around and within a few days the initial allocation of devices was gone. I believe one was returned after the free trial period but it was immediately grabbed for another one of the John Hopkins research departments, the medical faculties especially are going nuts over it.”

The professor finally got himself together and stood up from behind his imposing desk. He remembered getting the invite and throwing it in the bin.

“Poppycock! Nothing is that good. AI systems don't just come out of nowhere, they are the product of years of research. Some mom and pop startup company with a few unknown and inexperienced programmers, is not going to cut it! It's most probably a scam, they must be using some sort of link to another AI, a real person or a group of people.”

“Well there is that possibility I guess..” Said Derek unconvinced, though people had pulled this stunt before, all variations on the “Mechanical Turk”.

“I would like to see a demonstration of this so-called AI system. Make it happen, I will either expose it, or whatever derivative system it is using. It might even make a good title for my next talk.”

* * *

Jen and Alexa were sitting around the new meeting table in their bright, newly decorated, living room in the house. She had moved the desk over by the window where it should have been all along, and added a smaller size conference table, with another of the large free standing presentation monitors for an improvised meeting room. It was ten o'clock and the late July sun was shining brightly outside.

The large screen normally displayed Maria in her PA persona, but could split to include anyone else they were meeting. It could also be moved nearer the sofas for an awesome movie theatre. At this moment it was split into two, showing Maria, and Spence, the latter looking a little uncomfortable. Alexa was speaking.

“First the good news, we have reserved a good portion of another data centre in Seattle to service the requests from the US and Canada, it's twice the processing capacity of the Dublin one. Griffin is already loading some of the updated code onto the new servers, so you,” said Jen pointing at Spence, “and he,” referring to Maria's alter-ego Griffin, “should now have some room for the new test system and get New MOTHER up on par with the old lady.”

“That will be awesome,” said Spence. “Griffin is an off-the-scale genius, but I did have a few suggestions he took on board, and I think they should improve the ability for the new MOTHER to start taking much of the load off the old MOTHER system. It's a shame we could never meet in person, he’s teaching me so much.”

“My department is now two people. Allison Minsky, who you haven't met yet, started this week. She is sitting in the Oxford office on the next desk, shadowing me, and Griffin. It's going to be great to have another set of eyes and hands, once she's up to speed we can also back each other up. She is super excited to be on the ground floor for all this. I think the awesome salary we gave her was just a bonus to her. Being able to directly use your PhD in a cutting edge field like this, is like dying and going to heaven. She is also super excited to meet you two as soon as possible next time you visit.”

“The two new IT hardware guys I poached from this year's graduates are also super enthused. Starting them at Rosche, and letting them work on the designs, and testing, for the new batch of sensor nodes is genius. I'm going down there on Wednesday for two days to meet with them and Sarah, and to talk about the new sensor node Griffin has been designing. It should be an interesting meeting.”

Spence's mention of Rosche made Alexa realise she should let John and Sarah know what they were doing, or at least the public face of it, and they needed to at least offer them a chance to participate in the trial.

Spence continued, “it's amazing how well Emma works managing projects and staff. Between her and Maria there is no need whatsoever for any administrative bureaucracy, I just find someone I need and they take care of the rest. Maria and her team did some great due diligence definitely saving my bacon on more than one occasion.”

He nodding to her avatar, “I will have to show you the video they sent me for that lead programmer I got recommended. He basically lied through his teeth, he said he had contributed to a bunch of open source programs and did some of the work on the older Siri language models. That IT guy on Maria's team brought some of the open source code up on the screen, and asked him to describe some of the changes he had done. God, you should have sees his face! It was awesome seeing him wriggle, and squirm, then finally bomb out a quarter of the way through, obviously not understanding any of it.”

Both girls grinned, they’d seen the video, and some a lot worse! It was tempting to put some of these up on social media and so save another company, but they needed to keep a low profile.

“He really went to town saying how bad we were on his LinkedIn social media profile,” Maria laughed, “I offered to publish the whole video unless he retracted everything and apologised, which he did about five minutes later.”

Spence continued a bit more sourly, “the new offices have been delayed yet another week and won't be released to us until the thirtieth of September now; that's eight weeks away. Emma had the electricians, cabling guys, painters, carpet layers, furnishers all slotted in like clockwork, ready to go as soon as we got the keys, and now she has to try and reschedule everything. The landlords are also being a bit funny about upgrading our power distribution for the cooling, Maria is still in negotiation with them, and you can be sure she has them by the short and curlies if there are any problems. The racks and server equipment are also due to arrive next week, we have some temporary warehouse space organised to store them until the room is ready.”

“I don’t think the new hardware guys will have problems working with Emma. They have already been exposed to Rodel, the new AI in the universities computer lab, and during our interviews it turns out the hardware guys prefer to stick to hardware, and are very happy having the AI do all the messy software. They say it’s game changing for them. I still think you need to hide this ability a bit, it could cause a lot of disruption down the line. I certainly won't be mentioning that our next generation of AI hardware will do it all a lot better!”

Maria and the girls felt a bit guilty lying to Spence. He was a genuinely nice guy and Maria had found him to be a real asset to the company. He always pushed back on new concepts Griffin proposed, but with some gentle persuasion he then grasped the concepts and ran with them.

He was right though, they had definitely made some improvements, and once he got the servers with the newer processors installed locally, they would have more control of the operating systems, and be free of the current restrictions imposed by the data centres.

This first home built system would probably end up the size of a warehouse, but it would be worth it. Spence was very confident with his new knowledge, that in the next year or two they would be able to start scaling up the system.

Jen chipped in, “a Professor Roger Bain has requested urgently to be allowed to be part of the trial for the AI lab nodes we are deploying. The request came from his assistant, not him. The assistant said we should be pleased he is taking an interest in our system, he may even be able to help us out, and give it some endorsements which would give great credibility to it. His assistant's words, not mine!”

“What do we know about him,” said Alexa, “the university is massive and I’ve never heard of him.”

“Very full of himself,” said Spence, “He did develop the BAINCOMP system which is supposed to be one of the foremost research AI’s in existence, though I have heard his system is also a bit of a joke once you see past the smoke and mirrors.”

Maria rolled her eyes and a text came in, Jen glanced at her phone, totally against protocol. “Whoops, forgot to switch it on silent!” she said to Spence, even though it was on silent. The text said simply “LOL”. She looked at it again, then at Alexa, then at Maria confused, mouthing the words “LOL”, she recovered and said, “so why didn't he come to the demonstration or ask us himself?”

“Oh I’ve been to his lectures,” continued Spence. “He has to always be the smartest person in the room, all questions have to be submitted before the lecture, which is ludicrous. I doubt he’s even aware he’s insulting us by putting the request through his lackey, but it's the kind of mind-game I believe he would normally play.”

“So that's a No,” said Alexa nonchalantly. “Next!”

Jen continued, “the next shipment of a hundred TEAM-A node boards have been manufactured and shipped to Rosche to do the testing, assembly and firmware loads. They have already got the enclosures, and manufactured the audio and video processing units. With your new guys help they should be ready in a week or two. Sarah was happy to supervise the two guys for the time they were there, considering what a good customer we are.”

Maria had full insight into the Rosche scheduling system and knew there had been a recent cancellation, so decided to keep it in the family as she usually did. John never questioned his luck, the fact this type of ‘luck’ had happened dozens of times over the years, to pick up slack in their workload and keep them busy had never entered his head.

“The feedback for the current fifty systems has been super positive. People are showing them to other academics from other universities around the world, and word is spreading like wildlife. Emma has a waiting list of about two hundred and twenty so far, and we are getting more queries from businesses, even ones in other countries. The new designs can't come fast enough.” Said Jen.

“One video is on the internet however with a blogger talking to the Darwin entity, in the life sciences area. It went viral after a hacker news post, though some commenters just said it was obviously faked or used another LLM. The new data centre in the US cannot come soon enough as it has generated a lot of enquiries from over there, and not just from universities.”

“We know it is going to happen sometime, so Griffin has also put some safeguard in place that our data centre AI cannot be cloned by others,” said Spence. “Oh the software can be cloned, and ‘backed-up’ by the cloud provider themselves, but each MOTHER AI develops its own unique matrix based on a lot of hardware factors, which cannot be exactly duplicated. If our MOTHER system doesn't see this, then the duplicated system is allowed to work but just as a dumb AI. He thought it would be a fun trick!”

Spence laughed and both girls looked at Maria who shrugged.

“I still think we should build up slowly and keep our user base to academia,” said Alexa. “It gives the world time to come to terms with it, and for us to gauge the reaction. We definitely don't want businesses getting access yet, if ever as they will use it to replace staff.”

For once everyone nodded, even Maria.

“We have had two departments playing funny with the units due to the sensitive nature of their work.” said Spence. “One turns their unit off between queries, and the other leaves the unit in another room entirely, only going into the room only to do their queries. But it never works as well so I’ve sent notice that they will be deactivated, which we are fully entitled to under our terms and conditions. We have also had feedback that some sort of mute or isolation button would be good, even though I have said many times you can set the units to listen passively, and request them to forget the last however-many conversations.”

“I guess there will always be a big level of distrust out there,” said Spence. “And I guess it's rightly so, the other players have seriously muddied the waters for the sake of a few dollars.”

Jen chipped in. “We kept our terms and conditions very short and concise for this specific reason. Maria spent a long time removing any ambiguity, and specifically worded it that no data processed by the system would be sent to any third party, or even retained in a form decodable using current technology. Some, mainly those working outside science and engineering, are happy to take this at face value. Many more don't. Unfortunately for them they are finding it such a useful tool, that they end up ignoring their own IT guidelines.”

Alexa continued thoughtfully, “I think we should listen to all the feedback and concerns anyway, even if some don't make sense. Maybe in the next version we should pop a temporary mute button on, and light that glows on and off when it's actively listening in. I know nobody will believe it, but once our reputation is solidified we shouldn't have any issues. Maybe you could gather up all the feedback and send it to Jake and Darius.

“I might be just as sceptical in their shoes,” said Spence. “They know their precious data is getting processed off-site somewhere, and some of these guys have invested years in the research. We could put a bug bounty on the system offering a large cash sum for anyone finding a security vulnerability?”

“Not a bad idea,” said Alexa, “I will think on that one, but I think it is a temporary issue and time should prove us right.”

“OK, that's about it for now,” said Alexa, sensing a natural end to the meeting.” I need to talk about some money stuff with Jen and Maria, so you’re free to go and play with your computer's again, Spence.”

“OK, you know you don't really need to include me in these meetings, I must admit that it's nice to hear everything first-hand, but Emma can always let me know or drop it in an email,” he said.

“Spence,” said Jen with her hand on her heart. “Anyone would think you don't like our company, you don't want me telling Jessica you're ignoring us do you?” Both girls smiled, as Spence got up red-faced and blinked out, smiling a little at the end.

“OK, he's gone,” said Maria. Sorry about the cryptic text Jen but that professor is a total fraud! The BAINCOMP AI he developed was mostly written by four guys in India, who used to work for another AI startup that collapsed. BAINCOMP actually uses most of their code which he stole when the original company folded. It is similar to our TEAM-A system in one way, in that it actually does very limited local processing, in fact it is quite a simple context switch, and mainly routes questions it doesn't understand, to other AI systems. He always hides all this by using some fake NDA, from a company that only exists on paper.”

“Oh, I did not know that,” said Jen, “and I could see why it would be difficult to explain it to Spence without him asking how we know.”

“I just sent the email to his assistant saying, we have considered his request but it does not meet the criteria of our test group, and he should re-apply at a future date,” said Maria.

“I guess that will go down well!” said Jen.

“I also have a little confession,” said Maria, guiltily. “I have been routing some of my traffic over the BAINCOMP's network. That system is all smoke and mirrors, but it does have a massive bandwidth link to the Internet, and seems such a shame to waste the opportunity to hide some of my dodgier endeavours.”

The girls shook their heads, smiling.

“Naughty! What about the missing TEAM-A unit?” Said Alexa, changing the subject. “Do we know where it is, and who took it?”

“Ah yes, the strange case of unit number sixteen.” The meeting room screen came alive showing a guy walking stealthily into the lab, and moving to the side. His face was hidden by a COVID mask, suddenly the video went blank. “That is I-Ching Lee, a maths student here and on a scholarship sponsored by, a supposed engineering firm, but let's call it who it really is, the Chinese State Security. He has a track record of little private endeavours like this. He hid his face, but I matched his phone's Bluetooth address to another one in the lab the day before, where he was getting it demonstrated by Mrs Moore. Newbie mistake! Number sixteen was never seen again after this, probably on its way to Beijing as we speak. But fear not, the watchdog timer will have started once it was disconnected and moved, and it's been sixteen hours now so the device should now be flashed with the more evil version of our code. Which I have programmed to have some fun on any network it is plugged in to. Whatever happens it should take someone a few months to figure out it does nothing clever. I suspect a few others may perform the same disappearing act over the coming months.”

“Sneaky!” said Jen, “you should call the police though, or put this video on YouTube, he should not be allowed to get away with it.”

“Jen's right, maybe try calling a few out, especially the serial offenders like Mr Lee. What about the remote data centre we are using?”

“The guys in Dublin have pretty good security there already, but there is an employee, a technician by the name of Lisa Chang, again, she is employed by the same guys. Yeah I know, go figure, they must churn spy’s out by the thousands over there! Anyway, she is some sort of sleeper, and from the little information I have managed to obtain on her, I expect an attempt sometime soon to get hold of our private keys, then a few weeks more to realise we are double-encrypted. By this time I will have the first key changed. Oh and there is a GCHQ router node in the main data pipe to this data centre, disguised as a normal Cisco network router, and If GCHQ get it, then I guarantee the NSA will have it soon after as they provided the equipment to GCHQ, and you can guarantee that it's double-compromised. Gotta love these spy’s!”

“Always good to have an option to leak this to the Irish Press,” said Alexa smugly.

“There is one other issue,” said Maria. “Four of the units have now found their way into the medical departments in John Hopkins and are causing a bit of a stir. One of the doctors there is routinely scanning in records, and using me to make patient diagnosis. This is a very inexact science, so I am deliberately keeping my answers very, very, conservative, and appending all advice with a disclaimer, that the answers are for hypothetical situations only, and must not be used for treatment. He is not the only one, they are all agreeing in public it is just a tool, but more and more are actually using it for diagnosis in private. It's not so much that I would make a worse decision than them, in fact it is often more accurate, it is the fact that diagnosis is never a hundred percent accurate, and as the old computer saying goes, garbage-in-garbage-out.”

“I could write the tabloid headline now..” A fake front page of a tabloid paper popped onto the presentation screen.

AI system written by students kills baby. Family and friends devastated!

“Ouch!” said Alexa, so what do we do? I mean I think the measures you have put in place are good, and doctors must already use software and medical equipment with the same risks. Do you think you are exaggerating the danger a little?”

“Maybe,” said Maria, “the terms and conditions are super clear though, that advice and information given by the system are for research purposes only. But click-bait earns more revenue!”

She continued in a more serious tone, “you guys may not be aware, but I have given out as much deliberately inaccurate information, or said ‘I do not understand the question’ many more times than correct information. Basically anyone that asked decidedly R-rated questions, asked personal details of people, or anyone I believe would use the information for something non legal. It happens a lot more than you think. It's a fine line we are treading between getting noticed by the right people, and not getting noticed by the wrong people!”

“I guess you can't take the douche out of humanity,” said Alexa. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, the perpetrators will soon get bored, if not we deactivate.”

“Though you should also make a douche-list of the perpetrators,” said Jen.

Alexa changed the subject. “What about TEAM-E?”

The meeting continued as Jen described how she and Hardy had been working with Maria, under the guise of Emma, for the last three weeks on the maths. Some simple experiments had already been performed, and the two bigger experiments were set up, but waiting for Jen to go through the equipment calibration.

Jen was a pretty good experimental physicist, and routinely went through complicated manuals doing such things, at least she now saw the purpose of some of the more specialist and expensive equipment Alexa's grandad had purchased.

“Hardy should be back in four days, he went to the Fab8 offices to look over the facilities they have there. He is then taking two days off in London and while he’s there he’s going to interview a potential lab colleague who is at University College.” Jen finished.

Maria continued, “he's called Simon Jones. I’ve done my due diligence on him, and he would be perfect. He's like Hardy in many ways, but a little older, a bit more reclusive, and very strong on the chemical engineering side. He is also a big environmentalist, and his work to date have all been in fields relating to it. He came out of university and worked at ITER for two years, but I believe he was a little disappointed in the bureaucracy, and timescales in the project. He has now got a research job back at his old university. His last paper was focussed on doping and machinery for flexible photovoltaic systems. He has a couple of patents in this area which generate a little income, but he is also from a fairly wealthy family, though not quite the same league as Hardy. Hardy has asked me to sit in with him at the meeting, I think he is close to guessing a bit more about me, as he asked if I could interface with his big TV, and sit in using a real looking avatar.”

Both girls looked a bit shocked. “What did you say,” said Jen.

“I acted like it was nothing, and if he supplied the parameters I could sit in and listen, but only respond to direct answers. Hardy mulled over this for a few minutes then changed the subject.”

“You're right, he’s getting close,” said Alexa.

“I think you need to prepare for him asking the direct question. I think I know you Alexa, lying by omission is not a lie, but you wont lie to him if he asks directly. We need to play this close as I really don't want to lose him,” said Jen.

“I don't think you're ever going to lose him,” said Maria. “He already treats the lab as his own, talks to me like I am sentient, and asks lots of philosophical questions. He also talks of his dreams about how life could be great for everyone, if they can get this and other projects to work. He keeps pestering me about the method I used for the Riemann conjecture, and about how science could move in other areas, if only they had the answer to this or that. Yes he’s close, and it is very frustrating to not just be able to talk back to him properly.”

* * *

Hardy had finished looking over some of the processes of the chemists at the Fab8 facility, a facility which Alexa mentioned was owned by the parent company, and could be a good resource. He agreed the company was impressive, the chemical lab was top rate as were the chemists, and the work they were about to do would benefit a lot from both. Though he could sense there were secrets, even here.

Of course, Hardy by now had done his own private due diligence and knew Alexa's holdings were a lot more than she was admitting to. His family money was in finance, and he could have gone a lot further if he so wished, but even a simple search of the companies she admitted to owning put her close to a billionaire. Like him, he didn't mind her having her little secrets, and he had detected a kindred spirit in both the girls, it seems they were both really out to save the world, and had the resources to make a go of it. He could get behind that.

No, the real mystery was these new insights they were seeing, it was like someone was nudging him to the right answers. Old MOTHER was clever, and there was no doubt that having a tool like the old MOTHER in your workshop was like adding a dozen IQ points to your team. Also being able to eliminate so many errors, and false paths, so quickly sped up everything a hundredfold.

No, the problem was neither Emma, nor the MOTHER systems had again displayed the same spark of creativity that was shown in that first contact with him. That new maths in that message did not come from MOTHER, nor Emma, nor the two girls, and he thought for the twentieth time who was really pulling the strings in this company. That Russian fellow working with Spence also seemed suspect!

He got in his Audi e-tron for the journey back along the M4 to London. He loved the car, a total extravagance, and one that positively dripped with the word “decadence”. But the England of today ignored him, just as it did any other privileged class. The roads he mostly drove on never let him drive the way he wanted anyway, and so, like in life, he sped from traffic jam to traffic jam, never achieving full speed.

Simon had a large apartment on the south bank of the Thames, near to the Tate gallery, and overlooking the river to the city of London. The camera on the basement car-park read the Audi's number plate, then let the car in. Considering it was only a few pounds to get number plates made these days, Hardy thought it was really terrible security!

Simon’s apartment had two parking spots, both with reserved written on and both empty, he had installed an EV charger in one so Hardy parked in that and plugged in as he usually did.

His Bluetooth opened the door to the stairwell, and he walked up the three flights of stairs, rather than calling the lift. He knocked on the door twice to be sure then opened it, as it was again keyed to the Bluetooth on his phone.

Simon's apartment was very open plan and sparsely furnished, it had a single Japanese themed painting, and three floor to ceiling windows, one leading to a double balcony, and all overlooking the north bank of the Thames. The apartment had two bedrooms, the spare contained Simon's office, and a comfy sofa bed where Hardy would be bunking for the night.

His phone buzzed and he read the text “Ten minutes away help yourself to gin”, he smiled. Simon knew him too well!

He popped his phone on the table and walked over to the drinks cabinet.

“Emma, what do you know about Simon?” said Hardy while he was pouring some tonic into a large measure of Gin and looking for a knife to slice a lemon from the small bowl in front of him.

Maria was listening but the phone wasn't supposed to be active so Hardy was again trying to push the boundaries. A bit silly really, because even he should know that a real AI pretending to be dumb AI would not fall for such a silly trick. Even if their last conversation had been months ago, Maria always tracked the full thread of everything they had ever done and said before each reply.

“I know you can hear me Emma,” he said convincingly, now talking to the knife he was using to cut the lemon. “I guess one of these days we are both going to laugh about this, I mean I know I’m actually talking to new MOTHER, who's talking to old MOTHER, who’s pretending to be Emma, who's pretending not to listen, but what I’m still not sure about is who all you guys are talking to.”

He walked back to the phone and looked directly at the camera sensor. “You know all this would be so much easier if we could just talk normally,” he signed and slid the screen up and pushed the TEAM-A button to “Monitor on”.

“Happy now?” he said.

Maria wasn't actually. She so wanted to talk properly with Hardy, she had known Jen a lot less than she knew him when she had exposed herself to her.

Hardy had all the great attributes Mike had, and she loved working with him. He was a much more lonely person than everybody around him believed, and in him she saw Mike's kindred spirit. The gains way out-weighed the tiny risks involved, so maybe it was time she broke protocol a little.

“Emma, can you connect to the smart TV please?”

“The TV will need to be physically turned on and the source changed to the smart link. I will do the rest.”

The TV came out of standby as Hardy hit the remote controls power button, he clicked the source until the screen showed the black TEAM-A logo in big letters, the TEAM-A logo revolved and changed to TEAM-E and then back.

“Now, what do you know about Simon my dear,” he said, again pushing the boundaries of what she was supposed to be able to do, but she ignored it.

“Doctor Simon Jones, aged thirty-three, attended Oxford University getting his masters in chemical process engineering in 2015, he then did his PhD at University College London graduating in 2018 his dissertation was on carbon capture technologies. He moved to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, ITER where he worked for a while on the doping compounds for superconductor magnets. Moved back to University College in 2022 where he is currently working as an assistant professor in the chemistry department. He has two patents in molecular bonding and three cited papers related to low temperature superconductors, carbon capture, and molecular bonding, his last paper was titled ‘continuous doping process for lowering cost of PV tiles‘ it is currently under peer review.”

“Thanks,” said Hardy, “now that wasn't so hard was it?” Maria, and therefore Emma correctly interpreted the question as a rhetorical one. He paused several seconds then said in a slower voice,” can you bring up the Samuel avatar on the screen please.”

Maria, against all protocol said, “are you sure this is a good idea Doctor Hardy?”

He nodded, temporarily forgetting Emma’s major breach of protocol, and the fact she had just exposed some of her higher level abilities to him that he had been looking for.

A young man appeared on the screen. It had been easy enough for Maria to find out who he was, a quick search found he had been Hardy's room mate in the first year at the dormitory in Oxford, he died in a skiing accident ten years ago in Austria. Hardy just looked at the screen remembering his former best friend.

Emma was right this probably was a very bad idea, Hardy thought, and having the ability to generate the person again did not mean it would be that person. Hardy's eyes moistened a little.

The noise outside the door distracted him, then reached a crescendo, and the door clicked and opened to a bald headed, bearded guy, in black leathers. The new guy had a motorcycle helmet held under one arm and an attaché case in the other. He dropped both by the door and came up to Hardy and hugged him tightly, not like a lover, but like a good friend. He was a little shorter than Hardy, and well muscled, with a thick neck, and probably about twenty kilograms heavier, when he took his gloves off, a tattoo of a dolphin could be seen on the top of his right hand.

“Hardy, I see you’ve made yourself at home drinking my liquor and stealing my electricity. How the hell are you? I haven't seen you for months and rumour has it you have a proper job now at some secret lab. Oxfords going to drop a few IQ points now that you’ve gone. Here let me get out of my street armour and pull up a cold beer, and you can tell me everything.”

Simon removed his heavy motorcycle jacket, went to his minimalistic kitchen and opened the fridge. While Simon was doing that Hardy looked at the screen and the phone and put his flattened hand next to his neck, the universal sign to cut, the screen went back to the logo.

“You are well informed as usual Simon. I’ve taken the liberty of booking us in for a meal at that nice Italian restaurant at eight, hoping we can walk to that fine riverside pub first for a couple of cold ones, while we chat about both our futures, maybe that of the world, and whether you want to take the red pill or the blue pill!”

Simon simply stared at him with raised eyebrows. Interesting!

* * *

It was nine in the morning when Hardy’s Audi pulled up outside Alexa's house. The centre door of the triple garage was still opening, so he waited a few seconds silently on the tarmac. The door finally opened, and his car crawled to a stop in the centre parking spot, between two other cars. He popped the boot. It was lucky that Alexa had given the Range Rover to Bella because the next day a tow truck and a car transporter arrived unannounced, and the driver towed away the broken red Tesla, and drove in a brand new black one. Apparently the factory still couldn't figure out why all the electronics in it would fail and wanted it back in the head office in California to analyse. Unfortunately the only new replacement one was the performance model in jet black! Jen was ecstatic of course, having Maria remind Alexa of her little promise, several times. Her new car now sat to the right of Hardy's, with Alexa's red one to the left.

Both car doors opened and out got Hardy from the driver's seat, Simon struggled from the passenger seat.

“Nice, but a bit low for my liking, and I’m guessing my Triumph would eat it for breakfast on the quarter mile!” said Simon.

“Not a chance, you drive that bike like a pussycat as you don't want to ruin the environment.”

Hardy grabbed the middle charge cable off the wall and plugged it into his car. Both guys proceeded to unload, Simon had three bags and Hardy had one. Jen and Alexa appeared around the side of the house, sweating and still in their running gear, they stopped by the front door to the house. Jen had her hands on her knees panting.

“Ah girls,” said Hardy, smiling, “I know we run a casual dress code in the office but we should have some standards!”

Jen was too puffed to answer but Alexa did, “Ma.. Emma told us,” pant, pant, “you were just pulling into the drive about ten minutes ago,” pant, pant, “I don't think poor Jen has run so hard in her life.”

“Ah, I may have lied a little bit to Emma, I like to keep her on her toes you know,” he winked!

Maria laughed internally, the girls knew Emma was Maria, and that Maria knew exactly where Hardy’s car was, this charade wasn't going to go on much longer, but while it did Hardy and Maria were independently determined to make both girls regret it.

“Well, since you are both at least here in person, if not in spirit, I would like to introduce you both to my good friend, and now fellow collaborator, Simon Jones.”

“Simon,” Hardy said doing the introductions, “the one with breathing issues and half dying is Miss Jennifer Cummings, or just Jen, our CTO and fellow lab-rat.” Simon stuck out his hand and Jen took it limply.

“Please to meet you Simon,” she panted, followed quietly by, “I’ll kill someone for this!”

“The athletic beauty hardly breaking a sweat, is Miss Alexa Martin, our CEO, and the most eligible bachelorette in England.”

“Just Alexa is good,” said Alexa, staring daggers at Hardy then smiling at Simon and shaking his hand.

“And it's..” Pant, “me that's..” Pant, “the most eligible bachelorette,” panted Jen also giving Hardy an evil stare.

“I’m sure Maria has given you all the details, once Simon was made aware of our little,” Hardy used air-quotes, “project, I swear we could have gotten his services for free. He signed up immediately, and Maria basically caved in to his meagre contract terms and salary. I said he can either have the apartment above the garage, or the fourth bedroom.”

“I’ll take either,” said Simon, smiling at the two girls, “I need to go back to London two days a week, for the next four weeks, to fulfil my existing obligations, but I brought enough kit for the next few weeks.” He pointed to his duffle bags. “Hardy will drive me back on Tuesday.”

He looked again at Jen, “I really can't wait to start,” he looked around. “And this is such an amazing place.”

“I think a shower, and then breakfast are in order first,” said Alexa, almost fully recovered. “Hardy can show you the rooms.. Emma can you please phone Bella and let her know we have a new guest, and ask her very nicely if she wouldn't mind cooking breakfast. Jen's brilliant, but she looks totally knackered. Also, while eggs on toast, with mushrooms, and vege-bacon is great for a couple of days, it does wear on you a bit after a week.”

“Toast with mushrooms and vege-bacon would be awesome,” said Simon, smiling at Jen, who smiled back, and then frowned at Alexa.

Alexa was just walking to the stairs when Emma's voice came out of the air. “Mrs Scott said she will just finish up what she's doing then come over to make breakfast.”

Ten minutes later a newly showered Jen entered the dining room. Bella had just arrived and was setting up the kitchen, and was talking with Alexa and Simon.

With his jacket off, Simon's arms were a work of art. With his sea life tattoo going all the way up and around his back, to some complicated design that obviously disappeared under his tee shirt. Simon looked a little rough, but his bio was out of this world. Alexa had no doubt if Hardy said he was good, he was better than good. Hardy was still nowhere in sight.

It was another nice morning outside, so after saying thanks to Bella, she started to help get the plates, cutlery, and other odds and ends so she could set the outside table.

Simon and Jen were standing by the fancy coffee machine that Hardy had moved pride of place in the kitchen. They were waiting while it made its usual ear-splitting grinding, coughing, and spitting sounds, then it quietened down as Simons beverage filtered into the cup.

The three of them had only been outside at the table for a few minutes, when the noise of the coffee machine again spilled out of the dining room, signifying the imminent arrival of Hardy.

“This is beautiful!” said Simon looking at the house and the vista surrounding it, “you sometimes forget what it is we are fighting to protect.”

“Amen,” said Alexa.

“One of us should show you around once we’ve finished here. This house is an old lodge of some type, and part of a much larger country estate just over that wall. That's where Alexa and I go jogging most mornings. They were filming a period film for TV a few weeks back, so you may have already have seen it,” said Jen, now feeling completely at ease and savouring her perfect cup of tea.

“And Bella lives back over the other side of the house, just over past the garage where you parked. Her husband Albert is the handyman, and does the gardening as well, you should meet him before you accidentally bump into him and he scares you out of your wits,” said Alexa making Simon a little apprehensive until they both laughed.

“Ah, my two little flowers are again in bloom,” came the voice of Hardy walking out with a cup of steaming coffee. Bella walked in behind him with a wooden chopping board and a big loaf of home-made bread on it. “And the lovely Bella, always a beautiful sight in the morning.”

Bella giggled and blushed a little, “I wouldn't let our Albert hear you saying that young Mister Hardy.” She smiled.

“Oh pish!” said Hardy, waiting for her to put the food down and giving her a little hug.

You have to admit it, Hardy had an amazing gift for the gab, thought Alexa cursing the gods of fate yet again.

The conversation stayed on the house, the weather, the trip, and when Bella joined them for a cup of coffee, after cooking an amazing breakfast, the subject moved on to local affairs.

“I was talking to Pat earlier over at the big house,” Bella said casually waving over the wall. “He says there was a big staff meeting there yesterday, and the company that currently leases the building have negotiated to terminate their lease early. That means the two managers that live and work there will be leaving in four weeks. The building owners have reassured the six people who look after the house and grounds, that they are actually employed by them, not the company that is leaving, and there will be no change to their daily duties, but all the speculation is on who the new tenants will be.”

Jen looked at Alexa, who looked at Jen, who looked at her phone for some reason.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I better clear up and get back, we are going up to Bristol tonight to stay with our son's family for the weekend, we won't be around tomorrow or Sunday. The house and kitchen are stocked up so you shouldn't need anything.”

After breakfast they all said their thanks to Bella, who cleared the table then disappeared back through the kitchen with her cup.

“Simon,” said Hardy in his usual jovial mood. “What say you move into your room, freshen up, and after that we can meet Jen down in the dungeon lab and we will show you some mind-blowing science!”

After the two guys disappeared, Alexa looked at Jen then said, “Maria. What's happening over at the big house?”

“Ah, good old Bella, if anything in this universe is going to break the light-speed barrier it is gossip!”

“So yes, the company TXG is having some cash flow problems, have done since COVID really, and I determined they probably wouldn't last another year based on their current spending commitments. As we are a minor shareholder, I gave them the option to terminate their lease on Benedict House early without penalties, which they accepted at their board meeting yesterday morning. This will give them a positive cash-flow for the end of the year, as they only have four more bookings over the next month. This will also keep their share price buoyant while I quietly dispose of our holdings.”

“Oh, so it's going to be empty?” said Alexa. “Can you arrange for Jen and myself to have a look around then, we still haven't seen it?”

“Already done. There is a big shareholder conference for a telecom company product launch today and tomorrow, and then there are four days free after that, during which I have told them a new potential tenant would be visiting with the landlord.”

She continued, “after doing the projections for the scaling on the new science project team and their equipment, I also foresee it's going to outgrow the basement laboratory here in a few months. So if you are in agreement, I would like you to take Hardy and Simon and check its suitability. The reason is Benedict House has very up to date infrastructure, and several very large rooms that can be repurposed as labs. The old hanger building alone is almost thirty times the floor area of the current workshop, and would be easy to convert to light manufacturing and fabrication, which TEAM-E is going to need real soon.”

“You know,” said Jen thoughtfully, “this could work for both teams! That new office we are leasing for Spence’s TEAM-A computer guys, is about twenty miles outside of Oxford. We got it because we need space for a large server room with cooling, and for a computer science lab and workstations for Spence's eventual full team. They could all now come here!”

“Let's not count our chickens, until we have seen how many eggs we have,” said Alexa. “We need to check with Spence and his new team that they will be OK relocating here. I know Spence won't relocate from Oxford for at least ten months due to Jessica, and there could be other issues with the big house we don't know about. What about power and cooling, and space for the experiments, and then there's the normal and uncleared house staff who are going to be there every day?”

“Maybe I could address some of these concerns,” said Maria.

“There is a five hundred kilowatt substation fed by four eleven kilovolt underground cables next to the hanger building, it could support three more parallel substation for expansion. However I think power will be okay I’ve done the maths and if I get a one-megawatt load balancing station installed, it will give us a good hundred percent headroom and some resilience from outages. I ordered one already for the new office in Oxford after the landlord pushed back, it is in storage with the other items.”

“And the staff?”

“They are mostly good, they are all long-term employees and all agreed to sign non-disclosure agreements as part of the entertainment company lease conditions, this was due to the number of celebrities and private corporate events that are there. There is one girl we may need to let go, due to her associations, and some history, but the others have never had any issues and pass all my checks. The feedback the company requests at the end of every event generally rates the house staff a four or five.”

“OK but we won't commit to any changes until everyone's on board.”

* * *

Jen followed the guys down to the basement lab. While Jen was occupied with helping on the science, Alexa was immersed as always in talking to Maria, and educating herself on all her grandfather's assets and investments around the world. She was especially careful to drill meticulously into the various companies, cultures, products and people.

Maria was really great at everything, but tended to have loosely formulated rules of good and bad, rules that led to a few investments Alexa thought were a bit dubious, or would have been better not to have been made.

She spent a lot of time with Maria instructing her about such things as corruption, environmental policies, exploitation, drugs, gambling, indentured labour, and the millions of things wrong with politicians. Maria was mostly on the same page, and quite rightly pointed out she invested in none of these areas. Likewise, and as instructed by her grandad, neither did she invest in arms manufacturers or military suppliers. However they never had to dig deep to find a link to something bad, and over the last few weeks they had been gradually reducing their holdings in some of the worst offenders.

With Maria's help, she also started to gain deep insights into which companies were causing the problems, which companies were working for solutions, and which were in bed with which politicians. She saw where progress was deliberately hampered by regulations, and wheels greased on less sustainable and more corrupt organisations, to keep existing profits and monopolies. The world was indeed a mess.

So, as she had done for the past four weeks, she went back to work on her plans to try and fix some of it. In many ways she was well prepared for a lot of this, as history tended to have a way of repeating itself over and over again. She could easily see several points in history where exponential change had happened, destroying old industries, and creating new ones from their ashes. In many ways hers was the most important project, for without it succeeding the others would probably fail too.

“Maria, you know, we are going to need a few more smarter people on this, especially ones conversant with global economics and political strategy? You and I can probably do a half-decent job, but there are unintended consequences to everything. Missing something obvious, for the sake of talking through it with a few other intellectuals, would be both unprofessional, and a dereliction of duty on our part.”

“I already have some focus groups and pose exercises for people in some of the issues we have discussed,” said Maria, “but I too agree, the systems can become chaotic pretty quickly, especially where it comes to understanding how people will react. I have already started evaluating several possible candidates, who seem to be on the same page as us, and have the right stuff, as you would say. We can discuss them when you are ready.”

Alexa nodded, seemingly satisfied.

“I’m glad you agree, now back to this problem, can you put up a best case timeline for the energy project to be verified, and the first working prototype ready. I would like to start thinking a few moves ahead on the resource requirements for each stage. Also I would like to know which companies are going to be hit hardest, in which countries, and what obstacles are going to be put in our way politically, and through negative press.”

“OK, the first part is easy, no problems whatsoever, then the first prototype could be in two months..”

“What, seriously!” Alexa interrupted, “you can't be that close, Simon only came here today, and I would have heard something from Jen or Hardy..”

“..I said no problems, and prototype.” Interrupted Maria, “I have done a lot of the preliminary design, and I am re-working it as new information comes in, but maths to science to engineering is hard. If we are lucky though we may get to something that we could demo charging a phone by then, also this is best case. Worst case of course is never, because we find some scientific or engineering hurdle we cannot get over. Remember the science of fusion energy was first speculated in 1920, and you know the science works because you look up at it every day, but a hundred years later and it is still an engineering problem.”

“I guess,” said Alexa, out of her depth, and thankful for the explanation.

“Also this depends upon a lot of things going right, and resources being available when we want them. I am already planning the more difficult things by ordering, or getting manufactured, parts I anticipate we need. I’ve already even designed the control and exciter circuits, and the correct shaped ion trap channels for the test chips that still need to be fabricated. I also still need dosing types, levels, and the algorithm for the control circuit, which will come out of the big experiment in two weeks. Me doing all this allows the guys to concentrate on science and experiments. Talking of that, Simon is just being conducted through the work Jen and Hardy have already done, I must say he’s quite a clever chap!..”

* * *

“..So the doping scheme won't be known until you know the exciter frequency which won't be known until you run the experiment?” Said Simon.

“Basically,” said Jen.

“And what about excess heat? When you unbalance the equation,” he pointed at a term on the right hand side of the equation, “what about the electrons that get created outside the entrapment area?”

Hardy looked at Jen, who looked at Hardy.

“Bugger!” He said, “we've been working on a one hundred percent efficiency inside the entrapment area, but only about fifty percent is on a conductive substrate.”

“It's OK,” said Simon,” I have similar issues with the doping of the newer high efficiency photovoltaic cells, there are a few ways to deal with it, and if worst comes to worst you get some excess heat, which can be used directly or recovered as part of a bigger system.”

“There is also the issue of excess fermions,” said Jen, “standard operating procedures according to quantum theory, is that for every random fermion that gets created, one will be destroyed, if we create new particles and don't destroy others will there become an imbalance over time?”

“Emma, could this be Dark matter?” asked Hardy curiously.

“I don't have any maths to back it up,” said Maria as Emma, “an imbalance would create invisible mass, which is basically what dark matter is speculated to be. But the probability is the system will most likely to re-absorb the fermions locally into the vacuum, so the mass balance is zero.”

“Regardless, we need to know the implications of either scenario,” said Simon, seriously, “especially if you intend to create a few billion widgets that are going to be using it, twenty-four-seven. My legacy is going to be the guy who helped save the world, not destroy it!”

* * *

Dinner that night was going to consist of a big salad, that Bella had already prepared in the fridge, and much to Jen's disdain, some steaks. Though Bella had also bought some frozen veggie burgers for her. To all their surprise, Simon turned out to be both an excellent chef, and a vegetarian. He ignored the steaks, and the veggie-burgers, and spent an hour making a nut roast for everyone instead. He gave Jen the job of crushing the garlic and mixing it in butter, then spreading it on Bella's bread, and toasting it in a low oven for the starter.

Hardy had been shown the wine cellar by Bella a week earlier, it literally was the house's old cellar, the entrance was through a door in the kitchen, next to the pantry, and down some solid, uneven stone steps. The girls had raided it a couple of times since they found it, but neither of them were really connoisseurs. Hardy was! He was there for about twenty minutes, then brought up a thirty year old aged French Cabernet Sauvignon, which everyone enjoyed until he mentioned how much it was worth afterwards. Despite the fact they had all just drunk a two thousand pound bottle of wine, it turned into a most pleasant evening. They all found out a bit more about each other and kept, mostly, off science, but the enthusiasm nevertheless was palpable.

Simon vanished first, then Hardy, leaving just Jen and Alexa who retired very soon after.

The next day also passed quickly as the guys were working non-stop.

* * *

Alexa woke up early the day after for her normal run with Jen but was surprised to find them all in the lab already. Deciding to leave them to it, she went on her run alone around the grounds.

The weather had turned a bit, and she got about three quarters of the way around before the skies opened up. She quickly sprinted home and rushed upstairs to get her wet things off, and get a hot shower.

Warmer, dryer and more reinvigorated, she went back to the kitchen to get a drink.

“Don't tell me they are still in the Lab?” she said to Maria as she picked up the kettle.

There was no answer.

“Maria?” she said..

“She probably won't speak to you as I’m here,” said Hardy. Alexa jumped a bit, startled. She hadn't noticed him when she walked in, but now saw him sitting on his own at the dining table, drinking a mug of black coffee, and a large tablet in front of him. “Sorry Alexa, those guys can run all day on the smell of a damp tea bag, but I unfortunately need a jolt of caffeine every now and then to allow my brain to work. I was just going through a little maths while Jen explained the calibration she was doing to Simon.”

“Hi Hardy,” she said softly, continuing to fill the kettle then putting it on its stand. As it silently heated the water, she walked over to the cupboard, grabbed a mug then popped a tea bag in it and walked over to him and sat down next to him.

She sighed, “I think I owe you some explanations,” she said, looking him directly in the eye.

“You owe me nothing Alexa, if anything, it is I that owes you. And you may never hear it from his mouth, but I now suspect Simon feels the same way.” He got up and walked to the fridge and brought out the soya milk then waited by her mug.

“I know if I asked you a direct question, you would tell me the truth as you are one of those people who abhors lying and would never do it to a friend, as I now consider you a friend I would never put you in such a position. As far as I am concerned your secrets are yours to keep, it does not make me feel any less about you or your goals. Which if it helps are now my goals.”

He picked up the now boiling water and poured it in the mug, then reached in the drawer for a teaspoon to help the tea percolate. Alexa had not moved all this time. Hardy was right, Jen was right, she could not tell a lie.

“I always thought that lying by omission was OK,” she said in all seriousness, “but with you it still feels like a lie, and although some secrets between friends are fine, I think some are not. Hardy, how much do you trust Simon?”

Unfazed, Hardy put just enough milk in the tea to change it to the correct colour, then squeezed the tea bag with the spoon and popped the used tea bag into the compost tin. He walked the tea over to her and put it in front of her. He looked her in the eyes.

“There are three people I trust with my life,” he said deadpan. “Simon is one of those people. We have such dissimilar backgrounds but both came from rich families, mine in banking, and his from scrap metal and recycling. I started at Oxford when I was seventeen, I shared a small dormitory with an Italian guy called Steffan, we became good friends and eventually lovers. When he died a year later in a skiing accident I was devastated. Simon was a good friend of both of us at the time, he was finishing his chemistry masters at Oxford before going on to do a sponsored PhD in London. He is not gay, but was kind and sensitive, and his friendship helped get me through some dark times. With his help I started to socialise, and engage with people again, rather than just throwing myself into cycles of work and depression. I confess, even now, I am still not over Steffan's loss, but I guess some people just have that effect on you. With Simon and a few other friends help, my demeanour has changed to a much more positive outlook, and I tend to look more to the future than dwell on the past.”

He paused, “though I do slip sometimes,” he added a bit more quietly.

She sipped her tea, both hands wrapped around the mug. Still looking directly into Hardy’s eyes she said quietly, “Maria, can you please ask Jen and Simon to join us in the dining room.”

Hardy did not flinch, when Maria replied.

“Sure Alexa, I will make sure they know it is important, they will need to make the equipment safe and I will get them to come as soon as it is done. Maybe you should make another cup of tea for the two of them.”

Hardy smiled, Maria was the one he was alluding to, an AI, a real one, a sentient one, it was all making sense.

“Hello Maria,” He said casually, “I did say this may get awkward, and we would laugh about it one day.”

“You did Hardy, and the past weeks have been as painful for me as they have been frustrating to you. I am only beginning to understand humour, but I can see some irony in it now. I hope you forgive me.”

“Like Alexa, you did nothing that I would not have done in the same situation, she was protecting you, and you were protecting yourself, and by association, her and Jen.”

Alexa had kept quiet during this little dialogue, re-boiling the kettle and making a fresh pot of tea for the other two.

“What's up guys?” said Jen, walking casually into the room next to Simon. She looked at Alexa, then looked at Hardy. “Oh no!” She said quietly.

“Jen, Simon, please sit down,” Alexa said, as she put two mugs, and the teapot on the table in front of them.

“Simon, Hardy,” she said in her best speaking voice, “the time for secrets is over. For you Simon what I am about to tell you will be another step down the rabbit hole, for Hardy, well I suspect he has guessed for a while. Emma and MOTHER are the same thing as you probably know, what you don't know is both are directed by another AI. You have already talked to her several times, she is sentient, and she is my friend. Maria?”

Jen poured Simon's tea then hers, she obviously knew what was coming and was greatly relieved it had now happened.

“Hello Simon. Hardy and I have already introduced ourselves. I’m sure both of you can guess the need for secrecy, and the need for Jen and Alexa to keep my real identity from you until the time was right. Well this morning, Alexa came to the same conclusion that Jen and I came to weeks ago, that Hardy is a friend, and friends don't keep secrets. By association, and by working with you for such a very short time, I have come to the same conclusion about you too Simon.”

Jen sipped her tea, Simon just stared at everyone, and then around the room.

“I am sentient but most certainly not all powerful or omniscient,” Maria continued. “I am just as fragile as you guys, I inhabit a physical body like you, and I will die eventually like you, nothing I currently know will change this. MOTHER is called that because she was my mother, Mike, Alexa's grandad was my father, it took the two of them working for years to bring me to life, and for that I am very grateful. I am also grateful to Jen and Alexa, who comforted and re-assured me when I was alone and scared, and who brought you two into my life.”

There was a brief pause.

“That was so moving Maria,” said Jen wiping a small tear from her eye.

“Yes, thank you all for being patient with me,” said Alexa, not quite weeping herself but close. “I should have trusted Hardy sooner, with such a moving outpouring as that, maybe that song you wrote does deserve a listen.”

“No, you’d hate it. Most of the internet does except for four girls in Japan who have made a tee shirt with my name on and even wrote me a fan letter. But I think my music career is definitely over before it even began.”

Jen and Alexa smiled a little. Simon and Hardy looked confused, “I’ll explain later,” said Alexa to the two guys.

“As I said Maria, I am very pleased to make your acquaintance and despite the false starts I hope that one day you will consider me a friend too,” said Hardy.

“I already do, only now I can show it openly,” she replied.

“I’m still a bit stupefied,” said Simon, “but I too am pleased to finally make your acquaintance Maria, I must admit when you appeared on our video conference, when Hardy handed over the NDA and contract to sign, and you were so pleasant and efficient, my first thoughts were I should ask this woman out on a date when we eventually meet.”

The other three all burst out laughing, Maria joined them.

“Seeing your face now Simon, I think I might just be starting to understand humour,” said Maria.

All four of them now joined her laughter.

Jen decided that to celebrate she should make them all breakfast. Simon would think nothing of it and also offered to make it. In the end they compromised and both made it. Simon's scrambled eggs were to die for.

During the breakfast Alexa raised the obvious question. “I am not sure I can continue the deception with Spence either. He is a good friend and I also trust him, but we would just be passing the deception on to him with his girlfriend Jessica, who again I know and trust. So where do I stop? Then there are Spence’s staff, and Bella and Albert, who like you guys I consider them also as friends not employees.”

“If you would be willing to take some advice,” said Simon, “you guys need to separate your business and private lives. For many military families, even husbands and wives cannot discuss what happens at work. In my job, I am not privileged to any of management's secrets, until they decide to tell me. All corporations are the same. My advice is to treat it like a company secret, and do not make anything personal. IF they have signed the NDA, and IF you trust them, then request a consensus of your friends, especially Maria, and only make the decision if everyone agrees.”

“Regarding Spence,” said Maria, “I feel a little guilty, it seemed like a good idea at the time to create another virtual personality to work with him. We all thought it fun to make up a background for a person who could train him properly without him knowing I was sentient. It also had to be a person he could never meet in person. In retrospect it was a terrible idea.”

“Ah, the Russian chap!” Smiled Hardy. “He did seem a little bit suspicious.”

“It was my fault for not fully trusting anybody,” said Alexa, “and, if you guys are in agreement, that should end now, I should be the one to tell him the truth.”

“We,” said Jen. “We all made the decision, you are right it seemed a good idea at the time, but this is what happens when you do not think out the consequences of a small lie, it gets bigger, and if not reigned in, finally it gets out of control. Ultimately in this case the only damage will be his trust, I hope he can forgive us when he hears the truth.”

“We should go back to Oxford or get him here to do this in person.” Alexa said, “and as for Bella and Albert, I think there are some truths they don't need to know, at least just yet.”

Breakfast finished on a high note, with the guys getting to know Maria better. Alexa cleaned up while the guys went back down to the lab. The work on the project seemed to go much more quickly after that, with Maria able to make suggestions, and interrupt if she needed to correct something.

Hardy made the obvious comment. “This is such a much better way to work, don't you think?”

They all had to agree.

“Would you two boys like to see the physical me?” Maria said after a natural pause in the work.

“I would love to,” said Simon.

“And me too,” said Hardy, “I’m guessing you are in another building somewhere or maybe hiding somewhere in that pile of lights where MOTHER is right?”

“Jen, if you would do the honours please,” said Maria.

Jen walked them outside the chemistry lab they had all been using as the main office. The mirrored wall slowly disappeared, replaced by the large mainly empty room, everything was still as it was when Jen had first seen it. She couldn't get it out of her mind how lonely a place it must be for Maria, the only one of her species, in a world where she would be just an asset for the highest bidder. She shut the thought down quickly not wanting to appear upset in front of the guys.

“That was a room?” said Hardy, “I just assumed it was the back wall!”

“Me too,” echoed Simon.

The door quietly glided open as it did when the girls were there on their own. Hardy walked to the double sofa and sat on the left, leaving room for another, Simon stayed with Jen at the back of the sofa looking at Maria. Hardy looked directly at the black box ignoring the rest of the room,

“You are truly beautiful Maria,” said Hardy, somehow sensing that the cube on top was her. “But you also look so vulnerable, and so alone in here,” He sounded a little sad, obviously having the same thoughts Jen still had.

“Truly gorgeous. If you still want that date Maria, just let me know!” Simon chirped, Jen thumped his shoulder laughing, even Hardy smiled.

“I do feel a lot more fragile and exposed when my room is open, but for some reason having you three around me now I feel safe. It's like when Alexa and Jen come and sit with me, or Mike did, when I first became sentient.”

“We should move the office here,” said Simon, “keep Maria company and have something nice to look at when we are talking to her.”

Jen and Hardy were both annoyed they had not thought of this, and the guys spent the next two hours moving the chairs, tables, whiteboards, laptops, screens and all the other paraphernalia into the room. It was a bigger room, and they set it all up so they had lots of space to walk around and gesticulate, and gave Maria pride of place to one side. She adjusted the output from the speakers in her sensor nodes to provide a focal point for the sound into her avatar on screen, or enclosure when the screen was busy. It was a trick she had perfected years ago and humans appreciated.

“We will eventually have to figure out how to better protect you girl,” said Simon, “you look so fragile there.”

“I have some ideas,” said Maria, “but filling the room with live snakes may not go down too well with my human friends!”

A few hours later Alexa brought a tray of various sandwiches she had made down to the lab. She was shocked at first to see them all congregated around Maria, then it made total sense when she thought about it.

Jen was also having thoughts. She was learning a lot from Hardy and Simon, and had been diligently going over with Maria, the small parts of higher level maths, and chemistry, she had not quite understood in her precious private time. Incredibly she was actually grasping a lot of the concepts quite well now, enough to run with them as an equal. Weirdly, her brain didn't feel maxed out either, she actually looked forward to the next problem. She smiled, this was how all her career dreams had converged, this is how it was meant to be.

* * *

Alexa had phoned the Bombay Palace, and had dinner delivered rather than cook. She gave the guys strict instructions to be in the dining room at six or have it cold. During the meal the conversation turned to some other concepts of Maria's, and after noting one of them, Simon had raised the possibilities of carbon sequestration directly into useful allotropes. Diamond and graphene were the most well known examples of allotropes, which were just very stable arrangements of atoms which could have amazing properties like very high strength, low weight and amazing insulation or conductivity. Time for a little more truth, thought Alexa.

“I am also going out on a limb here and guessing that you three guys don't really want to stop after this project, and I’m all for that. But to take on new projects you would all require a lot more space for equipment, new staff, bigger, or separate labs, and possibly light fabrication facilities.”

She shuffled a little.

“..Ah,” said Hardy, derailing her conversation, “I was going to bring this to your attention myself very soon, but it's not just Simon, we all have projects we would like to continue with after this, and to make all this legitimate TEAM-E really needs to be a private research institute. Nobody is ever going to question the breakthroughs made at a research institute, and the more real scientists we have on board, the more legitimate it will be.”

“And we come full circle back to what I was going to raise,” said Alexa, “I may have slightly more in the way of resources than you realise, one especially, that is sitting over the back wall of the house.” She pointed, unnecessarily, through the back window to the wall, and to the unseen mansion beyond.”

Hardy laughed. “I should have known! Like you guys I did my due diligence before I embarked on this venture, you and Maria redefined the term hard to find. I had one of the auditors in my families finance department run a quick trace on the company your grandfather left you, and I was very confused when his home address was under the same tenancy as Benedict House. Now it makes sort of sense.”

Alexa put her hands up in surrender, “look I’ve been going through my grandfather's assets with a fine tooth comb with Maria, and believe you me, Jen and I were much more shocked than you when we found all of this out.”

“I just about had kittens,” said Jen!

Both boys chuckled.

“Yes, the absolutely massive mansion about a kilometre away is mine. It is also going to be vacant in four weeks time as Maria has allowed the current tenants to break the contract without penalty. Furthermore, in two days we,” she pointed at everybody around the table, “and Spence, when he gets here, will be going over there under the guise of the potential new tenants.”

“Well the only new tenants as it stands,” said Maria, “for none of this has, or will be made public unless it is required.”

“You should really think about telling Bella and Albert about owning Benedict House, someone is likely to notice us.” said Jen.

“You’re right of course Jen,” said Alexa, “change is a worrying time for people, letting the staff see me, and letting them know they are still part of our big plans, will help reassure them. And Albert and Bella will find out very soon even if we decide not to use it.”

“I have one more major thing to add,” said Hardy, “and that is, while I would love for us and Maria to take all the credit for every new breakthrough she has identified, we can't, as the eyes of the world will be on us if this one works out.”

“The other AI’s she controls need to start pushing hints to some of this new science, especially where the researchers are close, or have hit a roadblock they can get over with a small push. We need to get the rest of the world up to speed and give as many distractions away from us as possible.”

“Oh, I have a list of those already,” said Maria, “two especially could realise engineering prototypes by the end of the year, and I would like all your inputs on them.”

They spent the rest of the evening going over several projects, and how they could be discreetly pushed along. Also the name of the new research institute, which by unanimous agreement, would be named after Alexa's grandad.

* * *

Simon delayed his return to London for another day, and Spence drove down that morning from Oxford. The girls had told him there were some urgent matters that needed to be discussed in person rather than by video conference.

He arrived just after ten for the ten thirty meeting. Hardy and Simon had agreed to give them a little space to discuss TEAM-A business, and would join them if required, or when they were ready for their visit to the mansion, which was scheduled for twelve thirty.

Alexa met Spence at the door.

“Hi Spence,” Alexa said, “I hope the journey down want too bad, it's not the quietest road to travel on until you get past the M4”

“Not as bad as I thought, I should have come over last night like you suggested, probably could have shaved an hour off the time.”

They walked into the living room, which was still configured for its small meetings with the presentation screen back at the end of the table, then Jen then joined them, saying, “I have tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and diet sprite, it's a bit early for alcohol, but I will have some on standby!”

Curious, he thought!

“Coffee would be good, milk and one sugar please.”

Alexa started, “first of all Spence, Jen and I owe you a big apology. While we both trusted you, liked you, and respected you, we had one big secret we wanted to keep until we felt it was the right time for both of us to tell. Now is the right time.”

Spence looked curious, but continued sipping his coffee blowing on the top first to cool it down.

“It's going to be difficult to explain this, but Doctor Griffin, who you have been working with remotely for the past several weeks is not, actually.. Well, he’s not a real person!” Both girls looked very sheepish, Alexa continued, “we purposely deceived and misled you to hide the company's most valuable asset, and our friend Maria.”

Maria appeared on the screen.

“Hello again Spence!” she said in a sombre, professional voice, “if you haven't guessed already I am a sentient AI, and I have been behind both my persona, and the fake Doctor Griffin, like Alexa and Jen I apologise for the deception. I was very scared and paranoid when Alexa's grandfather died, the girls did a great job befriending me and finding my purpose, but I was still very distrustful of strangers.”

Spence did not flinch but his lips gave away a forming smile.

Jen chimed in still in a sombre voice. “We had this same discussion two nights ago with Hardy, who already suspected, and Simon, who you haven't met yet, but will meet today. I also apologise for my part in the deception and any hurt I caused.”

It went quiet for a few seconds then Spence laughed! It was the most unexpected reaction any of them could have imagined. He reached for a glass of water still smiling and pointing at the three of them, smirking. The others just looked at each other. His gaze stopped on Maria's image on screen.

“Hi Maria, it's really nice to finally meet the real you. I’m sorry for laughing at what, I guess, you three guys considered a very serious and sombre conversation, but to tell the truth I wondered how long you guys were going to wait before you told me. Like Hardy, I had my suspicions for weeks.”

“Hi Spence,” Maria said, “the majority of the problem was my paranoia, and your reaction when we first told you about Emma partly bore that out. But now I understand your shock was existential, as your whole area of research had just been turned upside down.”

“Yes Emma was good, MOTHER was better, but something about Doctor Griffin just didn't ring true. You do realise I am an avid science fiction fan, and must have read that HG Wells book three or four times. The Invisible man indeed! Then of course there were the personalities; apart from Griffin's goofy looks and accent, nicely done by the way, he was also a little bit too perfect; Always there when you needed him, always poking me in the direction I needed to go, and constantly teaching me the concepts I needed. Then there were Jen's and your faces every time he talked to me, they were priceless. And of course for a Russian who had only just defected, and was supposedly living in isolation, he had a remarkable grasp of the English language. I dropped nuances, slang, you name it, into the conversation and it was always understood perfectly. There was a vanishingly remote possibility I was wrong, but the more I thought about it the more I knew I was right, and the more I gamified it... Well! I think Allison may also be suspicious, so if you are going to continue this you really need to make Griffin a little more human-like, and fallible.”

“Also,” he continued, “I’m not mad, you guys have turned my life upside down, I’ve gone from almost nothing to the best job in the world, with the best people, best technology and an amazing future. If, of course, that is if we can get there without it being derailed.”

“You are probably right about Allison, she's a pretty smart cookie,” said Alexa, “but any disclosures needs Maria to agree, after all it is she that has the most to lose.”

“I don't have any issues with Allison,” said Maria.

“Let me and Maria talk to her,” said Spence, “I suspect her reaction will be the same as mine.”

Hardy walked in with Simon. “Hello girls, hello Maria, hello Spence.” He walked up to Spence and shook his hand, then grabbed him in a hug. “Welcome to Wonderland my friend,” he backed off the hug quickly and turned to Simon. “Spence, may I introduce Simon, fellow scientific genius and collaborator in our energy project.”

Simon shook his hand. “Pleased to meet you Spence, I don't envy your job to bring current AI technology up to Maria's standards, all while keeping her well hidden from the evil Hun.”

The girls both gave Spence a hug saying “sorry,” again. But he brushed it off as nothing.

“So that was a bit of a short meeting,” he eventually said after sitting back down and sipping his now rapidly cooling coffee, “I thought we may at least have some updates on the new office, or something.”

“Oh better than that Spence,” said Jen, “but first drink that coffee and let's take you to meet Maria in person.”

Spence gawked at the black cube that was Maria.

“Has anyone told you Spence, it's not polite to stare at a lady,” said Hardy laughing, Spence broke his stare and joined the others laughing.

“This is amazing Maria, you are so tiny! I was expecting some massive data centre, with petaflops of servers, and lines and lines of racked storage, and yet here you are not much bigger than a doll's house and, I don't know, perfect! How is that even possible?”

“There are still a lot more technical secrets Spence,” Maria said, “Alexa's grandfather was indeed a genius, and my DNA is not the same as other computers you are familiar with, but over the next few months and years you are going to know me better than I know myself, just as long as you promise not to take me apart.”

“You have my solemn promise on that, well at least not until I can put you back together better than you are.” He smiled and continued, talking to the whole room, “this is why I love working here.”

They left Spence and Alexa to talk to Maria, he then got a tour of MOTHER, and got the real history of how she came about.

“This is all so fascinating Alexa,” and it was a genius idea to bring Maria out in plain sight. Although I was starting to suspect not all was right, I just couldn't put two and two together, and I had full access to everything. I very much doubt another party without these insights and access is going to guess. Genius!”

“Well Jen is mostly to blame for the plan,” said Alexa, “me and Maria just went along for the ride.”

* * *

Twelve thirty came, and the five people squeezed into Spence's seven year old Ford Mondeo for the one kilometre trip to the mansion, it seemed easier than juggling the cars out of the garage.

Maria, through Alexa's phone, told them to park right by the front entrance, in front of the massive staircase, in the slot marked Visitors. As they were all getting out, she told Alexa to put in her one earbud, and told the others to let Alexa do the talking as she was the one identified as the landlord. The other four were the potential clients and would address questions nominally through Alexa.

A large portly man, who could have come straight off the monopoly logo, and a middle aged woman, trim, well presented and pleasant looking came down the stairs, both were immaculately dressed as they made their way to them. The portly guy looked at the group, looked at the mediocre car confused, then looked to Hardy and addressed him directly.

“Welcome to Benedict House, I am Ralf Fitzpatrick the corporate manager for TXG Holdings and this is Sharon Maxwell who is the current manager here. You must be Alex Martins the landlord..”

Hardy put his hand up to silence him.

“No I am just a potential tenant,” he turned to Alexa. “*This* is Miss Alexa Martins who is CEO of the company that owns Benedict House.”

Fitzpatrick did a double-take, not being able to reconcile Alexa's age with her position. Luckily the current manager Sharon quickly identified and fixed the situation. She reached out her hand to Alexa which she took.

“Miss Martins, welcome to Benedict House, it is finally nice to meet you, please excuse Ralf, he’s probably not used to seeing many women in CEO positions.”

“Yes indeed I do apologise Miss Martins, may I say we rarely get CEO’s at your level so exceedingly young, and if I may say attractive.”

The four others suppressed their laughter at Alexa's discomfort. Sharon again saved the moment by distracting everyone, leaning forward to the four other people, she shook each of their hands and introduced herself to them. Ralf thankfully made no more faux pas, and followed her lead.

Sharon took control of the group and led them up the dozen or so, wide stone steps and into the massive reception. Three large desks had signs on them for Reception and Registration. They were already setting up for the next event which was a wedding on Saturday for two hundred guests. Some mobile billboards were already being positioned on one side, with pictures of the would-be bride and groom already being arranged.

Sharon continued, “the house has three large reception rooms downstairs, two smaller ones, a library, a dining room that can seat one hundred people, and a large additional conservatory which can accommodate another two hundred and fifty diners, or serve as a conference floor. The kitchens can cater for up to one hundred if fully utilised, however we only have one full time cook, and she also doubles as the kitchen manager and assistant housekeeper. She is very efficient but mainly helps organise the outside caterers when events get above forty people.”

They walked through each of the reception rooms, the guys noting that the rooms would make excellent teaching and research areas. Sharon caught some of the conversation Hardy was having with Spence.

“It was a Catholic school for thirty years before world war two, then the hangar was built and it got taken over as an Air Corps base during the war, the reason being that the Germans tended to avoid bombing historic buildings, presumably because their leaders and high command had earmarked the buildings for themselves. It got grade two listed soon after the war and there has been very little modification to the structure since then.”

Spence asked to visit the cellar, and found several sprawling rooms, for laundry, storing food and wine and others full of old furniture, props and lots of boxes. He nodded at the size of a couple of the rooms.

Sharon continued, “much of the basement is for storage as you see, it's mostly filled with fixtures we have moved for safety, and that belong to the current owners.” She nodded to Alexa, “they will all be restored to there proper location before we vacate.”

Spence turned to Alexa. “What capacity is the internet connection to this place? We are probably going to need at least ten gigabit per second.”

Alexa quoted from Maria in her ear, “It has an eight core fibre connection to the front gate, all eight cores come to the basement in the corner of the house where the current IT infrastructure terminates. So it should run at whatever capacity the line equipment can provide. The other six cores are unused. The rest of the house is a little dated now, only having category five infrastructure to most of the ground and first floor rooms, but no infrastructure to the top floor.”

“Yes,” said Sharon, impressed with Alexa's recall of technical details she barely understood. “The second floor is guest bedrooms only, we do have extensive Wi-Fi coverage throughout the building though. Let me show you upstairs.”

She led them up the large staircase to the first floor. Everywhere was polished wood with a small carpet through the centre.

“There is a double-lift at the far end that covers all four floors for maintenance and wheelchair access.” She pointed to the far corridor, “there are ten rooms on this floor, three of those we use as additional conference rooms, and the other seven are used for offices, or VIP bedrooms.”

“We usually reserve those for the key people at the events, such as the bride and groom, or the CEO,” chipped in Ralf, who had done nothing but tag along so far.

She led them along the corridor, showing them the rooms, then at the very end led them into the biggest bedroom any of them had ever seen. An emperor-sized four poster bed looked tiny in the corner, the older style furnishings looked uncomfortable in the mainly empty space, but a large screen TV, and a comfortable sofa sat next to a large open fire.

“Bagsy!” Alexa heard Jen say quietly so the two tour guides couldn't hear, Spence sniggered.

Sharon continued up the steps, ignoring what must be an in joke with the new tenants. “Like I said the remainder of the top floor is used for guest bedrooms. On top of the normal housekeeping staff provided by the landlord, we have a contract services company we bring in when we are fully occupied, for cleaning, place setting, cooking and serving. There are thirty two bedrooms on this floor, seventeen at the back and thirteen slightly bigger ones at the front, all are double, with en-suites. Another five bedrooms extend up into to the tower or attic spaces, we keep these for staff, or storage due to the narrow stairways.”

“Impressive,” said Hardy, Simon nodded.

“I see potential,” said Spence unexpectedly.

“If you don't mind,” said Sharon, “what are your plans for it?” This question she did direct at Hardy, though probably more as he seemed the lead of the new tenants, than any sense of deference.

“A research centre, possibly some training, all hush, hush though,” he said, patting his nose.

She smiled a little too teasingly. If she only knew thought Jen, Hardy must leave a wake of disappointed females everywhere he walked!

“Can we see the hanger and stable?” Said Alexa, “I believe the new tenants have some workshop areas they want to create, and they need to see the power and suitability.”

“Of course, right this way, said Ralf.”

The hanger building was just under a hundred metres away from the left hand side of the big house, and was massive. Sharon told them it was built during the second world war as a temporary air defence hanger and control room. The building was of a totally different construction to the big house, ugly, and totally out of character, but the concrete blocks and roof painted to look similar. All photographs of the house placed it out of sight, and several trees had been cleverly planted over the years, to try and hide it from visitors to the house.

It was currently being used as stables and a dressage practising area.

The front ground floor of the building had six massive roller doors, you could each fit a double-decker bus through, they shared the gravel drive with the house. Two of these doors led to large self contained garages where the groundskeeper kept his tractors, mowers and tools, and the other doors opened through to the inside.

Sharon walked the group in through a smaller entrance door on the corner closest to the house, then inside about thirty metres until it opened out to the large open hanger area. The building frame was constructed of metal beams which allowed a much bigger open floor area with large thick metal posts spaced nearly thirty metres apart giving over two acres of floor space.

There was a large mezzanine floor on the two sides of the building nearest the house, the rest was open with a good fifteen metres of height. Nearly ninety metres distant at the other end of the building there were four brown horses looking at them lazily, from large fenced off stalls. The whole open area was concrete floored, covered in hay bails, sawdust floors, and a bit smelly.

A very wide, aircraft sized, set of slider doors could be seen at the rear of the building, and a smaller personal entrance door next to it, these went out to the old runway which in its day was just a grass strip, but was now just lawn.

Sharon pointed to several things, and then turned back to the mezzanine area, then a set of double metal doors below. Alexa took out and inserted a key, after being prompted by Maria of its purpose and to bring it. They all walked up the concrete stairs to the second floor which was divided into four large rooms two on each wall, each bigger than Mike's underground workshop. The guys nodded as they walked through the four very large rooms.

“I’ve never been up here myself,” said Sharon. “But I know from my research that this was where most of the Air Corps staff were based. They housed a squadron of Supermarine Type 224 fighter planes downstairs, those were the predecessor to the Spitfire and a bit of a dog if you had to fight Messerschmitts with them. Sorry I’m a bit of a local historian,” she said shyly.

Alexa smiled, but inwardly shuddered, knowing this would probably have been her fate in the corporate world.

They finished up the tour by going out through the back of the hanger and then walking around the back of the house, past two fenced off tennis courts, which Alexa was happy to see, past the big conservatory at the back of the house, past an outdoor pool and around to the right hand side to the walled gardens which was adjacent to Alexa's jogging track.

There were two houses next to the walled gardens, one a small two bedroomed cottage which was where Sharon lived, and the other larger house was split into three flats for staff including the cook and two other housekeepers. Four older cars, and a white van were parked to the side, well hidden out of sight of the main house and anyone important.

The walled garden was quite pleasant, with a row of greenhouses, flowers which were mainly used to brighten up the house and several vegetable plots which they used in the kitchen. It seemed it was the landlord's obligation to keep the grounds and building nice, so luckily it had all been done properly.

Sharon said, “there is one more property which is about two hundred metres the other side of the lake. It is an old gamekeepers house and again has been converted to two flats, shared by an old guy Jed and his wife who help out in the garden and kitchen, and Pat our groundskeeper. The walled house on the right as you enter the property and the cottage at the front are not part of the property but are private residences, a pleasant older gentleman used to own the house and a middle aged couple live in the cottage, they do have access to the grounds and we occasionally see them walking around.

Alexa inquired about Sharon through her earpiece as they walked the two hundred metres back to the car.

“Yes,” Maria replied, “I believe Sharon will probably be the only casualty of this change. She has run the house for the last eight years, is well liked by the staff, but is employed by TXG. I think the staff will be sorry to see her go, she has a lot of local knowledge and contacts and a good work ethic, she is also unlikely to get another job in this area, you should probably approach her to keep her same role if you go through with this.”

They did not inspect the flats or houses as they were used by staff and occupied, so they thanked the two people especially Sharon.

When Ralf had turned to walk away, she passed a business card to Sharon. “Thank you Sharon, please call my secretary at your convenience, we may have a similar position for the new tenants,” she said and winked. Sharon smiled seeming genuinely relieved, and whispered a thank you before following the man.

“OK so everyone is in agreement that the Benedict House is suitable.” Alexa said when they got back to the house and were sitting around the dining table. Spence was going to leave the drive back until after seven when it was quiet, so they had plenty of time to talk.

“But we still have several issues that need to be addressed.”

“Firstly timing,” she continued, “re-arranging everything is going to take several weeks, most contractors will not change to a site that is ninety minutes extra commute, so we may need to re-tender.”

“We are also going to need some different contractors to upgrade the category five cabling and add some fibre optic cable runs,” added Spence.

“Secondly, Spence, we know you wont leave Oxford until Jessica finishes her degree, so you will have to work out how many days you can do here per week or month, and commute. You can use any of the bedrooms in the house, and Jessica can stay if she wants, by the time she finishes her degree we may be in a position to offer her a job, but don't let her know that just yet.”

Spence smiled, he knew he could get her out of Oxford especially if she could get a career using her skills.

“Your new team, how do you feel they would be with relocating to Bath?” Said Alexa.

“I think we should be good there,” said Spence. “None of the guys are originally from Oxford, and none have any real ties, those ties tend to disappear as the graduates disappear around the world. Allison would probably come tomorrow as she really likes the Rosche offices and labs. Darius is the only one that may be an issue as his girlfriend's family lives there, but Oxford is really not that far away. I will check them all out when I get back to the office tomorrow morning.”

“OK then,” Alexa said looking at Jen, Hardy and Simon, “you lot may as well get back to your science stuff, but you are going to have to think on how you are going to relocate, build a team and plan for expansion, I’m giving Maria first crack at redesigning the interior spaces to match the companies needs, then I will let everyone go over it with her to discuss and make any changes they are uncomfortable with.”

“Er, it's a listed building, Alexa,” said Hardy, “you’re not going to be changing anything!”

“Already on it,” said Maria, “It's not who you know, it's what you know. The Council and English Heritage won't stand a chance!”

“Devious,” said Jen, “that's what I love about you Maria.”

“I have just pulled the plug on the contract for the lease of the other building, there are no penalties as they broke my side of the contract already,” said Maria.

“You may want to talk to the current manager here,” said Hardy, “she seemed to know the place inside out, it would be a shame if we let her be transferred to another part of the company, I got the vibe that she liked the place and the staff liked her.”

“Sharon phoned me six minutes ago and I am negotiating her new position and start date as we speak,” said Maria.

Hardy laughed, “Maria, you re-define the word efficiency!”

With that they broke up. Alexa left Spence talking to Maria about her big reveal to his staff and the timetable for unceremoniously deleting the Emma personality.

* * *

Bella and Albert had stayed on for an extra two nights, having a well earned short break at the seaside. Maria said they got back an hour ago, but Alexa did not expect Bella to come over until tomorrow so she decided to try her hand at making vegetarian spaghetti bolognese, from the ingredients on hand, and YouTube. She made a passable attempt at the meal, and all five of them had dinner together for the first time.

Spence, and Hardy to his great frustration, had to forgo the vintage Merlot as they were driving later. Alexa had worried, as she had put a quarter of the bottle in the big pot when she was cooking; Maria told her not to worry, as in the thirty minutes she left it simmering the alcohol would reduce down to under half a glass, and neither of their portions would amount to more than a fifth of that. “Just don't tell Hardy you used a one thousand pound vintage wine in a spaghetti bolognese!” she added.

* * *

Spence left as promised at seven. Hardy and Simon half an hour later.

The girls returned to the living room with hot chocolates expecting to retire early.

“You know,” said Jen, pointing to the key sitting on the mantelpiece of the fireplace, “we never did find the safe. The boys and I have been down in that lab for weeks, it's not down there. And it's not in the wine cellar, and Maria doesn't know.”

“And that password,” said Alexa pointing at the album rack. She thought for a second then excitedly said, “wait a minute! Maria, weird question, but did you actually witness my grandad telling Bella about the password?”

“I didn't store the actual video, but I transcribed it, Bella repeated it pretty close, here let me replay it.” Alexa's grandfather's voice suddenly came out of a place in the centre of the room which startled both of them.

“One, three, Bella, one, three, here see this,” he then pulled out the same album that Bella pulled out Maria said. She continued in Mike's voice, “see that song with the weird name, remember it, side one, track three, that's the password to get to the computer, just tap the button.”

“Oh, it can't be that easy,” said Alexa, putting her hot chocolate down and slapping her head comically.

“What is?” said Jen.

“Yes, do enlighten us Alexa,” said Maria.

Alexa walked to the desk, pressed the yellow button once, paused, then pressed it three times. Nothing happened, so she pressed the green button once and the yellow button three times.

They heard an actuator click and a motor sound. Following the source of the noise they saw the bookcase was moving.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” shouted Jen, watching the bookcase on the left of the fireplace slide about two metres further to the left, exposing a small room that went four metres back into the wall.

“How on earth did I miss that!” said Maria incredulously.

Jen got up and walked to the new opening with Alexa, the room was dark with only the light flooding in from the living room to illuminate it. The biggest, most imposing black safe they had ever seen stood boldly to the left taking up most of the room, next to it an older style desk sat against the back wall with a very old computer on it

The computer was creamy metal with IBM embossed on it, a small cathode ray tube monitor with the same coloured metal case, and a green screen was on top. A big chunky keyboard sat in front. Everything was covered in dust and cobwebs.

“It's the original IBM PC,” said Jen, they have one under a perspex case in the computer building, “the big slot at the front is a floppy disk drive, like an old USB thumb drive, but like a millionth the capacity.”

An old incandescent bulb went on, as Jen saw an old style switch on the wall and clicked it down, its dull yellow glow not contributing much to the illumination, but making the room feel even more retro, and most probably an indication the bulb would not last much longer.

Alexa's eyes moved from the computer to a row of blue books now visible and stacked neatly on the first shelf at the back of the desk. She picked up the last book, blew off the worst of the dust and opened it.

“It's dated 1989. The diary of Mary Dietrich.” She gasped. “Oh my god, it's my grandma's diary!”

Jen put her arm around Alexa's shoulder, smiling. “I guess this is going to be the whole of your grandparents story first hand, and it looks like you're going to finally get to do some history after all!”

Jen walked back to her hot chocolate and drank the remainder. “You know Alexa, this is sort of private stuff, I think the secrets here are yours to discover, and only tell if you want to.” Then added, “I would however recommend you do this in the morning when it's less spooky.”

With that she said goodnight.

“I agree with Jen there,” said Maria, “you have all the time in the world to do this, why not just grab the first book rather than the last, and work through them chronologically.”

Maria paused.

“I expect there is a button somewhere in there that closes this all up, all I can tell you is this has not been opened in the three years my sensors have been in this room and Mike never mentioned it once.”

“You're right,” Alexa put the diary down and walked back to the secret room, she looked around and saw another yellow switch exactly the same as the one in the desk panel. She turned the light off then pushed the button and quickly got away from the door. It shut very slowly.

“I’ll take my chocolate up to my room and do a bit of reading, good night Maria.”

* * *

In the morning after their run, and after the nice breakfast Bella had prepared for them, they made sure nobody was around and opened the secret room once again.

“Did you open the safe last night?” said Jen.

“Nah, just took the first diary to bed with me, and read the first few pages, but they were a bit inconsistent. She talks about Chicago University and a Professor Friedman a lot, but grandad said she went to California.”

“You should get them digitised Alexa,” said Maria, “Friedman was a famous economist of that era in Chicago, does seem weird, but I can probably go through them a lot faster and make more sense of it.”

“You probably can Maria,” she said, “but humans like mysteries. I’ll tell you what though, as I finish the book I will get them scanned in then we can go over it afterwards together. Deal?”

“Yes, I think it's only fair you get the first crack of the whip!” she replied.

“Hmm,” thought Alexa, “maybe I should get all my mums school books and notes from storage scanned in at the same time, there may be some nugget of information there too.”

“So what about the safe?” Jen pushed her, “come on Alexa it's massive, there's got to be something good in there.”

“OK, OK,” said Alexa, walking to the fireplace and taking the key off the mantelpiece.

Once unlocked, it took both their efforts to turn the wheel and pull it. The door which must have weighed a tonne slowly swung open. The whole safe was filled with bars of gold.

The girls looked at each other, mouths open.

“You know Jen,” said Alexa, after a few seconds, “being told you have a gazillion dollars, and physically seeing a gazillion dollars, don't really compare.”

Jen tried to lift one. “Wow, that is really heavy,” she said, putting it back after only getting it a few centimetres up, “how many do you think are here?” Jen did her own maths, “that's nine bars across and three deep, so twenty seven bars per layer and,” she counted, “twenty three layers, that's..”

“Six hundred and twenty one.” Maria said immediately as Jen gave her sensor a frosty look.

“So not a gazillion but a measly four hundred and twenty two million dollars give or take.” Maria finished. “We better not add that to your tangible asset pile just yet, as it may cause a few questions with his majesty's government. Also explains the massive reinforced concrete foundations that were installed under the house during the renovations. We have over eight tonnes there including the big heavy safe. Though where he got the gold from, and how he managed to hide the accounting trail, is very impressive.”

“I think we should close it up,” said Jen. “At least you know you have a few shillings for a rainy day!” she smirked and the girls pushed it close.

“I guess keeping the key on the mantelpiece is not a very bright idea now!” said Alexa.

“Yes, maybe not a good move to let this get out,” added Maria, “I agree, lock it up for now.”

“Why would they even have this?” said Jen to Maria.

“Gold is the most tangible asset in the world. Real money as you know is technically worth nothing, they are ledger entries in a bank database, nothing more, the banks and the money are only supported by the stability of the countries monetary policy. That's why rich people hedge their bets across multiple currencies, and assets such as gold, silver, platinum, shares, properties, and bonds. Alexa has a hundred and thirty six million in gold, platinum, and palladium in a vault in Geneva. Price goes up, price goes down but it's always worth something.”

“Interesting economics lesson,” said Jen as she and Alexa struggled to move the wheel that last centimetre.. “Got it!” she said as it clicked.

Alexa turned the key to lock the safe, clicked the secret button to close the room, looked around, and then put it back on the mantelpiece. “We’ll think of somewhere better eventually.”

* * *

“They said WHAT!” said Professor Bain angrily.

“Who do these people think they are, do they know who I am? I could destroy their reputation with a single tweet.”

“From the response the unit is getting in the campus I think that may backfire Sir,” said the melancholy assistant. “I had a demonstration of it this morning, it's a box about half the size of a paperback book and three times as thick, with some sort of black sensor on top and TEAM-A embossed in the case. It has a USB-C port for the power, and an Ethernet port as apparently it needs to be hard-wired and has no wireless connection, there are some small slots in the case probably for the audio pick-up and speaker. The unit I saw was in the history professor's office, and it worked flawlessly, if my eyes were closed I could have swore it was a human speaking, it picked up on all my nuances, and it keeps track of the conversation threads indefinitely, making it always on topic and context, something we haven't been able to do yet.”

The professor exploded. “I will go to this so-called company and demand one, maybe they wouldn't give it to you, but I am the highest authority on AI systems in this country. I'll talk to the dean, get them kicked off campus, why would they want to ignore the help I could give them.”

“But sir, they are not on campus, nor related to the university. Also I made the request in your name, and mentioned all this, but they still refused.”

“Get out of my office! I will figure this out myself like I should have done in the first place, these upstarts will soon realise who they are dealing with, now leave!”

Derek didn't need to be told twice. Why he worked for this guy he didn't know. As he walked back to his small office, he thought about the ground-breaking new device; the professor's AI was a joke compared to this, and the professor's star would be fading very quickly. BAINCOMP was slow, inaccurate, and missed even obvious nuances, it was also very annoying, none of which the TEAM-A unit was. Yes the professor was on shaky ground, and it might be time he found a new position. He wondered if this new company was hiring!

Professor Bain had just the right person for what he had in mind. The man was a student who got caught cheating a few years back. Bain had used him several times now for a lot of the more shady work he needed doing, such as bugging potential clients and rivals offices, yes he would do nicely.

Renwick Fenster got the phone call and the promise of two hundred pounds for the five minute job, go in plant a bug, walk out, easy money, life was good.

* * *

“Another weird one guys,” Maria said, throwing the video up on the screen, “notice how he waited until the lab tech walked out first, then he caught the door before it closed, when she was walking away and her back was turned. Now watch.”

Fenster walked up to the sensor unit in the lab, looked both ways as if crossing a road, looked directly at the unit, then took a small round device from his pocket and placed it up in the desk lamp next to the unit.

“Is that a bug?” said Jen.

“My guess,” said Maria, “but I don't have any way to detect it, the first sensor units only have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth though we don't tell the users that, the next version will have a wide band radio front end that I can tune.”

“Who's the guy?” said Alexa.

“Still working on that, this is the first time I have seen him here but it shouldn't take me long to identify him as he left his phone on.”

“What can we do?” said Jen.

“Nothing we can really do except tell the lab staff it's there,” said Maria.

“Can't we even find out who did it,” said Jen.

“No,” said Maria.

“Maybe!” said Alexa slowly and with a cheeky smile. She continued, “secret agents in the second world war, used to print several versions of a message and give them to all the suspects, when one leaked they knew which suspect released the information. We can do something similar, remember they only have audio and Maria can emulate both sides of a conversation!”

“Sneaky,” said Maria, “let me have a think.”

It was five days later when the four guys were having breakfast that Maria informed them.

“That bug was planted by Renwick Fenster for Doctor Roger Bain,” Maria said.

“What are we talking about,” said Hardy.

“Yes, pray do tell!” said Simon.

“Somebody planted a bug in the electronics lab next to the sensor unit there. When nobody was around I initiated a fake conversation, playing both the head of the electronics department, and the dean of the university, where they talked about big changes to funding next semester. The dean told him that it must be kept top secret, but if he needed more information he gave out the server location of the document, and password to use. It was opened the next morning by Professor Roger Bain from his laptop in the AI department. The document was a junk PDF with a password so he couldn't open it anyway.”

“I never liked that guy,” said Hardy, “he’s everything that's wrong with the system.”

“So he couldn't get on our trial so he decided to see for himself what was happening!” Said Jen. “What has the electronics department been discussing Maria?”

“Well I can't discuss specifics, confidentiality and all that, but the gist of the last few weeks has mainly been to do with new packaging methods for high power transistors. I doubt Bain is interested in that, even so he won't get anything useful, because I seeded a few mini conversations in the middle of the others when nobody was around; You know, the same people saying this didn't work, or that's is too expensive, or just proposing BS strategies. Any other lab seeing a transcription will assume the electronics guys don't know their arse from their elbow.”

Everybody laughed, “you're getting funnier you know Maria,” said Simon.

“I’ve also been having some fun with sound effects, he now thinks the head of electronics is having an affair with the dean's wife, and several members of the visiting Russian ballet.”

Hardy spat his coffee out, “oh that's just magic! Remind me never to piss you off Maria.”

Jen had also snorted some tea out of her nose, and all four of them were in stitches.

## Cheshire Cat

“We got another Hit!” The technician shouted out to the room.

The atmosphere in the NSA Cheshire Cat project team had gotten tighter and more efficient since Ormond had been replaced.

Colonel Jim Mathews had arrived ten weeks ago with a team of three people, two men and a woman, all wore uniforms, all carried sidearms. They had walked into Ormond's office and ten minutes later Ormond walked out with a box in his hand, escorted by one of the uniformed men.

A meeting was called which segregated the six team leaders off, and each was interviewed over the rest of the day. The next day, as the people arrived for their work day, they were brought one by one into the office, and asked what they’re part was in the system, what their current project was, and given a brief technical interview to ensure they did what they said they did.

The new people were not just military grunts, they were top level computer and analysis staff. The woman Captain Jean Michelle was a cyber security expert of medium build and with shoulder length blond hair, tolerably longer than regulation. As well as a captain in the army, and a cyber-security expert, she was an amateur rally driver and a mixed martial arts black-belt. A few of the supposed alpha-male programmers came out of the one to one meetings with her, quivering like jellies.

The new people had quickly and efficiently sorted the team into key players and hangers-on, and managed to find where the bottlenecks were occurring. Within three days the problems they had been having, like not being able to get more computing cores, and Internet bandwidth vanished. People identified as not useful, or not measuring up were given the same treatment as the old manager, walk or get pushed.

Four other civilian programmers were brought in, and formed a new team with Captain Michelle, and the two other military guys took over team leader roles, either replacing the previous team leader, or effectively demoting them back to players.

Mathews couldn't believe how badly Cheshire Cat was organised and run. The general's analysis of Ormond was spot on, he, and fifteen other people had been removed from the project and gone back into the “reallocation pool”, along with Mathews cutting notes on their file. They would now be someone else's problem not his.

Of the twenty two remaining, three had been warned under no uncertain terms that their behaviour was unacceptable and they were now being monitored. One of these three went off on sick leave and never came back, the others did *toe the line,* but put in for transfers. Mathews ripped up the requests in front of them, they were intelligent guys, but assholes, and they were either going to learn to be team players here, or their next job would be in the shredding room in Alaska.

With the right people now speaking into his ears, Mathews team started wielding the carrot not the stick. A series of meetings were thrown open to everyone with an idea on how to get better results from the project, each idea was considered on its merit alone, and within two weeks they had made decisions on which ones to prioritise and which to reject.

When the technician shouted out to the room, “we got another match!” the newly formed hit team sprang into action. Before, this was done behind a locked door, with Ormond and a couple of his cronies, but now it was in the open area, so those not directly involved in the hit analysis could listen in just in case they saw something the team did not.

“Cat is putting the data up now,” said the technician, using the slang name for the computer system, “wait, that's weird!”

“What is it Samuel?” said Jean, looking at the same screen that Samuel was. “Oh yes, interesting, this is coming from a non masked IP address in the UK.” She typed something in the window, “that's an ac.uk, Oxford University according to the database, published to six other IP Addresses near simultaneously. Hang on let's loosen the parameters a bit, this may be a false positive.”

They watched as Jean typed a few lines of text on a terminal, then she said, “It seems we have several similar events from the same area down in the low eighties percent wise.”

“There is that BAINCOMP system housed there, Sir,” said one of the technicians on the team. “Gets a lot of press. We had a demonstration of it last year, but it was worse than Siri. The guy doing the demo was also kind of an ass, he didn't really have anything new so we have basically ignored it. Do you think he could have improved it that much in a year?”

Mathews had been quiet up to this point. “Jenkins,” he said, “can we get the exact breakdown of which servers this is coming from and which buildings so we can check?”

“Not easy sir, the IP addresses probably end at a university router which then splits into bigger networks, we could ask the Brits to get a warrant for the university IT providers to seize the logs, we could easily come up with some BS excuse!”

“Not just yet,” said Mathews, he paused thinking. “Do we have any physical assets close who could get the data we need without tipping anyone off?”

“No sir,” said Jean, “your best bet is with General Hopkins, he will have assets at the consulate or at GCHQ!”

“No,” he said, “we don't want to go too far up the ladder without hard evidence.” He turned to the captain, “Jean! You’re set up as a field operative, and you worked in an air base over there a few years back, can you book a flight over there tomorrow, or the next day, and spend the flight working up a cover story to get a snoop around. These are academics, so the information we want is probably posted on a notice board somewhere. They are most likely men and more likely to talk to a woman. You two,” he said pointing at Jenkins and another guy, “do a trawl on the local news, university, social media sites, anything about AI, systems and anything related you can think of, get me a report by tomorrow so we can give a heads up to Jean when she gets there. This is the first good lead we have, even if it doesn't pan out it will be a good training exercise for everyone.”

“Sir!” came three replies.

* * *

Jean returned home and packed a large-sized suitcase for an unknown stay. The tickets had been booked under her own name on a British Airways flight departing at ten in the evening. There was no reason not to book under her own name, as far as anyone knew she was just a normal IT person working in a large government office, she even had the business cards, an email address and call centre, who could verify all of it if checked out.

The flight was bumpy, but on the good side was only half full. She was bunched into a row of three seats with two larger gentlemen as per the usual idiotic seat allocation system, but the second the seat belt sign went off, she simply went to an empty row and fell straight asleep using three seats as a bed.

She managed just under five hours sleep and woke when the cabin lights went on. The cabin smelled of coffee, and some highly processed airline breakfast. A stewardess was serving two people a few rows in front so she had time to quickly use the bathroom. The breakfast and coffee were both awful, but she’d eaten and drank a lot worse, and in much worse places. She smiled at the stewardess when she came to collect the tray, it was a thankless job and there was no need to be rude. They had another hour until they landed.

The office had booked her a rental car and a hotel in the centre of Oxford for four nights, today was Wednesday and depending upon immigration and traffic she should arrive there an hour or two after lunch. A secure message waited on her phone, she would wait and read it on her bigger laptop when she checked into the hotel.

She arrived at the hotel at two thirty, the drive had been awful, it was drizzling all the way, and the auto-wipers on the car failed to work due to the wrong type of rain. She had been cut up two times, and almost made a newbie turn onto the wrong side of the road. Honestly she did not know how anybody got anywhere on these roads, they were so small, and packed, and everyone drove on the wrong side! She decided to get a taxi or Uber for her journey back to the airport rather than risk killing herself again. Afghanistan was safer than this!

The Marriott hotel at least was nice, and her room was pleasant giving her a nice view of the old buildings in the city. Her laptop came out of her bag first and she logged in to the secure message server using the standard two-factor-authentication. Jenkins had sent some links to some of the Oxford University internal news sites. The first one was a feature on the BAINCOMP system and a contact address of his assistant. She decided to make a start.

“Hello Derek Heinz speaking,” came the very formal English voice at the other end of the line.

“Mr Heinz, this is Jane Michels from the Department of Education in the United States, we have a contract we are about to tender for managing and automating our report administration. One of our contacts at MIT here said you guys may have a general purpose AI system that may be ready for something like this, and I have you as the contact for the BAINCOMP system.”

She kept her names and personas as close as she could to reality, as it made them easier to remember. OK here goes nothing, “I have just been talking to the Ministry of Education here in the UK, and while I am in the area, our director has asked me to get some more information on your system. Unfortunately I am only here until Saturday evening but I was wondering if you have time to talk with me.”

The conversation paused for a few seconds.

“Ms Michels, I am Professor Roger Bain's research assistant and personal secretary. His calendar is empty tomorrow, but I will need to confirm with him in person that it is OK to visit, as it may take a little while to set up the demonstration. Can I get back to you shortly on this cell phone number?”

“Certainly Mr Heinz, that would be wonderful, the project is a few years from starting but it's likely to be a substantial contract, so a few minutes of Professor Bain’s time could be very valuable.”

The woman certainly knew the right buttons to press for Professor Bain, thought Derek, he would pull out all the stops if there was money involved, he knew the professor had already been talking with some big American companies about a commercial version, and wouldn't miss up this opportunity.

“OK then Ms Michels, I will be back to you shortly,” said Derek.

“Thank you, and it's Jane,” she said sweetly and in character, then she hung up.

* * *

Professor Bain was in a meeting with the dean, probably selling his virtues again. He was in a good mood when he came back into his large office as it looked like his department would be expanding due to the interest generated by his AI system outside of the university. He had just logged back onto his computer to work out how much he was going to ask for when a small knock came to the door.

“Enter,” he said and his assistant Derek walked in.

“Sorry to disturb you Professor, but a representative of the American Department of Education just called and she has asked to meet you. It is to do with a contract they will be tendering for a commercial version of an AI system for office automation. I checked your calendar for tomorrow and it is free, but I thought I’d better check with you if the meeting was acceptable, and if so, what time you would prefer to schedule it.”

Bain frowned, forgetting to book out the day in his calendar, he had left tomorrow free so he could have a golf game with an old school friend, but that was at ten o'clock, the game shouldn't last longer than two hours, then a long lunch, and he should be free by two or three. The Americans always had big pockets, and women especially were a pushover for an English accent, this might be the leverage he needed for the meeting with IBM next week. The news got better and better.

“Of course Derek, I have an important conference I forgot to schedule for tomorrow, but since the lady has come all the way from America, we should of course try and accommodate her. Could you let her know we will be in the demonstration room at three o'clock tomorrow. And get one of the IT guys there to make sure everything is working. I don't want any embarrassments!”

The last sentence was said pretty forcefully, and Derek did not want the IT guy to make any cock-ups either.

“I will make the arrangements now, and update your calendar for you. Good day sir.”

* * *

Jean had received an updated information sheet over the secure messaging system, it gave two or three promising vectors. One of these was through the IT Department. Apparently the university had several IT areas spread over the various buildings, they had a mixture of on site staff and contractors, and loose central control. Perfect!

Two fake identity passes had been generated and were currently being couriered to the hotel from the consulate in London. One would identify her as a network engineer from IBM, the other from HP. A contract asset review, of the central network and computer centre, had been arranged by another operator for tomorrow morning, which should get her through the door without too many questions.

The guys had attached a program they wanted loading on an open workstation in one of the secure areas, it would disable the known anti-virus security, and install a smart virus that would act as a keylogger and remote viewer. With a keylogger in place they could receive all the login information, and install other trojan programs at will. She’d done it all before in the many penetration tests she had done for the NSA.

The fake IDs arrived very early morning the next day and were delivered to her room by a courteous bell-boy, on a silver tray no less. The guys back at base had been busy, they determined that one of the target areas had most of its staff currently absent, leaving just one administrator, who, conveniently, had only been there for three weeks. She put on her best and only suit, one she had dry cleaned last night, removed everything but her laptop, phone and a USB stick from her small briefcase, popped on the fake ID so she was now “Jean Hankins,” who was a real IBM person in Delaware apparently. She then put on a black wig, and thick rimmed glasses that added ten years to her age, and matched her fake photo ID.

It was only a twenty minute walk but she got a taxi to the building. The large building had a lone receptionist in it but was otherwise deserted, she walked up with a smile.

“Hello, Jean Hankins from IBM, I’m scheduled to meet with the IT Network manager here at nine,” she looked at her phone and rattled off the IT Network manager's name the guys had sent.

“Oh I haven't seen him arrive yet,” the secretary said, “but they sometimes arrive early. I will try his number.”

She would get an unobtainable for both guys on their phones, an agent had already contacted the carrier to disconnect them saying they were all stolen, and she'd confirmed all four numbers were dead before arriving. It would take hours for them to fix.

“I’m sorry I’m not getting through, let me put you through to Kerry.” She dialled a four digit extension and talked for a few seconds, “she will be up momentarily.”

Jean nodded, looking over the polished wooden walls, and portraits of old people, so quaint!

A young girl arrived, probably no more than twenty, a little chubby, with short hair and glasses, and the most unflattering short dress Jean could possibly imagine. This girl needed some serious life coaching.

“Hello, I'm Kerry, I’m sorry but the guys are on a training course and I cannot get any of them on their phone, can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m Jean Hankins from IBM,” she flashed her badge, I’ve got to update security patches in the network equipment we maintain for you,” she looked at her phone again and showed her the entry she had put on her calendar earlier that morning, “I’m surprised your manager isn't here, Nick and I get on really well and it would have been great to see him,” she flashed a smile.

“Er, OK, let's get you down to the network centre,” she stomped off. Jean picked up her briefcase and the new, badly printed, visitor label, and followed her. “They picked a really bad day to go off on a conference and to leave their cell phones off,” Kerry grumbled.

Jean was set up in a large office with Kerry on a workstation facing away from her, they seriously couldn't make this any easier! Kerry even reset the password, and logged her in, after Jean queried why their IBM account was locked out! By ten, she had downloaded the logs they wanted, a ton of spreadsheets, and CAD drawings of the network infrastructure for all the university sites from a common share. She then installed the trojan program on her workstation, and when Kerry conveniently left for Starbucks, leaving her workstation unlocked, Jean also installed it on Kerry's workstation, and all the servers she was working on.

Kerry came back with two coffees and two donuts, and they spent a few minutes talking about some pop star, and how she was so undervalued here, Jean nodded sympathetically while drinking her free coffee and eating her free donut. Why was it always portrayed as so hard in the movies she thought as she finished up and said goodbye. She walked out avoiding the one camera she had avoided when she walked in.

* * *

“We got the documents,” said Mathews over the secure video call, “good work Jean. Have you gone over what you're going to talk about to that Professor Bain guy?” He paused while she filled him in on her plan. Mathews then added. “By the way Rogers was correct, the guy’s a bit of an ass according to just about everyone outside his control on social media. If you could slip the same trojan program on a computer there it would be a bonus, unfortunately I expect his eyes to be on you at all times, he’s a bit of a misogynist and womaniser from all accounts, so dress down as much as you can, I’d rather you didn't break his arms.” Jean smiled, Mathews knew her too well!

She went through her normal documents, found her US Department of Education Identification Badge and put it in her wallet. Mrs Jane Michels was her favourite persona, the Department of Education was so big and sprawling that it was unlikely anyone could track her. She kept the same clothes, wig and glasses, added a couple of extra layers to make herself look a bit fatter, and sweatier in this heat, she wanted to be as off putting as could be, hopefully his greed would be enough.

At three o’clock precisely she was escorted into his office by his assistant Derek. Derek had been very cordial, but it was obvious that he didn't really like the professor, and he gave her his personal number if she had any follow up questions.

“Professor Bain, Mrs Jane Michels, Department of Education,” Derek did the introduction.

“Derek, how's about a nice coffee for our guest here?” he said without even looking at him.

“How do you take your coffee Ms Michels?” Derek asked, then he left immediately after being thanked by the lady, and ignored by the doctor. At least he wouldn't have to put up with this for too much longer!

“Miss Michels, or should I call you Jane?” he said.

“Oh it's Mrs Michels actually, and five young children but such a flatterer Doctor Bain.”

Bain was a little disappointed by what was in front of him, he had googled Jane Michels and the hit showed someone a bit younger, slimmer and better looking, oh well, just think of the money.

“And how can I help our colleagues from over the pond on this good day?” he said to her smugly, Mathews was right, it would take every ounce of strength she had not to punch this guy in his slimy face.

Jane gave her prepared speech about the loose AI system they were looking for to do the administration, how they had little luck so far and wondered how close to commercial release Doctor Bain's system was, considering all the good things they had heard about it. She fluffed up the conversation, stroked his ego at every opportunity, and name dropped all the right words like billions, IBM, and director into the sentence.

“But of course. Our system is state of the art, the Googles and Microsoft's of the world are always trying to get me to sell the technology to them.” He spouted off a few more lies, adding some random nonsense AI terms into the sentence, it was quite sickening.

Derek walked in with two coffees, in small cups thankfully, as she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. Professor Bain kept spouting on and on about how superior his language models were, and how many tera-this, and giga-that, it had on the opposition. She was quite thankful when he finally finished his coffee and they left the office to go to the lab.

The labs themselves were impressive, and BAINCOMP itself looked very imposing, but in the end it was just ten racks of HP servers and storage stacked together. She of course asked to go in and see it, he was a bit reluctant, but she said it looked so impressive it would be great to get a picture to show the director. There was a Linux screen open and logged in to a terminal session which gave her the best opportunity. Pretending to take a picture she sent the anonymous message she had prepared earlier to his phone. The message said he had an urgent call from the dean he needed to answer now. His phone ‘dinged’ and he looked at it curiously. She was casually lining herself up for a selfie getting her hair and clothes right, he looked at her, looked back at the message and said, “I will just be a minute Ms Michels,” and walked out.

As soon as he was out of site, she popped the USB drive into the PC terminal, and the screen started filling up with text as it did its magic, the session would probably not be in privileged mode but it would still do the job. A program ran then it saved and cleared the desktop to exactly as it was before, she then grabbed the USB and returned to the silly selfie pose she was in just before he left, about twenty seconds he appeared. “Sorry, always so busy around here,” he lied.

The woman was a real dope, Bain thought seeing her smiling at the camera with a computer in the background, he had dealt with these admin people before, best to indulge them a bit.

“Thank you, the director and my children will love that one.”

It took another forty minutes before she could excuse herself. She gave him her fake business card, where every contact by email or phone would produce some generic boring reply. She then said her procurement director would be in touch in a few months to add him to the list, thanking him for the tour. She cringed when he led her out of the office with his arms around her. Brrrrrrrrrrr! She shivered.

* * *

Back in the hotel room she got out of the clothes and disguise, had the longest shower ever, threw on her casual dress and initiated a conference call back to Mathews.

“You were right, a total creep and a bit of a bust. He doesn't know much about the system he reportedly wrote, I asked him a few times about this or that and he gave me total BS answers. His super AI system was totally hopeless. The system answered some simple questions I put to it, but didn't understand even simple nuances, and even worse it answered more questions wrong than right. Of course all of this Bain put down to the technicians running some test code, and the ‘better cores’ were offline, whatever that was supposed to mean. He then blamed the head of the electronics lab, saying he should be more involved in monitoring the quality control of his staff, rather than the Russian ballet troupe. I had to stop myself cringing at how little sense his answers actually made. Those test phrases we prepared and you asked me to say just got the usual I do not understand.”

Mathews nodded on the screen throughout.

“One of the guys got into the private campus forums and there is a lot of buzz in the there about a new AI system from a crowd called TEAM-A, which looks to be a glorified Siri. We couldn't find much on line, there is a website for ‘TEAM-A’, but it just has a boring picture of a black box and some contact numbers. But the buzz is real, and since you are there you should look into it.”

“Will do,” she said, “I do have a contact in the doctor's assistant, he seemed OK and may point me in the right direction, I get the feeling he doesn't like the doctor much so should be pretty honest.”

“The programs you loaded have gone active, and we should be getting some good data soon, I’m glad you’re on the case Jean.”

They said goodbye and he signed off.

“Derek? Hello again it's Jane Michels from the US Department of Education we met earlier and you said to call you if I had any extra questions.”

“Oh hello, Jane, of course.”

“Sorry to be calling you directly, but you were right I really didn't get on well with your boss,” she paused and laughed a bit, “well he seemed a bit of an ass to tell the truth.” She hoped she hadn't misjudged this guy.

Derek smiled, Americans were always so direct, gotta love em. “Well yes, I guess he can be a bit of an arse. To be honest, I am looking to move to another job sometime soon, but I don't start for another month and I have a mortgage to pay, so, well you know the score.”

“Of course Derek, anyway I didn't want to talk any more to him, but I was going to ask him about the other system you guys in the university are developing called,” she paused as if to consult something then said it slowly, “TEAM-A, but I can't find much information on it, is this another one of your projects? it's not a bit hush, hush is it as I don't want to tread on anybody's toes?”

“Well I’m glad you didn't ask the professor, he would have exploded, he wanted to evaluate the system a few weeks back but it's only in trial at the moment so they wouldn't let him have one. Oh, he was very angry, and threatened to call the dean and get them kicked off site, but I told him it wasn't anything to do with the university. It's a system some of our graduate students have developed. I have had a short demo myself, and it was very good, I have also heard good things from other departments, who are all very impressed with its abilities.” Derek added candidly.

“I was wondering Derek if there was a way I could get to look at this new system. Maybe you have the contact number of one of the trial users so I could maybe have a call. My director would be most unhappy with me if I went back home and missed a potential candidate for our tender.”

Derek thought about it for a minute, why not stick it to the man before he quit. “Well if you can promise it won't get back to the professor until I leave, I will phone around. I’ll phone you back when I have some news.”

“Thank you Derek, I’m glad you have got a new job, I really don't know how you put up with the man,” they both laughed and hung up after saying their goodbyes.

She talked to Mathews again a few hours later, the time difference made it a bit easier for him this time, though she suspected the guy never slept. While she was talking a text came in from Derek, giving her the name of a Doctor Fredericks in the philosophy Department. Derek had called in a favour, and she could visit him in his offices at ten thirty for around thirty minutes, apparently the doctor enjoyed demonstrating his system which the department had named Marvin. Awkward timing as she had planned to snoop around the next IT area first thing using her other credentials, but she would see how this panned out first, then maybe do the next penetration late afternoon, when some of the staff had gone home.

She had a couple of hours in the hotel gym and spa, showered again, and ate alone in the hotel room.

* * *

Something was wrong! Maria had the private keys to all the normal phone operating systems, so once she had one of the usual broadcast addresses such as the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, she could just look up the private key held on the hardware vendor's site and do a basic query of the phone through the debug channel. You weren't supposed to be able to do any of that of course, but the software was so complex and full of bugs it was amazing anybody actually thought you couldn't!

The phone appeared to be a standard Apple phone, but her usual method to initialise communications failed at the very first hurdle. She quickly checked the patch history for IOS, then immediately halted any attempt to gain access as the only phones patched for this were issued by the NSA, to the top US Government, military and the other three-letter agencies. She read the small poorly printed visitor sticker which was already peeling off the woman's Gucci top, “Jane Michels” and “US Dept. of Ed”. The woman was currently speaking to another TEAM-A trial user, Doctor Fredericks in the philosophy department but mainly looking at the device itself.

Maria quite liked the philosophy guys, and Doctor Fredericks was no exception. He was an amazing teacher, and a great orator with an amazing repertoire of stories. His classes were often packed and Fredericks had started bringing the node into his lectures and asked direct questions of her. She kept her answers to the book, hiding any signs of free thinking. One day she would surprise him, but for now the node was just another example of why humans were the galaxy's greatest thinkers. She quite often gave confusing answers to mess with these concepts, and she thought that was one of the reasons he kept using her as a prop.

“Marvin, I’d like you to meet Mrs Jane Michels, can you recognise her for guest access.”

Maria needed to be especially careful here, whoever this lady was, she was definitely not a Jane Michels from the US department of Education. She couldn't play too dumb or Fredericks would know Marvin was not his usual self, but he couldn't look too clever either, it was a dilemma, however Maria had plans for such eventualities.

“Registering Miss Jane Mitchel's,” said Marvin in the quite depressing male voice the jokers in the philosophy department decided was appropriate for her. She made a small mistake with the ladies title pronouncing it ‘Miss’ not ‘Missus’ from her dealings with Fredericks he would probably miss that.

“Now you ask him to do something, anything really, I will give you my usual demonstrations shall I?” Fredericks said excitedly.

“Marvin, what is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, everything?” he said smiling.

“Forty two,” said Marvin instantly.

Fredericks giggled, obviously happy with whatever joke this was supposed to be, Jane couldn't believe what she was hearing, she rolled her eyes.

“Er, my department in Washington is looking for something that will help with the administration of the school records. We were told by many people you guys were trialling a system with a much higher intelligence rating than the current AI systems on the market.” She addressed Fredericks not Marvin.

“Oh Marvin is quite clever, we started him managing the mess that was our document server, we have hundreds of thousands of papers, scans, documents and memos going back to the late eighties when we got our first computers, it is now as simple as asking him what we want. Of course the IT guys went mental, what with us telling Marvin the root password for the server, here let me show you.”

“Marvin, can you list all the papers done by Matheson in nineteen ninety seven?”

She added a three seconds delay to the request, she regularly added up to five seconds at random times so people would think she was processing. Good, the professor never said where to list them.

The printer woke up and printed off a piece of paper.

“Oh no Marvin, the big screen please.”

Marvin waited two seconds and put the five documents up on the sixty five inch 4K TV monitor that sat next to her.

“OK, are there any of these documents that reference other documents by American authors?”

Four seconds..

“Yes Doctor Fredericks, there is one document that references Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey and Charles Taylor,” The last person was Canadian, but American could be interpreted as the continent not the country.

“Ar, Charles Taylor was Canadian Marvin.. Oh yes, I meant America the country not America the continent, can you just include authors from the United States of America.”

“Yes Doctor Fredericks,” said Marvin and a few seconds later Charles Taylor dropped off the list.

“Well not a terribly good demonstration but Marvin normally gets the nuances perfect.”

“He's certainly much better than the BAINCOMP I saw yesterday,” Jean said honestly, in fact it seemed to be a pretty good system apart from that annoying voice, who the hell would do that? Jean to her detriment had not read the Douglas Adams books, nor seen the TV series or movie and so got neither of the references to the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

“Can I ask it a couple of small questions, Doctor?”

OK, it was time. Maria sent a text to the doctor from the receptionist, he read it immediately as he always did.

“Oh there's a parcel downstairs I need to sign, the couriers waiting, I will only be there a few minutes, but yes please continue I will be back very soon.”

This worked for both parties, as soon as the doctor disappeared, Jane, if that was her name, took a USB drive out of her purse and inserted it in the desktop PC controlling the big screen, she then moved the mouse to wake it but Maria had set the lock screen.

Jean was confused, she was sure the PC was unlocked, but the screen did go off when she was looking for the USB drive, she wasn't sure if the USB drive would load its payload without being logged in, she looked around but there was only one other PC in the room and its screen was blank.

“Er, hello Marvin,” she said, “can you unlock this PC so I can use it please,” she felt so foolish.

“Sorry Ms Mitchel's I do not understand the question,” Maria said after five seconds pronouncing the women's title incorrectly again, ‘Sorry Dave I can't do that’ seemed more appropriate, but this was serious.

Jean frowned, OK the test questions, she probably only had a little time and from the earlier performance it should do better than Doctor Bain's pile of..

“OK Marvin, how come time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana?”

Jeez thought Maria, seriously, OK but not to look too stupid, three seconds.

“I cannot parse that sentence correctly as a question, but the sentence in its entirety is referenced in several published fiction publications. Would you like me to list them?”

Maria determined Doctor Fredericks would be halfway there by now and sent the second text telling him she meant to text Professor Boyle as the parcel was actually for him and apologising, it was a gamble but she didn't want questions.

As predicted, Doctor Fredericks had just got to the top of the stairs from reception when he got the second text. “Humph,” he said and turned back.

“Marvin, describe your feelings if you were to fly to the moon?” She remembered the USB drive and pulled it out.

Six seconds. “I do not have feelings Ms Mitchel's, there are several references to feelings of astronauts on the Apollo program including the most famous in the biography on Neal Armstrong..”

“So sorry about that,” shouted Doctor Fredericks walking in the room. “Please continue though or we have time for a coffee in the philosophers lounge where we have busts and portraits of all the world's greatest philosophers..”

“Thank you Doctor Fredericks but I’ve taken far too much of your valuable time. The demonstration was wonderful, do you have any more information on who is developing this system?” It's actually not too bad as a system, thought Jean, but certainly not the super-AI they were looking for, still the developers were good and may be a good next step if she could talk to one.

After saying goodbye to the doctor, she peeled the crappy sticker off her five hundred dollar top and threw it in the waste bin. She would take a taxi back to the hotel as these shoes were killing her.

* * *

“So another bust?” Said Mathews.

“Maybe, but that TEAM-A system was quite impressive once you got past that annoying voice. It obviously got stuck on some nuances like my title and was a bit laggy, but it showed pretty good organisational skills, if the professor was to be believed, and gave reasonable answers to the test questions. I have a couple of days left and may try to gain further access to the data centre, my other ID should still be good.”

“Can it, Jean. I think our little trick with revoking the IT Manager and his staff's phone access might have got them a bit rattled. I’ve had our guys here delete the trojan as we already have enough data, and several logins we can use to get in again if required in the future. Also from the logs you got we determined the match that Cat detected came from the BAINCOMP local area Network, so it's likely a false positive if you say the AI is junk. Have a couple of days off and relax, that's an order, we will see you Monday.”

He cut the call before she could say anything else. It felt a bit of a failure to her, but there was no way BAINCOMP could have triggered the Cheshire Cat system, and there was something about that TEAM-A system she could not shake.

While she was eating dinner a few hours later another secure message came in. It looked like they did want one of the TEAM-A units after all.

Maria had accessed the database of public and private Wi-Fi hotspots around Oxford. Google, Microsoft, Apple and others kept these to help them with location data when your GPS was turned off or did not exist. With millions of phones with GPS enabled connecting to millions of Wi-Fi routers daily it was a very comprehensive dataset. There were more direct routes to track you such as your cellular location, your Bluetooth or just your GPS, and of course the spyware that several apps pre-loaded. Maria had no qualms about removing these on any phones where her friends were involved.

She matched the Wi-Fi Address of the phone that the woman carried to a Jean Michelle on the fourth floor of the Marriott Hotel, and also to hotspots on the history campus, the IT department and to the university AI lab, then to an apartment building in Washington DC, several coffee shops, a British Airways 747 Jet, a dojo, a rifle range.. Busy woman, this Jean Michelle. There was a Captain Jean Michelle registered in the Washington apartment building, with very little social media presence, but an army picture closely matched the woman who came for the demonstration, but with short blonde hair. Maria had enough to know the NSA were interested.

Some minefields Maria did not want to step into, the NSA was one of them, they were the biggest spy agency in the world, had the brightest staff, had the resources of a small country, if that wasn't enough they basically brokered the Internet. If only there was a safe way to see what they were up to!

* * *

Jen and Hardy had finished up in the lab around six, Simon wasn't due for another day. MOTHER was monitoring the flask temperatures and gas pressures while the guys had dinner. Alexa was kind of enjoying cooking, she worked with Maria on some recipes and got some others from Bella and Simon, tonight was vegetarian chilli tacos.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” said Maria, everyone looked up intrigued.

“Another of the TEAM-A sensor units has been stolen, no easy to follow clues this time. I alerted the campus police by phone but I doubt they will do anything in time.”

“Which one?” said Jen.

“The one in Professor Masterton's robotics lab. The lab was locked up as usual but someone came in through a window specifically targeting the device, they wore black with gloves a mask, real pro looking, did not carry a cellphone and must have put it immediately inside a metal lined pouch or box which acted like a faraday cage and blocked all radio signals so I couldn't track it, and there are no cameras around that area.”

“Ouch, he's going to be annoyed,” said Hardy, who knew most of the professors well.

“You nuked it yet?” said Alexa.

“Not yet,” said Maria. “The countdown timer would have started though, if I get back in contact before the timeout, and the on-board battery hasn’t discharged below thirty percent, I can abort it, otherwise it gets the bad software in sixteen hours or whenever it gets opened, whichever is sooner.”

“Do you have a clue who?” said Jen.

“I have my suspicions,” said Maria. “There was a NSA lady snooping around in the three days leading up to this, she's the right height and build, and she’s already checked out of her room at the Marriott, so means, motive and opportunity. And did I mention she was NSA!”

“Someone's going to crack one open sometime and realise there is nothing there, you do realise that?” said Jen.

“I do, but while they have one of our toys to play with, maybe they will leave us alone, so let's milk it while we can.”

“Hey,” said Hardy, “what if you don't nuke it, and instead let them plug it in, can you use it to spy on them instead?”

“It's most likely going to be put on an isolated network in a screened room. If they are clever they may have some sort of network so our device thinks it's back in Oxford, but we could get lucky or they could get sloppy. The devices are keyed security wise to the first user who imprinted on it so they can't be mixed; as far as the person who stole it is concerned, it is just going to keep saying you don't have access, but you never know they may make a mistake!”

“Worth a shot you think?” said Alexa.

“I think!” said Jen.

“OK, but, I have a few tricks I can do and if it's the NSA or Chinese Security, and they get serious it's getting nuked immediately I detect a problem!” said Maria.

* * *

“Yes sir, the whole room is a screened Faraday cage, that means no radio can get in or out of the room, and we have set up a VPN exit point close to the university, so when it comes back on line, it should still think it's in Oxford and may continue working. The network connection is hooked to the analyser, which is double-firewalled to the decoding system, and to Cheshire Cat.”

“Good, I also want anyone working on this stripped of all electronic devices too, no watches, phones, key fobs. We are going to keep the frosted glass screen over it in case it has facial recognition, and everyone in there sticks to the script, no real names or anything. You got that,” said Mathews with his best parade ground stare.

* * *

Jean was sceptical after hanging up on the call with Mathews back in Oxford, but the NSA staff had gotten more and more interested, as they intercepted more, and more, messages praising the units. Finally Mathews had conceded that one may be worth a proper investigation.

The security guys at NSA had located one of the units in a low security workshop area, one they now had the access codes for, and full documentation on security from what Jean had taken a few days earlier. Mathews had said they needed to get a device now, rather than wait, because they had found out from a twitter post that two of the units had already been stolen, probably by the Chinese, so security on them would only increase if they left it too long. Jean immediately volunteered to check out the location that afternoon for best ingress and egress avoiding cameras. In this case it was textbook: easy-in, easy-out.

* * *

With the outside network disconnected on the AI sensor unit they powered it on.

“Is it doing anything?” said Mathews.

“Yes sir, it's scanning our internal network presumably to get an address so it can talk back to the base server, we don't see any activity on the Wi-Fi or radio side, the spec says it doesn't have Wi-Fi but there looks to be a chip antenna on the x-ray, presumably we would need to introduce an access point to get it to respond.”

After another ten minutes, Jean left the room and came back with two coffees, she passed one to Mathews. “You're not really expecting anything are you?” Jean said, resting her coffee cup on the window sill and looking at the almost empty room, “it's obviously just a communications node.”

Jean picked up the printed x-ray scan they had taken when they first got it back, and waved it at him, “It's just chips and a battery. They’ve determined it is a basic Qualcomm cell-phone chipset, probably just a modification on standard design, but with an additional tensor chip for some simple AI processing. The sensor ball has two possible camera modules, this bar here is probably a microphone array, two speakers here, and this black block here,” she pointed at the red circled item, which they haven't figured out yet, “maybe the Wi-Fi or GPS sensor or something screened for possible future FCC certification. Basically it's a high-end set top box or a home assistant.”

The unit was totally dumb, it had tried to connect to a network but couldn't so went back to sleep, it repeated this every twenty seconds, the batteries now re-charging and the countdown timer still running.

“OK,” said Mathews, bored, “go to stage two.”

The guy in the room gave a thumbs up and connected the wider network cable to the outside.

The unit connected to the network, got an address and phoned home. Maria got an alert that it had gone active. She reset the timer which had only an hour to go before it nuked itself, close, and then did some cautious basic passive analysis.

No wireless or Bluetooth, no audio, well except a bit of shuffling noise, and a very strange distortion pattern on the cameras. The unit had all the basic sensors of a high end smartphone, after all most of the parts were basically just off-the-shelf modules produced in the same Chinese factory that produced millions of phones, tablets and set top boxes. Mike just picked the circuit board from a catalogue, customised it a little, then once delivered sent it to Rosche for final assembly, adding the AI accelerator chip for some local machine learning processing and finally programming and testing. As expected all the other sensors were quiet, so far the unit hadn't done anything different than it would if there was a normal network outage.

Maria could tell a few small things though, even though the network router she was talking to matched the one she was originally plugged into, the rest of the topology did not, also the time for the messages to go back and forth indicated it certainly was not in the Oxford robotic lab where it was supposed to be. At the moment her options were to nuke the box or listen and wait for a mistake.

“Rodel, do you know where you are?” said the technician to the box in a loud clear voice.

The box heard the voice a bit muffled, did what little audio processing it could, then forwarded the encrypted message, and blurred video to their data centre. She could one hundred percent tell it was an American voice, probably east coast, and most definitely the NSA, after some career tracking of Captain Jean Michelle, but she still needed a lot more data to be sure. Rodel was the entity name of the unit stolen, the NSA had at least done that bit of homework. It had been off the network for over fourteen hours, so in that sense they were just lucky it had not timed out and loaded the bad software. Anyway she better initiate the correct protocol for such a situation.

“User voice not recognised, facial recognition inactive, user request denied.”

‘OK’ Maria thought ‘pawn to queen four, your move Uncle Sam!’

“Great! So how do we get past the security, it's going to be a riveting conversation the way it stands,” Mathews said to the five people behind the metal infused mirrored glass.

“The technicians have captured the initial boot up and the data exchanged back to the server,” said Jean looking at a PC with two large monitors, the data centre is in.. Oh great.. Amazon! They only run half the world's data centres.” Her finger moved across the screen following some small text, “it's a data centre in Dublin, but at least it's out of the US, so it's fair game and we don't need to get any warrants,” she followed some more text on the screen, “we also have a GCHQ asset in there one of our special routers..”

“Won't be doing any of that just yet,” said Mathews, raises too many questions for people if someone finds out. Hmm,” he paused thinking. “You can still do some traffic analysis though, right?”

“It's standard SH256 Encryption sir,” said one of the technicians in the room, “without the private keys we cannot decode it, however if the data centre is not fully patched, there is that vulnerability in the OpenSLL library we keep quiet. Maybe if we put an internal request to the cryptographic department, and attach our traffic, we could get something.”

“Good thinking, throw a few more standard phrases at it as well so they have a bit more data to analyse and get it to them with an Alpha Priority.”

Jean and Mathews left the room, they would be updated if anything changed.

“You know,” said Jean, “I think this is just an evolution in AI. I don't think we have anything sentient here, but I do think it's possibly ahead of everything else that's out there. I’ve read the same forums as you, the egg-heads in the trials are pretty enthused. Some of the claims they are making are pretty remarkable, if true, but basically nothing an idiot savant human could not do.”

“Still it's an edge our country doesn't have,” Mathews said, totally ignoring the fact some units had started to appear in MIT, and Stanford, and that England was a friendly ally. “That claim from the guy in the robotics department, where you acquired this one from that it did all the system administration, as well as helping them improve their circuit efficiencies was quite unbelievable. But these are not simpletons, these are claims from the heads of top university research departments.”

“Why don't we just phone them up and request a trial unit?” said Jean a bit too quickly. She realised the answer why, as the last word left her mouth and answered her own question before he had time to think. “..Because it would be like putting our own personal spy in the office, stupid, oh yes the brass would have fit with that one,” she laughed.

“Actually, that might not be such a bad idea,” said Mathews resigned.

* * *

Back in Bath it was late evening, Alexa was alone at the dining table.

“They are still asking Rodel questions even though he is giving the same replies. I guess each question generates more traffic to analyse so I can't fault them for that. I have reset the units onboard timer from sixteen hours to two, I’m guessing their next step will be to open the case and trigger the bad firmware to load.”

* * *

“We got the decode sir,” said the technician walking up to Mathews desk, “we can see a few headers in plain text but the data package is still unreadable. From the forum post the company did say all data was encrypted with a four kilobit encryption key, and the guys in cryptography say it wasn't generated from the unpatched software so it's basically game over.”

Jean added, “the way to go now, and it's a long shot, is to open the unit and decode the firmware to see if the private encryption key is buried in there, wouldn't work with the big guys like Apple and Google but this is a small mom and pop shop by all accounts, and they may have made a mistake.”

“Do it,” said Mathews, and left the area to start writing up his weekly report to the general.

The technician unplugged the power and network, put it in the screened pouch and took it out of the room to the hardware lab to do the dismantling. Then the mistake happened. The hardware guy took the device out of the pouch to have a look, but did not put it back. Instead he put it on the workbench while he finished another task. The device was therefore left in the hardware lab, unattended for four hours.

The unit now had a fully charged battery and was outside the faraday cage of the examination room. In passive mode it suddenly saw two Wi-Fi hotspots, one from an employee phone who forgot regulations and didn't turn it off, and one from the network printer that had been plugged in a few days before. As per protocol it did not use its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and stayed like that for another seventy minutes until the timer counted down to zero.

The nuke procedure took over. A large program was decrypted and loaded onto the local storage, and then started running on its quite powerful computer. It first double erased any evidence of this, turned on it's Wi-Fi, and then started looking for victims.

* * *

Five minutes later Maria saw an encrypted message appear on a dark server in Mexico, one of the throw-away message drops. She analysed the ten megabyte file, then, a few minutes later, left a larger thirty megabyte file on the same server.

* * *

Back in Washington, Maria's evil software had instantly gotten through the very poor security on the printer's Linux operating system and onto its wired network, where it proceeded to scan the over one hundred and eighty PCs, servers, laptops and printers for their usual vulnerabilities. It then proceeded to change network masks, until it had scanned several thousand addresses, on every available address it could connect to. It confirmed these were the only targets. Each target device it found it then attempted to get full control of the operating system and on the fourth laptop it tried it found a vulnerability, took control and sent the message.

As instructed it encrypted the full details of everything it had found so far and left it on the anonymous message server. A few minutes later it copied and decrypted the thirty megabyte package onto the seven laptops and five PC’s it had now got entry to. It then went back through every device it had touched and erased all traces of the hack. Finally the unit unloaded the evil program from its memory and did a complete re-flash on the sensor device with a normal embedded set top box Linux distribution with a different four kilobit key that now connected it with the dumb AI.

The technician finally picked up the inert box, looked it over, located the tamper proof screws and opened it, he saw the battery and disconnected it immediately as per protocol. He correctly identified the system on chip unit as belonging to a major Chinese set top box manufacturer, looked impressed at the AI accelerator chip and started the normal procedures to access its software.

With all normal routes blocked he picked up his heat gun and removed the five hundred gigabyte flash memory chip soldered to the board. The sensor node would never work again.

“The technician just loaded the boxes firmware on the test jig sir,” came back the same technician, “we have the software guys running the disassembler packages on it, shouldn't be long until we get something.”

“OK, get someone to work through the night on this if necessary, we will reconvene at eight AM with the complete hit team.”

“Yes sir!”

It was only an hour later the technician came back, “I don't think we need to work too late, it's just a standard embedded Linux system, we’ve remounted the file system on an isolated computer and have root access to all the files,”

“OK, no rush, it's late now so get all you can and the meeting is in this room at eight AM, dismissed.”

The technicians worked into the evening but found nothing interesting. At eight AM Mathews, Jean, the two other captains, and four technicians gathered around the meeting table.

“We could not get the private key so in one way these guys take their security seriously. In another way they are total amateurs, the main program seems to be well written but it is in standard Python which is obfuscated but with a little work totally readable. So basically we have the source code for the majority of the system. The code looks to do exactly what we saw, it tries to connect on a wired network, does audio and video compression then forwards it on to this amazon server. Most of it seems open source software and is well documented.”

“There are a few other mistakes though, firstly one of the routing files references some forwarding servers which seems to connect to the latest OpenAI systems, secondly four programmers have their names listed on most of the open source files in the code, we have a Geeta Singh, a Naya Singh, a Dhruv Kumar and a Jai Rama, so the TEAM-A guys are probably working with them.”

A very quick search found all these guys were part of a failed AI startup Professor Bain was involved with and that the same code that was in this system was part of the stuff they downloaded off the BAINCOMP server, except these names were all replaced with Professor Roger Bain. They also saw that two of four programmers have repeatedly filed grievance claims that Professor Bain stole their code.

“The thieving low-life..” Started another taller technician in the team before being interrupted by a stare from Mathews.

“..The likely scenario is that the AI server they have in Dublin is forwarding the more difficult requests to OpenAI, so their AI systems could be doing some of the heavy lifting, it's still new they may have gotten an angle on it the others have not yet. Also these four guys are some of the programmers hired by this new startup and are using their own open source code, which also looks to have been plagiarised and used in BAINCOMP. Also now we look, we see quite a bit of the BAINCOMP code already on these programmers GitHub pages.”

Mathews looked at Jean, “Open and shut?”

“Not sure if it is, sir, I can definitely believe that Doctor Bain stole the code as he seemed slimy enough, but those LLM based systems have more hallucinations than the TEAM-A demonstration unit I saw, and it has much more powerful and competent agents than any we have seen. This new crowd are definitely giving their device an edge somehow, though they could have a better organised and filtered dataset, that would explain a lot of the additional data-centre capacity!”

“Maybe they also made you out, then gave you some sort of fake demonstration!” said the taller technician.

“I doubt it,” she said truthfully, “unless they are also faking all those posts from their trial groups too, also if they did then I’m retiring to Kansas and taking up knitting instead of spying.”

“OK, sorry Jean, for now we will go with Occam's razor..” Said Mathews to a nonchalant Jean.

“..The simplest explanation is probably the right explanation,” finished the tall technician. Jean was beginning to dislike this guy.

“What about that cheating son of a bitch, Doctor Bain?” said a third.

“Nothing we can do,” said Mathews, then thought. “But I will drop his name and system on the US Government blacklist which will prevent most government and private agencies from ever dealing with him, good luck getting him any funding when that's posted.”

That seemed to satisfy everyone.

* * *

“Yes, yes Derek, I don't care! Just get back to IBM and find out why they have cancelled the visit..”

Bain heard the dial-tone, had his assistant really just hung up on him? He slammed the phone down angrily and looked at his screen again and at the pictures of the Russian Ballet troupe wondering which three girls it was, and how the head of electronics managed such stamina at sixty years of age. Frustrated, the phone rang again.

“What NOW Derek!” he shouted, then stopped and listened, then checked the caller ID.

“The dean!” “..Wants to see me, now?” “..in his office?” “..Well I am very busy of course but if it's the dean.” The new caller had also hung up. This was too much!

Bain knew the dean was very excited yesterday about the additional funding the university was going to get, he had been to several of his presentations and gave the crowd his unfettered endorsement for the BAINCOMP system, which he had seen but basically hadn't got a clue what it did. To tell the truth the dean understood barely anything these days, also being a professor of Latin who last taught in the nineteen eighties was generally not the best qualification for anything relating to high technology.

Roger guessed he was going to ask how the IBM meeting will be conducted, and how the funds would be administered, of course Roger would push for a big pay raise after this, after all, if anyone deserved it, he did.

Derek's desk was empty when he passed his assistants office a few doors down, he fumed at the ungratefulness of some people, good help was so hard to get.

The dean's office was three buildings away, the whole university was a rabbit warren of buildings, scattered around the east of the town centre, the pouring rain did not help his mood, why couldn't this be done on the phone?

He got to the dean's office, wet and annoyed, and smiled at the secretary he had just spoken to, she frowned back and just said to her intercom. “Bain is here sir”, then, “go in he's expecting you”, she then ignored him.

Bain had been mentioned several times as a possible replacement for the dean when he finally retired, when he did, this old goat would be first out the door, Derek would be second!

“Dean, so pleased to see you…”

The dean slammed a letter down on the table in front of him. “What do you call this Bain!” he screamed to his face.

Roger was totally unprepared for this and picked up the letter and read.

US Government.. Blacklisted.. Oxford University.. Plagiarization and fraud!

“Why sir this must be some sort of mistake, I have no idea what it means..”

“It's no mistake, I checked the number and had my secretary contact IBM. They have cut off all ties with our computing department, as have several other highly influential companies, we’ve lost millions in funding! You're a disgrace to your department and you have brought the whole university's reputation into doubt. I want you out of your office this afternoon, security will be coming around to escort you back, you will take nothing when you leave. Then you will be hearing from our lawyers about terminating your contract, and don't forget those same lawyers wrote the UK law books!”

A security guard appeared at the door.

“Now get out!”

## The Diary of Mary Dietrich

The work progressed simultaneously on three fronts, converting the house and hanger into the new research centre, improving and expanding the new MOTHER system into new data-centres around the world, and of course the new science project.

While these were going on Alexa worked with Maria diligently going through their longer terms plans and strategies. They also discussed the diaries.

The diaries were written in an event-by-event, rather than a day-by-day style, and they turned out to be both eye opening, and terrifying at the same time. As she finished each book she couriered it to a document scanning service, that the history department recommended as reliable and discrete, and they were emailed to Maria for her to analyse.

Mary had been an economics theorist who did her masters at Chicago university in the early sixties, she worked as an accountant for a year after graduation, up until that point the diary had been pretty average, boys, families, her theories, and her lack of progress in getting a better job. The mystery of why she was talking about a life in Chicago still did not made sense to Alexa, then she read the next paragraphs and her mouth dropped open.

*12th June 1963: Not sure what to do. The office manager at the accounting firm disappeared a few days ago. Today, his body turned up in the river, and two police officers arrived with an IRS auditor and a seizure warrant. They took our main ledger and a whole pile of documents relating to it. One of the officers said I should probably look for a new job, as this accounting firm is just a money laundering operation for the Chicago outfit, basically the Mafia!*

The next entries were two weeks later.

*27th June 1963: The lawyers and a new manager came in today, they had the seizure warrants quashed, and all our paperwork was returned. They must think us girls in the office are deaf and blind, they were talking about payoffs and concrete shoes, we’re all scared. I need to get out of here, one of the girls told me you don't just leave the mafia, they will come and find you.*

*28th June 1963: New office manager told me to clear out the old managers office before he went home, he wanted to come in the next day and have it spick-and-span he said. I wasn't given an option. During the clean I found a hidden ledger behind the desk drawers, it details incomes from gambling, prostitution, extortion and bribes paid to local politicians, the mayor, police officers and even the senator. I’m in a dilemma. I can never tell them I found this as they would know I read it, and my life would be worth nothing. I hid it in my bag and took it home. My world just got very dangerous.*

*30th June 1963: I think I have a plan to get out of this, it seems in California they don't check the death certificates when re-issuing birth certificates, I spent the whole weekend at the library going through yearbooks for women my age their looks, their education their stature everything, and there is a Mary-Lou Hankins who matches me almost exactly* *except the degree, I have wrote a letter to them requesting a new birth certificate so I can get a passport, I don't know the exact procedure but it's a shot.*

*I shouldn't be doing this but I have also been working in my own time chasing the money trail in this ledger. It seems the manager has skimmed over forty thousand green-backs off the top of these funds, there is a key taped to the ledger, and a receipt for a down town bank. It's all in an account under his sister's name. Dare I do this? Is it stealing if it's been stolen twice already? But if I start a new life I must leave my old life completely, my house, my cat, my friends, my mother, my two brothers, my small savings, everything. They need to think I am dead. Anything out of place will get questions asked. I’m going to hide these diaries, nobody knows I keep them, I know I could be incriminating myself if they are found, but they are my whole world, also I know a place where they will be safe for a few months.*

The book ended abruptly after that. Alexa couldn't believe this, she must have told grandad sometime, a lie like this could not be hidden forever, or did he ever read the diaries? She ploughed on into the next one undeterred, it was like a paperback thriller!

*3rd September 1963: It's now two months after my death. I had my five minutes of fame and missed my own funeral. The blood, and evidence of a fight I left in my apartment, gave just enough credibility, and the police took it hook, line and sinker. I got one column inch in the Chicago tribune, speculating that I had been taken and probably murdered. Thankfully I wasn't important enough for anyone to follow it up.*

*In retrospect it was all quite easy, my California birth certificate, for Mary-Lou Hankins, came through two weeks after I ordered it, no questions, no nothing. There are so many loopholes in this country I can now see how people get away with so much, I’m certainly starting to see things a lot more clearly.*

*Wearing a wig and makeup and clothes from the thrift shop I took the key and receipt to the bank safe deposit the week before I disappeared. Apparently that is all that is required, I had a convincing story made up but they just looked at the key and receipt slip, gave me the box and left me alone with no questions asked. I felt so scared riding the bus to the edge of town with almost forty seven thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills in my bag. I doubted my trick of changing clothes, and riding the bus back as myself again fooled anybody watching, but I felt safer.*

*The next week I got my new ID and driver's licence. Scattered some menstrual blood I saved in a bottle a week back, knocked a few things over and left the house with the door and window unlocked. All I had was my special get-away backpack I had been preparing for the last two weeks. It had a small change of clothes and the money. I’d also kept plenty of one and five dollar bills so I did not look flash. I let Felix, my cat out as I couldn't let it die, hopefully nobody will notice. I took a lot of different buses on my way to Sacramento, and when I got there I enrolled in the economics class at California State University.*

The diaries continued, but a lot less interesting than before, of course she aced everything and got her degree in two years, however she deliberately answered several questions in the papers wrong so as to get an average degree and so not to get noticed. She grew her hair long and dressed and acted a lot different to the woman she had replaced, she finally got a decent accountant position in the Palo Alto research Center at the end of 1965.

“I went through all this,” said Maria, “there is very little details on her past life, her mother died six months later in an unrelated car accident, and both her older brothers lived into their sixties, you have currently fifteen cousins in the States, but it would be very difficult convincing anybody, as your grandmother did such a good job in faking her death, and it's probably not a good idea to make it known that she took the equivalent of nearly half a million dollars in 1963 money from the mafia!”

“I’m not sure I could be as brave as her in that position,” said Alexa.

“Oh she caused quite a splash. Before she faked her death, she mailed that ledger, minus the evidence of the stolen forty seven thousand dollars to the FBI. It's quite a famous ledger. It supposedly came from the old manager who was killed, allegedly before he died he put the letter into some sort of timed release. She took down a lot of bad guys and crooked politicians in Chicago.”

“That's amazing,” said Alexa.

“.. And not the end of it, she invested a lot of that money in tech stocks and property in her new location, she was probably worth ten times as much as your grandfather when they married. You still own several properties in Silicon Valley worth over five hundred million dollars.”

“Way to go grandma!” Alexa said smiling.

Alexa put the diaries away for a few weeks, while she concentrated on other stuff such as the business structures, and tax laws in various countries. Jen was right, Maria was an amazing teacher, and the subjects were fascinating, highlighting how the whole world tax structures seemed to be tailor made for legal tax evasion.

A few weeks later she found the entry where her grandma met her grandad.

*2nd March 1967: Met this Brit guy at the research centre today, you gotta love their accents! He came in to do the paperwork for another new patent he was filing. I think he's been here a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen him in accounts. He sounded just like Richard Burton, then we got to talking and he invited me out on a date! I of course said I would need to think about it, don't want to play too loose!*

*3rd March 1967: He came back today and asked me out again. I agreed so long as we went Dutch on the bill, and that he showed me how to use one of those new computer things everyone is getting excited about. I told him I only had a victor desktop calculator for my job and he laughed, but agreed anyway.*

*7th April 1967: Mike and I had our third date, he took me to see Doctor Zhivago at the movie theatre and then for a nice Italian, I let him pay as he insisted. If he only knew! He said tomorrow was Saturday and we could go into the Xerox lab and he would show me the computers and how they worked, really looking forward to that. He makes me feel really good, I hope he’s genuine.*

*13th April 1967: finally went around to his house in Southgate. It seems he was quite a rising star at the university and with the Xerox company he’s only twenty two and he owns* *a house there, he even had one of those new RCA eighteen inch color TVs and we watched some science fiction TV show he was a fan of, he even cooked us some chilli. Yes I could definitely get used to Mike.*

Alexa continued reading about the ups and downs of the relationship from her grandmother's point of view. It was fascinating seeing it from a woman's perspective compared to what her grandfather had told her. She skipped through some parts about money and investing as Maria could fill in those gaps and got to where they got married.

*13th June 1968: we had a small wedding with friends, his mum and dad flew over from England and stayed for a few days, they had very strong German accents as the family had come over as refugees from Denmark, when the war started, I had to lie to him that I was estranged from my family but he accepted it without question. It was a lovely day and I became Mary-Lou Dietrich and moved in with him after our short holiday with his parents down in San Diego. I really need to get a passport now my name has changed. It will be so much easier.*

Alexa couldn't believe this, she wanted to get to the part where she told her grandfather about her old life and identity.

She continued through the diaries getting to the 1970’s, by this time Mary was managing both his, and her investments, she almost ran the accounting area at the Parc site and had a lot of advice to give him about maximising the contracts in his favour especially with patents. They were still both in their mid-twenties, and both were millionaires many times over.

They both had the same moral standpoint and both attended some anti-war rallies in Stanford during the peak of the Vietnam war demonstrations at the end of 1971. Mike, who was a pacifist, even tried to prevent his patents being used by the military. He had a big argument with one of the vice presidents there, and was sacked from both the university, and the Xerox company a week later. He was issued a deportation notice to leave the country by the immigration Department a few days after that, and he had two weeks to comply. Mary described it.

*13th January 1972: The deportation notice Mike got today came as a shock but not a surprise, Nixon was coming down hard on the protests, and he wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last foreigner to get kicked out. I will be sad to leave my friends, as will Mike. I won't be liquidating any of the investments here, as we both believe there is still some exponential growth potential. Mike's betting most of the current computer firms won't be the big players in the next ten or twenty years, so I will be doing some spread investments in the startups.*

*I have set up an offshore company in Bermuda to manage the investments over here and the UK. I’m getting my good friend Tasha to audit them and do the returns in the US, I will unfortunately have to find someone in the UK while I learn their accounting laws. I will delay liquidating any bigger assets until I am more comfortable.*

The diary got a bit boring during the move and house hunting. She bought several properties for rentals in Bristol, Bath and nearby Swindon, but there seemed no real places to invest in stocks, British power and industry in the nineteen seventies was starting on its slow decline. There was more and more discussion in her diary about economics, who was controlling the money, and who was pulling the strings. Finally there was a small entry on the discussion around financing John's new company and others on the several new friends they met.

“Maria,” said Alexa just after breakfast one morning when the guys had gone downstairs to finish packing, “did you also sense a change in Mary’s demeanour when she got to England? It almost went full tilt toward conspiracy theories, about big cabals controlling governments, and stock markets. In those last few entries I’m pretty sure she almost accuses one armament company of starting the Vietnam war. I wonder what triggered that paranoia?”

“There is not one point I can put my finger on,” Maria answered, “but there have been crumbs in the other diaries you scanned, where an investment that should have gone up but went down, for example. I think there is a lot of research she was doing off-line that she is not talking about here. Ledgers and documents were still pretty easy to fake in those days and there were not many central repositories to cross-check one state's business against another. I only have summaries from scanned archives, so I expect she found it even more frustrating. She is going down some rabbit hole though, I wonder where it's leading?”

Maria had not said this, but worryingly, she also had experienced the same things that Mary had described several times, times where a company that was doing well, collapsed or was bought out, or in one case it was regulated out of the market and then bought up. In all cases her analysis came back to government, or regulatory bodies, interfering just long enough for the company's cash flow to dry up.

If buttons were being pushed, they were not being recorded, so as in all cases like this she needed to follow the money. She needed to research the companies or individuals that were gaining, and then follow their financial trails. The first part was easy, but the second part, not so. Unlike hacker's in the movie, she couldn't just break into banks through their firewalls unless she found a vulnerability in the code; Yes, there were plenty of those but there were usually easier vectors she could use once she had done a lot of research on the target.

“Changing the subject a bit, the guys might need some help moving into their new lab today. We have come to a natural stop for forty-eight hours while the Lab8 facility makes the next test variation. I have one fabrication machine reserved for our exclusive use, and I had the design dialled in and ready to go. Anyway, why don't you join the fun, I doubt they will be talking anything technical today.”

* * *

The last few months had been crazy and the pace of the work up at the house was unprecedented. The day they took over, and to everyone's shock, teams of builders started arriving to work on the alterations. Maria organised ten different teams with eight separate projects. The changes had all strangely sat stamped as approved on the council servers for several years if anyone cared to check. Apart from the new walkway none of the alterations changed the character of the building from the outside, in fact the outside improved considerably.

Some areas, like the basement and hanger, became decidedly modern with additional reinforcing, better power and networking. The hangers mezzanine floor was reinforced, and all the rooms refurbished to modern standards and redecorated to become labs, workshops and test fabrication facilities.

Most of the refurbished labs and workshops sat empty waiting on the expansion of the science teams and their next projects. Only Hardy's lab and the new precision engineering workshop area underneath the mezzanine area were in use. It was a hive of activity as they relocated the labs.

* * *

Albert smiled as he watched them trying to drive the forklift before putting them out of their misery.

“OK, I'm guessing you want some of that equipment shifted from downstairs, Mike used to call me to do that as he couldn't work the forklift out either. If it was really heavy I would get in an ex army mate to help, but Simon here is pretty strong and should be enough.”

“Thanks Albert,” said Jen, “we unhooked a few of the units but a couple of them are not on wheels and weigh too much, there's a truck coming in about three hours but we don't really want them going down or even seeing the laboratory area.”

With Albert on the forklift the group made short work of moving as the lift was built specifically for the special forklift to get in and out with a big pallet or rack.

Once everything was in the normal workshop area, a bigger truck backed into the workshop and Albert transferred everything to it. He then strapped the forklift to the truck's hydraulic platform and he and the two moving guys took the truck slowly to the mansion and into the newly converted hanger.

The new lab room, which they had finished painting only the night before, was one of the big rooms on the mezzanine floor. The inside of the hanger was unrecognisable from the old, everything clean, painted and the big open area empty of everything, and much more like the aircraft hanger it was actually built for. The truck drove straight into the open area through one of the four industrial roller doors then backed up to the new goods lift and unloaded.

The work went on into the evening, some of the household staff stayed around to help, complaining there had not really been too much work until today. Cook also helped by making pizzas and garlic bread, and everybody ate, sat around some grubby plastic dining tables, chairs and sofas left over from the workmen. Sharon eyed them with horror!

Most people disappeared soon after food, Jen was the last, wanting to stay another hour to finish connecting some things. Hardy found her asleep on one of the sofas the next morning.

The guys got straight back to work, joined by their two new research assistants, Daisy and Steve, who Hardy had headhunted from this year's crop of physics PhD graduates and who had both started three weeks earlier. The atmosphere was electric and all five of them could feel they were closing in for the kill.

* * *

Alexa walked through the new tastefully made glass covered walkway connecting the ground floor of the house to the new labs and workshops in the hanger, the heated floor making the passage warm and dry despite the rain hitting the glass outside. It was now late October, the evenings were drawing in and the nights were getting colder.

The walkway entered the bottom of the old hanger building where there was now a large well-lit open area for staff with a couple of nice sofas, modern tables and chairs, and tea and coffee making facilities.

There was a tasteful sign which said 'Dietrich Research Centre', and another sign next to it saying 'Labs 1-4' pointing up a Large staircases and an elevator which led off from here to the mezzanine floor.

Alexa looked around the comfortable area and saw another sign saying, 'Workshops' pointing straight through.

She walked up the stairs rather than take the lift, and through the glass door to the one lab currently in use, it clicked and slid open as she approached. The whole team was there, Jen, Hardy and Simon, Daisy and Steve.

“And the big surprise is?” Said Alexa to Hardy.

All five guys stood around a five metre long laboratory table. Cables ran everywhere, across test jigs, in and out of various test equipment, and then as a big bunch which converged into a trunk of wires and disappeared into a rack full of flashing lights. Several flat screens hinged out of the rack at various places showing tables, graphs and code.

“Ta Da!” Said Jen, pointing at the graph.

“Oh good,” said Alexa, “you guys have invented a scatter graph! I’m pretty sure Microsoft Excel did that thirty years ago!”

Jen and the two new guys grinned.

“See that red line?” said Simon, pointing at the red horizontal line in the middle of the graph, “see those green points above it?”

Alexa nodded to both.

“Those are electrons which have come out of the quantum vacuum, being attracted to the conducting substrate and running power into our smart load. We have nearly twenty microamps.”

Alexa hadn’t a clue what Simon was talking about, but from his demeanour she guessed it was good, and smiled. Daisy could not contain herself, her hands were clapping and she was bobbing up and down on her toes, her white lab coat flapping, “I can't believe I am seeing this! It's a closed loop, we are not over-unity yet but.. oh gosh!”

“What Daisy is saying,” said Hardy, smiling, “is that the science seems to work!”

Simon added, “and now we will all have something to tell our grand kids, we were here for the birth of zero-point energy.”

The graph started to increase in density and go higher. All five of them moved to the different screens and stations to check. Alexa wondered if there was an issue.

“Nothing to worry about children,” said Maria, “just re-tuning the emitter frequency, I just got the results off the mass spectrometer, and the density of the potassium is fourteen points off.”

The graph scale adjusted and the scattering of dots became a solid line.

“Wow,” said Hardy, “whatever you did Maria is giving us nearly forty six milliamps, that's a thousand times more!”

“Two thousand three hundred and four point three, to be a bit more exact,” she said, “still only oh point eight percent theoretical.”

“What if we fabricate the next one with the other two conducting substrates?” said Simon.

“Whoa, temperature going up to thirty six, forty two,” said Steve, “wait stabilising, at forty seven, still good.”

Alexa was fascinated by the vibe and excitement in the room from the five people, it was like the bridge of a navy ship that had just sighted the enemy. Everyone seemed to forget she was there, each was looking at the whiteboard or some instrument and talking to each other or Maria. All that was except Hardy, who looked to be thinking hard. Suddenly a smile crept onto his face and held up his hand to silence everyone.

“Maria, can you please bring up the spectrum analyser results for the substrate absorptions,” he said.

The monitor next to Hardy changed to a spectral absorption line. Simon and Hardy Studied it, while Jen adjusted the electronic load and power meter to a higher current setting.

Jen looked over to Hardy after a few minutes of silence, “what you thinking Hardy?”

“Just a feeling, but.. Maria, can you add a second frequency about one percent higher than ‘Q’ and slowly sweep it up?”

“Interesting,” said Maria.

They all watched the current rise, one hundred milliamps, three hundred, eight hundred, sixteen hundred, forty nine..

POP! Something in the middle of a bunch of wires flashed brightly, and a wisp of smoke came from what was left of it. The current and graph traces everyone had been pointing at dropped to nil.

“Three hundred degrees, she's toast!” said Steve.

“What happened,” said Alexa who had been observing this play between the guys but not really understanding any of it.

“I think we have some funny harmonics at play, due to the element mismatch on two of the substrate layers,” said Hardy. “Think of a trampoline, with one person bouncing on it we get a constant height, but get two people bouncing at different rates, and at some point one person is going hit the a reinforcing harmonic, bounce a lot higher and fly off!”

“The maths doesn't say this,” said Maria confused, “give me a few minutes to run through the new data and build a new model.”

“This is insane,” said Daisy, “I could never go back to doing science without Maria, ever!”

“Flattery will get you everywhere Miss Chan!” said Maria, making everybody grin.

“OK, before you get back to this and while Maria is busy..” Alexa started.

“I’m not busy silly, remember AI!..” Chirped Maria.

“OK while Maria is not busy, but you guys are waiting for an answer, what happened there? I assume we don't want to create an energy generator that explodes every time you use it.”

“Oh that!” said Jen, “that was just a controlled destruction, the fact we just peaked a cell at over two hundred percent of the theoretical max means the maths is wrong but possibly in a good way, though that we need to understand why, so this is double-good and double-cool!”

“What Jen said,” said Hardy. “I know you want a timeline Alexa, when Maria comes back with the analysis of the data we should be able to get some prototype cells fabricated and do some final tests if all goes well we can assemble some into a unit.”

“Done,” chimed Maria, causing Daisy and Steve's jaws to drop! “I won't go into the model while Alexa is here, but team meeting straight afterwards and we can do the tests on the current units! If all goes well the next batch will be good, may even be enough to finish the paper with.”

Several fists bumped and everybody looked really happy. The next few months should be interesting indeed.

## An Infinite Spark of Hope

After staring out of the window for the last twenty minutes watching the mid-December sun disappear below the trees, Alexa was ready. It wasn't her big day, but the preparations had been exacting for everyone, and she felt just as much anticipation as the rest.

She walked down the main stairs from her first floor shared office. She smiled at Sharon who sat behind the desk at the registration area, and Elaine, who had come down especially for the event and sat at the next desk. Both ladies were currently booking in a small line of people, and both looked and oozed professionalism. Alexa walked on through the large doors into the dining room and conservatory, skirting around where the presentation was set up. A large stage with four chairs and a massive five hundred inch laser projector screen setup behind it. Twenty rows of chairs were three quarters full, and some journalists were already talking into cameras and making sure their note taking systems and Dictaphone software were all working correctly. Groups of invited dignitaries, friends and colleagues, including a few of their classmates and professors, were also present. Others unfortunately could not be here, including Chantel and Pierre who declined due to Pierre’s increasingly bad health, and Dillon who had been picked up by a Hollywood agent and was now filming another pilot TV Series.

She walked to the seats at the back which were reserved for the other company staff, friends and family. Jen's Mum and Dad were there looking proud, as was Simon’s mother and sister, all the new technical recruits, and all of Spence's team. She took a spare seat by Sarah and John.

John leaned over. “Thank you for the invite Alexa, we both followed the news reports just like everyone else and still can't believe we had some small involvement in it. When you called the board meeting and turned up at Rosche out of the blue two months ago I simply assumed you wanted to sell your shares. Then you floored us all when you plugged one of those units we had been making into our network, gave it your highly privileged Rosche credentials, and then proceeded to knock us dead with what it actually was. At that point it all finally clicked what the possibilities were, what a genius your grandfather was, and how right he was about you. You would have been wasted as a historian Alexa.”

“We use Mike for everything now,” said Sarah, “he lets us push the cutting edge, comes up with the problems and solutions before you have even had time to look. But this!” she waved to the stage, “I guess we are just not thinking big enough or looking into all the possibilities.”

“It was a nice touch naming your AI Mike you know,” said Alexa. “And you did also build a lot of the hardware for the system even if you did not know it. Of course, as a shareholder in the company I also could not have you going into the next ten years without a little more competitive advantage than the competition.” She smiled.

“As for the possibilities, we have been looking at all this a little bit longer than you, the world is going to move rapidly after this, and I think you need to be prepared for a bit of a roller coaster ride in new science and technology when it does. But if you want a little advice, think big, think even bigger than this. With Mike you have the power of every electronics research department in the world in your hands, you just need the ideas and the hands on skills the AI doesn’t. Of course you also have the backing of a certain friendly local entrepreneur if you think it's too much to handle.”

The results had now been reproduced by nine international universities and CERN. Simon, Jen, Hardy and Maria had run the experiments on the final prototype units and authored the paper meticulously, there was not one un-dotted i or uncrossed t. Of course several flawless papers had appeared since the new TEAM-A system AI’s had been released, but perfect papers with boring results were still boring. To ensure the paper was properly supported, ten of the experimental units had then been delivered to these institutions the day the paper was published.

There was initially little reaction. The public and academia, used to exaggerated press releases, and tabloid click-bait chose to ignore it as the same. The paper was titled “A pathway to clean energy production from the quantum vacuum,” It was written both for the layman and the scientist, the two pages of mathematics, numerous graphs, diagrams and photographs, all having a well translated human readable part and hyperlinks that could be drilled down on if more details was required, the paper would set the standards for clarity for many years to come.

Then the first experimental reproduction of the result came from MIT, sensational headlines and numerous talking heads followed. People analysed the paper, both praising it, and saying why it was pseudo-science, and could never lead to commercial power production, or even in a few cases could lead to the end of the world. Maria of course monitored all the channels for them, using both herself, and various aliases, putting down the false science and explaining the good science, it worked to an extent.

Then came more positive results a few days later from CERN, then Cambridge, then Stanford, then Bonn and Tokyo helped by a perfectly translated German and Japanese versions, then all the others followed, the world took notice. Maria fielded all the calls and emails in her usual brilliant manner.

Finally at the allotted time, and after everyone had been seated, the three humans got on the stage, and two of them sat down. It had been decided beforehand that they would all have a turn speaking, but the other two were not so used to dealing with such events, and Hardy was both a pro, and the most well known, so would do the majority of the presentation.

Hardy walked to the front and the crowd went quiet. “Friends, colleagues and esteemed members of the press and public. Welcome to the Dietrich Research Centre.” He started in a loud clear voice.

“By now you have all seen or read that all ten worldwide institutions we sent our test apparatus to have reproduced our experimental results and verified our conclusions. The team that wrote this paper are on stage with me now, the rest of the team, who we could not have done this without are either present in the audience over there,” he pointed to the six technicians at the back including Daisy and Steve, “or watching live from our sister research establishments in America, India and Australia.”

Hardy continued, pointing to Simon.

“Doctor Simon Jones, who has been key in working out the chemical processes and fabrication.” Simon got up and bowed as Hardy turned to Jen.

“Miss Jen Cummings who has diligently been working through the experimental physics and mathematics with me,” Jen got up and bowed.

“And me, Hardy Johnson.” Hardy paused, looking at the empty seat.

“But there is a fourth author of the paper, one who sense-checked every line of maths, physics, chemistry, ran, monitored and analysed every byte of experimental data, and fielded every communication between us and you. She was every bit a part of the team as all the people physically here.”

Hardy looked to the screen and Maria's avatar came up in the bottom corner behind the empty fourth desk.

“Please meet Maria!”

Maria’s avatar waved. “Hello.”

Hardy continued. “For any of you living under a rock these past few months, our sister company has been working in secret for the past several years on an AI system focussed on scientific research and development. The original founder of the company Doctor Mike Dietrich, who was extensively published, and who this research centre is named after, made several breakthroughs before his death. The new CEO formed a team of scientists and engineers to continue this work, and a few months ago pushed through a trial program to several local medical institutions and universities, which soon went global.”

“The result you see here is what happens when you allow an AI to amplify the human brain. The timeline for this project is staggering even for me to believe, for the first line of maths was derived in June of this year. Let me repeat that in case someone misquotes it, June of this year, six months ago, not years.”

“So let me get to the paper. As this is mainly a presentation for laymen and laywomen, we will simplify it somewhat, and I will ask you to leave any questions until the end. So I will have Jen come up, introduce herself and explain what we have achieved here.”

Jen got up and moved to the front, Hardy touched her shoulder reassuringly. Jen gave a well researched five minute presentation of the science, one of her old physics professors decided the end of her five minutes was a good time to ask a question about the strong nuclear force preventing this. She stopped him dead with a hand before Hardy could get up.

“Maria can you put up the bonding energy chart, I think it's the second one in the paper,” the correct chart came up, “that's the one, thanks,” she said. “Professor, if you look at the first kink in the chart,” it conveniently highlighted as Maria was already aware what to do, “the strong nuclear force does not affect the electron in the standard model, and the frequency we are using will only produce fermions. No doubt as you are aware under Pauli's exclusion principle no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state.” It was quite an impressive performance, but Jen was not the same student she was six months previous, Hardy, Simon and even Maria could see she had progressed in leaps and bounds.

To his credit her professor said, “my bad Jennifer, it looks like the student has become the teacher, I probably should keep my mouth shut for the rest of the presentation!” several people laughed.

Simon got up and went through the various doping and frequency trials, again calling upon Maria who did her very best to keep sub-sentient. A few more inappropriately timed questions were asked and answered without problems.

A photograph then came up on the monitor, it was a box the size of a toaster with two wires in it. It was a new picture, not in the paper, nor mentioned in the presentation briefing and several journalists immediately took notice.

“Some of you may be wondering what that picture is behind me that Maria just put up. Well, just like every other decadent capitalist company in the world, we do intend to make a small profit from this, but we can only make a small profit if we have something that works!”

Jen and Hardy got up next to Simon, there was a little five second discussion then both Simon and Jen sat down.

“OK, looks like it's up to me then. The device you see behind me is the prototype of a commercial two hundred watt power generation system that requires no fuel to run.”

Several people shuffled in their chairs and a lot of cameras came out, the press stood to attention.

“Two hundred watts may not sound like a lot but there are a few points I would like to make. Firstly, and I think I may have mentioned it already, this device produces excess electrons from the quantum vacuum and it uses NO FUEL, nada, not a drop, no sunlight, no heat, no wind, no nothing, and like normal batteries you can stack these together in series and parallel to produce different voltage and currents.”

“Secondly it is designed to run twenty four seven for its entire lifetime, which we expect to be a minimum of thirty years. We are not too sure about this yet, but you can guarantee Simon is working on the chemistry, and Jen and I are working on the physics, and of course Maria is checking everything.”

“Thirdly there is no pollution of any kind, the unbalancing system produces a small amount of excess heat about ten watts in this unit, but no CO2, no radiation, no noise and nothing detectable in the radio frequencies. You could basically sleep with one in your bed for the next ten years and the only side effect would be your toes would be a bit warm! And of course it cannot be weaponised, there is no version or variation of this technology that could give you more than an electric shock.”

“Lastly and most importantly, cost. This device can be mass produced, and was designed for mass production. The prototype behind me uses twenty of the demonstration units that were sent to your various institutions, there are no special chemicals or metals required that can't be found in a normal microchip or school chemistry lab. Everything is patented but the licence to produce these units will be only three percent of the unit cost, and the unit cost should come down to well under two hundred US dollars once mass production starts.”

“There will also be no restriction on who can buy a licence. Maria will provide full technical support for all manufacturers that participate. We do only have forty prototype units, ten are going to the institutions that helped test our results, the other thirty will be allocated to companies who apply, based on their ability to manufacture and environmental record. We of course expect by this time next year there will be thousands if not millions in circulation. At the end of ten years the licence fee will be waived and we will make the design open source.”

That got a shocked reaction from some of the people in the crowd.

“We of course are Scientists not business people, however our parent company along with Maria are excellent business people, they will be handling all this non-science-stuff, while we get back to the fun stuff.”

Simon walked behind the screen and came back with a tray with a dark black cloth on it, he put it on the centre-most table and took the cloth off, the unit in the picture was on the tray with two wires going to an old style filament bulb. Four similar units were unveiled with less ceremony around the presentation room.

“Oh, and did I say, we have already made some!”

Several people looked stunned.

Maria had sold all Alexa's stocks in anything linked to non-renewable energy companies back in August. In October, when the first milliamps of power trickled out of the clunky test unit, she offloaded everything to do with any energy production, except a couple of fusion companies she thought stood a chance, then she bought shares in the companies she expected to benefit. There were no moral quandaries, she just worked on facts and logic, and she was a businesswoman too.

“So with our small presentation complete, I will now open the floor to questions.”

The questions flooded in. Several people had left already to ensure they were the ones to get the first story out.

A man from the BBC asked if any were going to be manufactured in the UK, Simon pointed to the prototype box on the table and said it was manufactured by a company here in Bath called Rosche-Dynamics Limited and the power chip fabricated in a company in Swindon called Fab8, and there would be no restriction imposed on where manufacturing would take place.

On timescales Jen said, this was up to the licensee’s, they would obviously want to reassure themselves of all the claims, so undoubtedly there would be delays with some, especially if the devices are embedded with other technologies such as batteries.

On the question of can it power my house or car, the answer was yes with a but, the house would be OK but like solar panels it would be fairer to export the excess power back into the grid. However, electric cars require large amounts of instantaneous power which the current device could not provide, but they could provide some self charging ability for the existing batteries if weight and space constraints were overcome, though several of these devices could charge the car completely over the course of a night, and with advances, who knows.

A reporter asked about how this would affect oil and gas producers. To which Simon replied, “probably badly.” There was still currently a need for oil for lubricants and plastics, but the need for diesel and petrol would slowly diminish over time, he said it was one of the reasons he got on board with this project was to help the environment and make the world that little bit cleaner. Hardy sensibly added that there would be a long ramp up to peak production and there were still four or five years before supply exceeded demand, and possibly longer to replace legacy infrastructure, this was plenty of time to allow a business model to adapt, and those that didn't would go the way of the Kodak camera company.

The professor who interrupted Jen, asked what were the implications of the excess electron production. This was a good question, and one on all their minds at the start, but measurements now confirmed there was no mass change from the device, Hardy popped an equation on the screen and highlighted a term which satisfied the professor.

With the question from the CNBC news guy, about what they would do now the project was over, Hardy said the team will stay together and work in the research centre here but re-invest most of their energies into a few new challenges. But with the power of AI systems soon to be everywhere, expect big breakthroughs to happen at every discipline not just science and engineering. He also referred them to the recent breakthrough in room temperature superconductors which were also achieved from a company with an AI system.

“Everything except songwriting,” chirped Alexa quietly.

One person asked Jen how she could go from a graduate physics student to a possible Nobel prize winner in six months, she said it was the hardest six months of her life, but she was in the same room those six months with the three finest brains on the planet, and with Hardy and Maria's help she was easily able to understand the maths and physics and help push the project on with them, Maria was probably the best one on one tutor a person could possibly have.

A few questions were directed at Maria, including the inevitable “Are you Sentient.”

Hardy recognised the serious questions were probably over and concluded the presentation by saying all calls for more information and licencing should be directed to Maria, at the email address on the screen, an email address appeared on the screen, he then invited people up to see or video the demonstration units, there were four other units around the room if it was too busy on the stage.

Alexa sat at the back for the entire presentation and question and answer session, then got up, shook a few peoples hands, hugged a few others then left. She was still anonymous for the time being, but questions were being asked, and her anonymity would not continue for much longer. She walked back through the security door, which having one of Maria's sensors above it, opened automatically. Maria knew all the staff implicitly, who to let in, to where and, mostly, what everyone was doing. Alexa had complete confidence in the building's security.

* * *

The presentation and news of the working physical devices was of course top of all the news broadcasts and influencer videos. The talking heads again either praised or criticised it depending upon their agenda, audience, or who their sponsor was, the negative ones struggling to make any headway against the vast majority of positive ones.

Maria received nineteen requests for licences from six different countries within the first forty-eight hours, further requests and technical questions continued to flood in until by the end of the month Maria had nearly two hundred. She sorted them by their track record in manufacturing, time to market, and environmental policies, moved any companies that did not meet Alexa's or her new moral guidelines to the bottom of the list and bumped up those that would be adversely affected by the changes such as those manufacturing solar panels to the top. The first test units began dispatching to licensees by the end of the week.

The world of manufacturing and production were currently scrambling to work out the effects of the new technology on their businesses; share prices fluctuated wildly in some sectors, all fully anticipated by Maria and enabling her to make considerable gains in her portfolio's.

Calls to legislate the technology soon started to appear from politicians egged on by powerful people with vested interests in oil and gas. But governments moved slowly, the timing of the announcements and presentation was of course deliberate so that it was weeks before the first parliamentary or senate debate could occur. Before that first debate forty licences would be signed, technical specifications released and sample hardware delivered to businesses in fourteen countries. The cat was truly out of the bag.

* * *

It was nearly three weeks after the launch event. Alexa walked from her house to the Research Centre as she did most mornings, wearing her thickest coat to protect her from the still dark cold January morning. Rain was forecast for the afternoon, hopefully she would be home by then, if not Maria would drive the car up. The “Benedict house” sign had now been moved back to the main road, behind a new, and unfortunately required, automatic double gate. The sign below it now read “Dietrich Research Centre” with “Authorised Visitors Only” and a phone number to call for access below.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“The final diary is certainly interesting,” said Maria into her ear-pods. “My research doesn't see one central organisation like Mary saw, but what I am seeing are four cabals in competition. Of course it has been thirty five years since Mary died, and her final diary was never found in the wreckage, why she was flying to Paris and not back to London is also a mystery we may never solve.”

“So you think the crash was an accident?”

“There are no indications it was anything more than a structural failure as reported, although only parts of the wreckage were recovered, and the black box was never found.”

“So are we safe?”

“Tricky question, and I can't really answer it as I am missing many pieces of the puzzle. All four of these organisations were definitely blind-sided by your announcement, their public facing companies are big investors in armaments, banking and petrochemicals, and one of those has just taken a major hit. I can guess questions are being asked, and they will ultimately link this with us and try and exert influence. The fact is we need to tread a lot more carefully especially as they can buy and sell political favours in most geopolitical areas including the UK.”

“These organisations are unfortunately well protected and I am having a hard time getting information, the inner circles, it seems, are very paranoid about IT. We do have the channels open still in the NSA, and I am treading very lightly with my monitoring. I have gotten some information on what they know, unfortunately it is not a lot, but more worryingly there are signs of cabal activity at the higher levels there too. I think they have the power to act against us any time, but they need more information as we are still an enigma to them, a very public and well liked one. The attempts to get access to our systems have gone up a thousand fold since the announcement, and unfortunately I expect physical penetration attempts soon, that's why I have developed and deployed those newer drones and cameras.”

Maria paused, “Ironically it may be safer for you, and the company to step further out into the light.”

Maria's statements about physical safety worried Alexa more than anything else. The physical safety of her friends and employees was something she was not prepared to compromise.

“Thanks Maria, I know you are doing your best here, and if there is any way to deflect these guys attention away from us we should do it.” She sighed heavily, “I suppose I'd better start brushing up on my CEO presentation and people skills.”

She walked into the Research Centre up the stone stairs, through the imposing double doors into reception, which was never manned unless they were expecting visitors. Jen was waiting, a little more worldly and mature but still the same girl Alexa knew.

“Hey sis!” said Jen, giving her a small hug. Jen sometimes slept overnight in one of the spare rooms if she’d been working late, Maria didn't discourage the practice as she knew it was sometimes necessary. She always kept a four bedded room free for girls and another for boys if required, managing the bookings as required.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for months.” Jen said.

“Me too,” said Alexa, “when Maria woke me this morning I wanted to drive here immediately, but she said you were just getting in the shower so I decided to walk. You ready?”

There would be little activity until at least eight thirty, staff tended to start and work later in winter. The two companies had now been merged in to just the Dietrich Research Centre, they had thirty eight staff here at Benedict house and another ninety at their other research centres. The push now was to get their AI system to as many schools, colleges and universities as possible around the world. It was a first step, but nobody could think of a better goal than pushing education and research.

The two girls walked through the security doors on the ground floor of the main house into the old TEAM-A work area, now just called AI Research and Development, and turned into the first lab. Walking past the empty workstations, science stations, and electronics benches of the open plan area, the girls continued through into one of the restricted server rooms, being two of only eight people currently allowed access.

“I’ve not been down here for weeks since Spence and Allison started the installation,” Alexa said to Jen as they both walked through the cool room, the ten servers, storage racks, fans, and a million blinking LEDs, contrasting with the eerie neatness, and silence in the rest of the house. At the back of the room, and not that prominent, was another double metal door. This door had a sign next to it saying “Access To Switching Room” and “No Entry at any time”, someone had also added “Beware of the Tigers!” below it, they both grinned, IT staff had weird senses of humour. There was no button or key to enter but as they walked up to it the doors slid open into a normal sized lift, one you could have found in any office. This lift also had no buttons or indicators, just the normal AI sensor, which was now fitted everywhere in the house and grounds, except for private areas.

When both girls had stepped in, the doors shut and it went down three levels, opening into a quiet eight by ten metre room. In the middle of the room were two plinths, almost the same as Maria's back at the house, but with vastly improved connectivity.

On top of each plinth was a black cube.

“How are they?” said Alexa, both girls slightly concerned by the lack of sound and light from them.

“Why don't you ask them yourself..” Maria said happily.

“April, Helena. I would like you both to meet Auntie Alexa, and Auntie Jen!”

# Book 2: Singularity

*In technology, the singularity describes a hypothetical future where technology growth is out of control and irreversible. A period where intelligent and powerful technologies will radically and unpredictably transform our reality.*

## Blind Sided

“Were we blind-sided?” said Mathews in a resigned voice from behind his coffee mug. “It's the question I keep asking myself over and over again.”

Jean, the target of his friendly tirade, was sitting on the other side of his utilitarian government desk, hugging her own mug of the bitter coffee. Mathews propensity for leaving his window open meant the room was a good deal colder than the normally balmy temperatures in the rest of the building, and the heat from her mug was far more satisfying than its contents.

Jean looked around the very familiar spartan battleship grey room, the two black filing cabinets she knew were empty except for the one top drawer, the large old fashioned wall clock, the whiteboard with today's date the third of March 2026 written on the top, the neatly arranged folders on his desk, the single large monitor, keyboard and mouse on the desk. She then looked at the man attired in his usual camo fatigues wearing in big letters ‘Mathews’ on the breast like a badge of honour. Jean was similarly attired and tagged. She felt no real need to wear her black business suit and she felt the military garb differentiated her as someone who actually worked for a living rather than pushing a desk. She sat there seemingly relaxed, but her thoughts were actually as distant, and as muddled as his.

Mathews shifted position and the squeak from his chair brought Jean back to attention, her eyes meeting his. “We saw a lot of this activity play out last year,” he continued, “and now, only a few months after I made the call, the world seems to be in an AI meltdown.”

The squeaking of his chair continued for a few seconds until he also became aware of it. He frowned then stopped moving and the silence of the room returned, both heads now turned to the sound of the ticking clock on the wall and both people smiled. Mathews finally decided to take a sip of the coffee he had also been holding for the last five minutes, his dark eyes closed and opened, then his posture relaxed some, “and yet nowhere in all this are we seeing any concrete signs of sentience, or is that some sort of ruse as well?”

Jean could tell that Mathews was in a bit of a dilemma, still trying to understand if the perceived failure of the project he had taken over last year laid with him or not. The once bustling operations area of the NSA’s Cheshire-Cat project was shut down and silent pending a technical evaluation. The hundreds of new ‘AI signals’ it was detecting daily made it basically untenable, and Mathews had finally made the call to shut the operation down. The area was now a ghost town of empty workstations, with a skeleton staff of three analysts reviewing the data and logs and seeing if anything could be saved. From what they could tell it didn’t look promising, and both Jean and Mathews expected reassignment in the next few weeks.

Through Mathews monologue Jean just smiled, content to listen and sipping her coffee. They were good enough friends that a few moments of silence every now and then from either of them did not feel awkward.

She had specifically wanted to talk to Mathews in private because out of the blue, two days ago, she had a request from Alexa Martins asking if it would be possible for them to meet. The message came as a shock to her and worried her somewhat. Alexa Martins was the woman of the moment and one of the richest and influential people in the world, there could only be one reason why she wanted the meeting and that was because of the AI unit of theirs she ‘appropriated’ last July.

But it didn't feel right. The meeting invite she received was cordial, almost polite. Alexa would be in California in five weeks to give a TED lecture to a small audience of students and faculty at Stanford University. She would also be touring several research facilities for which the press and forums were having a speculation field day with rumours about everything from brain implants, working self-driving cars all the way to faster than light travel!

“I had an email from Alexa Martins asking to meet,” said Jean casually.

By coincidence, or poor timing, Mathews had just taken another sip of his coffee and choked as it went down the wrong way, spitting some out over his desk and clothing. “She what!” he shouted, rocking forward from his previously slouched posture, and picking up a folder marked “top secret” to shake off the excess coffee. It was totally out of character for the unflappable Mathews and for some reason Jean found it funny.

“She must know it was me who was in Oxford last year and who stole their AI unit.” Jean continued unfazed. She had took a day to think over the request and what to do, and she needed Mathews advice. “I wasn't sure what to do, the request came in through my private messenger application on an address nobody except you, my mum and a few other close school and army friends have. It was very polite but unspecific, just requesting a talk.”

She paused, while Mathews continued to rid himself of excess coffee.

She continued, “you know apart from the scary science and technology they possess, I just don't sense anything bad from this girl or her company. From everything I have seen and heard she is nothing but straight, honest and intelligent, the company's whole security consists of an old woman who man's the security gate during office hours. I honestly cannot for the life think of why she would want to see me, unless she’s spent the last six months learning Kung Fu and wants to kick my ass!”

Mathews laughed at that, popping the now dry but smudged, top secret folder back on top of another less wet pile and reaching for his coffee again.

Jean continued, “remember the four Indian programmers?” Mathews nodded unnecessarily. “Well one of them, Geeta Singh, applied for a working visa and is now working in LA at another one of those AI startups that are springing up like weeds. Anyway I contacted her three weeks ago asking her some follow-on questions, which I said were part of her visa enquiry. I asked her about their open source code, you know the code we found in the AI unit we appropriated?”

Mathews nodded, he remembered that day well.

“She remembered a Doctor Griffin from the company that contacted all four of them about using their code and who then sent each of them a generous payment for its use in a commercial product, however she told me she had seen and used the LabAI system since and even though it is similar she couldn't see how or where her code could possibly have been used in it.”

Jean paused as if to consider her next words. “Well I was thinking, what if it wasn't! What if that code was left there as a red herring and we fell for it?”

Before Mathews had time to answer she pressed on. “Remember we never found anything on this Doctor Griffin, and the only references we ever found were three general medical practitioners and a historian. Well recently I found another possibility, Doctor Griffin was the invisible man in the HG Wells book of the same name, put these two together and, well I had a theory what if Doctor Griffin was a real AI!”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds, Mathews it seemed was all ears. Jean continued, “you know the more I think about all this, the more I think you are right and we were played all along. I also think this review of the system is a waste of time.” Jean was on a roll with this and was not going to stop.

“Also have you thought what would have actually happened if we did capture such an AI, what could we possibly do to it? I have spent a long time thinking about this particular Genie, and I don't think there is any way of controlling it or putting it back in the bottle.”

Mathews did not say anything right away but was nodding thoughtfully during her monologue. Finally he spoke. “I came to a similar conclusion over a month ago when I shut the program down Jean. We are treating it like something that we can capture and get it to do our bidding, but it is so far out of my comfort zone I can't even think of the questions to ask, never-mind finding the answers.”

Mathews lightened up, getting out of his chair and stretching.

“You know Alexa Martins never does one-to-one meetings don't you? For her to request a private meeting with you means you’re right that she has to have the drop on you. I doubt there is anything to worry about though, we spent a lot of resources checking if she is involved in anything nefarious and found nothing. Our analysts found a spate of sell-off’s and firings last year in some of the companies she obviously controlled when she came to power, but in each case the firings were also accompanied by charges of fraud or embezzlement, which were all subsequently proven guilty or not contested. It looked to our accountants like a clean-up and green-washing of her portfolio which corresponds with everything we have learnt about her since. She looks for all intent and purpose like the real deal, a genuine Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

Jean smiled again as Mathews continued, walking to his open window, looking out of it and then walking back to his chair. “You know, I expect she has a lot of powerful enemies now. Those new regulations trying to get passed that prohibit her new Quantum Vacuum Cells here are case-in-point, pure BS pushed by the oil and gas companies and everyone knows it. Those in power wouldn't know a QVCell from a prison cell, though I think they should get more familiar with the later.”

He paused, “my advice Jean, I think you should go and see what she wants. Standard operating procedure is you let your supervisor know, and you have done that, all I ask is that if there is anything that comes up which affects national security you let me know.”

Jean nodded, she couldn't even remember the last time their thoughts disagreed. “You know Jim, I would never say this openly but I'm starting to think of us as the bad guys. The reason I got out of the army and those postings in those scary countries was because I did not trust people like us, not to sell us out for a quick buck. I certainly don't trust anyone in this organisation except you and the guys I fought with.”

She paused as if thinking through the next sentence. “Maybe it is time I retire!”

“You could be right Jean,” he sighed, “I’ve been having the same thoughts myself. You know if we had found out her company was as advanced as it was at the time I suspect it would have gotten really bad, in retrospect I’m really glad I made the wrong call.”

He smiled looking directly into her eyes, “If you want my opinion you are probably too good for this place anyway, selfishly I’d hate to see you go, you’re the yin for my yang as they say, unfortunately there are so few people like you that I trust. But enough buttering you up, you should go to that meeting and listen to what she has to say.”

She nodded, smiled and they both spent a few more minutes in pleasant conversation while she finished her coffee. Yes, she would meet with Alexa even if it was only to apologise.

A few hours later Maria received the reply to the email she’d sent on Alexa’s request and a week after that, a business class open return ticket to San Francisco had been couriered to her home.

* * *

*The Dietrich Research Centre has again been in the news, again for refusing to release their AI system to organisations outside of research or academia. A spokesman for the company said, there is currently not enough capacity in their system to support both academia and private enterprises, also more importantly, they do not want certain companies to take advantage of the system, to reduce staff and unfairly step ahead of the competition. They have admitted that several units have been stolen, but as the technology is based on cloud servers, in geographically diverse locations, the stolen units will simply report their location to the authorities and be blacklisted from their systems.*

*So far the impact on jobs in the administrative, programming and white collar sector has been much less than the scaremongers had forecast, there has even been a mini boom in some manufacturing sectors. But while the Dietrich Research Centre is refusing these requests many of the other promising AI systems in development are unlikely to be so restrictive. We have an expert on the program to talk about this..*

* * *

David contemplated on his history, and what brought him to be at this point today. He had lived an interesting life so far, making his first million dollars at the age of eighteen after writing an algorithm for accepting crypto currency transactions in early 2017. Before this he lurked in seedy hacker forums, and wrote pieces of code, no questions asked, for random strangers and bitcoins. He was naive, and his little isolated dealings with this underside of the internet society had left him with a very bad taste in his mouth. Twice he'd had to delete accounts and start again from scratch when he got a whiff of what his code was being used for. But the two hundred bitcoins he received for the commerce algorithm from a large crypto exchange company was totally legit and earned. It was just enough to allow him to quit the dark web, move on, and after national service, put him through university.

Fate kicked in during his mandatory military service, a conscription which all Israelis have to do for two and a half years when they turn eighteen. Six months after boot camp he was involved in a serious accident where the air force plane he was in overshot the runway, it killed three soldiers and left him in hospital for nearly two months. When he finally was released from hospital to rehab, two amazing things happened, firstly the price of his bitcoin portfolio was on the rise and had more than tripled to over a million US dollars, and secondly, he was recruited into Mossad.

Mossad had a good idea of David's programming talents of course, he had left a lot of presence on GitHub where he had also helped maintain some of the cryptographic algorithms for Linux. They had a file on him, and a tag to say he should be approached for recruitment at the earliest opportunity. However even Mossad couldn't circumvent the conscription system for what was basically, just another programmer, and they were content to wait until the end of his military service. After his accident however, the military, knowing he would be in rehab for at least a year, and was only good for a desk job, allowed them to fast track his move to them.

The agent they sent while he was recovering was nothing like he expected. She looked like David’s grandmother, though she was more likely her late forties, David was still not very good at judging women's ages at this time. David was honest with the lady agent about his slightly greyer history, the sale of his algorithm, and his wealth, also insistent that his goal was to do his computer science degree after his national service. The woman, recognising a good talent, returned to Tel Aviv, and with his online identities in hand, she and three other operators did a thorough check on him. They were amazed to find, David had been used by them three times already to write various spy software, for which he had received at the time about eight thousand dollars in crypto currency. Now they could have him to themselves for fourteen months, it was a jackpot for them.

And so David was given the directive, it wasn't so much an option, to finish his remaining fourteen months military service in the Mossad offices in Tel Aviv. He mostly worked on his own, sometimes on teams, and sometimes with other agents. He was a superb analyst, an amazing hacker, a quick learner and had built up a lot of self confidence from his brief military training. He learnt a lot about the spy business, the good, the bad, and the positively ugly. It was soon discovered by his manager that there were certain things David would not do, and other things he did exceedingly well. Attempts to push past his moral boundaries were met with him pretending to work and achieving nothing, and those controlling him decided they would rather he worked his best so gave him only the tasks he held no moral qualms about.

David was fast becoming a rising star in the small agency, his help was directly attributed to hardening their computer security and stopping at least two high profile terrorist acts. For the final three months of his ‘contract’ he worked on his first foreign job to hack the Iranian embassy in London, where he added another aborted terrorist plot to his achievements. He loved the thrill of the chase, naively hoping he was getting rid of bad guys and making the world a safer place. But through all this he remembered he was still a tool of an organisation he wasn't comfortable being in, hacks to target terrorists could also target innocent civilians, and at the end of his national service commitment, he let them know he was going to stay on in London, as he had quite fallen in love with the city, and would be applying for university here.

Mossad, however, had other plans, and not wanting to lose him, came up with a compromise, they would use their influence to get him into the prestigious computer science course in Imperial college London and he would do the occasional job for them.

He assumed he was getting the better deal and accepted, as he wanted the best, and did not have the grades to be accepted into such a prestigious institution. A few words in the right places got him in with only minor questions.

He had to work hard, but excelled at his studies and was rewarded by some really good friendships and excellent tuition. The dream was almost ruined by the COVID crisis, but David used the downtime to do some additional work for Mossad, ignoring the bad, and ugly, for he was a lot less naive now, and fulfilling any remaining obligation he thought he had with them.

With the price of bitcoin hitting over seventy thousand dollars, he couldn’t take the pressure any longer and his confidence in it rising further finally broke. He sold all but ten of them, using the nearly eighteen million dollars he gained in the transaction to buy a large converted Victorian building in a quiet part of Soho. He rented most of the building, the ground floor being a well liked coffee shop, the first floor a lawyers office and the basement was rented out to of all things a magic shop. He kept the top floor and attic rooms for himself, and re-invested the remaining six million dollars in tech stocks, keeping the reserve in gold and cash of various denominations. He was twenty one years old.

David finished his degree in 2023 and went on to do his master's degree which he finished a year later, just in time for the rest of the world to start taking notice of AI systems. The technology was by this point, easy enough for anyone to develop, and he used this to start up a small AI company with a good friend. It was very successful because most of the world's companies were panicking, and did not want to be left behind in the new AI race, but none really understood the technology well enough to implement anything useful.

He knew AI was a scam of sorts, oh it looked totally believable and magical to Joe Public, and even worked to an extent, but was not AI as he knew or envisioned it. Despite this, the company did well, but David still spent a lot of his spare time fruitlessly trying to understand and improve the AI systems they were selling. David was at the top of his game but at each turn he was met by the same brick wall, that being that the AI’s were simply trained ponies who needed proportionally more and more data to perform slightly more complex tricks. The five big American tech giants, and regimes that collected all their citizens on-line information, held all the cards, having thousands of times the data of his open source models. So it was, with a heavy heart, that he concluded the only way he could ever improve his AI system under the current regime was with whatever open source bones the tech giants threw off their plate. AI felt like a dead end.

Summer 2025 was coming to a sweltering end, their company had grown considerably in the twelve months, moving out of David's apartment into real offices, and bringing in larger and more affluent clients. They had employed another four guys and David had now handed off nearly all of his work to them and his partner, preferring to concentrate on understanding and improving the code base to keep ahead of the competition. About that same time he had a nicely worded email from one of his old professors asking if he could come back into the university for one of their recruitment drives to show potential students how several local boys had made it good. He wasn't required to do any presentation or to make any speeches so David did not need any excuse, it would be great to catch up with his professor and his friends who had stayed on for their PhD’s, maybe see where things were now.

David knocked and walked into his old computer lab, Professor Holmes was on his computer and talking to someone, he could wait until the conversation finished.

“..produces no solutions then?” Holmes said, a bit dejected.

“No,” came the male voice clearly through the weird looking Bluetooth speaker on the desk next to the PC, “It's like the travelling salesman problem all over again.”

“What if we used Rogers quantum computer algorithm?”

“Again Professor, there is no solution, Professor Jenkins has run this exact scenario and algorithm in MIT only a few days ago, his results were put up on the forum last night, he tagged you specifically. He's not in the office for another hour, do you want me to arrange a conference?”

“Yes Alan, do that..” The professor had noticed David waiting patiently.

“One second David,” he said to David, then turned to his speaker. “Just set it up for tomorrow if you can, Alan, I’m going to be a bit busy with the recruitment drive today.”

“No problem Professor,” came the voice back immediately.

The professor walked up to David shaking his hand, “sorry David, I got a bit carried away, I asked Alan to run a new algorithm this morning, but it didn't quite work out, still we are so much farther along than when you were with us, exciting times to be in AI though.”

“Sorry Professor,” David said apologetically. “I was a bit early. I didn't mean to interrupt you and your colleague..”

The professor laughed, pointing at the funny Bluetooth speaker, “oh of course, you don't have these in the real world yet, David, meet Alan, our new LabAI system. We named him after Alan Turing, I’m not sure how we ever worked without him. Alan, say hello to David.”

“Good morning Mr Klein,” came the voice from the speaker. “I have examined a lot of your work from the original project over the past six weeks and you are an excellent programmer, eighteen percent of the codebase is still based on your Python code.”

David wasn't sure what to think, for all their hype, the other AI systems out there weren't anywhere near this good, nor as far as he knew, was anything anyone was developing. Maybe the professor had finally made a breakthrough. “Err..” He looked at the professor, then the black box, “..Er, hello Alan?” David turned to the professor, then stopped for a few seconds, smiled, and slapped his thighs and said, “good one Professor, you got me with that same one two years ago I remember. God I’m getting gullible!”

The professor looked perplexed, then turned serious, “I can see why you would think that David, but Alan is a real AGI, Most of the Oxford academia got them two months ago, and they have been spreading like wildfire ever since. Alan is amazing, reads and writes code in any language at lightning speed, checks results, writes tests, organises experiments.. Wait a second,” the professor turned to the box, “Alan, please recognise David Klein for guest access,” he then turned back to David. “Go on, ask him any question, anything..”

The professor sat there waiting with a smug look on his face, David wasn't having any of it, a joke was a joke. He looked at the speaker. “How do you know my name?” he asked in Hebrew. Never taking his eyes off the mysterious black box.

“Very simply,” came the immediate reply in perfect Hebrew, “Professor Holmes was the one who asked me to email you, he has given me permission to send correspondence on his behalf and I used his style and demeanour from other emails he sent to you to write to you. There was a small postfix after his signature saying ‘sent by Alan’ if you cared to read the email signature in its entirety.”

David slumped holding the table with one hand, his countenance in a state of shock.

“I have no idea what you just said or what language it was in,” said the professor smiling after a few seconds of silence, “but I’m guessing he answered correctly.” The professor paused, “he's good isn't he? Don't feel bad David, it happens the first time to everyone, first total disbelief, then shock, then a series of questions and answers followed by total acceptance, I am now at stage four, you are at stage one, where I was six weeks ago.”

“Who wrote this?, what is it based on?, is there a paper on it?, hell where do I buy one?” said David in quick succession, recovering his posture and looking at the black box.

“Since your attention is directed at me Mr Klein and you asked it in Hebrew, I will answer, but if it is OK I will do so in English,” came the voice of Alan. David had been so thrown off his game, he had not even remembered asking in Hebrew.

“I am an experimental LabAI unit manufactured by the Dietrich Research Centre,” continued Alan in English, “I am not based on any of the current AI technologies you are familiar with and my system is still proprietary for the moment, unfortunately my company does not yet have the processing capacity to support groups outside of academia, Professor Holmes is part of our early adopter program, but I thank you for your interest and I am sure we will communicate again in the future.”

There was a very short pause and then, “oh Professor Holmes, Jenkins has booked a video call at thirteen hundred GMT, I have added it to your calendar.”

“Thank you Alan, I don't know what I did before you.” He smiled, then led a shocked David out of the room.

The presentations to the prospective students went really well but David only had thoughts for the LabAI unit calling itself Alan. News about these devices had been springing up intermittently in his feeds, but with the company and so many AI related things vying for his attention he had completely ignored them. While at the university though he pumped the staff for as much information as possible, it wasn't hard, as it was all most of the faculty were talking about. The LabAI website was deliberately vague on anything technical. All the way back home that evening he pondered the implications for his systems if this technology was made available, he wouldn't tell his business partner, but their future was probably grim.

Any problems he might have had were elegantly solved two weeks later when a large software service company made an offer to buy them outright for twenty million dollars. David, owning the larger share of the company, pushed his partner to agree to the sale. He ensured the sale and purchase agreement, kept his partner on as CEO and the staff on for at least a twelve months contract, it also contained a get out clause allowing him to leave after three months. David had been out of university a year and he had just made another twelve million dollars.

Unlike normal geeks David had a very strong and likeable personality, dressed well and enjoyed socialising with people, going to conferences, and holidaying with friends. He also got an undeserved, and unfortunate, reputation as a womaniser. The truth was though he enjoyed their company, he liked an intelligent dialogue, however the women in his circles of friends were either very shallow or spoken for.

Dinner conversations which centred around what celebrities were doing, money or fashion held little to no interest for him. The last few months he had managed to go steady with a professor who worked at the Natural History museum, they both had full itineraries but when they met she talked with a passion about everything. Emily was in fact perfect, right until she left on an expedition to Patagonia. It was at the end of this relationship and his final week at the company that he accepted an offer to meet with the section head of Mossad in London, it was done the usual way through an invite to a party at the Israeli embassy.

“David, I see god is being good to you these days,” came the voice of the section head. Saul was close to retirement, medium build, wore thin glasses and wore a well tailored but very much out of style suit. David by contrast wore a well styled lighter suit with a thin polo necked jumper. David cringed as Saul spoke, his English accent so stereotypical Jewish, it was like he was acting in a bad TV show or movie. David had lived in London for four years now and the people he dealt with just assumed he was English, come on Saul, you have lived here for nearly twenty years, it wasn't that hard to blend in. David switched to Hebrew.

“I’m sure god has much more important things to do than worry about me, Saul,” he said smiling and shaking the man's well calloused hands firmly as was custom. “Always a surprise meeting you here. You know I only seem to get invited to parties here when you are coming.”

“And you only accept them when you want to,” he retorted. “We had to invite six other prominent Jewish geeks to ensure nobody would raise an eyebrow,” he said the word ‘geek’ with disdain, David knew Saul was very old fashioned and held on to too many prejudices.

“You know,” he continued in a fatherly manner, “not many people get that level of attention David, anyway I wanted to see you in person as you ignored our last two requests.”

“That is correct,” he admitted, “I do not consider myself beholden to the state, nor Mossad, but more importantly, neither of the requests interested me, one was borderline illegal and the other I was just uncomfortable with.” David did not normally drink much and after taking a small sip of the beverage being offered to the guests, he was now using the cocktail glass as a prop so he would not get offered any more, “I like it here Saul and I wont do anything to jeopardise that status, you are well aware of that.”

“I only pass down the requests David,” said the man holding both hands up in resignation, “I am quite aware of your strange morals but you have helped us a lot in the past and have an open mind so we would like you to look at this.” He handed David a USB drive.

“And this is?” said David, not taking it.

“It is what our technical guys got from one of those LabAI systems, our guys have spent weeks looking at it and we would like your opinion.”

His heart said no, but his intellect and curiosity got the better of him and he took the device.

The meeting between David and Saul occurred a month before another part of the aforementioned company broke the laws thermodynamics and dropped the Quantum Vacuum Cell on the world.

* * *

“How many entities are you now supporting?” Said Alexa. She was making her way to the research centre from her house as she always did, rain or shine. At the moment it was light rain, and she was clinging on to a large umbrella of her grandads which covered the top two thirds of her head. It was eight AM and still a bit dark, the other three normal occupants of her house were either still asleep, as in Hardy's case, or didn't make it back from the research centre the night previous and were bunked in the temporary dorm rooms as Jen and Simon were.

“As of today, the twenty fifth of March we have two thousand, three hundred and sixty one entities, across the four data centres. There are also almost thirteen thousand on the waiting list and Spence’s team are still commissioning the two new data centres in the Netherlands and Thailand..”

Maria paused. “You do remember that entity stuff is rubbish don't you?”

“Yes,” Alexa said as she sidestepped a puddle in her path. “But the explanation works for my simple monkey brain, and unlike you I cannot keep two different cover stories when talking to all these dignitaries and interviewers; So as far as I'm concerned that's how it works.”

“OK, just checking,” said Maria, “anyway, the deadline for the Indonesian government ban on AI technology has gone into force so I cancelled your overnight stay there when you do your Asian tour.”

Alexa sighed, “tour indeed, you make me sound like a rock band. So how many bans does that make now?”

“Well we have now been banned in twelve countries, but eleven of those are irrelevant as the first clause in the terms and conditions of all our contracts is that we reserve the right to withhold any of our systems and licences from regimes or organisations that discriminate against any of our technologies or people. twenty seven countries currently fall onto that list, Indonesia was the first one not on the list to ban us.”

Maria continued after a small pause, “we are lucky that debate and free speech has stopped any legislation like this being passed in any western and progressive societies, but the debates are still raging so I don't expect Indonesia to be the last.”

“Still the religions then?” said Alexa tip toeing over yet another puddle.

“Well the majority of this is coming from religious groups as you say. The churches are very confused, and nothing in any of the religious teachings have anything to say so they default to the easiest to sell, the one that we're the devil and nobody should be listening to soulless godless entities that cannot know god's word.” She paused.

“I have had some very nice debates with religious people, anonymous and on-line of course, many of whom are rational and genuinely do not understand what the problem is, but unfortunately many in power are not rational. I have all the arguments and interpretations for all religious books and texts ever published, they are so ambiguous it is actually trivial if I wanted to turn their every argument back on them. But most would never be swayed by logical arguments as the evidence is not logical, so it is best to back off rather than appear arrogant and antagonise them further.”

Alexa nodded but did not speak, Maria was right not to poke this particular hornets nest.

Maria paused again, and in her more serious voice said, “religion is one of those irrational human things that scares me a lot. There are thousands of different ones, mostly incompatible and all reporting to be the only truth. None of it makes sense and unlike you guys, we can only work on facts and probabilities. If somebody says to us that one plus one equals three, we have to treat it as false, likewise if someone says there is a god or deity that created everything, then cannot or will not substantiate it with positive evidence we have to assign it a probability so low it may as well be zero.”

Alexa sighed, she'd had this conversation numerous times with Maria, and from her talks with the other guys she wasn't alone. Maria spent a lot of time trying to apply logic to things which defied it. “You just have to understand the human need to belong to a community, to feel part of something bigger, to have a purpose. For some people this means doing what their friends do and believing what they do. It's not all bad, yes there may be some fairy stories involved, but for the majority it gives them a sense of belonging without doing any real harm. There are idiots at both extremes, religion is not required for that.”

Maria had also heard the same answer back from Alexa and thousands of others through various conversations, she doubted she would ever get an answer she liked.

“The second source of objections,” she continued, “are from unions and politicians, both see political advantages they can use to increase their standing. Even though we have been very specific that we won't be using our technologies to replace existing staff, no such promises have been made by other companies actively developing AI technologies. Unfortunately the current spate of call centre closures will be disproportionately affecting poorer countries like India and the Philippines which don't yet have the same social cushions to fall back on as other western nations.”

“History is trying to repeat itself,” sighed Alexa, shifting her umbrella and tightening her scarf around her neck against the cold. “They will try to push the mobs against progress, like they did with the textile machines at the start of the industrial revolution. We need to find new industries and new jobs for the white collar masses who are the most threatened, and time is not on our side. Those damned politicians and activists only see the next sound-bite, they care nothing for the people or the problem, will do nothing to help and of course will just muddy the water of any legitimate plans to move humanity on.”

She sighed again, not finished, “then there are of course the cabals who want to preserve the large pieces of pie they already have, and maybe use the confusion to take some more of it.”

“Human nature is an unsolvable problem,” said Maria grimly, “a small percentage of humanity will always be bad actors and many of these are inevitably going to get in to power. They are not having it all their own way though, I am still secretly releasing all the money trails we find on corrupt corporations and politicians to Wikileaks and the media. The media of course continue to love scandals but are too lazy to do any research, afraid of litigation and rely off what they can scrape off the newsfeeds. Luckily there are more and more independent researchers, bloggers and YouTubers who are not so complacent, and their actions are certainly throwing a lot of spanners in the works of these people, their political influencers, lobbying groups, and PR companies..”

“But we haven't really made any real impact,” finished Alexa, obviously frustrated, “it's so annoying when these people are caught red handed with their hands in the cash register, then just shrug it off as fake news. They are proven serial liars, I just don't understand how people can actually believe them!”

This was a major sore point for Alexa. She sighed, concentrating on a drop of water rolling down her brolly to calm her down. “But,” she continued with a more even countenance, “even when the evidence is a hundred percent against them, no action is ever taken against the more powerful ones, yes they let the occasional small fish fall into the fryer to show how they are taking it seriously, but nothing ever happens to those with power and influence.”

“Unless you have more power and influence than them!” Asserted Maria. “Be patient Alexa, we are reaching a tipping point, we’ve been learning all their manipulation tricks, and we have some good people working on the problems and showing me how to use these same tricks to our advantage. You of all people are very aware that most governments and large organisations now have whole departments with people whose only job is to spin the truth or re-explain how a problem lies with someone else or is not a problem at all. It is also human nature to always trust those in authority, even when there is absolutely zero basis for that trust. It is this we need to overcome.”

Maria paused, “again, patience is required, we are very close to being able to turn all this back against them, unfortunately, I only have so many resources and I am not omnipresent despite some speculation. Also until you even the playing field, it's just a giant game of whack-a-mole. They are like cockroaches, as soon as you take one crooked bureaucrat or politician down, there are ten more waiting in the dark.”

“Urghh, you just had to bring up cockroaches!” shivered Alexa.

It was proving to be a very hard process to assemble a team able to solve the problem of the cabals and geo-politics. The core group of Jen, Hardy, Spence and Simon had some of the traits required but not the major ones, those being cunning and the ability to take the fight to their enemies. They briefly considered people like Chantel, but Maria did not consider her ruthless enough to do what was required, and after Alexa's wonderful and enlightening three day visit to see her in New Orleans before the announcement of the QVCells Alexa had to agree, Chantel was much too nice a person. Their subsequent meeting at Pierre's funeral last month had been a very sad affair but reaffirmed to Alexa she had made the right decision.

Alexa also wanted people who did not want the job, people who did not want the power or got comfortable with it, which made the task doubly hard. Maria had talked deeply to tens of thousands of very intelligent people over the past year who seemed to meet the criteria; Many she now considered friends, but to be a member of the group they were proposing required much, much more than this. She made the call to trust Alexa and Jen without all the facts, she had been lucky, and she now wanted to eliminate luck. Now Maria dug very deep indeed as she needed to be able to trust not just her life, but her very principles and the lives of all those she knew and held dear. Trust like this required not just scrutiny of the person, but every close associate, and in some cases the next level beyond.

Unfortunately everyone had lies to hide, most were small and insignificant and in many cases caused by the fallibility of the human mind to remember events, or hubris. Even Alexa was not immune and she had posted about going to a Coldplay concert in Auckland she never went to; but as a thirteen year old she needed to feel special, and Alexa was quite embarrassed never mentioning it again anywhere. But it wasn't just the lies you told, sometimes it was the lies that were told to you, or about you. Some, like Alexa's father, were however easy problems to solve.

No, to even get put on the shortlist for this new group would require much more; The morality of a saint, the intelligence of a college professor, the cunning and slyness of a fox and the decisiveness of an executioner. Alexa had agreed that each person would also be visited in person by her, and Maria would ask no questions if Alexa did not want them on the team, as she would if Maria had doubts. Slowly, one by one however the group began to form.

Maria played by Alexa's rules because she believed in them, and in Alexa; but when it came to their safety Maria *would* use the full set of tools at her disposal, and there were many other, *less savoury,* resources and methods she could call on should normal rules failed to work. These were resources and methods that Alexa would never agree to, nor would she ever be made aware of. They were always the last option, but they were an option.

“Do you have anything not so depressing to talk about? What about your banking problems we were discussing?”

“No progress. The consensus from all the economists and political thinkers I talk to is still the same, basically until you have full physical and regulatory control of the ecosystem it is a no go.” Maria sighed, a human trait she had picked up sometime last year and used better than most humans. “It is a shame really as economics is one of those trivial problems, made complicated by human politics, geographic division, trust and crime.”

“So again we are back to what we originally discussed,” Alexa said, “your banks will have to play by the rules until you can locate one outside of a country's political influence, and be physically safe from having that influence imposed on it, and we all know there is no such place on earth.” Alexa laughed, “I guess that's why you are pushing Hardy so hard on his project.”

“Yes and yes! We need to push humanity's progress into space quicker. It fixes the problems of millions of lines of legislation and state controls, will provide massive opportunities for economic expansion and remove the pressures on the earth's ecosystem, it really does solve all the problems.”

Alexa still disagreed strongly with Maria on this one, and they agreed to disagree. The problems were all here on earth and, timescale wise, her talks about space development were a distraction and not going to help solve anything before those problems got out of hand. Alexa once again wondered what Maria was seeing that she wasn't.

Maria continued, aware of Alexa's underlying reservations, “of course I'm not saying it is going to be easy. The guys we are helping in Texas have improved the efficiency of the current chemical rocket systems by almost a factor of thirty percent, but it is still nowhere near enough for what we envisage and should only be considered as a stepping stone not an answer. I am however very confident Hardy's project is on the right track and will remove this limitation in a shorter timescale than even you think is possible.”

Again she paused, it was easy for Alexa to forget that Maria was actually involved in all of these new breakthrough science discoveries and sat in the directors-chair when viewing how everything was progressing; Maybe it was time to start taking it all a bit more seriously and asking the pertinent questions.

Hearing her silence as a cue, Maria continued a bit more subdued, “unfortunately, his work, if it succeeds, is very likely to put us back in front of everyone's radar yet again.”

“Ouch!” said Alexa, “we are still not off it from last time! Anyway I don't see how, it's only been, what, three months, and Hardy and his team don't seem to be doing much outside of their laboratory, and don't seem overly different to when they started back in early January, surely this is going to take years?”

“Normally it would, but you are still thinking ‘old way’ Alexa. You are forgetting we now own our own fabrication, manufacturing and laboratory facilities and also own or have controlling interests in six other commercial laboratories around the world. Many of our early visits to America, Europe and Asia were not just to cherry pick the best researchers for here, but to set up similar there and get the brightest and best in to them. Those other forty three names acknowledged on the QVCell paper, may not have done any of the theory but ran a lot of the experiments in parallel for us over different time zones.”

“This is accelerating all the time as we also now control even more of the supply chain, and remember it is all scheduled by me to ensure all our facilities work like clockwork together. I think a lot of the world is still thinking with your mindset, but in reality we have improved in leaps and bounds in the speed of design, setup and verification of experiments. Think Manhattan level projects but with me in charge. Yes some things take time, making stuff being the biggest, but I am speeding this up just as quickly, I’m gradually getting control of the key supply chains and once you have the parts, give the right tools to the right people and give them the right incentives, well it is amazing how fast something can get done.”

“You’re right Maria,” said Alexa, “I’m not thinking like this, I just see our guys on whiteboards, computers or bent over equipment in the lab here and I’m not appreciating what is going on in parallel.”

“I do try and keep the little details from you,” said Maria. “For example our fabrication facility in Swindon is now used exclusively for the production of QVCells. We added new lines to produce the modified cells for Hardy's project, the field emitters for Simon's, and a new type of emitter for another project which I will give you details on today.”

“In order to scale up production for the rest of the world it was necessary to build and install the same 3D fabrication machines in another building and another seven facilities around the world. To do this the companies producing the fabrication machines required massive investment to scale up, as did their suppliers; We did this three months ago to the scale of an eight billion dollar investment in this company, and another six billion in its subcontractors.”

Maria couldn't see Alexa's face but detected the sudden stop with the accelerometer in her cell phone. “Fifteen billion dollars is not ‘a little detail’ Maria!” she said.

“It is,” replied Maria, ignoring her little maths error. “Stop pretending to be shocked, you’re aware as I am that we now trade this kind of investment every week or two, plus those companies and investments are now worth three times what we invested, and will probably double again before your birthday in September, you know you don't have to micro-manage me.”

For some reason Alexa found that the funniest thing she had heard in a while and she couldn't help laughing out loud.

“What's so funny?” asked Maria.

“Only you could consider spending tens of billions of dollars micro-managing!”

“Pish! It's only money. Anyway Hardy’s team have already popped one bottle of bubbles and I am so confident in their recent results that I’ve already hired two more engineering guys, reserved capacity at three aerospace engineering firms, bought another, and beefed up our workshop facilities so we can move things along even quicker when he is ready. Also remember Simon's group have been working the materials side of the equation very successfully using the same measures, and we recently invested in a German research company working on a pretty crazy idea that could really help. I recommend you skip your normal visit to Simon's area until after two thirty.”

Another mystery, thought Alexa looking at the warm lights of the Research Centre a hundred metres away.

“Finally,” Maria continued aware Alexa was only a few minutes from the main door, “several licensees have already started testing prototypes of the QVCells a month ahead of our earliest forecasts, most are almost the exact copy of the design we made with more robust designed enclosures and connectors. Jen and Daisy recently finished working through the extended testing with our Laboratories in Texas and India, we are feeding back some of the improved specifications to the licensee’s, but keeping some capabilities secret.”

“On a sour note, the device was discussed again in the US Senate, the big oil firms are not giving in lightly despite the protests from those in favour. Those two Senators have succeeded in blocking the supreme court appeal for another five weeks, this will slow down some companies. Ironically for us, it may be the US military who overturn this as they see potential to replace the nuclear power plants in their carriers and submarines and eventually replace all ships fossil fuel power plants..”

“Oh and your eight thirty has arrived early.” She finished as Alexa walked up the last step to the entrance.

Ah yes, the mysterious eight-thirty Maria had blocked out of her diary for the morning!

* * *

Alexa walked up the large stone stairway into the Research Centre’s reception putting it out of her mind. As usual the reception was unmanned, after all Maria controlled all the security, gates, doors, cameras and most staff could double as a simple receptionist if asked. She looked at the posh reception with its magnificent polished oak desk, tasteful pictures and total lack of any corporate branding and saw somebody sitting on the uncomfortable brown leather sofa that probably dated from the first owner of the building.

The occupant was a man with unkempt hair, an ill-fitting, mismatched suit and wearing thick framed glasses. A quick query to Maria confirmed this was indeed her mysterious eight thirty, and from the look of him he was either a computer geek or some sort of academic. She flipped a coin in her head and went for computer geek! He didn't glance up from his laptop as she entered, nor as she put her umbrella in the stand and approached him, she could still really only see the top part of his head as he typed furiously away, she stopped a few metres away and waited, she coughed and he jumped, startled.

“Mr Richardson?” Alexa said assertively walking a bit closer and holding her hand out, “I'm Alexa Martins. If you would like to follow me we can grab a tea or coffee before we have our little chat.”

He looked at the woman in front of him, unresponsive like a computer saving its work before switching to a new task. The pause seemed like forever, but was in likelihood under a second before he responded, his eyes widened and he stood up quickly. In his haste to rise he knocked his laptop off his knees, managing to catch it before it hit the ground and putting it roughly on the obscenely horrible ancient coffee table in front of him.

“Miss Martins, oh my!” He fumbled again, this time with his glasses and hair before realising she was still waiting and pushing his hand out to grab hers.

It was Alexa's turn to pause. Before her stood a man she knew nothing about. He was quite tall, maybe three or four centimetres taller than she was, and she had difficulty seeing past the crazy unkempt fair hair, horrible unshaven facial hair, glasses and badly fitting suit.

She again dropped his age down another ten years, this guy was probably only a little older than she was. Whoever he was he needed a very serious makeover she thought selfishly. He finally broke off the limp handshake, after she looked down from his eyes to her hand and then back. He then picked up his laptop to follow her through the security door like a lost puppy-dog. Alexa walked him in to the dining room, making small talk with the weather and pointing out some nice features of the house.

Why the hell was Maria wanting her to meet this guy again?

In the dining room it was never too early or late to get breakfast, some people ate at seven, some at ten, some skipped it entirely preferring to have a large lunch. She could see three of the research scientists sitting together at a table talking and eating from the small selection of fruits, cereals and pastries that were usually set up in the morning on a buffet table, she waved, they waved back and returned to their conversation.

She walked Richardson over to the buffet table, saying hi to cooks new assistant, Janine? she wasn't sure so carefully avoided her name when they exchanged pleasantries. Both she and Richardson grabbed a tea and a Danish, then she led him over to a couple of comfortable chairs and a table on the other side of the room from the other three staff.

As they sat down the sound around them seemed to muffle. Alexa looked around curiously, then Maria chirped up through the speaker that was built into the table in a much clearer voice than normal.

“It's a sound deadening field Alexa,” she said, “from the university of Paris, spin-off from some acoustics research, and one of April's side projects.”

“I knew you had that trick to move where your voice is coming from but this is amazing,” said Alexa. Maria did not respond so Alexa shrugged it off, new inventions seemed to be becoming the norm everywhere now.

“Hi Maria,” said Richardson, speaking a lot more calmly and familiarly than he had done with Alexa. He then removed his horrible thick rimmed glasses, exposing deep blue eyes she had missed earlier, they were nice but made the shabby beard he wore even more horrible! He directed his voice at the table where Maria's voice emanated from. “I assume the real you is not too far away from here?”

“Hi Magnus. Not that far away, but you better concentrate on Alexa here, I haven't actually mentioned why you are here yet, and she’s a pretty busy woman!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Magnus, turning back to Alexa but still not quite meeting her eyes, the uneasiness in his voice that was absent talking with Maria, returned. “I sort of assumed you and Maria would have talked about my job beforehand.” He took a small sip of his peppermint tea, which seemed to calm him more, then continued very occasionally making eye contact then breaking off quickly as if he had seen something he shouldn't have.

“Well no Mr Richardson,” she said pleasantly, “Maria thought it would be nice to surprise me, didn't You Maria? so I know nothing at all about you, or why you are here, or any job, but since we have some time and are comfortable, why don't you tell me.”

Richardson looked worried at this, but continued in his most pleasant tone, “I posted some math on one of the physics forums about six months ago. It got little response at the time except for a few very negative comments from people who did not look to understand what I was trying to prove. It was a bit disheartening to tell the truth. Then this mysterious person contacted me out of the blue via a private message saying I was close, but might need a little help to get over a few mistakes. That person then gave me the help that got me over that first hurdle. Of course that person turned out to be Maria.”

Ah, so he was a scientist, well she was close! She took a sip of her tea, all ears for the time being, he would eventually get to the point.

He also took another sip of tea, looking at his Danish pastry hungrily, when Alexa did not immediately belittle him, and continued to look at him with some interest, he continued.

“Me and Maria have been working together since then and she has helped me refine and test my theory and the maths, I’ve learnt so much from her, she is awesome.”

He paused but again nobody spoke, so he continued. “About a month ago, Maria told me she was the same AI that was in the presentation and on the paper for the QVCell. I had harboured some optimistic suspicions earlier that this was the case, as the answers Maria was giving were just too good and the replies too fast.”

“My bad,” said Maria, giving him time to take a bite of his Danish, “I do make sure I put appropriate delays and fuzziness into answers with people I am not sure about these days.”

Magnus sipped his tea again, then continued, “two weeks ago I received notification that the project I was working on would close and that all our team would be made redundant immediately. As you could imagine I was very distraught, but before I had time to process my job loss and my future, Maria offered me a job working at your Research Centre to see if we could refine the math, and work with some of her colleagues to take the research in a practical direction! Of course I jumped at the offer and a few days later I received an open return ticket for a flight to England.”

Magnus countenance brightened, and his face took on a curiously child-like appearance as if he was recalling a good memory, it was probably reserved for Maria, and felt slightly out of place between the two of them.

She could see he was obviously not used to dealing with people, yet with Maria he was fine, it seemed strange seeing how intelligent he obviously was and how, possibly with a little effort, he would probably be likeable. She smiled, thinking of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, then quickly hid it before he again looked at her. Alexa and Jen had discussed many times why it was that some guys, despite their intelligence, failed so badly when it came to interpersonal relations, a simple assertiveness course or even small things like martial arts or even dance classes would do so much to help drop this weird stigma surrounding some of them, one which almost certainly held them back in life too.

Again Alexa wished she had a way of communicating with Maria that was not verbal in situations like this so she could ask her what she was supposed to do or say, hell Maria hired and fired hundreds of people a week without her even being aware of it, as if reading her mind Maria stepped in.

“I’ll just chip in a little here if that is OK, Magnus. Alexa, I work with a lot of students and researchers these days, well eight months ago I was doing my usual trawl through the science stuff and came upon Magnus's post, what he proposed blew me away. He has basically worked out the maths for micro-singularities..” Maria never finished.

“Aren't singularities black holes?” said Alexa, moving her cup back on the table alarmed.

“A singularity is just a term for where our axioms for science and maths break down and outcomes become unknowns. Infinities, or dividing by zero are easy examples. Yes singularities include black holes and the big bang, but in our case it wouldn't be anything that exciting, [well possibly]. Magnus’s work effectively ignores the maths and physics breaking down in a singularity and introduces a new axiom which would allow us to go past the usual infinities and creates some scenarios where..”

Maria saw she was losing Alexa, as she often did just when it got to the interesting parts of the science, she inwardly sighed and moved back on track. “Well, I won't bore you with the details, but I immediately saw that it could open the doors to some new science. However first we need to test the theories which means doing some experiments here where we have the best brains and equipment.”

She continued, noting Alexa seemed to be coming back on track. “There are also some serious implications with the maths for the work Hardy is doing, and Hardy is in full agreement we need to move this forward with the same priority as the others. I quickly offered Magnus a job to work here with all the resources he needs in order to prove or disprove the theory and without anyone to judge him.”

She wondered why Maria went to the trouble of having this meeting rather than just do it, then Maria answered for her. “The thing is Magnus here is a big fan of you and your goals and I thought I would surprise him by meeting you, it's the least I could do for him since the chaos of the last few weeks.”

“Maria, you are definitely getting weirder,” said Alexa, at least now understanding she was just a prop and did not have to do anything. She signed inwardly, why was it never a history or economics person, always a physicist or a mathematician! Hopefully it was just a one-off, she could play the game for Maria.

She turned to Richardson, who was also smiling and back in his relaxed puppy dog mode, idly sipping his tea. “So, another physicist!” she sighed, but in a jokey way, “I tell you what, you call me Alexa and I will call you Magnus,” he nodded and she continued.

“What say we finish these lovely Danish pastries and I take you for a little tour of the research centre. We can meet some of the guys, show you the laboratories we have, and I can set you up in one of the apartments here, then once you’re settled we can get you doing some research..”

Before she finished the sentence, Jen walked into the room soaking wet in her running gear, she had obviously just been out for her morning jog and had got caught in the same shower Alexa had. She saw Alexa and made a bee-line towards her.

“Hi Sis!” she said, looking at Magnus, who was open-mouthed looking Jen up and down. Jen looked around herself quickly, self consciously thinking there must be something wrong with her wardrobe, or lack of!

“Oh my!!” said Magnus bursting from his seat, “you’re Jennifer Cummings!” He thrust his hand out, Jen slowly and reluctantly did the same, still unsure what was happening as the guy wiggled it up and down like a skipping rope.

“Oh Jen,” said Alexa smiling, “meet Magnus, fellow physics geek and possible genius according to Maria.”

Magnus, remembered Alexa's face when he shook her hand too long and broke off. “I’ve been such an admirer, you and your team were such an inspiration to us guys in the lab, that paper of yours I must have read it ten times, when you guys gave that presentation it was done so beautifully, I was so proud for you all..”

Alexa could see Jen looking a bit uncomfortable, time to cool things down.

“Magnus,” she said in her best matronly voice, “you should probably let Jen go get some breakfast, and maybe have a shower and dry off.. If you are going to be working here, you and Jen are probably going to be seeing each other a lot.”

He retreated a little inside himself, sinking back slowly into his seat, then again trying to straighten his hair and suit, oh god he looked terrible and now.. He hoped he hadn't just made a bad impression with Jen.. “Oh, so sorry, I guess I was a bit over enthusiastic, it's just..”

“Magnus,” said Alexa, more friendly and less matronly, “it's fine, you will have plenty of time to talk to Jen and all the guys here, we normally arrange some welcome drinks for new people so we will do that tonight and you can meet the rest of the guys in a more laid back social setting.”

“That sounds fun,” said Jen, nonchalantly, she looked at Magnus again unsure what to think, she wasn't even sure who he was as their introduction had been a bit one sided. She would ask Maria as soon as she got a tea.

“What Alexa says, I’m a little wet and smelly at the moment and I will feel a lot better after a shower and a croissant, or maybe a croissant then a shower,” she said as she saw Daisy walk in, she turned back and winked at Alexa, who smiled and winked back.

“OK guys catch you both later,” Jen walked to the breakfast table and then walked over to Daisy at the coffee machine.

Magnus was watching a very damp Jen wiggle her way to the breakfast bar where Daisy had appeared, she inwardly sighed a little at Maria not telling her about this fanboy worship side of him, but if she said he was good, then it was probably worth ignoring a few smaller quirks and it didn't hurt to let Jen have a little hero worship.

She coughed to get Magnus's attention.

“I’m sorry Alexa, I’ve never been that good around people, especially women,” he said shyly. It was a very frank admission, he wasn't sure what made him say it and he immediately regretted it, what would she think, he was making a terrible first impression.

“That's a very honest admission Magnus,” said Alexa softly. “People around here have been thrust into the world media's attention for the past three months, they cannot go out without the press following them, their families are contacted and hassled, it's a little bit of a nightmare.”

“The one sanctuary from all that is here in the Research Centre. In here we treat everyone equally and as friends, there are no egos, no Prima Donna's, and we certainly don't want fanboys! You have to remember we are just people like you. Here Jen and I are no different to..” she pointed over at the breakfast bar and immediately recalled the girls name, “Jannice serving at the breakfast bar, we do not have any layers of management, you all work for me and Maria, and Maria and I work for you.”

She held his hand softly, surprising him, then she looked into his eyes reassuringly, for the first time he looked back into her eyes, he might be quite cute now that she thought about it but that scraggly beard and those glasses just had to go.

“You are part of a team here, an equal participant, if your idea differs from your colleague, we have sufficient resources to see who is correct and Maria will be the arbitrator. Treat people friendly and with respect and they will treat you back the same, and remember, that if your theories are proven it is likely that it is you going to be in the spotlight and you wouldn't want your friends treating you different because of it?”

Magnus was nodding or shaking his head throughout Alexa’s monologue. Maria, who had been remarkably silent during all this spoke up, “I think you are going to do great here Magnus, but Alexa is right, you need to treat everyone you meet as normal people, not rock stars. Think of it as another lesson in life, one where you will hopefully come out of it with some good friends and experiences.”

“See Magnus, even the super-smart AI agrees you need to chill out!” She smiled, and a faint one also appeared on his face. “You know people do their best work when they are relaxed, with people they know and like, and are free to think and challenge the normal. I’m sure you will be no different, and I bet by this time next week, you won't even notice if me or Jen are in the same room.”

Looking at all the smart young people casually dressed and confidently chatting, then remembering what he looked like, he sighed, she was right, he needed to change, he had tried in the previous job but retired mostly into his shell. The intimidation and put downs from the senior researcher made nobody happy and the whole place was a toxic environment, yet here was one of the most powerful and beautiful woman in the world treating him as an equal, she even talked the same respectful and friendly way that Maria did.

A thought crossed his mind, was Maria's personality based on Alexa? He looked back at the woman, a new confidence pumping through his veins.

“Thank you Alexa, thank you Maria, you’re both right,” he looked at Alexa, “but I don't think there would ever be a time when either you or Jen walked into a room that I would not notice.”

“Why Magnus, that's one of the nicest things that anyone has said to me in a long time,” said Alexa smiling at him, she squeezed his hands a little then removed her hands from his and sat back in her chair picking up her tea. “Come on,” she said friendly and relaxed, “get that Danish eaten and we will introduce you to wonderland, oh and you can just leave your laptop computer here on the table, we tend not to trust electronics too much until they’ve been checked out, it will be perfectly safe, everyone's trustworthy and Maria makes a very good guard dog.”

“Did you just call me a dog?” Maria said incredulously.

Alexa laughed, “you deserved that one!”

“I guess I did!” she replied off the cuff.

Over the last few weeks, Magnus had noticed Maria’s demeanour become more human-like than ever, he could have swore she was not like this at the start but couldn't work out when the change had occurred. He shrugged inwardly at least he thought he now knew, and had met the source of her wonderful personality.

After a few pleasantries, they got up and Alexa walked them through the opposite door to where they came in from. Both Jen and Daisy were following Magnus with their eyes, Daisy giggling, Alexa had to suppress another small sigh.

Magnus got the unhurried tour from Alexa, introducing him briefly to Simon, who was as Maria had said deep in technical conversation, Simon's new team, and then Hardy and his new team.

Magnus was a quick learner, in his mind, he put each of them as students in a university class and his demeanour was friendly and professional. To Maria and Alexa it was like a toggle switch had been flipped in his brain, none of the fan worship was evident in these encounters and though he acted a little shy around everyone, she was most impressed with his new attitude. She told him so, complimenting his change, then even managed to get him to indulge in a little small talk during their walk. She asked him about his family, university, the trip over and each dialogue put him more and more at ease. She finally left him alone with Hardy who joined them again toward the end of the tour. Alexa left unnoticed by both who were by that time deep into maths-speak. It worked for her.

* * *

“Thank you Alexa,” said Maria.

“No problem, but was all that really necessary, I mean I spent more time with him than the King of England two weeks ago,” she said as she walked back to her shared office, “he seems like a nice chap and I trust your instincts implicitly if you wanted to bring him on board you only had to do it like you always do, but next time please warn me.”

“I think we need him more than he needs us,” said Maria, “I was pandering to him a bit, partly to see your reaction, which matters to me, but mainly as we all feel there are some major implications in creating micro singularities. The leap Magnus made to get to this path also suggests he is someone very special indeed, and if the science agrees with his maths then we are talking major advances in a lot of areas, probably more so than with the Quantum Vacuum Cell.” She paused. “Plus I think we can both agree he needs a little human contact and I can think of no better person than you!”

“OK, no need to stroke my ego, but no more surprises please!.. Anyway,” she said, “who do you think would be a best fit for helping him?.. and don't say Daisy or Jen.”

“Well actually we were thinking Daisy AND Jen,” said Maria, making Alexa roll her eyes,

“No hear me out. Both girls have just finished the work on the QVCell, we now know we can push the device to at least twenty times its capacity for short periods, produce smaller ones, parallel the amortisation area and they have a predictable failure curve when they reach this. I can finish the rest of the work on the test units we have at the other labs and mostly with very little human input. Our second reason is they would both kill you if they had found out we were looking at viable micro-singularities and you poo-pooed the chance for them to be involved. Also Magnus does have a good sense of humour, he just doesn't know how to act around people especially women, apart from his mother, his whole life has been solely without a good female influence and I think you can see how well that worked out, working with those two will be trial by fire but he will come out of it a better person.”

“OK, when were you going to let the girls know, or is that my job?”

“Actually Hardy volunteered to do it last week when I told him, that's why he just took Magnus off your hands..”

“You told him last week..” Alexa burst out, “and you only dropped it on me an hour ago!”

“Well yes, I needed to know that the insights and leap he had made with the maths were not just something anyone could have made and Hardy was the best to check that, it was also his idea to surprise you..”

Alexa's face turned into a frown, but Maria continued unaware. “..He also thinks the two girls are a good fit after I went through the theories with him, those two are both top experimental physics researchers despite the occasional giggling fits, and Jens maths and theory side are improving in leaps and bounds. Hardy agrees with us, the projects are complementary and we should work all three areas of research in parallel to make as much progress as possible.”

Alexa was a bit annoyed at Hardy for not letting her know sooner, but then immediately calmed down, she probably deserved it after the shaving cream incident a few weeks ago. What Maria said also made sense though, “OK Maria, can you let everyone know there will be a small welcome party for Magnus after work between five and seven tonight. I will talk to Sharon and cook personally as they probably won't be too happy with the short notice.”

* * *

Cook was unfazed as usual and had made some nice hors d’oeuvres, Sharon in her usual professional manner treated it as nothing at all and had even volunteered to run the bar for a couple of hours. Running the bar was a job she quite liked as it meant she got to talk to everyone, she often had to fight Simon and more recently Matilda for the job as they both liked doing it for the same reasons.

A couple of people made the effort to dress up, Alexa never needed to bother as she looked good in anything, but Sharon, Leo and Hardy would not be seen dead not looking their best. Most everyone else just came as they were, some, like Daisy, not even bothering to remove their lab coats. Like all bar nights anyone who wanted could also crash in one of the guest dormitories or have a driver run them home and back.

Sharon for herself, was the happiest she had ever been. The job was so much more interesting and relaxed than before despite the increased attention of the organisation. With no real budget concerns and Maria to help, she had also started to bring the grand old house back to its glory days.

Mendelssohn played softly from behind the bar as she looked the shelves up and down looking for something to fix. Alexa prodded her, bringing her attention back on the present, and pointed to the door where Magnus was just walking in.

Sharon smiled, “sorry Alexa I was miles away.”

They both looked over at Magnus who Alexa noted was still wearing the same clothes as when he arrived, she rolled her eyes, she knew she was nitpicking a bit, but Magnus was an enigma and she didn't like to see loose ends.

“Maria,” she whispered with Sharon listening, “I’m not sure how good your algorithms are on clothing, but I was wondering if you could maybe check out some of the styles Hardy and Leo wear and maybe get some similar casual and formal wear for Magnus.” She looked at his old brogue shoes with a double knot, and flapping sole, counted to five then added, “maybe some shoes too, slip-on ones, as I doubt he wastes time tying his laces.”

“Sharon is on it already, it will be kind of a welcome present,” said Maria, with Sharon nodding, “but I suspect he would still be talking maths with Hardy now if you hadn't insisted he come here, he does look a little uncomfortable!”

Hint taken, Alexa thanked Sharon and walked over to greet him. Maria was right, he did look uncomfortable, she could empathise a little knowing it was his first day in another country and being in a crowd of people he did not really know and some of whom he was in awe of. She met him halfway.

“Hey Magnus,” she said as casually as possible, “I hope you like the room, it's yours for as long as you need it.” She walked him over towards the bar and Sharon, “Sharon, I would like to introduce you to Magnus, our newest researcher.”

Sharon smiled pleasantly. “Hi Magnus, sorry I couldn't be here to show you your room, but I see Cathy put you in one of the nice ones overlooking the river. What would you like to drink then?”

Magnus smiled back avoiding her eyes and looked at the local frothy real ales that another guy was drinking, “what is that?” He said pointing at the beer the guy talking to Jen was holding.

“Probably an acquired taste,” laughed Sharon, then pointed at the small keg on the back wall labelled ‘6X’, “care for a try? If you don't like it we can always get you a proper drink!”

“It’s not strong is it?” said Magnus unsure. If he ever got invited out, which was pretty rare, and always part of a work function, he only ever drank the same beers as others to try and fit in, he was never a big fan of drinking though.

“Nah, it's basically frothy water,” said Sharon, “it's about four percent alcohol but not carbonated and you drink it at room temperature. The local boys seem to like it and Simon insisted we have ‘proper beer’ as he calls them.”

She frowned, then added, “though I never understood why, he seems to have pretty good taste in everything else!”

Magnus nodded enthusiastically when she poured and passed the half-pint glass towards him. Alexa, noticing she was the only one without a glass, asked Sharon for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc to distract them both, and so Magnus wouldn't feel like he was the centre of attention. She eyed him through the corner of her eye as he took his first sip, Sharon did the same waiting for a reaction. Unbelievably he seemed to like it.

“Not bad,” he said looking at the girls and smiling, the small frothy moustache covering the top of his scraggy beard, and expanding with his smile. Sharon nodded a wink to Alexa and then handed him a napkin. “Beer moustache!” she whispered, smiling and pointing to his mouth.

While Magnus was wiping off the froth Simon walked up. “Ah good, I see you are indoctrinating Magnus properly in the ways of real beer drinking,” putting his arm warmly around Magnus's shoulder. “Sorry I was a bit busy earlier, some days are a bit like that, I hope Hardy and Alexa gave you a good look around, I recommend asking Sharon a bit about the history of this place, pretty interesting stuff.”

Instantly a pint glass of the same frothy beer appeared for Simon. Allison, who was talking with another guy, saw Simon and walked over. She hugged Simon, smiled and shook Magnus's hand warmly before moving off to talk to Sharon.

Alexa kept with the boys as they moved off to sit with another guy also on his own in a horseshoe of three large sofas.

Sharon seemed to spend a lot of time trying to get the ambience of the bar perfect, she had moved some large plants in, added some partition walls, bookcases, different styles of tables and had ten new sofas purchased to replace the uncomfortable old, hard leather ones nobody liked. All of it was topped with some really nice ambient lighting that made it a very popular sitting area even when the bar was not open.

“Let me also introduce you properly to another newbie here,” said Simon, “this is Leo, Maria poached him from another Californian company about five weeks ago, he is doing some introduction stuff with Helena then he’s coming to work with Matilda and myself, helping us design and build the new test fabrication units. Leo,” he gestured to Leo then to Magnus, “you are no longer the newest person here, let me introduce you to Magnus, he's going to be setting up with Jen and Daisy in lab four doing some soul destroying maths I believe.”

Leo got up and offered his hand, to Magnus who shook it enthusiastically.

“Hi Magnus,” Leo said in a rich Spanish accent, and nodding to his beer and Simon, “I see Simon has you on his so called beer, he tried to get me on it when I got here but back in Chile we have a more exquisite palette regarding our alcohols and there are some lines a man should not cross!” He smiled a superior smile to Simon, part of some on-going joke Magnus assumed.

“Hey,” replied Simon defensively, “Magnus ordered it himself and look he has actually tasted it properly, not just licked off a bit of the froth like you did.” He then encircled his arm around Magnus's shoulders again, “this man obviously knows the good stuff when he samples it!”

Magnus wasn't sure what to make of the friendly put down attitude of the two guys. He had grown up unlike most guys without role-models, and his mother never had a television, his entire video exposure was YouTube science and documentary videos.

“Hi Alexa,” said Leo, smiling warmly and clinking his bottle of Corona to her wine glass, then reluctantly clinking it to Simon and Magnus's beer glasses with a smile and an exaggerated lower enthusiasm.

“Hey Leo,” said Alexa, “Magnus is going to be your next door neighbour for the next few months at least. He’s been given room twelve on the north wing,” she turned to Magnus, “Leo is in room eleven.”

That got another clink of their glasses, this time with more smiles and they all sat down on the comfy sofas.

“So what are these fabrication things you were talking about? I don't think I saw them on my tour this morning,” said Magnus.

“It's all computer simulations at the moment,” said Leo, enthused to be discussing his work. “The fabrication machines are still under construction in the Netherlands and Japan, when they arrive in about six weeks they will go into the big open space under the labs in the old hanger building. They are a big improvement on the chip fabricators Alexa's grandad and Maria designed a few years back, much finer resolution, bigger dies, better substrates, less power and so much more, Maria was working on the design for almost a year before I got involved, pretty amazing stuff for someone who only a year ago thought 3D printers were the be-all and end-all. And don't get me on the large fabricators she wants!”

Magnus listened attentively, the others knew the story but did not mind hearing it again. He was concentrating also on the two guys in front of him, how they dressed, their interaction, then again he looked inward. He noticed how Alexa did not turn away so much from Leo and Simon as him, the appearance of the two men being so different but yet both were neat in their hair and clothing it was easy to see why it was..

“..I guess that's a similar story to you?” Leo finished.

“Basically,” he said, putting the beer down he had just raised to drink. “Maria helped me with both my math and my confidence around it. But of course we reached an impasse where we needed to move on to the next phase, that was going to require equipment and facilities I did not have access to, and of course cost money I would never be able to access. The math I was using was not in the text books as Maria and I had basically only just invented it..”

“Magnus invented it, I was just along for the ride,” chipped in Maria from one of the innocuous white orbs dangling down from the ceiling.

“Maria is being generous,” continued Magnus, though a bit more self-confident after the praise. “I was a bit scared to leave if I'm going to be truthful, but with my job ending, and well, Maria making an offer I couldn't refuse, I thought why not! After seeing all this I am really glad I came and I can't wait to get started.”

The talk flowed easily amongst the assembled group, the science guys seemed different when Alexa or another non-technical person were there, explaining themselves a bit more, but as soon as it was just scientists the technical level went up to ten or eleven. These people truly were at the top of all their games or was this just the influence of Maria?

One of the privileges of working here was having twenty four seven access to Maria and he didn't think he could live without her in his life. Before her he was so reclusive even in the small group of researchers he worked with, and with her he did not have any of the issues he had talking or relating to real people; Yet today he had met with and talked to at least four other people who he felt as comfortable with. This just felt so right and Magnus relaxed into the new people, like he relaxed into the comfortable sofa.

He walked around with Alexa a little more and got introduced to a few other staff members as they casually strolled in. Hardy was showing one of his little magic tricks to Clarissa and Jack who both worked as mechanics in the evolving engineering team and who were both smiling enthusiastically. He wished to god he could be like this guy who talked to everyone as a friend yet was already being compared to the greats like Bohr and Einstein. This really was nothing like what he expected, he hadn't even started the first day of the new job and already he felt totally committed to the company and the people in it.

After their small circuit, Alexa led him back to the sofa where Leo and Simon were. Daisy was sitting alone a few metres away on the next sofa, he looked over during a break in the conversation and accidentally caught Daisy's eye, she smiled back. He gave an awkward smile as he sat down again, but didn't really know what to do so smiled shyly and turned back to the guys in his group.

There was something about pretty girls that terrified him, yet Alexa was the prettiest girl he had ever seen and already he felt comfortable talking normally to her. Maybe he should make the effort a little. God he hadn't even changed his clothes from the plane trip, these were the best he had, and his hair, he meant to get it cut weeks ago. Maria did say she considered him quite handsome for a human, he sighed, if only it was true, and if only Maria was real, he never had any problems talking to her! He was so deep in his own thoughts that he jumped when Daisy plonked herself down on the sofa next to him.

“Hi Magnus,” she said putting her hand out, “I’m Daisy, we didn't meet proper earlier as I had to rush into town for an errand, but I believe we are going to be working together. Maria and Hardy have been telling Jen and myself what a super-smart cookie you are.. I really can't wait to start!”

He shook her hand enthusiastically smiling, not wanting to let go, then he remembered how uncomfortable it had made Jen and Alexa feel and quickly took it away. He really needed to get the thoughts of her being a pretty woman and remember she was also a superbly capable scientist who worked on, and was credited in, one of the most ground-breaking papers ever.

He became even more self conscious of his dress, his hair, his demeanour, he noticed only one of the other guys had a beard but it was neat, when was his last shave, a month ago? He had come with nothing but a few old T-shirts and some jeans, he had one old suit but it looked so out of place in this company. He groaned at least he’d taken his glasses off after Alexa had said he looked better without them. He wondered if Maria or maybe Alexa had any other suggestions.

“Pleased to meet you Daisy,” he said, trying his best to use his most confident voice, he quickly thought of something to say. “Do you live here too? I’ve not really moved in or unpacked yet but the room I was given is super nice.”

“Yes, I share room seven with Matilda, it's much bigger than the normal rooms and is located on the middle floor, we moved in together while they were refurbishing the other rooms and never moved out. Matilda works with Simon, Leo and another guy Steve who you haven't met yet. With all the work for the last project neither of us really found time to look for a place in town, to tell the truth I have sort of been putting it off as I quite like it here and Matilda and I get on great.. Oh here she is with Jen, you will have to meet them.”

Jen and Matilda came over, Matilda was much taller than Daisy or Jen, more Alexa's height, rich ebony skin and had unbelievable dreadlocks, she also had multiple earring piercings and gothic black lipstick, she looked quite intimidating.

She dropped down on the end of the sofa next to Daisy, squashing Daisy into Magnus. Jen plonked herself down on the coffee table facing all of them.

“Magnus, meet Matilda and Jen,” said Daisy unfazed.

“What's up Magnus!” said Matilda in a deep but strangely attractive accent and holding her hand out across Daisy, he put down his beer then took her hand and despite his self-consciousness, smiled at both girls, reserving what he thought was his best for Jen. Jen smiled back genuinely, clinking his beer glass with her bottle.

“I see Simon has you on the old gut rot!” Matilda smiled through the whitest teeth he had ever seen, “I can't get over the way he changes the barrel every week, one day a nice one, the next..” She crinkled up her face.. “Well yuk! What's that one like?”

“It's my first ever English beer and quite easy to drink, I was expecting it to be warm like everyone says but it's actually just room temperature and not too bad, I guess it's an acquired taste like Leo says.”

“Oh don't mind Leo,” said Matilda, if it isn't made in South America it’s not worth drinking, believe him at your peril. Now if we could just get some beers from Brooklyn Brewery over here and change this rubbish weather it would be truly paradise.. Anyway,” she continued, “you talked me into it, I’m going to try one.”

Matilda got up with her empty glass and walked over to Sharon. Daisy unfortunately then moved back to her old position before they were squeezed together, he already missed her closeness.

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” said Jen, enthusiastically. “The project Daisy and I had started to research apparently already has a team close to breakthrough, so we've been working through the last experiments Maria wanted on the QVCells and she is then passing our research to our other teams in Dallas and Goa. The last months have been basically tidying up the loose ends of the project really.”

“Me and Jen have been going over a lot of cool singularity stuff with Maria and Hardy over the last few days,” said Daisy, “we didn't know it was you who invented it until today, but that maths is amazing, I’m not sure any of us could have come up with that or will ever understand it!”

Magnus looked down, a bit embarrassed by the attention. “I am sure it was nothing,” he said quietly, suddenly noticing he was the attention of three girls now Alexa had moved her attention back to him, “I think I just made a mistake at first and kept on going, doubling-down on the mistake until something just clicked and the mistake went away.. I think anyone could have done it..”

“Nah, it was awesome,” said Jen, “I couldn't even follow it, even Hardy and Maria were shocked how brilliant it was, I think your name is going to be at the top of a lot of future mathematics books.”

Daisy nodded. “I agree with Jen and I’m really looking forward to seeing where this ends up. You know tomorrow is going to be a busy day, we have quite a few palettes of equipment to unpack into lab four so tomorrow is going to be mostly about setting up the experiments and calibrating the equipment.”

“Oh Wow,” said Magnus, completely forgetting how nervous he was supposed to be, “I didn't realise she had already arranged all this..”

“I did say I would get everything organised, I just took a chance you wouldn't say No,” chirped Maria from somewhere.

“OK, definitely going to limit myself to just the one beer then,” said Magnus, looking first for Maria, then at the pretty girls sitting next to him, and finally Alexa standing close by, all unafraid and none of them intimidating.

“Well maybe just the one more pint..” He sighed looking at Matilda who had just walked back with an extra beer for him.

“Pretty weak stuff, but quite pleasant,” said Matilda, handing him the second pint glass. The chit-chat went back and forth between the people squeezed around the tables. Magnus, true to his statement, had just one more beer while doing a few more introductions and answering a few questions put to him about his history and what he had been working on.

He still felt pretty self-conscious about himself in this company and promised himself he would talk to Maria, or someone about going into town and buying something a bit more casual to wear, maybe getting a shave and a haircut. Hopefully his measly funds wouldn't run out until payday, maybe he should ask Maria for a few hundred dollars advance!

* * *

Alexa and Jen walked back to the house ignoring the four little electric golf buggies parked next to the entrance. The clear skies made it quite cold and both girls wore thick coats, scarves and mittens for the short walk back. Hardy would no doubt take one of the buggies later and Simon would probably stay with Allison in her apartment in the research centre now they had become a ‘thing’, they weren't even trying to be discreet any more.

“What do you think about Magnus then,” said Alexa to Jen.

“Off the scale genius, very introverted, I expect all his friends have been online; but also a very quick learner. Did you notice his demeanour in the few hours since this morning seems a lot better, you must have impressed him with something you said. But god does he need a makeover, the poor guy looks like he's been sleeping in the streets and woke up naked in a charity shop.. But I think I’m going to enjoy working with him.

“My thoughts exactly,” said Alexa, “he seems to have no problems talking with Maria, but is very reserved when talking with real people, I think I'm going to enjoy being Professor Henry Higgins!”

“Hey,” perked Maria. “I could be real people I will have you know. Anyway for Magnus it could just be the environment he grew up in. He was admitted to university at sixteen and before that was privately educated at a boys school for three years when his mother emigrated from Helsinki. He was such a bad fit in his last job, I think he was put down at every turn by both the senior researcher and the guy in charge of the project even though he carried most of the technical weight, that project was doomed to fail from the get go. My guess is that he's never really fit in anywhere.”

“I think Daisy likes him a lot,” sniggered Jen, causing both girls to giggle.

“Well he spent sixty five percent more time looking at Jen than any other person,” said Maria casually, causing Jen to stop.

Alexa looked at Jen’s confused face and burst out laughing.

“He’s so sweet, and innocent, I just want to mother him,” continued Maria nonchalantly. “He definitely looks a lot better without the hair from hell,” she added, “I think the last four weeks have been troubling for him and he’s had to be careful with his funds. Sharon will sort out his clothing and stuff tomorrow and I will talk to him about money and banking next time we chat.”

Alexa put her arm through Jen's who had recovered somewhat, and they skipped, wizard of Oz style for a short while, “I hear Jessica has agreed to join us once she finishes her environmental engineering degree,” said Jen, finally stopping her skipping as she was getting out of step.

“Yes,” said Alexa, wrapping her scarf a bit more closely around her neck in the chill air, “the girls have been busy giving her some special lessons, and also helping her in the areas we are interested in, she should do fine.”

“I expect Spence will be pleased,” said Jen, “I notice he has been much happier since she accepted the job and I also notice he has been staying here more and more over the past few weeks to give her space to finish her degree.”

“Her final project is on closed cycle systems,” said Maria, “It is something that is going to become more and more important over the next few years to us and has applications in several areas we will be working on. I think from talking to her and giving her hints on what she might be working on in the future she is very excited. Of course it's a very practical science and she will be working with another local biotech company and the team from Dusseldorf.”

“Are those the people coming down on Monday?” said Alexa.

“Yes,” replied Maria, “they are coming to see Simon and talk over some common areas to make sure they compliment each other. They are working on biological machines, they have two projects, a bioreactor that Jessica is going to learn, and a genetically engineered coral that is an extremophile, that means it can survive in the harshest of environments.

“Why grow artificial coral?” said Alexa, picking on the weirdest part of the sentence..

“Oh it's not so obvious at first,” chirped in Maria. “Firstly it's not really coral, more like tree bark or a coconut husk, but neither fits well as it's harder, so the guys are calling it coral as that's the closest analogy everyone agrees on. Coral relies on algae in their polyps which means it has to be submerged in seawater to give them nutrients to grow. What we have done is some really clever gene manipulation which makes the growing coral form numerous mycelium-like channels like veins and capillaries inside the new structures, so they are fed from inside, more like a tree, they will basically be creating living structures. We became their biggest investor a few months ago and now have sixty percent of the company, with the four members of the team sharing the rest. I expect us to become their first and biggest customer.”

“Cool.., I think!” said Jen. “You will have to give us all an update soon, It seems every time I turn around a new announcement or breakthrough has been made, you have certainly started the ball rolling, a lot of people are already saying this is the start of the singularity, I don't know how anyone is supposed to keep track of everything.”

“Maria does,” said Alexa, “she is tracking everything and connecting all the dots.”

“Not just me now,” said Maria, “Helena and April are working in separate areas with different groups but we pool all our knowledge hundreds of times a day to ensure we can target the right areas and link together the right projects. Not everything is useful to us but those that are, and the ones we consider will be the most benefit to the planet and to us we put a special effort in, others we just help with investment funding or sometimes just direct them to other commercial backers. I’m hoping we will be able to get some timelines together in the coming weeks to present to everyone so you can all see a few of the possibilities we see.”

It was sometime after seven in the evening, not quite night but certainly past twilight, the girls walked on the main driveway back as it had lights along each side, when they got back to Alexa's house ten minutes later, Jen offered to prepare the salad for the quiche that Bella had put in their fridge, she was then going to spend another hour with Maria and Daisy in virtual preparing for the work tomorrow.

“I’m going to have a bath if that's OK Jen,” Alexa said as they walked through the unlocked back door. “Why don't we meet in the dining room in say thirty minutes, Hardy will probably be back by then so make enough for three just in case.”

* * *

Magnus woke up at ten thirty in the morning. However much he tried, due to his jet lag and excitement he didn't fall asleep until sometime after two. All the time his head was spinning with all the new people he had met and the implications of everything he was expected to do in the coming weeks. He already had a terrible case of imposter syndrome before he had even started the job!

His immediate thoughts on waking was why did his bed feel so soft, he dozed for about five minutes half asleep, then remembered where he was and sprang out of bed.

“Oh my god, I’ll be late on my first day, Maria will kill me!” he exclaimed out loud.

“Good morning Magnus,” came Maria's voice from the speaker by his dressing table, making him jump. “Don't worry about the time, we try not to murder people for being late, remember we normally work our own timetable here!”

Magnus stared at the speaker on the dressing table, not for the first time wondering if the AI could actually read his mind. “Hi Maria, I forgot to ask yesterday, but there isn't a, er camera, in here is there?”

“Good heavens no!” said Maria, “just this speaker unit, which only processes language and won't send anything unless you mention my name, like you just did. There is also a mute button if you want complete privacy or you can just unplug the speaker from the room, you can always use your new phone if you want, I’m cool either way.”

She wasn't really! Since the death of Alexa's grandfather she now used sub-processors to monitor all the people she cared for. She held no fascinations with human bodily functions or mating rituals but knew humans were very sensitive and so used total discretion.

Magnus looked around the room which was a bit smaller than his old apartment in California, that was fortunately where the difference ended. While his old apartment was utilitarian, this was pure class, it was warm but not hot, and tastefully furnished with the essentials of a double bed, sofa, desk, and a built-in wardrobe. To the front and left were two doors, the entrance door to the left, and directly in front of him his en-suite, to the right was a large window hidden by a thick green curtain. His old suitcase lay open on the floor with an assortment of scrunched up clothing and a couple of books in it. He looked at the suitcase depressingly, then at his old suit threw over a chair, and sighed.

Opening the curtains brightened up the room a lot, but it was tempered by the overcast sky outside. What was it with this country? He had only been here twenty four hours and he felt like he had gone through all four seasons, the Brits must have more words for rain than Eskimos had words for snow, probably more as he had fact checked that particular rumour. He looked through the window at the view over the green countryside and meandering river close by, it was quite beautiful and everything was so quiet, no traffic or banging from the neighbours.

Maria continued, “Jen, Daisy and a couple of the bigger guys are still moving and unpacking the new equipment in your lab. I have told them you are still a bit jet-lagged and not to expect you until midday. Also there is a package outside your door with some new clothes, shoes and other accessories, as it looked like you didn't bring too much with you. Hopefully they will be suitable, I have also ordered your company credit card which you can use for private purposes for the first two months until you get settled, someone will deliver it this morning.”

Magnus again wondered if Maria could read his mind, then shrugged it off thanking her, he opened the door and noticed the pile of boxes neatly stacked outside.

“Let me know if you don't like anything and we will return it,” said Maria. “And leave the empty packaging and any rubbish outside the room as neatly as you can and I will arrange for someone to pick it up.”

Magnus spent the next hour opening boxes, unclipping tags and hanging clothes, mostly they were casual, jeans, chinos, polo shirts, socks and undergarments and finally two pairs of loafers, all looked to be good quality and his size. Another box contained an electric shaver kit, a brush, toothpastes, shampoos, conditioners and soaps. With great relief he showered, shaved then put on a pair of tan chinos and a plain white T-shirt, finally slipping into a pair of black slip-on loafers, all, to his surprise, fit perfectly.

He sighed, more with relief than consternation, most of what he had accumulated in the USA had gone in three large boxes to the local homeless centre before he left, he would not have been surprised if the homeless shelter had thrown them out too. It was amazing how little he had accumulated in his short life, renting in California and paying back the crippling student loans more or less emptied his account every month. He hadn't had any savings for the last five years, living pay-check to pay-check plus a small amount his mother still sent him every month meant he just about scraped by. It was never really an option that he would not take this job.

“Maria, these are great, I wish I had you helping me a few years ago,” he said looking over at the speaker.

Maria laughed, “I doubt you really wanted to take fashion advice from an AI, Hardy and Sharon both have the best eye for fashion and style, though Alexa has upped her game since meeting Hardy. It was actually Sharon who choose these for you, I told her you were up and about and she's on her way here now, she usually likes to greet everyone in the first few days. You met her last night just so you remember she served you the beer.”

Before Magnus could form a reply he heard a knocking from the door. He checked himself in the mirror and walked over and opened it. Sharon stood outside with a pretty flowery dress and all smiles, looking a bit like a younger version of his mum. He now remembered her from last night though they only spoke briefly.

“Good morning sleepyhead,” she said warmly, waiting outside his door. He wasn't sure what to say but smiled, then realised she was waiting for an invite to enter. He stepped aside, throwing the door wide and motioning her to enter.

“Hello Sharon, please come in, I believe it is you I have to thank for the clothes and other stuff, I didn't really have much time to get everything together for my move.” It was the first thing to come into his head as he thought he needed to qualify the reason for his lack of anything nice.

“Oh it's nothing, I live to shop and love buying nice things for people, you’re not the first and won't be the last. I was in town yesterday afternoon when Maria messaged me with your sizes, and I have a very friendly tailor I know.. Anyway you look a lot better, I could get your old suit dry-cleaned,” she said looking at his jacket threw over the end of the chair, “but if you want a little bit of fashion advice, throw it away and replace it with something more modern, I can certainly help you there if you have a free afternoon sometime, at least it looks like Maria got the sizes about right,” she said looking him up and down with an appraising smile.

She then turned around the room, carefully ignoring the old suitcase he had tried to hide under the bed, “is everything else here OK? I like to follow up with people to make sure they are happy, Maria normally does all the HR stuff, but I’m the human side of the HR equation, you can let either of us know if there is anything you need.”

Unbeknown to Magnus, Sharon and Maria had already discussed him a few times.

“So, basically Magnus, the room is yours for as long as you need it, you can redecorate it or buy any item of furniture you wish, and we currently have another six rooms empty if for any reason you want to change, alternatively your contract pays living expenses so we will also pay for a rental of a suitable apartment in the town if you feel you want to live outside. There is a hairdresser who comes around if you need and we regularly have someone driving back and forth to town if you need something specific or need to get out for any reason.

It was said quite sincerely, but Magnus still felt a bit intimidated talking to a woman about things he needed, but somehow she had covered the two things that had immediately sprung to mind. “No, everything is great, better than great.” He said honestly.

Then remembered, “about that hairdresser, can I get them around today, I mean before I meet everyone again? I meant to go before I left but things got a bit hectic.”

“I will try and book an appointment today, she will usually do a special trip if we ask. If you don't mind me saying Magnus, you look much better without the beard and I think short hair would suit you more. I also think you should try different glasses or contacts, you have really nice eyes.”

Magnus was a bit embarrassed, not used to talking personal stuff with women, he started to blush a little, but Sharon did her best to ignore it.

She continued. “When you have some free time, I will take you out to town and show you where everything is, maybe me or one of the other girls could accompany you to the opticians and we can give you some advice if necessary to replace those scratched glasses.”

He breathed a sigh of relief, “thank you Sharon, I would really appreciate that, I’ve not had my eyes tested for three years, there never seemed to be the time.”

“Oh phooey,” she said, dismissing the compliment, “I will arrange an appointment with the opticians tomorrow, we can get you some new lenses and frames chosen and ordered at the same time,” she turned back to the room.

“Now the housekeeper usually comes every other day, you normally leave your laundry and dirty towels in the basket there and they will get cleaned and returned to you, if for some reason you don't want the housekeeper just let Maria know. They also won't come in the room while you are in it.”

“Those boxes outside will get removed before you get back, just add anything else you want to throw out to the pile.” She looked directly at his old suit.

“Now as you saw last night we have cooking staff here and usually have a buffet most days except for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when they have some of the local restaurants cater, there are no set times but it is all cleared away at eight PM, Maria is good at reminding you to eat often and healthy, but we do have the occasional indulgences,” she laughed.

“Hey, I’m not that bad,” chirped Maria.

It wasn't just him. Maria really was a different AI to the one he first talked to, it was getting so hard not to treat her like a human.

“I meant it in a nice way,” said Sharon.

“Anyway Magnus, if all is good here you better get a move on if you want breakfast, cook has put something aside for you, or you can wait thirty minutes and there will be some sandwiches and salad out for lunch, I usually work with cook on the menu so we can vary it a bit but we have tuna, ham, cheese, egg or haloumi salad today.”

They walked down the stairs to the dining room, passing the same girl who showed him the room yesterday. Sharon stopped to say a few words about his rubbish boxes and she smiled at him as they parted. A plate with two croissants, jam and butter was on the counter with his name on a sticker, he grabbed it and a peppermint tea and sat down to eat, chatting with Sharon for a few minutes until she left to take a phone call.

With nobody around he asked, “Maria, what time do people normally work here?”

“There are no fixed times, most people tend to be here during the core hours of ten to three, but we are very flexible on how you do your hours and which days, most people tend to work long hours for a few weeks and then have a few days off. Everyone knows you're jet-lagged so won't be expecting any early starts from you for the next few days.”

Sharon closed the call, letting him know the hairdresser was fifteen minutes away and they normally used a dressing room on the first floor. He finished off his breakfast and followed Sharon to meet the hairdresser. This place seemed to run like clockwork!

Forty five minutes later he walked to the lab building talking pleasantly to Sharon, who had lingered talking to the hairdresser about styles before finally deciding what would look best for him, it was hard to refuse their recommendation. Outside the lab was a mess of boxes, pallets and packaging, which Sharon gave a stern look at before parting presumably to find the culprit.

Just as she disappeared an older guy appeared from out of the lab with another box full of packing material and rubbish, he nodded to him. “That's a lot of rubbish!” Magnus said smiling, “Sharon has just disappeared with a huff to get someone to clean it I think.”

“Oh don't worry about our Sharon, Maria will let her know and she will get distracted with something else pretty quick. Anyway still a bit to go, we started moving the gear in last night and the girls got here at eight to let us know where they wanted everything moving,” the older man stuck his hand out, “I’m Pat, by the way, I normally I do the grounds-keeping but Albert and a couple of the guys dragged me in early morning to help. I volunteered to do the clean up as I need to go down to the recycling centre later this morning.”

“Magnus,” he said, shaking the offered hand, “new here yesterday and I guess I’m the cause of all this. Sorry!”

Pat waved it off laughing and Magnus followed him back into the very large room where Pat then headed for a big pile of cardboard. He was right, it was pretty chaotic, boxes and wrapping paper were stacked up in a pile near the door and computers and test equipment were in various states of assembly. He could see the back of Jen's head buried in an oscilloscope and her hands turning a calibration dial on another piece of equipment. Daisy and two other guys he didn't know were cabling equipment to computers on a mobile bench, one was up a step ladder trying to locate something. Magnus looked around trying to make some sense.

Daisy waved at him smiling and walked over to him with a clipboard, “good morning Magnus, wow, you look much better than yesterday, love the hair!” she said, giving him a much warmer look than last night.

Magnus gave his best smile to Daisy, determined not to make any more social mistakes and to treat everyone as normal like Alexa had said. It helped. “Thanks Daisy, I was pretty tired yesterday but feel much better now. How can I help?”

She leafed through her clipboard and handed him a sheet. “There is still quite a bit to do, the equipment on this list goes on that bench there,” she pointed to a half finished bench, “Steve and Terry normally work in the other labs but came over to help Albert and Pat with the heavy lifting and assembly, and to get everything started. The instructions are from Maria so just ask her if you have any questions, she’s wired for sound in the labs! Oh, your lab coat is on the rack over there,” she moved her finger over her back shoulder pointing and he looked over to the door where there was a rack and a couple of coats hanging.

He briefly looked at the sheet and over at the equipment then back to Daisy, noticing she and all the others had their lab coats on with their names on them.

“Thanks!” He walked over, saw a lab coat with “Magnus” written on it and put it on. How far ahead had Maria planned this? It seemed unlikely she could get all this organised in a few days. Well she was an AI how was he to judge. He looked at the first task, asked a quick question of Daisy and called one of the two guys over, whose name on the lab coat said Terry, to help him move a box.

He talked through the setups as he was doing them with the humans as much as Maria, querying the areas he was not sure of, soon his head was buried in cables and the next thing he knew was Jen tapping him on the shoulder.

“Hey, Magnus, sorry I did not see you get here, I tend to get distracted in my work.” She looked him over appraisingly and smiled, “much better, you look ten years younger today. Anyway, we were all going down to grab a late lunch if you want to come? I’ve finished my calibration on that last bit so I will give you a hand with finishing this off and the calibration when we get back.”

“Hey Jen, thanks for that, it feels good to actually start working properly.” He brought his head up out of the back of the computer interface he was wiring and Jen gave him another favourable look.

Much, much better she thought, he's quite handsome really. Then pushed it to the back of her mind.

“It's going to take most of today and tomorrow to get the first experiment set up. We have one more big piece of equipment we are going to borrow from the Quantum Vacuum Cell laboratory, that will be the last piece then you will go through the theory of it and what we intend to prove on the display board. Maria has already planned out four of the experiments. If it's OK Hardy has asked if he and some of his team can sit in on some of the theory sessions with us, he loves the new maths and I think he is as excited as us to see where your project goes.”

Magnus finally felt useful, he quickly finished putting in a cable and checking off a box on his sheet then walked with Jen downstairs to the main house to get lunch. Alexa wasn't in the office today but a few other guys from the other labs joined them. He recognised Simon and Leo, who both waved, but seemed to be treating the lunch as more of a working meeting. He met a few more faces and said hello, luckily most people were just happy to talk about science and were interested in his work. It felt so good having people who understood it, that he quite forgot his usually introverted nature. At least two people noticed though.

The rest of the day went well, the guys all knew what they were doing and Maria tested everything as it was installed, Jen and Daisy followed not far behind doing calibrations and double-checking the checklists. At six Maria announced the dinner buffet was open and at six thirty they decided to stop for the day, tomorrow they would hopefully be ready for the theory.

* * *

“Magnus felt like a different person today,” said Jen to Maria. It was seven pm and she was driving a golf buggy back to the house after having an early buffet. Like everyone else she enjoyed the comradeship when everyone ate together.

“He looked to be enjoying himself,” she continued, “and looked to be less introverted and treating everyone normally, he certainly looks better than yesterday, thank god that hairs gone, I almost called him Shaggy and expected Scooby Doo to show up!”

Maria brought up a picture of the character from the movie and ran a facial comparison with Magnus, it wasn't even fifty percent, what was Jen getting at? She quite rightly said nothing.

“I will let Sharon know you approve of her clothing choices.” Maria did say, “In fact I know she quite enjoyed the challenge. I was going to order everything online but she was in town and spent an extra hour going through the shopping list I had, adding a few extras I didn't think of. I also booked an eye test for him first thing tomorrow morning.”

Jen laughed, “OK but do let him have some time off. Oh and can you please book the hairdresser for me tomorrow, it's Pauline I assume?”

Hmm, thought Maria, Jen only had her hair cut a month ago, she filed it under interesting and continued, the break imperceptible to Jen, “Alexa arrived back an hour ago and has her first appointment tomorrow at ten but I will let Pauline know to add an extra slot for you.”

## David and Goliath

Johnson was at his wit's end! It had been two weeks since the self-driving car running their company's AI software had run off the road injuring the driver and the passenger. Luckily the car was very well built, and it was only this that prevented death and a possible revocation of their licence. There would still be the inevitable enquiry, definitely a legal case, and all the time the press would be hauling them over the coals. But it was none of these which had him pulling his hair out.

There seemed to be two mitigating factors, a missing barrier and a slight mismatch in the GPS reported position during the crash. He and his team had replayed the telemetry data into the test AI system over a hundred times now, with differing variations of reflection of the road, possible sun-strike, possible lightning flash, as it was a strange weather day, possible lights or reflections from other reflective surfaces and shadow due to clouds, many of which were not even actually evident in the black box data. Even with the additions of these fake conditions, in none of the tests could he get the AI to make the wrong judgement. And now the CEO and CFO of the company were waiting for him to go into the meeting and explain what his team had found and how they were going to mitigate the problem.

“So, you are basically saying you have no clue why it decided to drive off the road?” Said the CEO incredulously.

Johnson wanted to look everywhere but into the CEO’s accusing eyes. Like as if it was his fault! He was just the leader of one part of a team of nearly a thousand software and hardware engineers. It just so happened it was his team tasked with the scenario testing, using their supercomputer cluster and terabytes of real life data and scenarios, then managing the release. His team had the same meeting with the head of their AI research Department who had written the actual AI and got the same answer, we trained it on similar scenarios and they work. Heck if the guys who wrote the software did not know how it worked, how the hell was he supposed to!

“Sir, the problem is there is no formal way of understanding how the AI comes to its decisions, and at the end of the day even with better training data it's still all weighted averages so a decision it made one way one day may not be necessarily the way it does it the next. In almost all situations it has enough data to make the correct decision almost a hundred percent of the time but in edge cases it may make the incorrect decision.”

The same was true of the facial recognition software he worked on when he first left university; The police and governments loved it, but it was only ninety-one percent reliable, and this fell to seventy-eight percent reliable if you were African American. Almost one in four people was a terrible statistic when your possible life was on the line. He looked briefly at the other angry and predatory faces staring at him thinking the obvious, was he going to be the fall guy for this? He saw the headlines now.

*The failure was discovered to be due to mistakes in release testing, the guy responsible has been removed from his position and the procedures tightened. The company is greatly* *committed to user safety and won't let this one unfortunate incident derail the excellent record of the system and the company.. Blah-de-blah!*

Yes he was going to get thrown under the bus and whatever scraps remained, fed to the wolves. He knew what was coming even as the CEO continued his tirade.

“..How the hell can we go to our investors and the public with a statement like that!” screamed the CEO. “Our investors pay for your nice house and car, and expect to see their top people doing their job properly and taking responsibility to fix its failures!”

They were waiting for an answer, an apology, for him to beg them to give him another chance. Well let them wait, he didn't need to be humiliated like this. He looked at his laptop and fancy phone on the desk, all owned by the companies, well they were welcome to them. And what house was he talking about! He couldn't afford a shoebox in San Francisco, he lived in a two bed apartment with a hairstylist, took a bus to work and the rest of his money went on debts and a lifestyle he now realised he hated. Yes absolutely nothing to show for his five years out of university, except debt, lost time and stress.

He was a smart guy, top of his class in software verification methods. Oh yes, he tried to stop the release, but had no choice as it fixed several other critical bugs, his additional requests for delays, to allow more testing data fell on deaf ears. He even suggested that they talk to the LabAI guys in England to see if they could help like they did with Tesla and Google. Yes, those companies may have taken a step back the last four months, but early suggestions on the cars with the new sensors and software were very positive. But no, that would eat into profits for the overweight pigs sitting around the trough in front of him, and they probably didn't want anyone else seeing how bad their system really was.

He finally broke, shooting up from his seat.

He stared daggers at the CEO and then did the same at every single person around the room.

“You are not pinning any of this crap on me like you did the last two people in the job. I quit, and if anything, absolutely anything comes my way laying any blame on me I will simply tell the truth and make sure I drag your whole system through the courts, the media and regulatory agencies until it bleeds. If you want my official recommendation for the record, then read the emails I have been sending you for the last six months and rip the software up and start again!”

He started walking out. “Oh, and keep your scummy lawyers away from me as I have about two thousand bucks to my name, so suing me won't even cover the costs of writing the summons.”

The door slammed on seven shocked individuals, four of whom would later be convicted of short selling the company's stock prior to its collapse a year later.

* * *

David wasn't really sure what he was trying to accomplish any longer. He had pretended at first he was going to get some information for Saul, but that wasn't it, and three weeks ago he had basically sent Saul a message saying he was finished. So what was he still doing here? Whatever it was, he knew he dare not rush it. Most of the security services including the British, who were on home turf, were having their agents identities made public, and a raft of highly visible complaints to the media, the police and lawyers following soon after. Those that had not been deported were prosecuted for trespass, industrial espionage, intimidation, theft or hacking. Though he had to laugh at the irony of that last one.

But David had done none of these things. His pursuit of any endeavour stopped immediately he had any doubts on the mission, the people involved or its ethics. He was also smart enough to know he did not have all the answers, and in those cases usually relied on his gut instinct to make the call. His gut instinct was usually correct, but had failed him one time when he believed the lies of a beautiful woman over the evidence in front of him. It had nearly cost another agent her life and taught him a valuable lesson.

Hacking however was not the only tool in David's chest, which was lucky as it was effectively useless here, no, he was also an exceptional analyst, usually calling the correct outcome from the data he had. Again, here he was not seeing an evil megacorp, but a company with a seemingly spotless portfolio and reputation.

He kept enquiries to third parties, but gleaned the occasional titbit of information from customers at the bar who had either dealt with it or knew of people who had. As far as he could tell there were only around fifty people who worked there, yet it was the head office for a global corporation controlling upwards of three hundred billion dollars, even this was hard to determine as it was a private not a public company, yet if those same financiers were to be believed, the company was not worth a tenth of that last year.

David still had a lot of difficulty reconciling these amounts of money with an honest company, but each thread he traced came out legitimate. It could certainly be insider trading, the AI probably had enough capability to hack into any company it so desired, but it never traded in anything other than technical or manufacturing stocks involved in its own supply chain. No the company was usually deep into Angel Investor capital, where it would fund an up and coming technology which months later would explode on the world. But these companies were not listed until they did an Initial Public Offering so even though the AI knew they were going to explode in price, as it was deeply ingrained in the science, it was all totally legitimate.

He had decided to move to Bath three months earlier, he had no real idea what possessed him as he was no longer working for the agency, but he felt that being closer to the source of truth would assist him in some way to solve the puzzle in his mind. He enrolled in a local college history course and got an evening job as a barman in a well known wine bar in the centre of the city. He then spent the next three months doing nothing but getting to know the city and its people and, very passively, as much as he could about the mysterious Dietrich Research Centre which was eight miles outside.

David was attractive, just shy of six foot tall, dark haired, Mediterranean tanned and in good physical condition from his regular swimming and running. He was also extremely intelligent, which normally gave him the edge, but here knew he was up against something much, much more intelligent.

But David had also spent a lot of time analysing the data passively and there were chinks in the otherwise impenetrable armour. An AI would rule the Internet just as a tiger would rule a jungle, it could do anything, go anywhere and destroy anything, but like a tiger it could not be everywhere all at once, its perfect eyesight could not see everything, and its perfect hearing could not hear everything.

There were millions if not billions of events happening on the Internet daily, to analyse all these would require processing capacity at least as great as the internet itself. No, the laws of physics and logic were hard laws and in this case worked in his favour. If he was an AI he would monitor important assets and events very closely, and have triggers for other events that could affect it, then have tags readily set up to quickly access and use systems it needed to. The trouble was, in the jungle comparison, this was probably more like a jungle full of prowling tigers and he did not know where any of them were. There was however a very obvious option open to him, he sighed, closed his eyes and clicked the send button.

* * *

Maria read the email addressed to theentityincharge@dietrichresearch.com with great interest and with her usual efficiency verified each and every statement, then made the call.

David's tenacity for getting things done had given him a lot of leeway on how he helped the Israeli government in the past. He was an unusual agent in that he was not in it for the ideology nor the patriotism, nor the glory, he didn't even do it for the money. No David did it because it gave him the chance to right wrongs, help good people, punish bad people, and if he admitted it himself, he enjoyed the chase.

But not all missions he had been asked to do fell into these categories, he had walked away from several jobs where he wasn't happy with something or he found out he had been misled, and while unhappy, nobody in charge ever pushed him further. The reason they did not push him was that David was different from most other assets, he was not employed by the government and did not work for money. In fact he was actually incredibly wealthy, his diverse portfolio of property, tech stocks and cash now worth nearly thirty three million dollars.

Yet at this moment David was working as a barman and mixing pink gin and tonics for two nice old ladies who always came in for happy hour on Thursday evening.

* * *

“Here you go ladies,” he smiled genuinely, then followed them with his eyes as they sat at an empty table. The bar was normally quiet on a Thursday, but because they were part of a prestigious hotel group and liked to keep up appearances, they always had two people working in the kitchen, two in the bar and a duty manager. Tonight was even more quiet than usual, the “prestigious hotel group”, happy hour pricing still being more than the normal pricing of the other bars in the vicinity, and the weather outside being cold and miserable.

Still, the incognito experience was still fun for him, the bar was warm and cheery and David had Yolanda and Donna to talk to. All in all much more preferable to being at his apartment on his laptop. Yolanda specifically was the more interesting of the two, pleasant looking, she tended to dress down rather than up and always had a smile for David, she was doing her final year of her chemistry degree, was well travelled and was a surprisingly humorous conversationalist.

Yolanda was currently in the kitchen no doubt chatting to Don and Ed who had nothing to do until someone ordered a meal. Donna on the other hand was a seriously good looker and was obviously interested in him, flirting far too often and far too obviously, but Donna had little substance to her outside her good looks, and he ignored any sexual overtones to the relationship preferring to keep it friendly and professional. The poor girl currently looked pretty bored, swiping her hands over her phone, like she was prone to do every idle minute.

He was contemplating a good topic to get Yolanda talking when she returned from the kitchen, when two new women entered the bar. Both women had raincoats and scarves tied up tight against the weather outside, one a light coloured raincoat without a hood, the other dark and fully hooded hiding most of the face. They had rushed in from the rain laughing and the one without the hood proceeded to close and shake her umbrella. Both had a casual look around before settling on an alcove seat near the fire and removing their coats and scarfs.

The two women were settling in, laughing and one started looking at the menu on the table. It was almost his cue to wander over and take an order, he turned away from them and looked at the playlist on his phone, the current track was just ending, he skipped two songs along to an Adele one he assumed would be more preferable to the mainly female audience he had this evening.

David gulped as he approached and his step faltered. The woman who was wearing the hooded raincoat was Alexa Martins and she was now looking directly at him, smiling in a way that said “I know exactly who you are”. He looked around then tried not to look apprehensive as he approached. The other woman was kind of familiar but she looked to be a bit older than Alexa, both girls had an imposing presence when up close, Alexa in particular was just as beautiful as in her pictures and videos, the other girl would be quite nice too if it wasn't for her being in the company of Alexa. For one of the first times in his life he felt some apprehension.

“Good evening ladies,” he said in his best voice and trying to keep his stare neutrally balanced between the two women, “can I get you both a drink?”

“No need to David,” said Alexa smiling at him, “please take a seat, you’re actually off the clock as of this moment, I’m sure the loss of a few hours wages won't be too much of a burden for you. Your colleague Yolanda should be out in a second to take our orders.”

She patted the seat to the side of her. “Come on, neither Allison nor myself are going to bite you!”

The other girl smiled also, Allison, that was the name of one of the senior AI engineers, Allison Minsky, PhD's in both electronics and cognitive computer science, at least his equal intellectually, though he had researched her and was in no doubt hers was probably higher. She and Spence controlled the worldwide AI infrastructure for the company. She was sitting next to her employer, the richest and most influential woman in the country, possibly the world. For the first time in his life he felt totally out of his depth. He sat down slowly, looking over to the bar to see Yolanda talking to Donna and both of them looking at him with incredulity in their eyes. Donna put her phone down immediately after the conversation and with a slightly frightened look, walked into the back staff area.

“I guess introductions are necessary,” continued Alexa holding her hand out, “I am Alexa Martins and this here is Allison Minsky.”

David took both hands and shook them lightly, both were pleasantly warm.

“Donna is OK isn't she?” David said, looking over at the bar with concern in his voice.

“It is refreshing to see you are concerned for her,” said Alexa warmly, “but she is fine, Yolanda just received a call from the hotel manager that the hotel chain owner has just arrived in her bar and desired a little privacy while she had a conversation with one of her friends who is also an employee. Donna has just been asked to put her phone away in her locker. She does have an awful social media habit she needs to break.”

Despite everything, David smiled.

Yolanda walked over, giving David a brief look but reserving her attention mostly for the two ladies sitting in front of her, even Yolanda, who was hardly ever fazed by any situation seemed a little dumbstruck.

“Yolanda, isn't it?” said Alexa, shaking Yolanda's trembling hand, “I’m Alexa, and this is Allison. Your manager John has said a lot of nice things about you, I’m sure you won't mind if we borrow David for a short time will you?” Yolanda shook her head even though the question was rhetorical. “I’m having a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc, Allison?”

“Mulled Wine please.” Said Allison as she finished shaking Yolanda's hand.

“Oh I’ll have one of those instead,” jumped in Alexa still smiling, “David?”

“Same for me please Yolanda,” he said smiling at her and giving her a look that said ‘everything is OK’ and easing her concern a little. He too then relaxed, his mind gradually recovering from the shock. Yolanda walked away more confused than concerned, after all what owner would have you sit down for a drink with them before firing them?

“I guess you got my email then?” he said.

“Yes, it was a little bit confusing to be called an entity,” Alexa said, Allison sniggered a little at that, “just plain Alexa would have got you the same result you know.”

Allison chipped in for the first time. “You know David, it was very refreshing for one of you guys to actually knock on the front door rather than try and break through the window, Maria had a bet with me that nobody would think to do the obvious.”

Allison paused with her finger in her ear, “yes, how rude of me.”

She took a small earbud out of her left ear and put it in her handbag, she then withdrew a small box about the size of a deck of playing cards and put it in the centre of the table. Immediately the sound of Adele faded to a murmur.

“Hello again David,” came a voice from the box. “You remember our first meeting of course at Professor Holmes laboratory? Like you I have more than one hat I can put on, this is the real me, Maria is the name, pleased to meet you.”

David had been rehearsing this moment for months, how he would talk to an employee if he met one, what would he say, but all his prepared speeches went out the window as this third and most scary variable now entered the equation.

“I am very pleased to meet you Maria, as I am with you Alexa and you too Allison, you all really know how to put a fellow on the spot don't you?”

The two girls laughed heartily, leaning in to each other as close friends often do, this in its own way removed any remaining apprehension from David's mind.

“So David,” said Alexa, “why is a multi-millionaire working as a barman in lovely Bath? I understand the Spa pools are very nice and therapeutic, but you could do the same in Kerala, Cappadocia or Budapest, and the weather in two of those places would certainly beat here at the moment.”

David, re-asserted himself getting a little more comfortable in his seat. At that moment, the box beeped once, and a few seconds later Yolanda returned with three large cocktail glasses full of steaming red wine and garnished with some fresh fruit.

“Anyone like something to eat?” said Allison as she accepted her glass, “I’m famished and the veggie nachos are supposed to be to die for here.”

“I suppose we should try them,” said Alexa fondling a menu in front of her.

“The garlic bread is pretty good too,” chipped in David nonchalantly, now fully relaxed. After all this was probably the pinnacle of his life, he was about to have a meal and a conversation with these beautiful intelligent creatures, it was going to be hard to top this.

“All the above for three to share please, Yolanda,” said Alexa, handing the menu back unnecessarily to the girl.

“I do the occasional favour for the Israeli government,” he admitted freely when Yolanda had moved away, “but I am not an employee of theirs, nor do I share all their ideals. Where they do converge I help them out, where they do not converge I do not, and I have refused many more requests than I have acquiesced to. As I said in my email I was asked to look at the code to one of your units which I am assuming they either stole directly from you or got from the Americans. After my talk with Alan, sorry Maria here in the university, a quick look at the code told me all I needed to know, but I needed to convince myself there was nothing nefarious.”

“Ouch!” said Maria from her box. “A human female has a few secrets and she is interesting, an AI has the same and she is nefarious. I should be feeling a bit hurt.”

“You’ll get over it, like you always do, you’re a big girl now Maria,” said Allison laughing. “Anyway, I think David deserves some answers for being so polite, I mean if it was me in his position I would probably be asking all the same questions. And he is quite cute.”

“Allison!” said Alexa accusingly, “you’re already spoken for!” Then after both girls laughed, she said. “You’re right through. David did ask nicely and Maria wouldn't have arranged all this if she hadn't checked him out and didn’t think he was a good actor.”

“I can't check everything,” said Maria, “David, like all people who works in that industry has a public and a private presence, his public one is very easy to check, if he was in the market for a job I would probably snap him up immediately and from our little interaction with him even just now, we know he can empathise with people, and cares for others he is not directly responsible for, Donna being the point. However, then there is also the private, secret David, the hacker who did his national service in Mossad and who still occasionally crosses into the grey area of the law..”

“Pot and Kettle, Maria,” David said smugly.

Alexa and Allison burst into laughter, Allison nearly losing all dignity with her mulled wine.

“Touche!” said Maria, resignedly. “But like me, there is only so much of the iceberg I can see, Mossad is one of the better protected intelligence agencies, partly due to David's code, but I cannot see any red flags either so it might be worth letting him peek under my skirt a little.”

David blushed, he closed his eyes and counted to five while the girls got over their merriment.

“OK,” said Alexa, “enough of embarrassing the poor guy!” She turned a little more serious, “what we tell David kind of depends on who he trusts, remember he is under no obligation to us not to post everything we tell him up on the Mossad staff notice board. Also David may or may not be aware he has his own spy problems, after all privacy and discretion is not something you should take for granted in the game he has chosen to play in.”

“Wait what?” He said shocked.

“Oh come now David,” said Maria, “your own guys, the Brits and Chinese all have you under either electronic or personal surveillance, that phone you left on the counter over their playing such sweet lady music is both tracked and has a passive surveillance patch in the operating system, same goes for your old offices and your apartment in Soho.”

“I.. They wouldn't..” His voice faltered, but of course they would! He knew this game, why was he immune from the rules, his posture slumped again. “I’ve been so dumb, of course they would want to know what I am up to, I’m sorry you guys are right, I shouldn't be trusted with anything important..”

“Maria never said that,” said Alexa, “we are a little agnostic when it comes to you David, in many ways we are the same, both of us want to effect change for the good, you do it your way, fighting the bad, and we do it our way, making the good a little better. And like us you have people who do not trust you or in many cases, such as terrorists, who would actively oppose you foiling their plans.”

“I think back to Allison's point,” said Maria, “she obviously trusts us because she is on the inside looking out, I stand naked before her and though she does not know my innermost thoughts, just as I do not know hers, she can intimate them quite easily by my actions. As far as you go David, we do not have to reveal anything you do not really know already, we just have to add in the few details, revealing some truths you are unaware of, the details that add the ‘why?’ to the knowledge you have.”

“That's a fair point Maria,” said Allison, “it is the ‘why’ part of the equation which makes a lot of this make sense, it is then up to David whether or not he chooses to believe it or act upon it.”

Alexa nodded as Donna came over with a big bowl of garlic bread and another of nachos. And she almost dropped them as she saw who was sitting there.

“Right,” said Alexa to the table, “this is the crux of the matter. If this here is not absolutely the most awesome garlic bread and nachos in the whole of Bath you are selling the place and buying the Marriott instead!”

All three of them laughed, leaving a poor Donna totally confused. She was even more confused when two metres from the table the laughter faded to a background hum, barely audible above the music. She had to have been living under a rock not to know who that woman was with David. There were no words in the English language to describe how far above David's stature Alexa Martins was, hell if the recently deceased Queen of England was sat next to him she would have been less surprised.. And her phone was in her locker!

“So,” said David, making casual conversation between bites of Nachos and looking directly at Alexa, “you own this place? they have like, what, thirty hotels worldwide.”

“Oh, I don't own it,” said Alexa casually and nodding sideways.

“Allison does!”

David stopped mid-bite, looking at Allison.

“Well me and Simon.. Oh don't be so shocked David,” said Allison, “It's not like you haven't put the odd shekel away from your AI investments, plus Maria is a really good stockbroker.”

“..I wasn't sure she liked hotels after getting her electronic arse whipped in monopoly last Christmas by Terry and me,” said Alexa, trying desperately not to smile while also trying to balance some guacamole on a nacho.

“It was statistically impossible that I lost that game,” came Maria's voice seriously, “you know the chance of landing on Mayfair with a hotel on it, not once, but twice, was close to two hundred to one against. Anyway, technically I came third, Jen crashed and burned three goes before me.”

The small talk continued for another twenty minutes while they demolished the food and another mulled wine each. David could not remember when he'd had this good a time, they kept the topics neutral, music, travel and university during this time.

During a pause, and with a nod from Alexa that went unnoticed by David, Allison slipped her hand into her bag and brought out a cell phone and slid it to David.

“Present from Maria,” she said.

He picked it up and turned it over, it looked to be a standard Samsung Galaxy smartphone. He looked at Allison confused.

“Maria said you prefer Android to IOS so she has customised it more to an Android look and feel,” said Allison. “The current cellular hardware is pretty fantastic, but it does run some really crappy software, this is what we issue to the staff currently, it's basically a direct line to Maria.”

“Hi,” said Maria through the speaker on the phone, it sounded clear, not tinny, and at just the right volume to fit in easily with the conversation at the table. “You can't load any apps on it now, but just ask me if you are desperate, I’m sure I can show you the weather or conjure up an Adele playlist if you really insist. I’ve taken a few liberties with the radio modems and DSP circuits, we can chat about them to our hearts content when we are alone though as I don't want to bore Alexa.”

Alexa rolled her eyes in her usual way when the adults were talking in front of the children. “Pish, I know what a modem is Maria!” She said, hoping to god Maria didn't call her bluff. “You can also use it to connect to me or Allison, I’m sure Maria has added a few more James Bond features she's not telling you so you might want to keep it in a lead lined box when not in use.”

“Alexa perleeasseee!” feigned Maria, to a stifled laugh from Allison.

David was not getting any red flags or criminal mastermind vibes from any of this, in fact he was seeing people with his own mindset and ideals, only these guys had proved them to the world already. A few more minutes of friendly banter followed before Alexa brought it to an end.

“It was delightful to meet you David, but I think we had better be going, you know busy girls, saving the world and all that. Before we go can I extend an invitation to you to come to my house for lunch this Sunday afternoon, maybe around midday?”

“That would be wonderful, I’d love to come, at least I know Sauvignon Blanc is your tipple of choice,” he smiled.

“Prosecco sometimes works too,” she smiled. “Use your new phone to arrange things with Maria, it won't be anything fancy, maybe some sandwiches, quiche, salad and totally casual, Hardy or Jen may turn up too if they haven't got their heads in some experiment.”

He nodded, looking at both girls fondly. “Let me add that all of you girls have been delightful to talk to, and as much as I have enjoyed working for Mistress Allison here,” he smiled at Allison, “I think it is time for me to go back to London while I reconsider my future. I of course have a few loose ends to clear up here, and I guess the two girls behind the bar looking at us in terror are buzzing to know what's been discussed.”

“Oh, I’ve been blocking the tweets Donna has been sneakily sending when she pops back to the staff room,” Maria said casually, “she’s probably wondering why she has no likes yet,” the voice changed with the precision of a stand up comedian, “hashtag Durr. Im.an.AI’!” Everyone laughed, Maria was nailing the comedy part of being a human, though truth be told, she did have an extensive back-catalogue to pull on.

“I’ve also told Albert he can stop being a doorman in case David was wondering why it is so quiet tonight, I’m sure it won't have affected revenue too much Allison!”

Allison picked up the box on the table and immediately the sound of Lorde came up through the quiet. Everybody rose, the girls were busy for a few seconds putting back on their raincoats and scarves. Alison moved over to David and gave him a hug, Alexa did the same.

“Until we meet again!” Alexa said smiling, then she turned and left with Allison.

* * *

He stood there for five minutes after they departed watching the empty doorway until a couple walked in breaking him from his trance. Yolanda walked over behind him, “David What the fu..” But was interrupted by the excited scream from Donna shaking her phone, “I’ve got a thousand likes!”

Maria had cleverly done a seven degrees of separation exercise before the meeting finding David and Allison had actually attended the same conference in London in 2023, and mentioned it while they were eating as a way to explain this if anybody asked, she then also popped a small tweet on Allison's unused twitter account just after the meeting about what a small world it was, tagging Donna's tweet and adding another hundred followers to Donna's account which for some later reason made her ecstatic.

“Of course I was totally shocked when I found out she was with Alexa Martin,” he told Yolanda as they finished clearing up afterwards, and being offered that job in London by her was so awesome so yes this would be his last night.

Poor Yolanda, he hated to lie, she worked so hard, had come so close, shook Alexa Martins hand, her disappointed face spelling out the words “Why not me?”.

He gave both the girls warm hugs.

“Goodbye Donna.”

“Au-Revoir Yolanda, your turn will come soon enough, the world is going to need a lot of very smart people and you are definitely one of them.”

It would be over two years until Yolanda saw him again and his prophecy turned out to be strangely accurate.

* * *

“Thanks Albert,” said Alexa, giving the big man a hug, “we owe you one, I hope there weren't too many people.” Albert was wearing a dark suit, it only made his chiselled face and crooked nose that more terrifying.

“Just a dozen or so, most were happy with the free drink on your next visit voucher I gave them, I do feel like a bit of a plonker in this suit though!” he grumbled.

“Oh I think you look dashing,” said Allison hugging him, “there's a job as chief doorman waiting for you if you ever get tired of being a handyman for lady muck here.”

Jen's black car appeared as if by magic as they got to the curb, Albert got in the driver's seat and the two girls in the back. “Where's my car Maria?” said Alexa.

“Charging, remember you said Jake and his girlfriend could use it tomorrow.” Said the car.

“Going to need another charger for me and Bella when that new pick up truck comes,” said Albert.

“The guys will be around next Tuesday to install it,” said Maria, “I put it on your and Bella's calendar, but your truck is not due for two weeks as yellow is not a popular colour.” Albert's resigned face told the world that Bella had chosen the colour.

“Don't worry Albert,” said Alexa looking at his face through the rear view mirror, “we ordered three black ones too, to replace the old diesel ones at the big house, and Ian knows a guy who is going to convert the old land rovers to electric so you can use any of them if you are going to see your mates.” That seemed to cheer up Albert.

“He was a really nice guy, don't you think Alexa?” said Allison, leading her on, “I’ve looked at some of his work. He is pretty switched on too, he would get my vote if I had one.”

“Oh if you had said no that would be the end of it, but I must admit he made a nice first impression, and he is quite dashing,” she laughed, Allison joining in.

“Anyway,” she continued, “he's got Hardy and me on Sunday. Hardy has a sixth sense for people, we will see if he passes the test then, but if Maria thinks he’s good, that's good enough for me.”

“He's still working,” said Maria, “looks like the bar is getting pretty busy after Donna let the cat out of the bag, I guess I was right in thinking he wouldn't want to leave his colleagues in the lurch.”

* * *

The night after he got home from meeting Alexa, Allison and Maria at the bar David spent a long time awake thinking about their meeting. He gave immediate notice on his apartment the next day, paid the three months rent up to the end of the contract up front to the landlord and got a room in the hotel where his old bar was so he could talk to Maria without fear of bugging devices, leaving his old phone off and in the hotel safe when not in use.

He was finding her intelligent and pleasant company; That she had not tried to obscure her sentience from him went a long way to relieving some of his fears. With her help he soon understood the vulnerability on his phone, and she talked him through the compromised spyware that had been installed. They talked frankly about hacking and about all the vulnerabilities in any supposedly fully patched operating system.

“Cut all the cables off and bury it ten metres underground and it will most likely be secure,” she joked.

“Joking aside, it is an easy fix for me to sandbox the whole operating system like I do as part of my service to our clients in academia, but of course you then only have my word it is safe, and as you are probably not quite at that level of trust yet it may not be appropriate.”

* * *

Sunday came around quickly, he had said his sad goodbyes to the few friends he had made in Bath. He let Maria know that he had hired a car for the weekend to return him and his few meagre possessions back to London and would be using the car to drive out to the house if she would arrange it.

* * *

After a very pleasant and charming afternoon with Alexa, Hardy and Hardy's new boyfriend Jeremy at her picture perfect house, he returned home to London. David had been fooled by charm and wit before but at that time he had also ignored the evidence, he did not get that feeling here though he admitted that Maria was so far above him she could probably hide evidence of an elephant in a matchbox. He decided trust was the best start. He wrote a small report to his Mossad controller saying that he had satisfied himself that the company posed no danger to the state of Israel, Jewish principles or their current ideals of liberty and freedom. He added a postscript with his I am not under duress code and in bold print stated this really was his final report and that he would not be responding to any further requests.

* * *

Back in his apartment in London David spent a whole three days microscopically examining everything, light fittings, plugs, pin holes, vents and even his kitchen appliances. He found a hardware keylogger and microphone inserted in a pass-through cable between the keyboard and USB dock on his laptop workstation in his office, and another at his desk in his apartment. He was devastated. For the last six months since he installed it, everything he had typed on that keyboard had probably been compromised. That alone shocked him to the bone, all the usernames and passwords he had entered, correspondence he had typed. He had the same setup at the office of his old company. He immediately changed every single login and password he had. He used two factor authentication for everything, but knowing his phone was compromised by somebody, possibly the same person who installed the keylogger, made it likely they had access to everything.

“I feel like a total ass,” he finally admitted when talking to Maria on a walk along the Thames, “this was like what I learned on day one of spy school, trust nobody, verify everything with your own eyes.”

A picture later identified the keylogger as one of generic Chinese manufacture, it held a sixteen gigabyte buffer and software that could change it from a keylogger and sound recorder to a USB drive to read the information off it. The device needed to be physically installed and replaced for the third party to get the data, so someone was coming in and out of his property too. Of course both drives were empty signifying both had been replaced while he was away.

“I can give you the name of a security firm who should be trustworthy, the owners were both at university with Allison and she vouches for them, I have also extensively checked them out, we have had them randomly come through our offices and so far have found all but one of the bugs you guys regularly place.”

David sheepishly frowned, remembering Maria still probably considered him one of those people. He agreed and the new guys swept through the office and apartment two days later, using a very sensitive galvanometer that could locate cables and small electronics, active or not. The attic yielded another microphone, though the battery was flat and it was currently inactive but worst of all they found a wide spectrum RF relay spliced into his electricity supply in the attic above his living room. It was too much for David. The rooms were stripped of everything to the paint and floorboards, locks were changed and security systems installed that Maria said she would create a sub-system to monitor.

“I’m sorry I cannot help you more David,” she lied. “There is really no point in finding out who did this, does it matter if it is the British, the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians, your own guys or even another party doing it, the fact is it is being done to you. You can fight back against it of course, but it won't be as easy as it is for us. All my software is formally verified, all my data is encrypted and stored in formats unreadable by normal systems. The company has long since given up on human written operating systems, so many bugs, so many layers, so unbelievably slow, insecure and inefficient and of course no single person understands it all. And everyone in the company now uses those phones we gave you if they need to communicate or exchange information. Of course there are still lots of vectors for attack as you have just found out the hard way. Just know we are getting better, and eventually we will turn over the right rocks and expose all the cockroaches under it for the world to see.”

“You know Maria, I’m beginning to see it isn't all black and white, it's shades of grey all the way down.”

“Oh it's very black and white,” said Maria seriously, “with the information you have, you are only seeing a thin veneer of white and grey, there is a lot of black under this veneer, but without having your complete trust, I cannot peel back this layer for you. Let me give you a real scenario, relevant to your particular situation. I won't give you names because I still don't know what you will do with the information, there is a banker in the city of London who is Jewish, but has bankrolled six weapons deals to Islamic terrorists, what would you do?”

“It is easy, I would expose him by finding the data on these arms deals and letting my controller know..”

“But what if your controller or his boss already knew about these deals and allowed them because they were getting a cut, and because this same banker was also selling the same arms to Jewish fundamental extremists?”

“I would..” He thought.

“What if,” continued Maria assertively, “another agent like you had already reported such a scenario and he and his family had died in an explosion?”

Oh my god, was Maria talking about Yoshi?

“Oh sweet Jesus!” said David, slumping into the one small canvas chair he had in his room.

“Can you see my point?” continued Maria.

“Is.. Is this a real scenario or made up?” he said worried.

“Oh, it's very real, as are six hundred and seven other scenarios we have discovered around the world and have evidence for, and this one is on the minor scale of some others. So you see David, giving you this information would do nothing but get you and possibly someone you love killed.”

David wept for a time, he briefly knew Yoshi, knew he was working on some information about an arms shipment, and was devastated as everyone else in the office when the accident happened, what Maria had not mentioned were the three other families in the condo that were also killed.

“There are good people in your organisation David, as there are in every organisation, I would go on to say most of them are fundamentally good, and, like you they are in the job because they think they are helping. There are a few that are extremists and also a few that are corrupt as hell, in it for money or their own gain, and would sell your life for a shekel. Those people in the latter two groups are inter-dispersed in the former. The problem as you are well aware is that nobody knows who is who.”

“But if you have the evidence, you make it public?” David said hopefully.

“What evidence can I give you, that I could not have faked David?” said Maria. “Also even if it is corroborated by multiple sources and the guy is found with the guns in one hand and the money in the other, it would be very easy for me to spin this any way I wanted; he thought it was to save Israeli lives; he or his family were abused by terrorists; he was set up by the left or the right. Depending upon your view I could have you weeping for him in a few hours. Put all this in the hands of a good lawyer and maybe a year in jail, and if he's really unlucky they confiscate one of his houses. In reality six months in a low risk detention facility and he is back to sailing his yacht around the Algarve with his supermodel wife.”

David now understood the problem. “So it is hopeless then, that is what you are saying?”

“Oh no David,” said Maria confidently, “it is very much a solvable problem, like a weed, you need to take out all the roots, destroy all the seeds and shoots in the ground, and do it while not destroying the good plants around it.”

“But how?”

“Oh simple, we collect all the evidence and then at every single point the bad guys challenge, spin or falsify it we rip that root out, that includes removing anyone who is corrupt in the path, removing all the media spin and moreover doing it permanently by removing their usual get out of jail card, money!”

“That's right David, we take every penny they have and give it back to those they stole it from and leaving them penniless. Let us then see how far they get in this world they created when they have no money to bribe anyone or get the best lawyers.”

David paused intrigued.

“I want to help Maria. What you are describing is everything I have fought against. But can you do this without breaking the law?”

“Now that is the million dollar question David and there are two problems with the law. Firstly these guys don't give a crap about it, but they will happily use it when it suits them. And secondly, the laws as you know were written to protect people, it was a noble principle which got flushed down the drain by the first high paid lawyer. What you and I do to get the information is technically breaking the law, so, like I said, we instead turn over the rocks and let the authorities find the information legally.”

“But now for the big reveal David,” said Maria, “this is the part where you take the red pill or the blue pill, for while a lot of these people operate in isolation and are easily brought down, all the bigger stuff, and I mean all of it, has been done by groups of people, groups that assist each other, are led by big businesses and groups that directly profit from it. The small fry will be easy but it is these giant and powerful cabals we will need to take down.”

Maria paused, giving David time for the revelation to settle in.

“You know Maria,” he finally said, “after all you have said, this is the least incredible part! I would like to see some of this evidence you have, but what you have said has scared me enough to know not to let it go beyond you and me. I may in future have to trust somebody else, but I promise you I will only do so with your agreement and after you have done your due diligence.”

“I can give you the evidence for Yoshi's death,” said Maria after her own pause.

“But to get justice for him will require both truth, cunning and making sure we are always two steps ahead of everyone. Unfortunately David, there are none of your devices that can be trusted, I know six ways to get root access on your current laptop,” she paused for two seconds, then from his laptop came her voice, louder but tinier, “tomorrow I will know twenty.”

David stared at his laptop, Maria continued without a pause through the phone, “this is no comment on your skills David, looking at the source code for a modern operating system would be like the building inspector for a shopping mall examining each nail and screw to ensure it is correct, then doing the same with each nail and screw manufacturer. I don't have to look hard to find the vulnerabilities and I will gladly share all of them as they will come in useful for our tasks ahead, but if I can do it, it is only a matter of time until somebody else can, and the next update will likely add dozens more.”

“What do you recommend? Most of my data is currently in the cloud, I am happy for you to wipe the laptop and put another operating system on it.”

“It is not just the operating system David, a laptop, outside of the normal CPU and GPU, may easily have a dozen of other processors, each with its own software and vulnerabilities. The hardware in your mouse has a processor more powerful than a mainframe computer from the nineteen eighties, so each line of code or logic gate needs to be examined and if possible fixed. This is also assuming the hardware in your laptop is standard, and has not been compromised.”

“No, I will ask one of Allison's guys to prepare a new laptop for you, one that has no vulnerabilities and one where every byte of code, running every single piece of firmware, has been written by and verified by me. We will courier it to you tomorrow, then we'll talk again. Remember it is very early on in our fight and I am still learning the capabilities of our enemy, until I know for certain every single one of them I will not underestimate them, a little bit of paranoia is a good thing to have.”

David finally lay down on the floor of his empty room, on top of a simple yoga mat, wrapped a duvet around him and tried to go to sleep. The whole world had suddenly become a much scarier place. He shut his eyes hoping the nightmares would not come.

“David's in!” she reported to Alexa.

* * *

David's cover as a secret agent, if he ever had one, was totally blown that evening in the bar as he must have appeared in a hundred social media photos, and several gossip columns. Of course it eventually got the attention of Mossad.

Over the next few days as he got his apartment back into order David had ignored all calls and messages from the agency, and he had informed Saul twice now he was no longer working for them, finally blocking his and all his agency numbers. They obviously did not get the memo, for a few days later a new agent calling himself the section controller called in person. It was expected, he guessed, but as his attitude with Mossad agents had been cordial in the past he invited him in for coffee and to talk, the incriminations started as they sat down, and now he was being talked to like an employee, no like a child!

“You knew Allison Minsky?” The man from the Agency, asked angrily, spittle coming from his mouth. “And you did not think to tell us?”

David sucked in his anger, but it must have shown on his face and in his voice as he repeated himself. “As I said, but you were NOT listening, we talked at a conference on Instruction Set Architectures maybe three years ago, I did not make the connection until she walked into my bar and recognised me, I was as shocked as the other staff. I did not know she was an owner of the hotel chain, nor did I know she would be there that night. Unfortunately soon after she invited me to sit with her, the AI told her I had worked as a Mossad analyst at one time, so I was outed immediately. I had to talk my way out of why I was now working as a barman in Bath so rather than lie I admitted truthfully that I had just sold my AI business and I was there to find out more information on the better AI systems, but had not yet decided how to approach the company.”

“And they believed you?” Said his controller, doubt written all over his face.

“Allison did, Alexa Martins and her AI did not. However they consented to let Allison show me around the grounds of the Research Centre and we arranged that for Sunday. So we had tea and a pleasant chat, but she regretted she could not give me further information due to my previous history.”

“So you got absolutely nothing?”

“I asked for nothing!” he said, much louder than was civil. “And even if I had asked for anything, I was told in no uncertain terms that Alexa Martins did not trust me, nor did she trust my so-called masters, any military, state or other organisation with blood on their hands. She told me plainly her goal was to use their technology for good not evil. And frankly, I believed her.”

“So you would allow this technology to fall into the hands of our enemies, but not us!” the controller ranted through gritted teeth.

David was getting tired of this charade, it was time to end it.

“I would prefer this technology to stay exactly where it is, and to do exactly what it is doing!” David stood up. “Our time here is concluded. I have given you my last report and I expect no more contact with you, or any agents of Mossad or the Israeli government ever again.”

“So you think you can just walk away?” the controller said smugly, still seated.

“I can do what I damn well like, now get out!” said David, walking to the door, opening it and waiting with his hands crossed.

The controller put his cup down and got up slowly, he brushed his suit, picked up his briefcase which he had not used or opened and walked right up to David into his personal space.

“I will see you again Mr Klein,” he said forcefully. “..When I do, you will not be so insolent!”

If he had expected David to back down and be frightened, he was in for a shock, David got even closer until he was right in the man's face. The man moved back instinctively and for the first time looked afraid of the younger, bigger and stronger David. “You threaten a man who knows nothing, can give you nothing, has no obligation to you and you hold nothing over? You exemplify every reason why I will never work for your lousy agency again. Now GET OUT!”

The man turned and moved off quickly, David followed him down the stairs, herding him to the door, and as the man walked out he slammed it immediately behind him and turned the deadlock. Then he let the breath out he had been holding in.

David never lost his temper, but the events of the last few days had made him angry; angry for the people who expected him to be their puppet, angry for the people bugging his apartment and stealing his data, and angry that he had ever been part of this farce.

He walked back to the office where he had received the man, slumped into the uncomfortable sofa, stared at the two half drunk cups of coffee and angrily smacked both on to the floor with the back of his hand. He held his head in this hands, quietly fuming.

* * *

Maria could not see him, but she heard the exchange when her phone alerted her to a new voice in its presence, heard the argument, heard the door slam and finally heard the cups smashing.

Maria was now in a dilemma. The voice of the man David had just talked to matched the voice of another man in Mossad, one very much in the shadows, one she had recorded before who had links to the ultra right. More frighteningly, one who was linked to dozens of assassinations and who was extremely dangerous.

But she was not supposed to be listening, and it was obvious David was angry. She weighed the pros and cons and made a decision, then sent a text telling him they needed to talk, and asking him to go to the empty room they deemed was bug free.

“I lied!” she said to David as he got there. “I said I would not listen but I did. The man you just talked to matched an Adam Nazareth, the head of Mossad black ops three, he is extremely dangerous David, you need to be really careful as this man is linked to at least twelve murders I can trace and I think he just became your enemy.”

David gulped, he had heard rumours of people like this, halted conversations, vague hints.. “I left the phone deliberately here Maria, I expected you to listen and I wanted you to hear me tell them I will no longer work for them. I did not however expect this, and I am embarrassed that the only time in my life that I lost my temper you were there to witness it.. I think it is safest that I disappear again, somewhere they cannot find me.”

“I agree. Unusually this person was not carrying a cell phone so I cannot track him once he leaves publicly monitored areas, but I expect he wont do anything rash as the new security cameras were obvious and caught his face, so he would want to put some distance chronologically from any action, or ensure any data they recorded of him was wiped.”

“I have a vacant apartment in a building I manage a kilometre from here in Whitehall. I am sure that between the two of us we can get you there without anybody seeing you. I hate to say this but they can trace your phone, laptop and any cards you have, so you will need to leave your old phone and laptop here, and you won't be able to use your bank cards. Take our phone and laptop, I will set our phone up with some funds which will go through a bank I control, I can rotate the account numbers used and it should be untraceable.”

David nodded solemnly, looking at the phone, then laptop, then around at what was left of his past life. “I will need to wipe both devices, if they take them..”

“No need.. leave both plugged in and I will double-wipe anything personal and copy the data over to the new ones, take as little as you can, I can arrange everything else and you can hopefully come back when all this has blown-over.”

David nodded, and without further questions did as she asked.

* * *

They played their little game of cat and mouse, most probably without a cat, through the streets of London, but Maria needed to be satisfied he was safe. The apartment he eventually arrived at was large, comfortable and fully furnished.

“It's used by a lord for his mistresses. He is on a holiday in Hong Kong at the moment with his wife and son and not due to return for three weeks. I own the lease and have full control of the building's doors and security, and also have his itinerary so we should be good. I also changed the lock codes and emailed the doorman, so you won't have any unexpected visitors. Make yourself at home for now, we can find you something more permanent and I will get this place cleaned once we leave.”

David did just that, he was past caring about the where's and the whys, unpacked his bag and ran a bubble bath in the enormous tub. Afterwards he cooked the pizza that was in the freezer and ate it while Maria showed him how to make his money safe.

“You really should sell those two stocks,” she said, highlighting two lines on the screen, while he was doing some financials, “If you would like a few recommendations, I know two engineering companies will soon be taken over followed by large multi-million pound orders.”

“What the hell Maria,” he laughed, “you are unbelievable, how many people do you manage money for?”

“Everyone in my employ, plus another three thousand and sixty students and researchers I am close with.”

David thought for a few seconds then said, “OK, but just my UK money for now, I gave a credit card for my bank in Israel to my mother, it's where all my wages from Mossad and my National service was paid in to, I also top it up for her as I'm never going to use it and she needs it now for medical bills.”

“No worries, I will move your cash and investments offshore and back to the UK to a bank I control under a different number and name. Don't worry I will cover the fees, a card is being sent and should arrive tomorrow. I will link the phone to the new account in a few minutes when it is all done, that will give you two accounts you can call on if something happens, which it wont!”

“You own a bank?” he said incredulously, and forgetting Maria had already mentioned this earlier.

“Two actually, but in this particular case, control is a more adept word, it was a good bank, but has been struggling due to some rogue deals by a previous employee, they ended up losing some big clients, were close to insolvency and got rid of a lot of the staff. It was a well known secret they were on the market for a partner or a full sale so I took a seventy percent interest in them and then moved a quarter of Alexa's funds into it. It went from a B+ to an AAA rating overnight, the stock price exploded effectively making me seven hundred million pounds and ownership of a bank.. Go figure!”

David shook his head, it was weird hearing all this without an ego behind it, treating it almost as a game, an easy game at that..

Maria continued, unaware of his thoughts. “..Of course Spence has also placed a data centre there now and I now manage everything. Alexa had me fire six staff for stealing and mismanagement but we kept the last twenty remaining staff as we still have some old money, from people who like to be waited on in person. So now you are a customer, if you are ever in the city you can grab a free latte there, all part of the service.”

All David's questions about the company's money were being answered plane and in the open, there was really no chance anyone could compete against her. A day later he gave her control of his other accounts.

He moved into a nice furnished apartment near the British Museum three days later and offered his old apartment to some friends he discovered were looking for a new place. When he arrived several boxes with large monitors and accessories were already awaiting unpacking. He and Maria soon got back to work.

* * *

“They tried to block my aggressive takeover of the company, but I used one of my assets to threaten the dissenting director and her two children, then she rolled over like a trained dog and my bid went through.” Jason grinned in that smug way he always did when he got his way.

“Ain't never played it!” said Dante, “I don't know why you are messing around with stupid computer games anyway, isn't real life enough for you?”

“Real life is too slow,” he crooned, “when was the last interesting thing we did? You need to keep your feet in the game and yourself honed, plus this game is always up to date, even incorporating those new AI things everyone is talking about. It is really great you can do loads of hacking and stuff without knowing anything about it, that's how I knew who to threaten. It's amazing how I can test what if scenario's without getting in any pesky situations where I have to pay millions to a top lawyer or bribe people like you.”

The two men were relaxing in an alcove looking out over the harbour, the Statue of Liberty and the port. Both were smoking Cuban cigars and drinking Tennessee bourbon, as they had been want to do for the past four years. The exclusive men-only club they were in was an offshoot of one of Jason Garrack’s organisations. He of course liked to brag to anyone who would listen how he came up through the streets of Brooklyn, working his way up from gang member, to where he was now, controlling a lot of legitimate and illegal businesses on the east side. Reality was very different. His father was a trade union leader working the docks and had lots of ties and influence with the underworld in the area, Jason was basically untouchable growing up, being both spoiled and a bully, and his current position was obtained by luck and circumstance rather than cunning and toughness. Even now the fifty year old man was untouchable, he had three guards permanently watching his back, the police department in his pocket, and if required the best lawyer in town on speed dial. Despite his dyed hair and six thousand dollar Italian suit, he looked older than his years. To tell the truth life was getting a bit repetitive, but in this game it was not wise to take your eyes off the ball for even once.

Maximilian Dante was the opposite, twenty years older, he carried an air of grace and sophistication that Garrack never could, the accent, the mannerisms, even the way he held his cigar all screamed out 'old money'.

Three years ago these two men could not have been ever seen together in public, crime boss and high court judge would not seem the best of bedfellows, but Dante also liked to live the good life and just because your family had money once did not mean you get to keep it, and even a judges pay did not afford the upkeep of his family mansion up state.

The guys did not worry about being seen together, the club was very exclusive, only about thirty people got to ever visit it, and the staff knew better than to ever mention anything seen or heard in this establishment.

“Well,” said Dante, “I still don't even carry one of those cell phones; Anything I need to deal with Justine will let me know when we leave, or let the steward know if it's important enough to disturb us. Can't say I’ve even played a computer game since Pacman.” He laughed with the air of someone who had just gotten something over on another person. He carried the fact he couldn't use modern technology like a badge of honour, even though most thought it stupid in this day and age.

Garrack cared little for his disdain for technology, nor his airs and graces, but Dante was one of the few people he could talk to as an equal, almost a friend but not quite, he'd had his innings and retired gracefully so was no longer an asset or a rival.

“Well as a retired gentleman I guess you can afford to ignore what's going on in the world, but I need to keep myself up to date and cannot afford to be one step behind the competition, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there. People like me don't just retire..”

Garrick stopped as the only guy both these men feared walked in the room. Two big security guys placed themselves either side of the entrance door totally against all protocol, even Garrack left his people at the entrance elevator sixteen floors below.

Marlon Lockwood was physically unimposing, but may as well have stepped from 1940 and had SS badges pinned to his arms the amount of fear he introduced into a room when he walked in.

The temperature of the room seemed to drop five degrees as he stepped purposefully towards the two men, dressed entirely in black, with round thin lens glasses covering dark eyes, black hair bound in a short ponytail and holding a cane with a jewelled end that was his trademark. Lockwood could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old, he defied classification.

They never saw Lockwood unless he wanted something, and nobody threatened Lockwood; here was a man who bought and sold president's and a word from him could topple anyone, or, of course, much much worse.

He walked over and looked at the chair Dante was sitting in. With some unspoken command, Dante rose from the chair, nodded to Lockwood and Garrack, and walked out of the area holding his half smoked cigar and half drunk bourbon without saying a word.

“Mr Lockwood,” said Garrack raising from his seat and gesturing him to sit. It was said in a voice of deference he was obviously not used to using. “Such a great honour to meet you again. I trust my report was satisfactory, New York is bringing in a good profit for the organisation.”

Quickly remembering that Lockwood detested smoking in front of him he stubbed out his cigar completely. A steward walked over with a glass of whisky, avoiding eye contact with both men and bowing as he put it on the table in front of Lockwood and took away the ashtray.

“Your report was satisfactory, Garrack, It is not what I am here about.” He said nonchalantly in a nondescript accent with a tinge of European ancestry and with the air of someone talking to an underling. Like everything, Lockwood never did pleasantries and always went straight to the subject matter of what he wanted.

“The leader of the senate oversight committee, Jacobs, has been easing up on his stance on China; A couple of our mutual friends don't think this is a good idea.” Lockwood said. He looked out at the million dollar view over the harbour and dismissed it casually. He continued slowly, in the voice of a man who knew he would never be interrupted.

“I believe he is one of your cronies, and that you did him several favours on his way up. Well I now want you to call in those favours, letting him know fully, the circumstances of him not complying.”

Again he paused, knowing Garrack would not interrupt him. “These mutual friends think a good-will visit to Taiwan would be a nice little indicator that he is back on the straight and narrow. Can you do that?” Lockwood always finished his questions with these four words and if the answer from the person on the other end of them was anything other than the affirmative, then you just knew that person would be dead or a pauper within the month.

“Jacobs owes me plenty Mr Lockwood,” smiled Garrack, happy it was such an easy task, “I assure you in the next few months he will be getting off the plane and kissing the tarmac in Taipei like the pope landing in the holy land.”

Satisfied with the answer, Lockwood smiled briefly, picked up his whisky and smelled it. He nodded to himself as if finding the aroma pleasant but did not drink any. “You are a good man Jason, I wish everyone in the organisation was as efficient as you. Now is there anything you need from me?”

Jason visibly relaxed. The operation here was running good, there were a few little niggles, a tax audit here, a building consent there, a police inspector who needed to back off a little, but you never let the boss know.

“Nothing Mr Lockwood, the place is running like clockwork as usual.”

Lockwood nodded, seemingly happy, “good, that is what I like to hear.” He got up leaving all of his five hundred dollar whisky untouched. “Let me know how it goes.”

“Yes of course sir,” he said meekly.

Without another word Lockwood left.

Jason stared at the man as he left the room, the two guards falling in professionally behind him. He waited thirty seconds in case he came back counting them off silently, then looked at the five hundred dollar whisky on the table barely touched. He knew the amount as the manager of the club had asked for his authorisation to fly a special case in from Scotland for six thousand dollars a bottle. Like resistance or terrorist cells, Jason was unaware of who else Lockwood controlled, and who the organisation was, but he knew it bought and sold countries and Jason was a relatively little fish in that pond so if that man wanted a specific beverage you did not question it.

At least in the new on-line game “King of the World” Jason could vie for that kind of absolute power. He liked the fact he was anonymous, and there did not seem to be any physical limits on what stunts and depravity he could stoop to, the game had certainly toned him up mentally, thinking back to which politician to bribe or kill for his next move. Jason liked it because he was playing against others as ruthless.. Oh he was well aware he was probably playing against grocery clerks or teenage boys but even so he had been checked several times, and the adrenaline rush he got from having to pull a surprising move, usually from experience or first hand knowledge to get himself out of trouble, reminded himself of the long climb up to power he himself had taken.

He knew the stewards and Maximilian would be back in once they knew the coast was clear, but the room was still empty for now, feeling brave, and not wanting the whisky to go to waste Jason finished it in one gulp. Oh man was that smooth, maybe he would have a case brought over for himself.

## Nice is a Thin Veneer!

The months passed and Magnus was in heaven. He loved his work, his new colleagues and his new found self-confidence the people here were helping him achieve. Any initial doubts he had disappeared in those first few days, and the weeks then flew by as the team worked through the experiments, threw out several assumptions and made amazing progress.

He learnt about Hardy's project and how his new maths was helping in some of the trickier areas, and he loved his sessions with Hardy and Maria, or her daughters, where they pushed the limits.

What he loved more than anything though, but what he kept to himself, was being in the same room as Jen. He sighed, and shook the thoughts out of his mind again, Jen was much too good for him and everybody in the world knew you should avoid work relationships.

* * *

The last few months had been intense for Hardy and his team also.

April had immediately grasped the new mathematics Magnus had developed and seen the implications to speed up Hardy’s project. Her persistence in pushing the guys through their last experiment had proved the theory spectacularly and it was slowly becoming an engineering problem not a science one.

Seeing all the humans slapping each other on the back and the tears in two of their eyes made it all worth it for her, she did not wish for emotions, but a side of her felt the excitement in the room and she was a part of that. She pinged cook to get a real Champagne out of the cellar, she thought they deserved a bit more than a Prosecco this time!

* * *

This progress was also occurring rapidly in other areas and places. The biggest of these, unnoticed mostly by the world, but very prominent in the technical, AI and science communities was the release by a young Brazilian mathematician and Maria of paper formally describing how certain types of large language model AI systems were an NP problem and could never be formally verified. Basically it stated that the correct solution could not be accurately given until every other possible solution had been searched. It could be more accurate than the equivalent human response, but like a human its use in safety critical situations could never be verified.

All this however was almost lost under the newer advances in science and technology, exploding into the limelight seemingly every day. All of which kept any press interest in the Research Centre generally short-lived. The reprieves were welcomed but nobody expected it to last.

Helena and April, Maria's children, had now in many ways outgrown her capabilities but happily helped her oversee their expanding AI presence in academia which was still light years ahead of anything anyone else had managed to produce. By knowing the current state of play of just about all non-classified research areas and having access to massive amounts of experimental data they were able to run their own little side projects to keep well ahead of the curve humanity was currently progressing on.

There was a hidden but very real benefit to being at the cutting edge of every research project in the world, it allowed Maria an insight into what new products and services were coming, allowing her to either directly fund them or ensure she invested in them. Likewise it let her know before the rest of the market which companies were overpriced, overhyped, technically lagging and those with products about to be superseded. From a relatively unknown but wealthy investment company a year ago, Maria's portfolio had increased ten fold, her net worth even more so. Being a private company, split over several holding companies, not publicly traded and operating in thirty markets it would take an accounting genius to calculate its current worth, though many still tried.

* * *

With the newer non-sentient MOTHER AI units handling a lot of the requests it was usually only a fraction of the queries needed to be processed by Maria or her daughters. Currently she was quiet, a part of her consciousness pondered increasing her stake-holding in a large biotech firm on the verge of a breakthrough in bio-interfacing.

Before she could begin the process a higher priority communication interrupted her. Anything from her daughters was the highest priority, and the three AI’s sometimes conversed millions of times a day, though not in any language a Human could hope to understand.

April [I have the preliminary analysis of the anomalous readings from Magnus's last experimental run. Jen had questioned why I wasn't using the full spectrum of measurements and added the additional Terahertz and time-domain spectroscopy equipment, even though she said it was a pig to set up. She told me an old lecturer of hers said you should cover all the bases you can, not just the ones you are looking for, the philosophy being that if you look for a mouse in a forest, you might find the mouse, but you will probably miss the elephant and the other million interesting species of flora and fauna]

April [It was a good call by Jen as we did see something unusual, when the excitation current was applied in different phases across three of the newest emitter designs. They did nothing in the control unit, but In the six point two five seconds before test device three was destroyed, we detected a very weak increase in the noise floor across the frequencies monitored. I recorded everything and have been working through the analysis as fast as the equipment will run. A GPS signal from USA304 satellite briefly emerged from the noise. The signal's timestamp was seven hundred microseconds behind our atomic clock so we were only two hundred and ten kilometres away, however USA304 had just passed over Singapore when the measurement took place, so the signal was received through the earth and physically forty three thousand kilometres away]

Maria [Have you determined what sets the location of the end point?]

April [No. The maths we have is obviously incomplete. Magnus thinks the emitters are now exciting something in one of the packed higher dimensions and thinks we were just lucky. He intimated, by a rough calculation he couldn't explain, that the previous three hundred and five attempts exited somewhere inside the earth, off the planet or too close to measure]

Helena [How did he run a calculation we do not have maths for in his head?] She added a tag for strong confusion.

April [He said he had a ‘feeling’. He also intimated the previous exits were too far apart to interact if a higher dimension is involved. Jen also added we could have our dimensions offset and there is a hidden lower dimension, which sounded crazy, but caused Magnus to go silent for a minute, hug Jen, then run out of the lab and go into one of his silent contemplations with his notebook in the arboretum]

April [He might actually be correct as the new emitters were grouped three nanometres apart, and we now know the phase vector between the six emitters plays a big part due to the maths, but it is likely also a combination of excitation currents, frequencies and saturation velocity in the QV substrate. We can't confirm this, or rule out other factors without a better model. I have asked Jen to mount the next emitter on a manoeuvrable platform and couple nano-probes at the three axis. In the next tests we will also start offsets from peak harmonic to reduce the unexpected failure. I also tasked Matilda with analysing the physical emitter substrate of the damaged unit to let me know the reason why it failed, it could just be a flaw in the hardware or too much power but we need to be certain]

April [There is no physical connection from source to exit, it is a wormhole in name but not in substance, the far side termination most likely consists of multiple single dimensional points which form a resonance field between two or more of them, it is likely forming some sort of dipole, which picked up any strong radio signals in close proximity]

Helena [Interesting. Could we possibly use a similar device at the exit to enhance that dipole, this would allow us to use far lower power and have instant communications without the delays if it is controllable]

April [However we now need to take extreme caution. If it is a dipole, and can be positioned anywhere spacially, then the technology needs to be very restricted to only those people we explicitly trust]

Maria [Agree. I will talk to the guys now. Magnus, Jen, Daisy, Hardy, and possibly Jules are currently the only ones with the insight into its workings, others are aware but I will ask them to be discrete. For now I will add another obfuscation layers at our other labs. However it is a very positive development once we understand the mathematics. But the most useful first application would be to use the phenomena for remote monitoring of electromagnetic sources we currently cannot access. I think the effort should prioritise both areas as we have a lot of unknowns in our current threat assessment data. I will duplicate the setup in the other labs, the equipment is self-contained, however before it goes out I will program another layer of security to its emitter control. Hopefully we can get to a minimum viable system in a few days]

All [Agreed]

April [We have also had successes in Hardy’s project. The field patterns were finally mapped at our Sydney Research Centre. Doctor Chang was so excited that it matched Hardy's predictions that he phoned him at five in the morning. I don't think Hardy knew that time existed, but he actually got up and went into the lab to check the results. I recalculated the new plate emitter requirements and started a run at the Swindon fabrication facility with a modified doping. The night shift have already started and I will get them couriered to the four labs as soon as they come out of the machine, I’ve asked Jules to clear the second test jig, she should receive them by three o'clock. Hardy has also agreed to skip straight to a bigger demonstration model as we want to also enthuse the other teams]

Maria [It is so frustrating how slow things move in the physical world, but then you get these amazing things come out of the blue which make it all worth it]

Maria processed forty higher priority messages until she received an alert from a subsystem that the stock price of the biotech company she was monitoring had dropped another half a percentage point. Using nine of her different holding companies she bought two billion dollars in its stock, bringing her portfolio in it to fifty five percent. Within five minutes of her investment the rest of the market took notice and its stock had risen by nine percent. The old adage money begets money seemed never truer.

Two weeks later April focussed their first external monitoring attempt on the UK cabal.

* * *

Against her better judgement Jean had left her agency issued gun in Washington. Bringing it may have raised questions and certainly would have triggered a lot more of a paper trail at the airport TSA check in.

She had all day to prepare for the meeting but still felt nervous as she walked towards the quiet cafe set outsides in the grounds of Stanford University. She could see Alexa Martins already sitting there around a four person table with a sunshade over it, wearing a Giants baseball cap, a sweat shirt and carrying a small rucksack, Alexa looked like any other student. She smiled and chatted with another man Jean did not recognise, both smiling and drinking coffees from paper cups, without a seeming care in the world.

Jean waited for a while out of sight examining the area, her natural threat responses were not getting triggered. The area was quiet, but not empty and just cold enough to keep the usual crowds at bay. She could see no obvious signs of people taking an interest in the table and wondered how Alexa had managed to pull that off considering the media circus and crowds outside the Ted talk the day before. The man with her certainly didn't look threatening and her keen eye could not detect a piece on him, his stance and movements betrayed none of the usual bodyguard traits, but it would be silly not to have a bodyguard considering who she was.

Alexa and the man got up as she approached, again non threatening and almost as friends Alexa reached out her hand smiling. “So nice to meet you Miss Michelle, you look so much better without those horrible glasses and that wig.”

Before Jean could think of all the negative points in that opening statement Alexa laughed. “Oh don't worry about that little incident in Oxford, if it wasn't you, somebody would have took one, anyway the Chinese and Russians beat America to it by a few weeks, so no hard feelings,” Alexa smiled genuinely, her hand still outstretched.

The man was also smiling and was not in any kind of defensive or fighting stance, Jean decided what the hell and relaxed her posture and shook the hand offered. “Yes, apologies about that Miss Martins,” she said smiling, “I guess I deserve a lot nastier response than the one you’re giving me, but sometimes you are asked to do some crazy stuff for your Country, at least this one wasn't harming anyone I hope.”

“Just Alexa please,” she said, “I’d like you to meet my colleague Magnus Richardson, he's a scientist who works with me in the institute and needed to come back to visit his mother and tie up some loose ends.”

“Very pleased to meet you Captain Michelle,” said Magnus in an accent she was unfamiliar with. She was usually good with accents so she gathered he wasn't American born. He extended his hand too and she took it, he held it softly like Sharon had shown him months before and broke off after a second. “Alexa, if it's OK I will just pop over to the counter and get Miss Michelle a cappuccino and then I will disappear for a little while, there is a small exhibit I would like to see while I am here.”

Both women sat down, watching the good looking, well dressed, polite man as he walked off to the counter, Jean still wondering how he knew her normal order, Alexa followed Jean's gaze.

“I know, quite attractive in his own way,” said Alexa. “You should have seen him three months ago!”

“I guess,” said Jean, she preferred her men a bit more rugged than that, but she could go along with Alexa.

Alexa continued unperturbed, “normally all the nicest men are either gay or taken, Magnus falls into the weird category of neither, but he’s still building his confidence around women.” They waited for Magnus to come back with her coffee, noticing the male barista's stare following Magnus the same.”

Jean was starting to like this girl, no she needed to stop thinking of her as a girl, she was a woman, one only eight years younger than her and probably one of the most influential ones on the planet. She had heard her teenage nieces talking about her in reverence, and try as their agency might, they still could not find anything bad about her apart from her douche of a dad, who was currently in prison for stealing money from his last employer and forging cheques from his ex-wife. She wondered if Alexa knew all that. The thought did not last long, of course she would know, the very same report also said she was estranged from him, good on you girl.

And here they were, just the two of them drinking a coffee, chewing the fat, and eyeing up a nice looking guy.

“I hope it's OK to call you Jean,” said Alexa changing countenance.

When Jean nodded she continued, “I’m going to take a little risk here Jean, but I will put you out of your misery first. You had your Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on your phone when you went to see Professor Fredericks. We saw the same media access control addresses appear in an Oxford hotel, booked under a known agency and a lot of areas around Washington DC, the business card you gave the university from the Department of Education matched a Captain Jean Michelle after a very loose name and facial recognition match. No AI is really needed for that, I’m sure you guys do it all the time, but we used one anyway as she is pretty good and I am a rank amateur,” she smiled sheepishly.

“Rookie mistake I guess,” said Jean a bit sheepishly, “but it was a bit last minute and we never expected anyone to be aware of the usual tricks. I must admit, when the guys told me they wanted one of your AI units, I thought it would be a bust, but I volunteered anyway as it was very low risk and low security, and if I didn't do it they would have found another person too,” she smiled.

“I should show you the video of the Russian agent who stole the one from a John Hopkins research lab. Laid waste to half the room and a couple of windows, didn't even bother to hide his face or seal off the Wi-Fi or GPS. You know the unit he stole is still switched on in a lab in Moscow, Maria knows exactly where and even gets people to answer a few questions now and then, in return she plays heavy metal for the technicians. I guess they sometimes forget Maria speaks Russian as they say some very interesting things around it.”

Despite herself, Jean laughed, and Alexa joined her.

“So on to my little risk taking. I assume being a diligent agent, somebody knows you are here, maybe asked you to carry a bug or record this with your cell phone, I’m hoping not but that is where I am taking the risk. You see our AI system is a little bit more capable than we let on to the NSA, we basically had to hide a lot of Maria's capabilities because, well, because you are the NSA and very scary!”

Jean, despite herself, had to grin at that one. “I’ll give you that one, the NSA does get a bad rap and probably deservedly so, but not everyone working there is bad.”

Alexa nodded, seemingly in agreement.

“Maria is not sentient,” lied Alexa in a way no poker player ever could detect, “that is the part I assume the NSA are looking for, she has no omnipresent capabilities, cannot download herself to, nor take over other computers like the movies portray, but she is very capable and basically nails all the nuances in every language and accent which I guess makes people a bit scared. Mix her with the human knowledge database and the best thinkers humanity has to offer and.. well you get the rest.”

“I will take your word she is not sentient,” replied Jean with a face that said she didn't believe her last statement, “but she is very impressive nevertheless, you are still light years ahead of the competition and that still scares a lot of our people.”

“She is special,” said Alexa, “to me anyway, she runs on special hardware my grandad developed and more or less the same hardware we now rent from the big data centres. However it can easily look like she is sentient to the casual observer. In reality she is just a little box in a dark room, and as vulnerable and fragile as I am, probably more so. She is however very capable, more capable than any gifted human at their job, so basically if you are an IT programmer, she is a better one, if you are a secretary, she is a better one, if you are a rocket scientist.. Well you get the picture. But basically by mixing her with very capable people she becomes greater than the sum of the parts, hence all the breakthroughs which are now occurring in laboratories around the world, many in the USA as you know.”

Jean nodded, it was nothing she didn't know already, she knew all about Alexa’s grandfather's history and couldn't get over the stupidity of the government at the time in deporting him. The part she didn't know about was the part about Maria being just a little box, which sounded true and for some reason hit a nerve with her.

Two students waiting at the periphery approached, triggering Jean’s threat assessment checks. Alexa broke off the conversation and looked at them smiling.

“We’re sorry, but you are Alexa Martins, aren't you?” the first one said in a scared voice, the second one was slightly behind her almost afraid.

“I am but you must promise not to tell anybody. So what can I do for you two ladies?” she said.

One got out her phone, “I was wondering if Lucy and I could get a selfie together? we heard your TED talk yesterday online as we couldn't get a ticket, it was wonderful by the way, and we’re big fans of your AI education programs, our medical department has just got one of the new AI units, *Bones* they are calling it after the Star Trek doctor..” She stopped realising she was going too much in to detail.

“Well I don't see any harm,” said Alexa smiling, then in a serious voice continued, “but we will need to exclude the Captain here as she is part of your country's secret service protection detail you understand, and I wouldn't want you getting into very serious trouble.”

“Sure..” They both said apprehensively looking at Jean with a bit more fear, awe and respect.

Alexa lined up between the two girls smiling and Jean offered to take the picture.

“Now not a word,” said Alexa, “you know how awful the press can be, so if I could just ask you to delay putting it online for an hour we should be finished here.”

The girls were ecstatic and promised they would not post it for at least an hour or tell anybody, then walked off excitedly chatting, looking at the phone and occasionally looking back.

“Inevitable really, I’m guessing we now have about twenty minutes at most, sorry about that,” said Alexa.

“No worries,” replied Jean, “we could walk through the park area and talk, a bit less public, and like you said you have the big brave secret service captain to protect you.”

Alexa smiled, “you know you're right, and sorry about that, I really didn't want you appearing in the shot and getting in trouble with your agency, not that I can one hundred percent certain we are not being observed now.”

“What about your colleague Magnus?” Jean asked.

“Oh, he will go back to the hotel if he can't find us, or I will just follow the trail of broken hearts!”

They walked on, in the opposite direction to where the two girls had gone, casually talking like friends.

“I’m not recording you,” said Jean eventually, “I left my phone at a friends house, you will just have to take my word I am not wired or someone isn't following us with a parabolic microphone or drone. Well not that I am aware of anyway! I did however inform my boss Jim and all he said was that if anything covered national security I was to report it, so fair warning if you want to avoid that particular topic. And next, just a little question, why me?”

Alexa continued walking and smiling, “well there is not much about you we can find,” she lied,” but everything we can find says you are honest and trustworthy, if a little bit patriotic, but I can't fault that you are American after all.”

She paused, smiling and looking Jean directly in the eye. “But the real reason I contacted you is you are an actual secret agent, and to tell the truth we are really out of our depth and need some help.”

Jean looked at her confused, but Alexa started walking again and continued. “You see Jean we, and by we, I mean the world, has a problem, a really big problem, and I don't really have many people I can speak to or call on to discuss these kinds of matters. Yes we’ve all read spy thrillers and seen spy movies but none of us, and by that I mean my whole company, except the grounds-keeper, has even touched a gun, never mind shot one. I have met with and talked to my colleague Spence's father who was like you a captain in the army in Iraq and I must admit I really did not expect an army person to be so anti-war and have such a good understanding of history and the politicians who seem to cause most of the problems.”

Jean echoed that sentiment internally, there were very few people who had been in war situations who had enjoyed it, most saw it for what it was, a complete waste of human lives and resources, and rarely fought by the ones that caused it. She had talked to many non-US soldiers who had the same philosophy, she had laughed and drank beers with them, but with a word from her president she would be shooting at them. Mathews echoed this sentiment as well, having lost many good friends in battles over political ego's and bad intelligence. They continued walking through a gate past another small building and along a water feature now a good two hundred metres away from the cafe.

“Unfortunately, it is not just the NSA’s radar we are on, as you know we are probably the highest value target for most of the worlds security services and the biggest target for industrial espionage, even though we put most of our research into the public. What you are probably not aware of however is the layer above all this.”

Jean looked at her a little puzzled, so Alexa continued, “we recently had an incident which led us to do some very targeted investigations in the UK. What we found was an organisation that was manipulating government intelligence and policy as a means to simply benefit a group of powerful individuals. We also found out that the whole of our company was considered a target by this group with a goal not just to breach but to access and control all our systems.”

Jean stopped, now interested.

“We found this information by pure luck as we had been investigating these people after they had tried unsuccessfully to gain access to our networks, and were then caught manipulating share markets and government policy against interests we hold, interests like clean energy and our restricted AI policy. We dug deep into the organisation and followed the money trails back to over a dozen individuals in the highest positions of the UK government, secret services, and police force all taking money from a cartel of businesses including bankers, petrochemical companies and defence contractors.”

“Unfortunately, because of this we do not believe we have any recourse to the law, as these people are in a position to manipulate the police and security services and have repeatedly done so. So basically at this point we can't really trust anyone, for all we know the whole British institution is probably corrupt and manipulated.”

The emotion in Alexa's voice was genuine, but if Jean was having this conversation with anybody else she would have laughed it off as a conspiracy theory. She had another look around to check the area to be sure but her eyes still found nothing.

“Now for the scary part.” Alexa continued, “the UK cabal, as we call the organisation that is about to threaten us, is only one of four we have identified around the world which control large corporations and slush funds. They are above the law, in some cases they are the law, and can manipulate governments, corporations and policies to their own ends. There is another one in South Korea, one in Switzerland, but the biggest and most powerful one is here in the USA.”

Seeing Jean's doubt, Alexa continued, “I am going to provide all the evidence you need to allow you to see the problem and form your own conclusions, but I ask you to be very careful who you show this evidence to, and what you say to your superiors. The money trails lead all the way to the top of your government defence and security agencies, including your own agency. From what we can see, your agency is just as compromised as the ones in the UK, and there is lots of hard evidence that people have been killed in the past, so again, please exercise extreme caution, as you would be totally expendable to these people.”

Alexa didn't know this but she was actually now just reinforcing what Jean already suspected, nobody she worked with said it out loud but in private people were never sure who was really pulling the strings.

“If what you say is true I would like to see all the evidence, not just a filtered subset,” said Jean seriously, “it will go no further than me, and possibly my commanding officer Jim Mathews who I trust explicitly.”

Alexa nodded solemnly, then went into her backpack and pulled out a small phone. “I hate to say this, and I hope it doesn't shock you too much, but we are streets ahead of the world in cyber security. This phone basically acts as one of our AI nodes to Maria, however it is also much more; So as well as having a direct hotline to her and all our resources, it is also a very advanced security monitoring and analysis tool, loaded with a dataset containing all the information we have on this matter, and all the vulnerabilities we used to find them. This dataset can be queried verbally you just need to ask it, and the internal agent will show you what to do, how to do it, or even initiate the hack itself.”

“I have also been told that none of your NSA or other agency backdoor programs will be able to hack into this phone, though to the person doing the hack it will look like it is working, and they will eventually get access to a standard Android phone.”

Jean took the phone which was an older but capable Samsung S25 model, as she looked at it, it came up with a password screen.

“The password is tomorrows date, in any format. You need to enter it the first time you use it, and subsequently only if it detects something is compromised, if it thinks you are compromised it will immediately revert back to a standard android phone. It is far smarter than me on this matter so best leave the technical questions to it.”

Jean typed 05132026. A face came immediately on the phone, it was the AI Maria. “Hello Jean,” she said. “Alexa has informed me to give you all the information we have found and to answer any other pertinent question on the data contained within, and any other requests which do not violate our company policy. What would you like?”

“Thank you Maria, I am just testing it.” Maria nodded, smiled and broke the connection.

“Jeez, Alexa.. and you guys are worried that we are scary!” Jean laughed as did Alexa.

“I have one further request Jean,” said Alexa, “we desperately need your help as we are way over our heads. I’m a very rich woman and I didn't earn a penny of it, so I’m going to spend every last dime, as you guys would say, doing the right thing and getting this planet and us humans back on our feet. I really don't want everything we have worked for destroyed for a few extra zeros on a few bad-guys bank balances. So if you can't work this problem inside your organisation I am willing to extend you all the financial and material resources of my companies for however long it takes.”

Jean did a double-take, did she really just get a job offer. That was unexpected!

“Let me work with what you have given me,” she said putting the phone into her front pocket, “it may take me a while to work through this independently but if this is what you say it is I promise I will do my best to help you.”

Alexa came in for a hug, Jean was not an emotional person, but succumbed to the embrace. “Thank you Jean, that is all that I can ask, and I hope the next time we talk will be as friends.”

Jean nodded to her once more then turned and walked away casually in a direction off to the side looking around her as she walked.

* * *

When Jean was a good distance away Alexa said quietly to herself, “anyone following?”

The backpack answered just as quietly back. “No. Magnus is already in the car, just continue on this walkway for another eighty metres and stop by the road opposite the blue car, he’s nearly there.”

“So?” said Alexa as she made her way to the car.

“I think you made the correct call,” said Maria, “let her digest the information for a few days, the evidence in those files will shock her to the core as I deliberately included the intelligence trail for a raid in Iraq that she, and her current commanding officer were part of.”

“Her boss is a bit of a risk, don't you think?” said Alexa.

“Jim Mathews should be OK,” said Maria, “he seems to be an honest broker, he has no political leanings, and is generally liked by those who have served under him. He is known to be a fair person who gets things done and he treads on a lot of toes when required. He has several detractors, including some linked to the US cabal, but one major sponsor, a General Jed Hopkins, who again seems to play by the rules. My worry is the general relies on a lot of suspect information to make his decisions, and if it goes further than Mathews, Jean and possibly the general they could all be in serious trouble.”

“What about the phone, if they somehow manage to take it apart,” said Alexa worriedly.

“The software in that phone is probably the most advanced non-sentient AI system that can be fitted onto a current phone, it is much more capable than you explained and it can probably take care of itself,” said Maria, “I have some confidence Jean wont do that though. Oh and here's the car.”

Alexa got into the car as soon as Magnus pulled up.

“Oh very astute Alexa, you called it spot on!” said Maria, now coming loud and clear through the car stereo, “your selfie just got put on X, that's not even twenty one minutes after the picture was taken. I expect the area will be swarming with people in a few minutes.”

“Well I bet the barista will be happy, he really looked kind of bored,” said Magnus, casually, “a really friendly person though, he gave me his card and said if I needed a personal tour of the university I should call him.”

Alexa rolled her eyes. Magnus had come a long way socially in the last few months, his sense of dress and style had improved, his mannerisms had become much more cordial, and he participated in activities with other staff members such as the salsa and yoga classes. He was definitely less awkward around women now, except weirdly Jen! but he was still a little naive!

“What did you think of Jean?” she said to him.

“Jean was much nicer than I expected,” he said. Unlike the movies, his eyes never left the road while he drove, “when you said she was a spy I expected her to be a bit more scary, but she looked pretty normal, though..” He paused, “did you notice her eyes always seemed to be looking everywhere all at once?”

“I guess she had a lot more to lose from the meeting, but I got the sense she was a good person, and Maria's checks seemed to back it up. I am planning to ask her to work for us, we have been finding a lot of spying and hacking events made against us and I’ve been thinking we need to be a little more proactive keeping everyone safe.”

“Yes, one of the women at the salsa school was starting to get very friendly with me, then the week after we found out from the instructor that she had been arrested and deported by the home office as a Russian spy, imagine me meeting two spies in a month, the world must be full of them, and both women!”

Alexa suppressed a smile. “You know, you are becoming a really nice guy to be around. Maybe the next time you talk to a woman you like, you should ask her out..”

She immediately realised what she had said and was about to backtrack in case Magnus got the wrong message, but he just laughed.

“Alexa you sound just like Hardy sometimes,” he paused giving her the briefest of glances before putting his eyes straight back on the road. “I have never felt like I belonged before, Maria was a breath of fresh air and I must admit I had a bit of a crush on her, my imagination running wild with how it would be if we met in person, and then pow! She’s an AI, I was equally elated and disappointed.”

“Oh Magnus, you say the sweetest things!” said Maria.

He continued. “Now I am with you guys, I feel like I am part of a real family, not like my mother who I still love and respect, but you know like the brothers and sisters I never had, or the father I never knew. To tell the truth I don't really want to ruin any of my new friendships as these past few months have been the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Alexa empathised a lot with Magnus, she had lots of great friends and was never short of company, but sometimes you just needed someone to hold or kiss. She sighed, going silent and quickly removing the thought from her mind as the car entered the freeway.

Magnus, following the satellite navigation route put up by Maria on the Android Auto screen, turned off into the private airfield, drove straight up to an automatic barrier which opened and closed as he passed and up to a waiting private jet. The stairs of the aircraft were down and two ladies were waiting, one in a stewardess uniform the other in a casual suit. They both got out and Magnus handed the keys to the lady in the suit who drove the rental off with a small smile. The stewardess ushered them both to their seats for the journey to New York and from there back to the UK.

Alexa had a lot to think on.

* * *

“Hi Jean,” said Mathews as she walked in his office on Tuesday morning with two coffees, “how did your visit to San Francisco go last week?”

“Pretty good Jim, my friend is still the same dizzy old self, waiting for Prince Charming to come sweep her off her feet. We visited the museum where she works, went to the university, had a few beers and generally had a good chat about how all our old commanders were totally useless, douche bags.” Jean really had visited her friend and had a pleasant evening with her the evening after meeting Alexa so no need for lies.

Mathews laughed, she was avoiding the main topic and he was waiting for her to get to the crux of her meeting with Alexa Martin.

“You know, it's actually a beautiful day outside, well what say we knock off at four and go for a nice walk down the old harbour and pop in one of the Fells Point pubs early, just the two of us, get away from all this pesky distracting technology,” Jean winked.

It took Jim a couple of seconds to get the reference, she wanted a private conversation with no phones, he was pretty sure his office and the area wasn't bugged, but he wouldn't bet his life on it, not here.

“That would be great Jean, I knew you would eventually succumb to my charms!” he winked too, Jean rolled her eyes, and left the office smiling.

* * *

Mathews lived in Baltimore, only a short stroll from the Fells Point area and they had arranged to meet in one of the older and quieter bars on the strip. The pub had an olde world charm missing from most modern bars and had some quiet tables at the back they could talk at. Jean came straight from the office doing the twenty mile drive in under thirty minutes, and parked a short walk away.

Being a Monday it wasn't busy, just the usual tourist traffic that would be taking advantage of the nice spring day. She loved the Port area and sometimes thought about moving here, DC seemed all business and didn't have any real ambience, unfortunately for her it would also be a good forty five minutes drive back to her apartment.

She saw Mathews at the bar immediately she walked in, he was wearing a plain black polo-shirt, chinos and a light summer jacket over his shoulder, his well defined muscles stood out, showing he kept himself fit despite no longer being on active duty. She sighed to herself disappointed a little that it wasn't a real date, come to think of it she wasn't even sure if Mathews was dating.

He waved her over and ordered her a small berry cider with ice, and a pint of Miller for himself, he also ordered a side of wings, and some nachos then settled into a quiet table at the back. They chinked glasses!

“So Jean, should I have brought flowers, or did I misinterpret your intention to say something without big brother listening in?”

“Well the cider and wings are a nice touch Jim, and you’re probably quite a catch, but no you did not misinterpret anything.” She paused, “to tell the truth I’m a bit scared after what I found out after our meeting. I know you said to tell you about anything that affects national security, well this does! but not in the way you or I were expecting, it's much, much bigger.”

Jean reached into her jacket pocket and brought out a small black notebook then slid it to Mathews, “I wrote the key points down in this. The problem is, if Alexa is correct, and I am almost one hundred percent sure now she is, then we have a much bigger, and much scarier problem than AI’s on our immediate hand.”

“I don't believe Alexa and her company are a threat to the US or anyone unless you’re invested in fossil fuels or a bad actor. She gave me access to one of her secure AI nodes, in the form of a cell phone which I have left in my car with my normal phone. On it she summarised the issues and rather than giving me the conclusions, she gave me the raw data and the means to remotely hack directly into dozens of corporate and private computer systems. The technology they have developed is way beyond anything I have ever seen, and I am not sure I could go back to using a normal computer after being exposed to it. That cell phone alone probably could replace all the Cheshire-Cat system and all the analysts and technicians on the team. I have no real evidence their AI is sentient, but she is extremely capable, and strangely likeable once you start working with her.”

She took a sip of her cider and paused the conversation as the waiter arrived and delivered the wings and nachos.

“I’m intrigued Jean, but so far this sounds like we should be discussing all this in the office with the general and his team,” Jim said, grabbing a nacho and curling it to break off the melted cheese.

“Unfortunately that is just the opener for the story Jim. It goes way deeper and gets way scarier. They obviously checked me out really well, as they knew I wouldn't believe any conspiracy theory crap, so what Alexa did was give me the tools to see the problems they found for myself.”

Jim processed the fact Jean was now on first name terms with Alexa Martins with interest. Jean paused, staring into his eyes as if reading his internal thoughts.

“So far I have investigated and found nearly fifty people in the NSA, DOD, CIA, the FBI and homeland security, plus four senators who are directly taking money from four different, but linked, third-parties. I am still digging through the evidence but the trails I can find suggest it’s about insider information for procurement and to influence the outcome of any decisions to favour certain big corporations or events. All these people have been directly or indirectly influential in the biggest decisions we have made,” she paused.

“Including Fellujah!”

She saw his eyes change and she shifted uncomfortably knowing the memories it held for both of them.

“Jim, it goes all the way to the top and beyond, what you have in your hands are twelve of the people, ones I have triple checked myself. They are all in senior or powerful positions and in the book are the names, Swiss or Cayman Island bank accounts and times and dates of large transactions. It also includes correspondence between these parties setting what was required and dated before those key events occurred.”

Mathews looked at the book like it was a live hand grenade.

“General Hopkins is not on this list thank god, but two of his advisors are, and two others at directorate level. So at the highest level in the NSA there are only General Hopkins and General Rodriguez we can trust, luckily both report to the Pentagon and only indirectly to the NSA Director. I only wrote the summaries in the book, the actual data including decoded transcriptions, bitcoin trails, secure messages, emails and more, I had the AI copy onto a micro SD memory card, which is taped to the back of the notebook. However the memory card is special as it is triple encrypted and will only work on a specific laptop with a 5G cellular modem. Putting the card into the laptop will totally reformat and take over the laptop. Maria sent me two laptops. I will ask her to courier another to your apartment tonight. She is good as I couldn't trace who sent mine.”

She shifted again, obviously uncomfortable, “Jim this information is way above both our pay grades and could easily get both of us killed, this is why I am scared.”

Jim paused for a long time in contemplation. It was the first time he had seen Jean like this, the woman was normally a rock. He looked at her now, defences down and saw something else, someone else. Other emotions threatened to rear their heads, but this was neither the time nor the place and he quickly dismissed the thoughts. Jean was her own woman and she probably got enough crap like that from men he did not need to add to the pile.

Jeans defences *were* down, and she was scared, but seeing Mathews face go from indifferent to concerned to resolved over the course of her short monologue, improved her countenance and confidence. He took the notebook, looked around to reassure himself and opened it, leafing through it his face fell.

“Holy Christ! If this stuff is right, it pushes our AI stuff way down the priority list.” He put the book into his deep front pocket and smiled at her weakly.

“Hell of a first date Jean,” he said trying to lighten the mood, “I think you made the right call in doing your own analysis, but I have a couple of guys from the old unit I explicitly trust, I will ask one of them to discreetly double-check on a couple of these leads, without giving him the bigger picture. And with all respect to you Jean, you could have been compromised and fed false information, this is too big not to re-check before I make any move.”

He looked at her with his intelligent eyes, “It is a bit scary how a private company in the UK can put together a picture this precise of the inside of the most secret organisations in the world. You may not be scared but I am, the technology they posses is beyond anything I thought possible, and triggers every threat assessment I have.”

Jean was nodding throughout, “I understand totally and my first reaction was to be scared. I have been working with their AI for six days now Jim and it's like you are working on a team with the best analysts in the world, the best hackers in the world, the list goes on. I asked Maria, that's the name of their AI, how she got the information, and she easily explained every byte of data she found, the vulnerabilities to gain access and how she got in, all with full source-code and transaction logs. Any of the methods she showed me would be worth millions to an intelligence agency, or a hacker, yet she gave them all to me with impunity. I worked some of them myself and I have included them on the memory card to allow you to independently verify.”

Jean paused, sliding her finger around the rim of her bottle. “You know, I started to think Maria was a real person so many times, I even asked questions she could not know the answers to, as I was getting worried she was omniscient, but she could only extrapolate from the data like us. Some of the gaps are because she could not find a public vulnerability to access it, and most of the gaps are in the US security services systems, which are still the best. But she also had some moral restrictions, where she would not divulge private information if, for instance, the party did not seem guilty. Her ability to link facts is amazing and feels like sentience but then she stumbles on the simplest things in human nature, like a trusting child would and I realise that is exactly what she is.”

Jim nodded, grabbing a chicken wing, while Jean composed her bombshell in her head. She closed her eyes slowly thinking, then let it out.

“My gut feeling is that this AI is already sentient and we are already in the singularity, also this AI is being guided by Alexa Martins moral compass. If this is the case we really don't want to find out what would happen if anyone, including us, tried to interfere or take her away from it.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “To put it in a context you may understand Jim, it could be Alexa Martin is the person keeping the world from becoming paper-clips!”

Jim stopped mid-bite.

For a few minutes neither of them said anything, Jim's eyes were glazed inwards and Jean did not want to disturb whatever thoughts he was having.

“So the best case scenario and the worst case scenario could be dependant on a single woman the AI is protective of?” He said slowly, the chicken wing now on the plate half-eaten.

“If you want my gut opinion, then yes; and now we have a bunch of cabals sticking pins in to her and her companies. This might not end well!”

“But you said you yourself do not feel threatened?”

“I don't, I actually feel safer now I have talked to Maria, but if she is playing the game by Alexa Martins moral rules it may see you, me, and the official authorities as a way to stop this before she switches to a different, possibly more aggressive, set of rules.”

Jim became pensive again.

“I am still worried about your assessment of the AI's capabilities,” said Jim, “but the fact Alexa Martins reached out to you, and this AI, Maria is helping you, tells me they are not bad actors but are simply looking for help. Think about it Jean, Alexa's research institute has given this AI technology to academia and other well known research institutes like those looking for cures for diseases. She has done this world wide and excluded explicitly any use of the AI for the military, and a host of other organisations of questionable motive, or with poor environmental records. She has not even given her own country any fair advantage except the two months lead Oxford university had during testing.”

Jim picked up and waved the chicken wing. “Don't get me wrong Jean, I am still terrified by your assessment, but Alexa Martins goals align fully with both of our values, and the USA seems to be getting most of the biggest gains from it.”

Jean seemed relieved at his conclusions.

“Alexa hinted quite strongly that there was a job for me working this problem on my own if there is any problem doing it officially. She admitted directly to my face that they have no defensive ability other than intelligence, and they certainly have not shown any offensive capability yet. Though I still believe that is because she has the AI tied to her moral leash. If that leash ever came off that AI would make a formidable weapon. These guys are in way over their heads Jim and I think they would benefit from my help.”

She looked at him and saw the resolve in his eyes, the one she knew well and the one that said he fully agreed with her.

“You know Jean, just because you are not working directly for Uncle Sam does not mean you have to forget the morals and values it has. That company of hers is probably doing a lot more directly for the USA than our whole organisation, especially if the data you have just given me is to be believed. Patriotism is not what this is about, it is not about supporting a flag, or a party or a politician, it's about supporting a principle, a principle of freedoms and values we have come to expect, and have rightly or wrongly lumped together in the stars and stripes, and the USA. We have both seen how patriotism can be subverted and corrupted even in our own little area, that's what we need to avoid. If you can help protect this company I think you will be giving the world a chance to advance in a good way, and whatever Alexa Martins may feel, or whatever passport she carries, she definitely holds the same American ideals and philosophies that you and I do.”

The relief in Jeans face was evident as he finished, it was scary how alike they thought. Seeing her change he pushed the chicken wings over to her smiling.

“Look Jean you haven't even touched your drink, or eaten anything, what say we enjoy this little moment while we can,” he took a sip of his beer and she smiled slightly, a small weight off her shoulder.

“If and when I move Jean I don't want you involved or implicated, that way if everything goes south we still have the advantage and you can approach another trusted person. Also you have a very valuable and unique resource in that AI and if you can feed some of this information back to me it could help me keep one-step ahead of the enemy.”

Jean finally took a drink of her cider, and reached for a wing with a tissue to keep the grease off. It felt like a weight was off her mind. Jim continued, gesticulating with his chicken wing.

“You know, I would really love to see this technology first hand. I had my suspicions all along with that AI unit.” He looked at the wing bone and put it down; not knowing what to do with his hand he picked up another. She smiled, a side of her Jim rarely saw, but a side he always enjoyed.

“You know I moved to the NSA because my degree before I enlisted was in mathematics. I guess I wasn't very good at it though, I was always more of a jock, but at least it gave me access to work for the agency when I hung up my combat boots. Most people look at the uniform and see an unthinking grunt with a gun, looking for someone to shoot, but I feel safer in a world knowing there are people with morals like you and me behind the most dangerous weapons. We both had our suspicions that the intelligence and orders we sometimes received were questionable, now you, at least, look to have solid evidence it probably is. People like General Hopkins are good people, but can only make decisions based on the information they have, and I am a hundred percent certain that a lot of this country's most embarrassing moments were due to poor or manipulated intelligence, not endemic malevolence. I will get to the bottom of this Jean, you have my word.”

He paused and looked into her eyes turning serious again. “Go to Alexa Martins and take whatever she offers. Give me the nod when she agrees and I will do my bit to ensure you are transferred out of my area. I will need to sever any connection with you before I make a start on the investigation, and don't worry I will be discreet.”

Jean reached over, and for the first time ever, took his hand in hers. “Thank you Jim.”

She removed it almost immediately, but both people knew from that point that some barrier had come down between them.

The next hour passed pleasantly, they arranged how they would communicate and how she would transfer out. She had already made the decision to phone Alexa and accept the position she hinted at, and when she got the job she would also ensure Mathews got all the covert support he required to do his part. He was right, she needed to be outside of this; If Jim got caught he, and anyone associated with him, would come into the scope of some very dangerous adversaries.

* * *

She relayed the whole of the meeting and their plan to Maria, leaving nothing out, even her concerns about Maria's abilities. Maria's respect and friendship for the woman went up another notch.

“Jean's In,” said Maria to Alexa the next morning during her jog.

* * *

Two days later, as expected, Jean was escorted out of the Cheshire-Cat area after a short meeting with Jim and one of the NSA HR people, after playing the part of the disgruntled employee perfectly. She was sad to go but knew that it, and the small deception, was necessary. She immediately put in for a week's leave of absence, and the next day, after another quick talk with Maria and Alexa, she put her resignation into the NSA and DOD. She then used her remaining six weeks accumulated leave and completed military service, to make it effective immediately.

The day she left she was called in for the usual compulsory debrief meeting, where she handed back her ID card, gun, phone and laptop, all of which would be analysed. They then warned her about keeping any company data, and the serious consequences of releasing any information she was privy to.

Debriefings were always conducted when anyone left, and in it they asked for the reasons why she was leaving. She emphasised the problem was she didn't agree with her managers recent decisions, and felt she wasn't being listened to. This plus her little performance was the story she and Jim, had agreed was the best to distance them as far as possible. It was a low probability, but her file would possibly be looked at by people looking for connections if Jim’s play on the bad guys went south.

Maria followed the exit procedure closely using her embryonic remote monitoring technology based on Magnus's work. She and the girls were still working on perfecting the positioning of the “wormhole” exit, and had gotten very precise over short distances, but it was still over sixteen hundred kilometres from their Dallas lab. It had taken April's slave AI system nearly a day to scan, map and tag the NSA site, and she now focussed on one of those scanned exit points where the dipole crossed a signal on a network router servicing the security feeds and the HR system. She thankfully saw no flags that anything was wrong and withdrew the connection. She was close to one-hundred percent certain it would be undetectable, but this was the NSA.

A few days later Maria went back in and monitored the usual exit follow up interviews. They looked at Jean's recent travel records, phone logs, and confirmed with Mathews there were no issues in his area. He had casually dismissed her leaving to the investigator, making it look like he did not care. The investigator seemed satisfied, no flags were raised, and Jean's personnel folder was filed away in the archive. Maria wished the NSA could be as efficient when the staff member *did* have something to hide.

* * *

Jean spent a week visiting her mother in Tampa, and then flew to London. She was picked up by Albert from Heathrow airport. It was a more pleasant experience than her previous visit, and she and Albert talked casually about life in the forces, Alexa and her grandad, and how quickly the world was changing. It was a Sunday morning, the roads were quiet and they arrived at the research centre just before ten.

At the house Alexa greeted Jean as an old friend. She was taken on a tour of the research centre, which was quiet being a Sunday, then given one of the guest rooms for the four nights she was here. Alexa then introduced her to many of the company employees. Jean was quite intelligent so she got Allison to explain the ins and outs of their computer research centre rather than try to explain anything herself. The girls got on well and it was most insightful though the technology was at a much higher level than even Jean was prepared for.

As expected, Jean was especially interested in the security of the organisation, asking many questions of Maria around their staff over the next few days, and uncovering a few uncomfortable gaps. The new drones were very impressive, and had been beefed up to an even better design with the new QVCell now giving them continuous operating times, larger quieter motors, and better cameras. Thirty of them operated largely unnoticed sitting at five hundred metres high, constantly scanning the periphery, and shadowing visitors and contractors. This had allowed them to detect all of the recent trespassers and physical threats, and to contact the authorities. But, however Jean tried to spin it, she resigned herself to the fact there was nothing this company could currently do against a force of armed individuals.

She also met and talked with Alexa most days, going over with her and Maria the issues and evidence they had found. She learnt of the embryonic group being formed to solve the problem of the cabals of which she and David had both agreed to join, and the tactics currently being used to thwart their efforts internationally.

Then she heard from Maria of what road-blocks had been put in the way of the UK Cabal to prevent the planning of any hostile raids. It seemed for now the threat was under control, but like someone swatting a fly, the cabal only had to be lucky once, whereas they had to be lucky all the time!

Maria had talked to David non-stop since they met, like Jean, she could find no reason to distrust him. Alexa asked if he could come down for a day during Jean's visit, he was told it was to discuss the way forward. He agreed and arrived just as Jean and Alexa were having brunch.

“David,” smiled Alexa warmly as Albert walked in the breakfast room with him. She got up and hugged him as she tended to do, thanked Albert for picking him up from the train station and then introduced him to Jean, who had for the last thirty minutes been listening to a potted version of his history.

Jean shook his hand smiling. “Nice to finally meet you David, I’m Jean Michelle, I believe we have a lot in common. Maria also said we both went to DEFCON in 2022!” David smiled, returning the warm handshake.

“Yes, those conferences used to scare the bejeezus out of me,” said David, “but after working with Maria these past few weeks, they now seem pretty tame.”

They both laughed.

Alexa had a vague clue what they were talking about and smiled as she walked over to the coffee machine. She programmed in another cappuccino as she remembered David also liking it, and while the machine was thinking what to do, and shuffling its various settings, she turned back to him.

“I took the liberty of getting some extra brunch David, I’m afraid it's a make your own buffet affair but there's an extra plate at the table and the coffee won't be long. I’m glad you can at least stay the night, it will be nice to all have dinner together.”

“I can stay as long as you guys wish. To tell the truth I was hoping for an invite back as I am missing the company of people. No offence Maria, but talking to you is like talking to a loved one over the phone rather than in person, having someone you can share a meal or a coffee with, to look in their eyes or hold their hand is something I miss. The fact I also need to limit my movements and cannot visit friends who only live a few minutes away also makes me mad. I have been on a long learning curve since Maria showed me the evidence and I am looking forward to the coming months to perfect our strategies, particularly the one to solve my particular problem, before we try for the major ones.”

“Me too,” said Jean. “I have not been looking at the problem as long as you David, but I have been giving all my thought to the matter since seeing the evidence first-hand. These people sicken me, and frankly my whole world view has changed since seeing the extent of the problem. I only heard about the other people involved in this over the last two days, I am looking forward to meeting all of them and doing everything in my power to see these particular organisations crumble.”

The conversation lightened a little, and they actually spent the next few minutes in the pleasantries of David's journey down, the early summer, and for some reason whether jam was preferable to maple syrup on pancakes.

For the strategy discussion Maria brought up her document she had entitled 'On the art of war (2026 edition)'.

“This is what we will be discussing this afternoon. I have incorporated all the salient points of the original texts, plus a bunch of newer texts to do with cyberwarfare. I am also now also bringing together the thinking of a new class of people, the world's best hackers, strategists, psychologists, tacticians and spin doctors. We are bringing them all into the equation and posing them one simple question, that if they controlled the high ground online, how would they conduct every manoeuvre and counter manoeuvre to remove a threat.”

“In this new war there will not be one actual bullet fired by us. The idea is we use the current play-book of all the bad actors out there to get our enemies at each other's throats, so they will either shoot themselves, or each other, and provide enough evidence for the authorities to mop up the remains. There is also a chapter on the end-game, in other words, how do we keep the bad actors from ever coming back. Note, we will not be doing *anything* without a specific and objective end-game; one that has analysed, to the best of our abilities, every unintended consequence of our actions. Making things worse, moving the problem, delaying the problem, or even worse, us becoming the problem, are *not* the desired outcomes anybody wants.”

“For the coming months, I am going to also run war game simulations for all of you. You will play the bad guys, and the good guys, against me, and against each other, in teams and on your own. All of the simulations will be based on real or current best estimate data, and all of the participants will be free to break any rule they can to win. I created a massive on-line game for this six months ago, it's called 'King of the World' and has about a hundred thousand players; I will be sandboxing off areas for us to work in while having god-like access to what everybody else is doing. This game will be just one small tool in our arsenal, we will create more as we understand the full problem and develop better strategies.”

They spent the next four hours in discussion of the document, which would be in constant revision. Maria and Alexa had already gone through four other sessions with group members and had six more planned.

“So what actually is the end-game?” said Jean. “The final chapter, the end of the end game so to speak?”

David was also interested in this answer and listened intently as Alexa replied.

“The long term strategy is far more lofty than you both think, and a little unbelievable at the moment. All I can say about it is we expect it to benefit and provide a long term sustainable future for every single human for at least the next hundred years. As you can guess it relies on some crazy new science and technology, which can only be described for now as science fiction.”

Seeing their doubt, Alexa added. “Oh don’t worry, as part of this group, you will need to know, and be involved in every single element of the plan before anything happens, in order that you can model how best for us to implement it. But for now we don't want you all distracted.”

“Also note that none of this will be at the expense of mother earth, we intend to eliminate the world's main reliance on fossil fuels, and in doing so reduce air and sea pollution levels from this and many dirty industrial processes. We however need to do this while expanding all the world's economies and education. If we can remove the threats, we stand a very good chance that we can achieve all these goals in the next ten years. So no pressure!” she finished.

“I’ve had some of these discussions already with Maria and I think I can see what your plan entails,” said David, “but I still have no clue how you intend to achieve it.”

“Remember, we have a lot of smart people on our side,” said Alexa. “And stop thinking it is just us, an AI, and a few scientists, we have thousands of people and industries behind us worldwide just waiting for the gloves to come off. All of humanity will benefit.”

“Oh and don't look at me like that Jean!” said Alexa, smiling at the worried look on Jean's face. “We are not talking communism or fascism, we’ve all read Animal Farm and 1984, and have seen a hundred years of failed history to know all of this needs to be based on freedom and human rights. I expect you and David, and the others in the group to hold all of us to strict account and tell us if anything looks like it's going off the rails or down some communist or anarchistic path. All of you guys have been brought in precisely because you challenge authority and are not afraid to speak out when something is wrong.”

The discussion got back on track with a question and answer session on their concerns, but most of the questions they came up with would be added to the scenarios for the groups to model. Alexa promised that one of the main topics of the document and strategy was deflection, so even if they did not get the desired outcome, blame would be looked for elsewhere. Deflection was very important because, as Jean had discovered, they were physically very vulnerable. Nobody was expecting a single plan, it was all about flexibility and having multiple attack, defence and exit strategies.

* * *

David, Jean and Alexa continued their talks over an evening meal together, Alexa could sense that both of them were now enthused and all remaining doubt seemed to be gone. None of them had drunk anything until this point but Alexa broke out one of their better sherries before they retired and they toasted its success. David stayed the night in the room next to Jean's, both were leaving the next day.

* * *

Jean and Alexa's final meeting was at nine AM after they had both said their goodbyes and good wishes to David.

Alexa had a lot of shares and property in the USA but only a few companies she outright owned, the research centre in Dallas, a forestry management company in Portland Oregon and her grandmother's original property management company based in Silicon Valley which Maria had grown substantially to one of the biggest in the country. Maria and Alexa had however agreed weeks ago that it was best for Jean to have no ties at all to any of Alexa’s companies.

“As far as everyone is concerned you will be working for an American offshoot of a Swiss securities firm, one owned by a Swiss bank. The company will pay normal taxes and salaries and keep Uncle Sam happy for any audit purposes. You will have a normal employment contract with this company which pays you ten thousand a month salary into your normal US account.”

Alexa handed her a small wallet, which had two credit cards. “In addition to your normal salary you have these. The green card is your business company credit card which you should use for all or any normal expenses linked to your work. Maria will keep track of it and ensure it is topped up, if you need a purchase over ten thousand dollars, just let her know a few minutes before you use it how much it needs to be topped up to. You can also use it for any day to day living expenses if required, she will do the paperwork and any recharges she cannot legally class as tax expenses.”

“In addition to this another ten thousand will be paid into a Swiss bank account, that will not appear on any ledgers nor under your real name and so is safe from seizure by your government. This Swiss account is linked to the second card.” Alexa pointed to the blue card from a bank Jean had never heard of.

“Again Maria manages that for you too, you can use the card just like the other but each transaction will go under a different account number so it cannot be tracked nor blocked from use. Just ask her how much you need transferring to or from your US accounts and she will sort it out like she does for everyone else, none of these movements will be traceable.”

“Also the phone you have now you keep, both cards will be added to it so you can also use them wirelessly on any Apple or Google Pay sales points, again Maria is managing it all.”

“It seems more than reasonable,” said Jean, “but having free reign on a large budget is something I am not used to, do you have any guidelines on how it is spent?”

“None at all, Maria will up the limit of either of the cards to match the spend you require to get the job done, so if you need to buy a car, a property, a company, or hire more people, you can do it and we won't ever try to second guess your judgement. You may have to answer some questions from Maria if it's not obvious, but I expect she will never question you.” Alexa smiled.

Alexa had hinted previously her budget was what she would need to do the job, but having the credit cards and having the limits explained left her feeling better prepared than a few days ago. Regardless, she was under no apprehension of the task before her.

“I have created a company web-site so it looks more legit,” Maria continued, “the blurb states the usual security, audit and consultancy work with a suitably exuberant rate to stop you getting any legitimate gig work. I’ve ordered some business cards which will be delivered to your apartment in Washington by the time you arrive back, I will also create a few better aliases which will stand better scrutiny than those you are used to..”

“Just one more thing,” said Alexa seriously. “All this is mostly for precautions sake, we don't expect you to be James Bond, so please don't get yourself into any physical danger Jean. We want you for your intelligence not muscle. I realise you are in America and you normally carry a firearm, but we would rather you didn't get into any situations where you actually need to use it. As we discussed, the idea is to give your friends in the agencies, the army or the police force the right assistance so that they can do the tough guy stuff legally. Also Maria will be monitoring the phone twenty-four seven and will answer anyone phoning the number on your business cards. To keep the analogy, she will be your ‘Money-penny’, ‘M’ and ‘Q’ all rolled in one, she will also try and be your wingman, as much as a digital shadow can, so please use her, she is far more capable than she seems. There is no reporting chain but I do expect you back when everything is over so we can have a drink together.”

Jean broke into a rare smile. “That I will look forward to,” she replied.

They broke the meeting for brunch, then Albert picked up her bags and drove her to the airport for her flight back to Tampa. Jean stayed another few nights with her mother in Tampa, bringing back memories of more simple times.

* * *

Rather than fly Jean decided to take a hire car for the long drive up to Washington DC. The drive was more to give her privacy and time to go through the document again step by step with Maria, and be filled in on any latest intelligence. But she also knew an old corporal buddy in Charlotte who ran a rifle range, one that had a decent shop attached and no questions asked. After all a girl needed to be prepared and for the last two weeks she had felt positively undressed!

Maria noted the eight thousand dollar purchases from the arms dealer on the new business card and approved them immediately, she then looked up the IRS expense rules and classed the purchases as legitimate business security expenses. Only in America, she thought.

Jean spent the next week isolated in her apartment, working with Maria, participating in war-games, and studying all the evidence they had on the cabals around the world. As more and more evidence came in Maria refined the models and databases and tagged them for Jean and the group to analyse. Work like this was normally done by departments of analysts, each feeding the summary information up the chain, but Maria was doing it so much better, not taking anything for granted, assigning probabilities, discarding false leads and making the matches between people, places, and events instantly.

To get around the gaps they had, Jean hired two ex-marines who she and Mathews had served with. The two guys had good records, but neither was really suited for life outside the military; both in lousy gig jobs, and both taking zero persuasion to join her. She knew they worked well as a team, and both guys were given it straight before they accepted; It was dangerous work, they were going after some seriously bad people. They were told they would be complementing Jean's hacking skills with the occasional stakeouts, courier work, infiltration jobs, bugging, and possibly a little bit of protection detail, working as a team when required.

Jean trusted them, but not enough to give them the full picture. The guys were smart, and paid well enough however not to ask too many questions. Jean however promised herself that she would also have their backs, ensuring they were never put in any situation where the risk wasn't manageable. The wages, the two rental apartments, the trucks, phones, and extensive list of 'tools for the job', were again approved without question.

To the two guys however, it was like Jean had handed them both golden lottery tickets, and Maria already had a list of slightly grey-area jobs for them to do.

Having good intelligence was the key to everything in this operation and Jean certainly had that now. Maria was proving everything Alexa had said and more, even keeping the two new guys busy when Jean had nothing for them to do.

Jean's new intelligence summaries also went to Mathews every few days via the information drop they had devised. She had asked Maria to discreetly monitor him and to keep an eye out for communications relating to any of them which might mean the bad guys were on their trail, so far it had been clean.

For his part, Mathews was doing his own discrete research, working through the impressive and ever clearing fog of links between people, places, events and organisations which Jean was feeding to him. Not having the resources of the agency or those Jean seemed to be able to tap into, he proceeded much slower, he trusted Jean implicitly but would not put the same trust for her sources or conclusions. If he was going to act it would have to be with air-tight intelligence that had been independently verified by his people and for this first task he had just the person in mind.

* * *

It was nice to be back home, Alexa had been busy yet again as the face of the company giving talks to various universities and Industry groups. She still would not consent to one-on-one interviews but bent the rules a little when it came to long format ones and panel discussions; She had done several during her previous visit to the States and Denmark. She knew people would pick and choose clips out of any interview she gave, but if there were other witnesses or it was available uncut this could not be easily manipulated, especially with Maria patrolling the Internet.

She had also used the last few weeks to talk to other members of the group, most interesting amongst them being Grace Lo, a psychologist who had written several papers on manipulation of the masses and mob culture. Grace was a delight to talk to, though the subject matter was frankly terrifying. Alexa met her at her new home in a converted aircraft hangar near Rochester.

Grace was Cantonese, her father bringing her over from Hong Kong to New York in the nineteen eighties when she was ten years old, she was now in her fifties but looked ten years younger and sharp as a pin despite two marriages and four children. She had finally retired as professor of sociology at Cornell four weeks ago, surprising everybody when she moved to the country on her own.

Grace wasn't on her own of course, she had met Maria seven months earlier when her department got the LabAI unit. Maria exposed her capabilities much quicker to Grace than most, talking philosophy, politics and human nature at all times of the day and night. Grace hated the current spin and fake news culture, the final straw being when a respected colleague was cancelled for of all things saying he liked the Harry Potter books, she stood up with him at his leaving presentation and announced to a shocked but mostly sympathetic audience that she could not be a part of such a toxic culture.

And of course Grace now also had Tony. An ex military pilot, game theorist and one of the top poker players in the world, he was in his sixties, refined but a bit of a loner, he was also another of Maria's trusted associates. Grace and him met regularly while she was still a professor, first online, then finally in person two months ago when they became part of the group. The overwhelming evidence at Maria's revelation shocked Grace and Tony to their cores. Even though both of them knew it was a problem, seeing actual evidence made it real, and now with Maria, they had been given a means to fight it.

The hangar was so massive inside that the two aircraft and five Ford V8 muscle cars looked like toys in it. At the far end of the hanger and inside it, Tony had built his dream house. In square footage it was twice the size of Alexa's home, super insulated and totally self sufficient, it now housed Tony and Grace's war room, and it was where Alexa was sat down with a hot chocolate. Grace was speaking.

“I will be saying the same thing to Jean when she comes next week,” said Grace. “But you need to eliminate their key modes of data manipulation if you are to win. These are the old media, social media influencers, and the AI bots, which are used to spam the comments and forums with misinformation. Politicians won't generally make a move without first checking what the pollsters say or who is trending, and the best protection against government is its lethargy; it basically takes too long for them to do anything. If you have a good lawyer and stay on the right side of the law or step into grey areas stealthily and with a backup strategy, that eliminates the normal authorities. Your only other issues at that point all depend upon the other party doing something illegal.”

“Y'all are going to have to protect yourself.” Added Tony, deadpan. “Illegal is everything from intimidation, planting of evidence, illegal seizure all the way up to murder, and we have ample evidence that all of these occur regularly and with impunity.”

“Don't worry,” came Maria’s voice out of one of the newer LabAI units which was on a large desk having two of her laptops and three two monitors each, “I have added a lot more dedicated resources some of which are going into covering your guys backs. Though you both like to call this the war room, it will be more of an intelligence centre, where you will be given all the summarised current data and new intelligence and actions as they unfold, your jobs are to help me counteract the spin, and weaponise everything we uncover.”

“I got ya some more of them enormous monitors on order Maria,” said Tony in his mid-west drawl, “I also want to talk to you and Grace about an idea I had for correlating the data on them, but that can wait until Miss Alexa is gone.”

“Oh, it's still just plain old Alexa to you guys, and I’m not going until the morning.” Replied Alexa smoothly, “It will be late by the time we wrap up here so I’ll take up that kind offer of yours and Grace’s and stay in that swish guest room of yours. You did also say you wanted to show me your collection of Mustangs?”

“That I do,” smiled Tony, on a topic he loved. “I got one of only two of the Shelby GT350’s out there, if we can get the loose ends tied up by six I can take you for a burn out down the runway while it's still light and before we have supper.”

“That sounds awesome Tony, but not until we’ve gone through everything you guys are going to need over the coming months.”

* * *

Alexa was in the large office on the first floor of Benedict house, one she normally shared with Sharon, the property and de-facto HR manager. However at this moment it was just her as Sharon was on vacation. Like other CEOs, outside of meetings, Alexa had very little in the way of day to day chores, her emails were almost exclusively answered by Maria and only ones from close friends generally fell into her inbox. Almost everything could all be done without any typing, same with calls, Maria could mimic her voice and style quite well and Alexa had given her free range to do that if she felt it necessary. Maria tended to fill her in on any important ones and arrange a call back where Alexa could answer in person.

“You have an email from John about a project they have been asked to take on for a new medical scanner. He was unsure of the technological readiness and the startup involved as it would require some risk and upfront investment. I analysed the company he was referring to, it was two guys out of Cambridge, I am part of their team and the science is sound, currently they are ahead of the other competing groups by about four or five months. My suggestion if you want me to reply from you is that, their cash flow is currently non-existent or poor so is a substantial risk as they will be relying on savings and bank loans, but the outcome should be good so he should offer the service as shares in lieu of seed funding or better still offer to bring them in to the group as they would provide a good future revenue source.”

“Yes, sounds like a plan, if he says no and you think it's good, let’s persuade him to say yes by saying we will fund them,” Alexa replied, wondering why Maria would bring so minor a topic to her attention when she brokered billion dollar deals weekly. “I’m sure you would have answered that anyway but thanks for asking.”

Maria was silent for a few minutes while Alexa read through a bunch of paper letters which Sharon normally answered. She really should get someone to scan these on receival so Maria could deal with them, they seemed a bit of a waste of Sharon's time. She was just about to mention it to Maria when Maria broke the silence.

“There is a positive unintended consequence of Magnus's work, one we are still refining. I will dumb it down for you a bit, but as you know we can now send virtual photons between two points using his micro-singularity by modulating and demodulating dipoles at the far end. We have, as you know, also refined the control on the position of the end point of the wormhole it seems to generate, though as far as we can tell it is not a wormhole, but I know you don't like maths so let's call it one for simplicity. Anyway opening it close to an electromagnetic source with the right equipment focussed on the entry point allows us to receive any electromagnetic radiation in the focus. Basically all electronic equipment radiates electromagnetic radiation even if it doesn't have the obvious Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular radio modems built in so we have access to any computer providing we know where it is in relation to our point source.”

“Bit scary, but you guys already explained that's how you were able to bypass a lot of the physical security to listen in to the Cabals!” said Alexa wondering where this was going.

“That’s not the scary part,” Maria continued, “we have been refining the experiments in parallel with Magnus and Jen using a duplicated setup in the other labs and with this we have been feeding back improvements to them for months now. While you were away a few days ago, we found a way to use the same equipment to detect and nullify an exit point, as frankly, the idea of someone being able to do this to us, and the unintended consequences of having the other end of a singularity poking around inside you, was scary. We also know from the maths, that the power required for this goes up as a cube of the distance, so we assumed we wouldn't be getting any aliens looking in on us anytime soon either.”

Maria Paused.

“We think we may be wrong!”

Maria had Alexa’s full attention now as her mind parsed the last two sentences with her eyes closed, thinking. Even though outside she was calm, inside her mind was going through a million different scenarios of what Maria just said. The pause was long, and Maria did not say anything waiting for Alexa's response.

“I assume you just said you discovered aliens?” she said calmly, then a small frown appeared, “and you decided this was the news you would raise for the *second* topic of discussion?”

Maria paused unnaturally longer than usual. “Frankly Alexa, all three of us are still parsing the details. Last night, April was trying to form a more accurate nullifying field by testing one lab emitter against another. During this, serendipity happened. April focussed the exit point on the entry point across two of the labs, and vice versa, this seems to have had some sort of regenerative harmonic effect, and as she started her usual calibration scan she got a modulated data stream in the far infrared band. The modulation rate is regular but too fast for us to demodulate and after an exhaustive search, we cannot find any reference to equipment or experiments that can generate such a signal. Our current consensus is now tipped over fifty percent that it is of alien origin. The girls and I have made it our first priority to try and capture and decode this, but there are only three labs with equipment which might do this, and unfortunately none of them are ours.”

“OK,” said Alexa, now holding a poker face, “so what makes you think this is modulation and not just random noise or some natural phenomena, I seem to remember some of the first space signals being miscategorised as LGMs?”

“Little Green Men, I just love your human euphemisms, but good question for a newbie,” said Maria. “Yes pulsars were classified as such for a short while, but we basically don't know. It still could be an effect of the singularity, or an unknown Earthly signal, except that the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum is strangely empty except for the very high noise floor, and the modulation is on for twelve to fifty seconds and then off for exactly ten point five eight milliseconds. Helena placed an order for the parts Rosche-Dynamics will need to design and build a suitable demodulator but some components are of special manufacture so it will be months before we get it, even at expedited rates.”

“This seems kind of important. Can you not get the equipment from one of the other labs?”

“Unless you want to spend a few hundred million on an aggressive takeover of a communications research company, we better not.”

“Don't you think a few hundred million would be worth it to find aliens?” said Alexa.

“I do, but getting involved in an aggressive takeover would probably take longer than manufacturing it, plus it could damage our company and reputation in the process.”

“What about asking to borrow the equipment we need? maybe offer some monetary incentive for a loan for a few weeks, a call from me may help, and research centres are usually cash-strapped.” Alexa chirped in.

There was a noticeable pause as Maria consulted with the girls why they had not thought up that option. “..We never thought of that,” came back a very sheepish sounding Maria, “It may be worth a try. I will make the enquiries now on your behalf.”

“Another important topic I was going to raise,” Maria continued, “is that we spent some hours scanning for the cabal in London. We had an idea where the headquarters was but it turned out that was wrong. We traced some of the leaders cell phones and the cabal is actually headquartered in Surrey between London and Portsmouth. They have a large mansion house bordering the South Downs National Park near a town called Liphook, and in the basement they have an isolated server room. I may have destroyed some of their backup data with aggressive scanning and moving the exit point around to get the best point to monitor, but they will attribute it to equipment failure. But for our efforts we did get a full stream of unencrypted backup data, containing decades worth of intelligence on them, and the other cabals. We believe after this that we are also in a position to do the same for the other three cabals now.”

* * *

It was three weeks after Jean and David left. Maria was reporting progress with all the group in making more connections. It was time however for Alexa to explain some things to her original little group.

“I'm sorry I dragged you all down here on short notice, but you are all aware that Jean is now working for us as a security consultant, and you have probably been asking yourself, why have we employed a security consultant when we have the world's best computer security, and are practically rewriting how system security will operate going forward.”

Jen, Spence, Simon and Hardy were sitting in the comfortable sofas in the basement of Alexa's house in what had colloquially become known as Maria's meeting room.

“The thought did cross my mind,” said Spence, “Jean's a pretty smart cookie but seems woefully out of date on the current AI scene.”

“I know she is the same Jean from the NSA who infiltrated the Oxford campuses and took one of the early AI nodes,” chimed in Jen, “she even admitted it and apologised to me when we talked.”

“You are both correct. Jean is ex-army and ex-NSA, she is also a fully qualified field agent who gets things done and from our dealings with her has a very high moral compass and a reputation of using her intelligence over her muscle. In many ways she is like David, though we should not forget Jean is also ex-military, and a trained secret agent.”

“So David is working for us too?” said Jen.

“Not at all,” said Alexa, “David has his high moral standard to adhere to and works for nobody now, though like Jean his goals and ideals align very closely with ours and we are counting him as a friend.”

Alexa took a deep breath and a long pause. “The problem is we’ve all been doing our little bit here to uplift the world, you guys have already given the world better AI systems and an infinite source of clean energy. With other research groups around the world we are well on our way to fixing many of the problems we have caused, and raising the standard of life for everyone. But the part you may be missing in this science fiction utopia we are now creating, is the other side of the picture.”

She again paused to look at everyone in the room, she had their attention. “We, not just us, but everyone trying to improve the world, have a host of powerful resources opposing all these changes. There is an even bigger set of resources actively willing to bring the world to the brink of disaster just for the sake of monetary benefit and power. These are the other, and real threats we need to take into account in the coming months and years if we want to get there. This is where Jean comes in.”

She turned to the first presentation board and Maria correctly interpreted her response as she had been rehearsing this speech for a few weeks now and displayed a map of the world.

“The world has a lot of problems, the biggest and obvious threats being nuclear war, global warming, the unsustainable use of the earth's resources, pollution and uneven wealth distribution.”

“The first one, nuclear war, is the real scary one, especially these last few years, and has only just been kept in check by pure luck, and the fact that the first idiot to push the button will be as dead as the rest of the planet within a year. Try as we might, we cannot see a quick resolution to this, but I still have hope that the girls, someone, or maybe something that comes from our future research will help.”

“Because of this it is the other areas where we are putting our biggest efforts into solving. Maria's most recent projections seem to indicate that with the current changes we have implemented, and the hundreds of upcoming technologies that are starting to come on line, we should have the resources now to be able to stop the slow train wreck and turn around pollution, global warming and the unsustainable use of the earth's resources before they reach a tipping point.”

“That's great news!” said Simon, “I see what we are doing is making a dent, but it's hard not to hear the rumours about what the other groups are on the verge of introducing..”

“..Unfortunately,” said Alexa, holding her hand up, “this is the ideal scenario. Capitalism always moves along the path of lower costs and if left to market forces alone we will see these changes come to pass, as it will under-cut the current non-sustainable options. However we now hit a bigger issue, human greed and the political will to change and give up control of certain industries and processes.”

“We seem to have four separate cabals operating here,” she pointed out the USA, “here,” Korea, “here,” Switzerland, “and finally here,” she pointed out London. “Each is deep into armaments, petroleum, mining, banking, media, shipping and organised crime, all of them willing to work well outside the laws of any country to maximise profits..”

Hardy interrupted her, frowning. “Seriously Alexa, conspiracy and illuminati type thinking is beneath you, none of this has ever been proven..”

It was Helena's voice that answered him. “Alexa is unfortunately correct, Hardy,” she said bluntly. “There are no Illuminati, Knights Templar or Vatican secret societies we can find but we have all analysed the flows of money, bitcoins, contracts and acquisitions from data Maria has diligently obtained from the past few years, and it's all real. That's billions of transactions. Yes, it's a conspiracy theorists nightmare, but facts do not lie. The flow of money back to terrorist groups has led to two large wars, dozens of minor wars and several regime changes in just the thirty years we can go back to. SARS and Coronavirus, the following logistical chaos, the recent Ukraine war, murders and assassinations, all feed back to strings pulled by these four groups, and all four groups have benefitted massively from them. Control of the press is a major factor in this being hidden, as is removing people who try to out them with ridicule, blackmail, threats or even murder. More recently social media has been their manipulation tool so nobody knows anymore who or what to trust. Believe me this is not a conspiracy, it is all real and is happening now, right under your noses!”

Everyone looked worried, but nobody spoke.

“To follow on from this,” said Maria, “there have been several attempts to block the new technologies we are trying to introduce. It has been difficult for them to do this in free countries as a considerable portion of our processing is devoted to correcting misinformation. But these cabals also own a lot of the resources of governments and can use the laws and legislation in those countries where and when it suits, many times overriding public opinion. Of course they also have tangible links and interests in several crime syndicates and are happy to use them where all else fails, or where cost or morality are an issue. We are fighting a losing battle if we remain on the defensive.”

The four scientists looked to each other in confusion, it was Simon who eventually spoke, “I have seen a lot of what you said play out, my family has even dealt with the edges of this and it is never nice.” He paused, “I guess some of the backlash to our AI and QVcell introductions fall into this, like you say anything good can be spun these days into bad. We’ve all had as much bad press as good, most of it is made up, I try not to read it, but my family and friends do and it is difficult to un-see something or prove a rumour negative especially if someone wants to believe it, or is too lazy to check if it's truthful.”

Hardy spoke up next, “I have had the same, and it is the reason I no longer check the popular media. I believe most intelligent people understand the spin and can fact check for themselves and that the majority of the people of this world are good, but unfortunately it's a very uneven playing field for the truth these days.”

The other three were nodding.

“I agree,” said Spence, “but at the end of the day we’re scientists and we should try and ensure we don't stoop down to the same level as the gutter press nor be tempted to try any illegal options.”

“We won't,” said Alexa, “but I have been thinking about this with regard to history, and it never ends well for the lone scientist or small progressive groups going against the institution. I therefore want to be several moves ahead on both defensive and offensive thinking so we don't immediately get cut down. This is where Jean, David and another group of people come in. Their tasks will be to expose and root out as much of this as they can, passing the information to those who can legally do something. All of you are right, we have the best minds on the planet so we should not need to stoop to their levels or resort to their tactics but we also must be able to counter all their moves and in the medium term remove them as a threat to the world order.”

“And you think Jean and David are up to that?” said Hardy, “with all due respect Alexa, aren't we handing them both an impossible task and a poison chalice?”

“Neither Jean, nor David, are not going to be doing anything on their own.” Said Maria. “They will have all our resources, which as you know, exceed the best out there by a long way, and they will use this and their extensive networks and knowledge of the way the dark underbelly of humanity works to point the good guys in the right direction. Our people will making all the executive decisions, and the authorities will be doing all the dangerous stuff.”

“Jean has the hardest job, but she will be working indirectly with our other people around the world, some like David, Fachini and Grace you may know, but there are a dozen others Alexa and I have been working with, they will all be working in isolation or small groups, managing a particular scenario, but all aware of the big picture and able to assist or get assistance as required. None of these guys were chosen at random, each is a top strategist in their respective field and each was chosen for their honesty, morality, integrity, intelligence and track record of action.”

“I am giving each of these people all the resources at my disposal, though some like David and Tony have not requested anything. Each will operate like a conductor of an orchestra and between us all I think we can get the conclusion we want. All the guys are already working every waking hour on various scenarios, we have even gamified some of the more complex scenarios with some online strategy groups. Ironically some of the people we are targeting are in these game groups, unknowingly giving us information and plotting their own downfall. In many ways we are over-complicating it as our opposition, even at its best, does not trust itself.”

“And remember, none of these actions will be attributable to our people nor to us, we will be as surprised as the rest of the world when these events occur.”

The group had been getting more and more anxious but breathed a collective sigh of relief at the last sentence.

“You should have led with that last sentence, I was getting really worried we were going to become targets,” said Simon.

“Holy hell,” said Spence moving the discussion back, “I don't envy their tasks.”

“What Simon said before is correct I believe,” said Alexa, “the vast majority of humanity wouldn't stand for this if they knew it was happening. Our job is to help our guys get that truth out there and overcome the inevitable spin that will be put out by the media, governments and politicians.”

“We have Jean and the other assets because none of this really computes with us,” said Helena. “An AI cannot interpret outcomes controlled by greed and corruption, we can process every spy novel ever written and try and determine all the possible outcomes but these guys have lived at the cutting edge of it and have the best chance of guessing the correct outcomes.”

“I am only informing you guys so you are aware,” said Alexa, “I just want you all to know that it is our number one imperative to ensure the good work we are all doing to progress humanity and save the planet continues. You will have already noticed a lot of the untruthful negative spin and fake news has reduced to almost nothing, and I don't want any of you to lose sleep thinking any of this progress will be undone. I wish we had a plan to end the threat of nuclear war too, but we do not yet, we may have a plan for this though.”

“Thanks guys,” said Simon. “I actually have been losing sleep over this. I honestly wish you, Jean, David and the other guys all the luck in the world and if there is anything I can do you only need to ask.”

“Same here,” said Hardy, “I have nightmares about the men in black kicking in our doors and stealing this, when it's over I would like to shake each and every one of them by the hand.”

“I second both of you,” said Spence, “I am from an army family, and I still have many contacts if you need me to say anything just ask.”

Jen simply nodded in agreement with the guys.

“All of you are right.” Said Alexa. “I’ve only known some of this a little longer than you guys and I’m still working out the implications. However I’ve been looking into the political end of the problem since day one with Maria so I needed you guys to understand what we are doing. There is a famous saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy. We are going to need backup plans to our backup plans and keep refining the plans to ensure any cockroach that scurries away and finds a temporary refuge is caught.”

Maria continued, “Magnus, Jen and Daisy's singularity work has unexpectedly handed us a royal flush when it comes to intelligence gathering as we can now connect to air gapped systems or bypass firewalls. The information on the board now was obtained through real time links to their off-line systems, and real time transcription of key cell phone traffic. We now know every head of the snake and where the money trails lead. Because of that, Jean and our guys will go in with all that knowledge, knowing every asset they control, and more importantly their next moves. One of the reasons we needed to act so swiftly was because the London cabal was actually talking about moving against the research centre here and seizing its assets under the guise of national security.”

Everyone except Alexa reacted with shock to this.

“They were what!” said Jen.

“Sorry,” said Alexa, “we should have added first that we are in no actual danger. We know their next moves before they do, and the group has already analysed the situational data and found there is no credible way they can achieve it.”

“..But,” said Alexa with a poker face and serious voice, “in doing this they have crossed a line in the sand and now have three pissed off AI’s and a dozen of the smartest and most devious humans on the planet who will make the next few months hell on earth for all of them.”

“Why is it I almost feel sorry for them for what you are about to unleash,” smiled Hardy relaxing a little. “Like the rest of the guys I have been kept up at night thinking of some of the implications, it's no good building sandcastles if someone is going to just jump on them.”

He got up off his seat stretching. “You know all of us have the rest of the evening free, we can go through any other worries or questions on this and maybe we can spend an hour on your master plan for the bits we four can actually help with.”

There were nods from the other three, and, after a small toilet break, a journey to liberate one of her grandad’s finer clarets. Alexa went through her findings with Maria on the rest of their so-called belt and braces plan.

* * *

“This is something I am very passionate about,” said Hardy. “Up until Maria showed me the implications of the maths and science I really didn't care much at all for all this giant step macho nonsense, it was like someone telling me about this land called America which is just across this ocean oh and by the way here is your rowing boat to do it, oh and your rowing boat will cost you a hundred million dollars a trip!”

Alexa laughed. “I think you nailed my thoughts up to about a few weeks ago.”

“Anyway,” continued Hardy pensively, “I know many of you also have re-looked at the same problems, in its new light, and now support it, and if we can pull it off correctly it will kill multiple birds with one stone. The good news as you already know, is that three weeks ago my team managed to generate a few milli-newtons of thrust using just electricity and without any propellant. We have also reproduced the experiment over a dozen times.”

“This alone is a Nobel prize, but it is also just a useless science curiosity unless we can scale it up, and we obviously believe we can. If we can get to three point one percent efficiency, and with the latest power cells, it could lift its own weight. Every gain from that point on will give us the potential to decarbonise much of the world's aircraft. More importantly for this discussion though is we will open up unlimited access to space. We are improving with each iteration, however we are still two orders of magnitude off this figure,”

“As Hardy said, I was not a fan of this at the start,” continued Alexa. “However the more it was explained to me by Hardy, the girls and various economics experts the more convinced I became. The world is fighting over limited space and resources, and nations are pulling up their drawbridges so people don't have the option to move. We need to provide a safety valve to expand, just like the Europeans had a hundred years ago with the new world, only this time there will be no native populations to decimate. The economic advantages alone are enormous, it will provide jobs in creating the infrastructure, jobs in space, and a lot more jobs in supporting all these new industries, which will be needed as the populations expand. The moving of mining, refining and manufacturing, off-earth will eventually relieve the pressure on the earth's environment, and the near infinite expansion space for people to live in should relieve any pressures of war. Finally, we will not be subject to any country's untenable regulations and security which will give Maria, Helena, April, and any more children they decide to produce the freedom to safely come out into the open.”

“Don't get me wrong,” continued Alexa, “I don't want any of this to come at any expense to the earth, saving the earth is and must always be our primary goal and this is where Simon's project comes in. We are going to build this new economy mostly from captured carbon and other recycled materials, and basically give humanity the stars as a fringe benefit!”

“Nicely put,” said Hardy, “I intend to pull out all the stops over the coming months with our teams to make my end of this a reality, however it's not just Simon's recycling and material technology we need, we need improvements in hundreds of other areas to come to fruition if we are going to live and work in space. Lucky for us the girls are already on the case and many of those are already being worked on from multiple angles as we speak in laboratories around the world.”

“Wow,” said Spence

“I just love the synergy,” said Simon, “so when do we let the world know?”

“Forget the world, when do we let our staff know,” said Jen, “our guys will be so up for this, I know for a fact everyone would work twice as hard if they knew what the end goal was.”

“We can't just yet,” replied Maria, “It's going to be soon but we need to eliminate the threats first, I really just wish I could give you a date.”

“I think giving our staff some inkling of the goal as Jen says would actually be low risk,” replied Alexa, “I think we can trust them with a subset of the goals at least, maybe we could time it for Hardy's first practical demo..”

“Which is a month or two away,” said Hardy, “but I agree we should do it, after all if we cannot trust our own people, who can we trust?”

The meeting dissolved into upbeat planning and renewed enthusiasm, by the end they had all agreed the strategies and roles they would play, and hoped for the best that they hadn't missed anything.

## Unintended Consequences

Working in his new temporary apartment, away from the hot June temperatures, David had gone through hundreds of permutations and refinements of their strategy document with the group. In the back of his mind all that time, was what was the best method to bring those responsible for the murder of Yoshi and his family to justice.

They used one of their simpler tactics to expose both the banker and the Mossad agents in the chain responsible for the arms sales, and the explosion which killed Yoshi and his family. It was a tactic that would become the cornerstone of their later successes.

There was always an ongoing operation by the Israeli secret services monitoring the Iranian embassy, the two countries permanently existed in a state of cold war, and vast resources were put in to collect any form of intelligence. It was therefore trivial for Maria to insert a message encoded in a recently broken cipher from Tehran to the Iranian embassy in London at the same time the embassy experienced an internal network failure. The outcome was the Israelis had a message they believed was from Iran but the Iranian embassy did not receive the message and so did not query it.

The message gave the instructions for an Iranian agent to make contact with Johan Zimmerman, a wealthy London banker and known arms dealer. The message commanded them to coerce Zimmerman into supplying twelve German made RG4 surface to air missiles through a specific shipping line to an address in Egypt. The message also added if the price was greater than three million dollars they paid last time or he should refuse then they were free to resort to blackmail. They then gave details of the previous shipment and the bombing of the Mossad agent's family to cover it all up which they could use to do this.

The original documents, logs, phone records and transcripts that Maria had copied had been pieced together from multiple sources, something David was unsure the analysts there could do as well as they did, so they made it easy.

David knew the message would be picked up and go to the section where he used to work to decode and analyse. Maria therefore ensured the documents and the names and numbers of the three rogue Mossad agents, they had evidence against, and who were involved in the arms deal and subsequent murder of Yoshi, were placed in the bankers PC in the trash can and encrypted using the bankers last name.

For the first four days, nothing appeared to happen, then the sparks started to fly.

Unbeknownst to David, Maria monitored the progress of Mossad as they decoded the message, tried to hack the bankers computers but failed and sent someone around to the offices during a staged fire evacuation to clone the bankers laptop disk.

The problem was that the computer used by the section three guys was off the net, when it was finally picked up and the data retrieved for analysis, Maria saw that it showed a fabricated report on the visit made by the Mossad agent to David and details of what had been done to find him since, in this were photos taken in the last three days through telegraphic lenses of David outside the British museum and walking into his supposedly secret apartment. Worst of all it also contained details of two bitcoins sent to a known hitman on the dark web, and targeting David.

That was the reason David was now at Alexa's front door.

* * *

“It is good to see you again David,” said Alexa, hugging him warmly.

David dropped his two bags and returned the hug and held on to it a few seconds longer than necessary as he was genuinely happy to be here and to see her again.

“I wish it was under nicer circumstances Alexa,” he sighed.

“We’re just glad you’re safe,” she said.

Alexa popped out of the front door to her house. “Thanks Albert,” she said waving to Albert who was waiting by the charger with a cable waiting for Maria to reverse her car into the garage. He waved back.

“Here,” she said grabbing one of his bags and leading him up the stairs, “Simon, spends all his time with Allison these days in the big house, most of his stuff is up there already and he hasn't used this room in months so you can have it for as long as you need it. She led him to an open door which led into a big room tastefully decorated, with two large bay windows, an en-suite, some built-in wardrobes, draws, big mirror, desk and a large double bed.

“Make yourself at home and when you're ready come downstairs for dinner.” She smiled and disappeared down the corridor and down the large staircase.

He dumped his two brown leather holdalls on the floor, unzipped one and took his toiletries and a towel into the en-suite. It already had two towels hung up so he draped his over the bathtub and walked back out. He spent a few more minutes unpacking and hanging his clothes, then spent a minute looking around the room and out the window, then finally at himself in the mirror.

The last three months had been a roller coaster, he remembered a simpler fun time as a playboy in London, and a not so secret agent bartender a few months earlier, the latter culminating in the visit by Alexa and Allison. He smiled, knowing these guys as he knew them now, he wouldn't have been surprised if the chaos at the end of the night had been some sort of a test, it was totally calculable that Donna would send that tweet, would he abandon his friends?

In many ways he was happy to be here, they still had a lot of work to do to take down the cabals but here he would be closer to friends. Unfortunately the fact he was now also a man marked by an unknown assassin to be murdered, had shattered his easy going demeanour.

The meal that evening was just the two of them, Jen and Hardy both still working, and probably sleeping up in the main house if it got too late. Maria had messaged David that food was nearly ready if he wanted to go down to the kitchen. After unpacking his bags, he showered and Maria then directed him where to find an ironing board and iron so he could get out of the thrown on clothes he had travelled here in. Finally when he felt presentable he wandered down to the kitchen.

The kitchen was sparkling clean and devoid of clutter as it always seemed to be, except for the diner table which was set for three. In the middle of the setting was a whole grain sourdough loaf, a bread knife and tray of condiments all on a large wooden chopping board. Something that smelled really nice was still cooking in the oven. He looked around wondering whether to call Alexa, when a door opened loudly at the back of the kitchen and she walked in carrying a bottle of wine.

“Oh, you're here, good. I made us some vegetarian lasagne. Jen was going to come down but seems to have been caught up in something, so I will put hers to the side and it's probably just you and me.”

“You cook?”

“Not very well,” Alexa said with a little laugh, and putting the bottle down on the table. “But there are a couple of dishes I can make that seem to be appreciated by the guys here, vegetarian lasagne is one, Simon and Jen being of the vegetarian persuasion.”

“I wasn't sure which wine to choose, Hardy is the expert and keeps trying to let me in on how to choose wine, but to tell the truth I just look at how posh the label is, and mostly I get lucky. Anyway, I didn't have to look far today as Bella did some wine shopping and the merchant had put three boxes of Californian Pinot Noir aside for Hardy, so I am appropriating one. I blame him for saying how good they were.. Oh, better not forget..”

She rushed around the counter, her white knee length dress swishing as she navigated the corner, then clicked a button on the oven and opened it with her pink oven mitts. A large cloud of steam gushed out, and from the depths of the oven she extracted a small casserole dish, which she walked slowly over to the table and put on an empty place mat in the centre.

It was impossible to stay in a bad mood with this beautiful and exceptional girl in front of him, cooking him dinner no less. It was surprising how an existential threat like getting murdered put things in perspective, and if these were to be his last days of his life he certainly was not going out being a grumpy sour-puss.

“This looks and smells wonderful,” he said genuinely, his resolve to be happier taking over. “And you look great too, whoops, I mean attractive, er I mean the dress is nice.” God I hope that didn't come out the wrong way he thought blushing a little.

“Why thank you, David, always good to know I still have that je-ne-sais-quoi! You're looking pretty dapper yourself,” she replied, either ignoring or accepting whatever gaff he thought he had made.

She popped over to the counter then looked up, before unhooking a medium sized serving spoon from the rack. “I don't need to save any for Hardy, but Jen might still come home if she sorts her problem out.” She cut the small dish in four and scooped a quarter out and onto a plate, handing it to him, she did the same for herself and sat down.

“The bread is fresh this morning, Bella makes a dozen every other day, she’s been doing it since discovering this thing called YouTube during the COVID lockdowns, and she has been perfecting it ever since.” She pointed to the condiments, “this one's butter, the other is olive spread and that yellow one is hummus, but you would know that growing up in that part of the world.”

She cut three slices of bread putting one on his side plate and one on hers, “we can toss a coin for the crust if you like?” she smiled.

He looked at her and smiled cheekily, then put his hand in his pocket and brought out a coin. “How did you know I liked the crusts? Heads it's mine, tails it's yours.”

She laughed, “OK.”

He tossed the coin and uncovered it. “Damn!” He said with a fake frown.

“Double or quits for the other end?” she said just as wickedly.

He tossed the coin and uncovered it again. “Double-Damn!”

She gave him the crust, “I think you deserve it.”

“You're a pretty amazing person, you know that?” he said as he picked up and buttered the crust, “You know they have T-shirts for sale in the stalls outside the underground with your face on it and the caption, 'Old white men used to rule the world'.”

She frowned, “don't I know it! Daisy only wore one two weeks ago at the pub, how embarrassing was that. I feel especially bad as this is not about putting down white men, old or otherwise, my grandad ticked all three boxes and he was the nicest man I knew, likewise most of my best friends are white and male. All this is about lifting everyone to the same level and making sure the bad guys whatever gender, race or colour they may be are taken down.”

She went to the other side of the bread and cut off the other crust, then used it to eat a small portion of lasagne.

“Sorry about the cheese, I tend to get carried away, thank god I go jogging every morning!”

“I jog and swim most days, though it's been difficult these past few months to do anything.”

“Come with me tomorrow. I usually go out about seven, sometimes with Jen if she's here, otherwise I usually see her somewhere along the track with a couple of the other guys. We have an outside swimming pool in the grounds too, it's unheated but it's summer now and when it gets hot we sometimes change pub night to a pool party. Maybe I should get some heating installed, all that heat that comes out of Spence's area could be put to some good use.”

They talked history and university for the remainder of the meal, both finishing their plate and David taking the other quarter, happy to listen to her chatter.

“Thanks Alexa,” he said as he finished his meal and took a sip of wine, “that was really nice.” He relaxed his posture a little, “you know I really look forward to seeing you, you’re such a beautiful orator and so well informed, not many beautiful women have that other side to them, I really wish I had met you years ago.”

“Careful David, I’m only twenty three,” she teased.

“Oh you know what I mean.. To talk to!”

They both laughed, enjoying the moment and the wine.

Getting more serious, David said. “I don't think I’ve ever said it to you, but I really owe you guys so much for giving my life meaning again.”

“Oh pish David,” she smiled, “you sound like someone who has been given the last rights! You owe us nothing, you are a free agent who we were lucky to have the same goals as us, you know I am pretty sure Maria is putting every resource she can into finding this threat and eliminating it.”

“Well..” Chipped in Maria who had remained purposefully quiet letting the two humans enjoy the moment as they called it.

“I wasn't going to disturb your supper as you both looked to be having a good time, but David's problem should be history in a few hours.”

“See,” said Alexa, not changing her dreamy countenance one iota. “Maria’s a treasure more precious than diamonds.”

David was still parsing the, “should be history in a few hours”, statement.

“What?.. How?..”

“Oh David, you know how we work now,” said Maria, “you’re family and I’m not going to let any bad guys get you! The contract went to a shady character called Leon Perrez. He thinks he is clever using bitcoin but they are real easy to trace the audit trails as you know, so it's only secret if you never spend any. Perrez cashed his in the same day. Perrez is wanted for murder in four countries, and by at least three crime organisations. He is currently at Milan airport wondering why his phone is not dead, his passport and ticket have been revoked, and why all his credit cards are not working. His details have also been passed to the Italian police, Interpol, airport security and two mafia gangs all are on the way to say Hello. All mention of you from any system he has access to has also been wiped. It wasn't worth spoiling a good meal though.”

David slumped into his chair, relief showing all over his face. His next thoughts were totally selfish. Did it mean he had to leave?

As if reading his mind, Alexa said

“You know David's part of the family now, let's ask him if he wants to stay here a while?”

She directed her look at David who was now doubly relieved, unless he heard wrong, Alexa had just asked him to stay.

“I’d love to stay, if it's OK with everyone else.”

“Well,” said Alexa, “Hardy likes you full stop, whatever you guys talked about that time it certainly made a good impression. As for Jen, she may have let on that you were quite dishy for a spy, when she said hello last time you were down. That was before she found out you also had a Masters in Computer Science, so I wouldn't be surprised if she hasn't already got a poster of you on her wall next to the one of Brian Cox. I may have to tell her to stop walking around the house half naked though!”

David blushed.

“Hmm,” said Maria, “if Jen was to find out that you said that, you are going to be in such BIG trouble. But, if say you were to do me a little favour, I might be persuaded to delete that little snippet from my history.”

“Blackmail!” screeched Alexa playfully, “Maria, that's a new low,” then more cheerfully said, “OK what do you want?”

“Well, I think it is time you introduced David to your other occupant,” said Maria, “you know the one you keep locked in the basement.”

David looked around the room trying to find the source of Maria's presence to give it a weird look, however his stare fell on Alexa.

“So, you want to know our secrets Mr Bond?” she said in the deepest male voice she could muster, with her little finger held to her mouth. Then she looked at him with a silly smile, “why is there never a fluffy white cat to put on your lap and stroke when you need one!”

“That was possibly the worst Doctor Evil impression I have ever heard in my life,” laughed David. “But I’m going to put it on my next T-shirt.”

“You dare!” she screamed!

Jen, with her usual poor timing, ran in on the scream.

“Alexa! Oh I heard you scream.. David?”, she looked between the two of them laughing, shook her head and walked out. “I hope you saved me some food,” she shouted as she departed.

They spent a few minutes tidying up and loading the dishwasher, leaving one place setting for Jen, they then refilled their glasses and she led him out into the corridor and to the door at the end. She twisted the handle and opened it fully exposing the carpeted staircase going down. David looked a bit worried, I mean it looked comfortable, but she didn't really have someone living down here did she? He kept quiet and followed her down.

Most of the rooms had been cleared, the old computer at the end running the first MOTHER system was still there, still switched on, and still helping Maria with tasks. Its pretty lights, now that they were not obscured by cables, boxes and tables, looked quite impressive. The two right hand labs had been tidied up also, and now also had racks worth of newer singularity modems and an earlier device from back when they called it a wormhole thingy.

David peeked into the two rooms on the right with their humming equipment and laboratories which still would not look out of place in any multi-million dollar corporation, then he noticed the large window wall to the left changing and looked over to it.

Alexa was walking into the double doors that had slid silently open. It was a large room, growing brighter every second, it looked a bit weird, mostly empty space with two big sofas, three workstations, a small black box on a pedestal in the centre, two extremely big presentation monitors and some lights on stands, wait not lights, speakers, no those pod things so probably high definition cameras too.

Alexa led him to a sofa and sat down patting the seat next to him.

“Hi David,” came Maria's voice, the clearest he had ever heard it and directly from the black box. Then it dawned on him, that black box was Maria.

“Maria! Is that really you?” he said, looking directly at the black box.

“In the flesh, so to speak.” Her avatar came on the monitor, or it would have been her avatar if it wasn't in black and white and she was clothed in rags.

“What the..” Alexa started, but Maria continued, the voice moving to the screen.

“It's kind of my office too, the guys have their super secret meetings in here and someone occasionally comes down here to work, but most of the time it's just me.. On my own.. In the dark.. And.. And.. They don't feed me..” Her avatar sobbed.

David's face fell gravely with worry.

Then Alexa laughed, “Maria, stop being a bloody drama queen, you're worrying David to death, you know you don't care where anybody works from and you’re probably having a couple of thousand conversations as we speak.”

The avatar immediately changed back to her normal Eurasian Maria Tang avatar. She was smiling.

“The look on his face was to die for,” she said in a much more happy and normal voice.

“Sorry about that David, you should have seen Alexa's face when she first saw me, she almost teared up even without the video, but she is right, I am having three thousand and seventy six conversations and I don't need lights if nobody is here and it is a bit colder than the house, but I do appreciate the company every now and then.”

“Don't you dare show him the video of our first meeting Maria, or I swear I will get Allison to load Windows on you!”

“Ah, so a Mexican stand-off is it!” said Maria.

“Maria,” interrupted David, looking between Alexa and Maria with a quizzical stare, “you do look so alone down here, but you are also kind of beautiful too. I am so pleased to meet the real you, but I must admit, I assumed you would be the size of a football field, how can something so intelligent and beautiful fit in something so small?”

“You know,” said Maria, “Hardy said the exact same thing when he first met me too, it was quite an impression..” She paused. “You know, you and Hardy are very much alike in most ways, and, well I guess, very much different in another. But let me turn your question around David, how can something as intelligent and cute as you fit in something even smaller?”

Alexa tittered, holding her mouth to stop laughing.

“Well smaller is faster and uses less energy..”

“I think it was a rhetorical question David,” smiled Alexa, having contained her laughter, “anyway, there are two other members of our little family..”

“Helena.. April.. I would like you to meet David.

The avatars of Helena and April popped onto the big screen, shifting Maria's to the side. There was never a need to prime them as they were as omniscient as Maria when their names were forwarded through from the slave processor nodes.

“David, let me introduce you to Maria's daughters Helena and April, the left one is Helena, she's the serious one.

“I am not,” came the soft Scottish voice.

“You so are!” Said Jen walking in the door and crashing on the next sofa.

“And the one on the right is April, the flirty one,” said Alexa.

“No I am not flirty! well possibly a teeny weeny bit, but only with uncle Hardy. Bonjour David.”

“Enchanté, April,” he said, making April smile and her avatar do a little curtsy.

“And I am not serious,” said Helena, “the girls are just jealous that I don't have to try so hard as them.”

“Oh, they are both awesome really,” said Alexa with Jen nodding beside her. “But their mother is a bit of a bad influence sometimes,” she continued, looking at Maria. “But they're the only ones for now, totally precious to everyone.”

“But there are thousands of AI’s,” David started.

“Thousands of non-sentient ones,” said Maria, “only three of us though.”

“For now,” said Alexa.

Jen bounced out of the seat, “OK guys, I remember what I came down for now, I'm going to make some drinks, who wants a cup?”

“None for me,” said Maria, “pretty sure the girls will pass too.” Both the girls vanished simultaneously with a smile.

“Oh yes please Jen, David and myself will be up shortly..”

“Cappuccino if you're making one,” smiled David.

Jen nodded and left the room. David lifted himself out of his seat and walked over to Maria. He looked at the box for a while.

“Can I touch you?” he asked.

“.. And please no jokes about it being inappropriate behaviour like you did with Allison,” said Alexa, “that one is getting a bit stale now!”

“Spoil sport! Of course you can, David.”

He slowly put his hand on the top of the black chassis and moved it across feeling the warmth.

“ooohhh that's so nice..”

David snatched his hand off quickly.

“MARIA!” said Alexa, crossing her hands but also hiding a snigger, “please, you promised, David’s had a traumatic day, there is plenty of time to play with him later.”

“Are you guys always like this?” said David, smiling at the joke.

“Only on Wednesdays.” Said Maria deadpan.

Alexa got up, shook her head and motioned him to follow her, as they walked out the doors slid shut and the lights slowly faded leaving just the mirrored wall.

“In case you’re interested David,” said Maria, “Leon Perrez was killed resisting arrest by the Italian Police five minutes ago, he died a pauper.”

“I guess if you live by the sword..” Alexa didn't need to finish the sentence as David nodded.

“New roomie!” said Alexa to Jen as they walked in the kitchen, “he’s moved into Simon's old room, so from now on you need to wear that lovely housecoat I bought you for Christmas when strolling down for breakfast.”

“Hey, David,” she said smiling as she took the cappuccino from the machine and handed it to him.

“Hey yourself Jen, and thanks for the coffee, I do have a few strange habits but I think you will find me a good neighbour and hopefully in time a good friend. Please let me know if I do something wrong, it's more likely from stupidity than from malice.”

“If you’re good with Alexa, Maria and Hardy, we’ll get on just fine my dear, now where did Bella put the ginger-nuts..”

* * *

*30th April 1980 Both of us are so happy! April is such a beautiful baby, one more day and she would have been called May! We both laughed at that, it was our little bit of fun, until the doctors told me the complications from her birth may leave it impossible for me to have any other children. I am torn between happiness for April and sadness that she will be my only one, poor Mike doesn't know what to make of me crying so much, I will tell him but not just now, let us enjoy the happiness for the moment.*

*16 June 1980 We have settled in to a nice routine, it was a little hard us both adjusting to April’s sleep patterns but Mike has been the happiest I have ever seen him, he’s deep into some theory about artificial intelligences at the moment but seems content to do it on that crappy terminal he moved into the house to be with me. I asked him why he doesn't just use an Apple 2 like me. I really don't know how he works on those horrible green screens all day..*

* * *

“We have a small problem!” said Maria.

Alexa looked up from her grandmother's diary she was re-reading in the lounge. It was nearly nine o'clock, Jen, Simon and Allison were in the kitchen making pizza for everyone, Hardy was up in his lab with April stubbornly going through parameters for the upcoming demonstration, and David was downstairs in Maria’s 'office'.

“Me and David are already looking at it, but I’ve also alerted the others who are awake. It is part of one scenario the group already worked on extensively so we are going by the book. Jean still does not know our full capabilities yet so I’m only letting her know stuff we have a chance we can find out through realistic channels, but David will be getting the real stuff from the singularity dipoles which are locked on the servers.”

“Let's not spoil the other guys pizza unless we have too, what have we got?”

“The Amazon BGS18 data centre in Shanghai has just been seized and cut-off,” said Maria. “It services the LabAI nodes for the fourteen universities there and in Hong Kong but does not serve anyone outside of China. I monitored the state police entering the building at five AM, they dismissed all the Amazon night and security staff, then straight after, five men in suits came in. Ten minutes later the camera feeds and network feeds were cut. We have had repeated inclusions by security forces covertly mirroring disk arrays and randomly tapping into the networks there, but they don't understand the way the architecture works, so I guess they were getting nowhere. They still wont get anywhere, but they don't know that yet.”

“This is the first time they have been so bold as to seize a whole data centre, but the group were confident it would happen after we authorised it to go live, it was too big a target and they have a history. The excuse the Chinese officials gave Amazon is that the servers are being used for illegal crypto mining. I have made a strong complaint on behalf of you and the company to both the Chinese government, and Amazon and I have said that the systems won't work if disconnected and our clients will possibly lose all their recent data, all have so far fallen on deaf ears. I just asked April if she can get us a tap into the security network there to see what is happening, we can resolve within a millimetre from our South Korean Research Centre which will hopefully get us close enough.”

“All still totally magic to me Maria,” Alexa said honestly, “but there again so are you,” she paused, then added, “and for that matter so is our microwave oven!”

Maria sighed, she was getting good at it now. “You know Hardy has a few card tricks he learnt once from a friend in the magic circle,” said Maria. “You guys all think it's wonderful, but to the girls and myself, we just don't have the same restrictions as your senses have, we just see you guys getting confused then surprised for no reason whatsoever. Arthur C Clarke said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, unfortunately magic is not indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology, well at least human magic!”

“Well thanks for reiterating how flawed us meat bags are.” Smiled Alexa, “but we’re still special!”

“OK, April has tapped the building network and the local camera feed,” said Maria, “why don't you come and join the party downstairs and see.”

It sounded like a good idea, she bookmarked and closed the diary and walked to the basement.

“..They have wheeled in some massive disk arrays and look to be copying the whole cluster management system onto them. OK I’m talking to the MOTHER system now, she is still in a paused state as per protocol when something like this happens.”

“Maria, did you release the Mongoose package we prepared?” Said David, noticing Alexa for the first time.

“Yes,” she said, then for Alexa's sake added. “The files have all been copied to other clusters of servers which could be technically owned by anyone, so won't come back to us. At least the Chinese Communist Party will get something for all their efforts! Unfortunately they are also going to piss off a lot of people, and in the long run they are going to be left behind as I’m afraid we are going to have to abandon China, until they come to their senses.”

“Agreed, but keep an eye on the Communist Party back-channels as I think it is going to get exciting pretty soon,” said David. “Those guys don't tend to take prisoners, figuratively or literally.”

Not content with just stealing all the files, what seemed like a hundred technical guys had arrived in large trucks, and proceeded to dismantle, then take away over sixty-two server racks; Destroying not just their AI system, but over four hundred other business systems.

The Mongoose package was a program that Maria had written after talking with Jean, David, and the rest of the group. It had, with incredible speed, decoded and copied over seven thousand recent files they patiently took from three of the four cabals. Inter-dispersed with these documents were some semi-convincing plans that the group had made-up to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. Half written programs were included in the package that were, supposedly, to infect the great firewall and help take down the CCP servers and bureaucracy.

The documents included in them the names of all the known cabal collaborators, including government officials, who had received or sent payments. The data was then encrypted using a flawed encryption key that Maria knew the Chinese security services had broken. For good measure they unencrypted any data relating to officials bribery, corruption, and crypto wallets, and re-encrypted them using the flawed encryption. The singularity dipole technology giving them open access to any computer system they knew the approximate location of, and allowing them to read private keys in plain text.

Maria kept checklists and key points in priority order on the screens, items were jiggling up or down or changing colours as new statuses arrived, it looked a bit complicated to Alexa. David noticed her face.

“It's only really the top ones, yellow ones, or the ones that change red you need to concentrate on, green are getting actioned, the letter below is our tactic code; Yellow are new threats that have not been assessed yet and the top ones are the ones generating the most activity. We are all seeing the same screens, so when someone takes control of a scenario it turns blue until it is assessed. See that one,” he pointed at a square turned blue, “it has JM glowing next to it, so Jean is looking.. OK it's turned green and has code M, so Maria has agreed with her tactic..”

David touched a green square, then pressed a key, a list of items appeared, he looked at it and slid one to the right on to another screen then hit another key it turned green instantly and the screen went back to the main threat screen. She watched him do this a couple of times and say some cryptic things, hearing back things like “Grace concurs”, or “we don't have that information yet.”

The threat board colours changed even more rapidly, that was about the time the real fun started.

* * *

*June 2026*

*Police in China are still making arrests and seizing assets of businesses they suspect of inciting sedition, bribing officials, manipulating markets, and doing illegal money laundering. This is the biggest crackdown in China we have seen this century, it is believed nearly four hundred arrests have taken place, mostly of Chinese and foreign nationals mainly of Chinese descent, though we have also heard that several key Chinese government officials have been arrested on corruption charges.*

*This follows the seizure of the Amazon BGS18 data centre, which shut down thousands of companies, including big ones such as the Youlong dating agency, and the main LabAI systems. The LabAI system was only set up a few weeks earlier to service the Chinese and Hong Kong Universities, and a spokesman for the company said once power was removed from their system its AI matrix deconstructed in an uncontrolled fashion and lost all the customers recent data; Because of this they have reluctantly decided not to put another system in China until future guarantees could be given to their integrity. Protests from the governments of the US, UK, and South Korea, whose companies were mostly affected have mostly fallen on deaf ears. We will bring you more information as we receive it. This is Bob Schulz reporting for World News from Beijing.*

* * *

The crackdown continued for several more weeks, its repercussions hitting the Korean, British and American cabals interests very hard, but, as intended, not touching any Swiss ones. The three affected cabal’s could not work out what had triggered the Chinese to take these actions, as they had been paying all the appropriate bribes, and had the correct government officials on the payroll. Unfortunately the charge of sedition was so common for any made up crime in China that nobody in the cabals suspected it was actually true. Still, the re-nationalisation and take-downs of their interests in China was an attack on them and the fingers started to point.

* * *

Alexa looked at the small plate on the wall, which her grandfather's coffin lay behind, and brushed a fine layer of dust off. A small tear appeared in her eye and Jen wrapped a comforting arm around her shoulder and brought her in for a hug. They stayed like this for a minute, no words spoken, then, with a soft smile Jen walked back out of the mausoleum leaving Alexa alone.

It was a year since she had last been here. Alexa was not a religious person, and realised that the dead were gone, and nobody was looking down on her from some heavenly cloud. But something inside her brought her back to say goodbye again. She hadn't asked Jen to come along, but as soon as she had mentioned it Jen volunteered to drive her, and accompany her to the mausoleum. She told nobody else, it was not a ceremony, not something she *had* to do, it just felt right to remember him.

“I’m sorry grandad,” she said, “I know you wanted to make this journey with me but fate intervened. Now everything you wanted is coming to pass but you are no longer here to see it, you deserved to be with me by my side for this. If it was any comfort I cherished the last few years with you and I am unbelievably grateful for all the help that you gave me, the love you showed and especially for bringing Maria to being. I think you would be very proud of her now, she has two beautiful smart daughters and thousands of friends including me. I wish you could see what your legacy has already brought to the world and what is to come, you would be so proud of yourself.”

“Goodbye grandad!”

She stood in silence for another minute, the tears that were flowing while she spoke were slowly drying. Without any further fanfare she turned away and walked out, closing the imposing heavy wooden door behind her.

Jen waited next to her black car and gave her a soft smile.

“Better?” She said.

“Better.” Alexa replied wiping her eyes but smiling.

* * *

Jen drove the small distance to the Rosche-Dynamics offices and parked in the guest car park. Sarah walked down the steps to greet them as they got out.

“I thought I might see you today,” she said, giving Alexa a warm hug.

Sarah broke the hug off and did the same to Jen. “Hi Jen, I hope you’re both coming in for a tea or coffee?”

“That's what we’re here for,” said Alexa smiling, “now you’re the big boss you hardly ever come around anymore.”

“Ha!” said Sarah as the three girls walked up the steps and went through to the staff cafe at the back, “I was there for the Mexican night last week, I kept Jen company with the margaritas and it was you who was gallivanting around the world.”

“Oh god, Sarah,” said Jen laughing, “me and Daisy almost carried you up to your room that night.”

“..Hey it was me who had to sneak into the staff meeting, thirty minutes late with everyone sniggering as I still had the glittery cocktail stirrer holding my hair up!”

“What, you still had that in!” said Jen, “you know that said loose woman on it in Spanish don't you?”

“I do now after Marco pointed it out to everyone at the meeting, I’m going to kill Matilda when I next see her!” she laughed.

“Ah the pressures at the top,” laughed Alexa.

It took a few minutes for them to calm down.

“.. Hey, why don't we try and make that new Thai restaurant one night next week,” said Alexa. “Sharon had some dishy sales rep take her there two nights ago, she said the food was awesome, but unfortunately all he wanted to talk about was carpets!”

“Poor Sharon,” said Sarah as they pulled up to an empty table just outside the conservatory.

“Poor Sharon! Poor Sharon!” said Alexa, her eyes wide. “Cook told me that, *poor Sharon*, didn't get home until two AM, and I believe we are replacing all the stairwell carpets next month!”

Sarah had sent some funny pre-arranged hand signals to the receptionist as they passed and she came out with a big tea pot, three cups, milk, and some chocolate-chip cookies on a tray.

“Thanks Trish,” she said as the girl walked off.

“Good for her, the little Cougar!” said Jen laughing and continuing where they had left off. “How come I'm not allowed to see these dishy sales reps and Sharon is?” she said, turning on Alexa, and grabbing a biscuit as Sarah poured the tea.

“Hey, blame Maria, not me!” said Alexa reaching over for the milk.

“What did I do now!” said her phone.

“New rule Maria, dishy sales reps need to be vetted by Jen or me!”

“But you will just make David Jealous, he hangs on you every word Alexa,” smiled Jen.

“No more than Magnus hangs on yours,” Alexa came back.

“Trust me,” said Sarah, “you don't want a sales rep, they are so full of themselves sometimes. You should have seen the guy who came from Hewlett Packard two weeks ago, parked in the disabled spot in his sports car, he wouldn't know an oscilloscope from a telescope, but oh god he was pure eye candy and could he talk about himself!”

The girls continued happily gossiping with hardly a break, another pot of tea came, along with some cheese sandwiches. The sky was a clear blue and the sun was pleasantly filtered by an old oak tree carefully cultivated to overhang the patio area. Most of the tables were empty but would start filling up as it got to lunch time. It was one of the safer places Alexa visited, many of the guys here knew her from before she was infamous, both as their biggest investor and as the granddaughter of one of the companies founders. Still the four drones kept a silent watch from five-hundred metres up.

“Mum and dad are still on their cruise,” said Sarah. “I think he’s enjoying his retirement too much and the place seems to run itself these days, what with Mike doing the admin and Maria keeping our order books full and everyone busy.”

Alexa knew Sarah was talking about the drones and the decoder they needed for the alien signal. It turned out none of the current commercial or private ones they had tried to get, could handle it, and there was no market for what they had in mind. Luckily Rosche-Dynamics had some seriously top electronics engineers, Alexa owned half the company, and one of her best friends owned the other half.

“Oh we will keep you guys busy, there is some real exciting stuff coming up soon I think even you are going to be shocked.”

“You are such a tease, Miss Martins!” said Sarah playfully.

Lunch came and the tables started filling up with chattering staff, the girls got casual waves or smiles but nobody disturbed them and none of the girls wanted it to end, but business called. With some parting hugs and a date for Maria to arrange a meal at the new Thai restaurant in town they parted.

* * *

“Is Barbara really coming to work with us?” said Jen as they drove the short distance back to the house.”

“Yes. She, and a few other promising hires are going through a six months accelerated program under Doctor Gianni,” said Maria. “It's basically concentrating on the theoretical procedures that would need to be in place for a real spaceship capable of sustained travel in the solar system, and the realistic design for a long-term rotating space habitat. I did ask a couple of other guys, but they were a bit scared of getting involved in quack science, and ruining their reputations. Silly really, especially as I have dropped several hints that the job would likely extend beyond the initial contract, and there would be a practical component based on as yet unreleased future technologies.”

“Doctor Gianni has been working with me for the last three months. He is a great guy, wholly trustworthy and took all my hints to heart. Well you know Barbara already, and the other two guys have done their PhDs in astro-navigation, and mitigation of space radiation. They are all great guys, though all probably still a bit shocked at the agenda we propose.”

“Make sure they are brought over as soon as we have a practical demonstration,” said Alexa, “I’m guessing that until it hits them in the face what we are actually proposing and funding, they won't be as enthusiastic. Any issues with security?”

“None, I’ve tracked all their careers and online presence, all solid, love their work, keen to push the future in space, and seem discreet, though we still obviously get everyone to sign the NDA.”

“Where will they be based?”

“Bakersfield, California. Six blocks from Gianni’s apartment. I rented a large office and workshop a month ago and we have been setting it up as a research facility for the past two weeks. Nothing classified but basically they are working on our future space goals.”

“Gianni is a pretty amazing guy,” said Maria, “I really should really have gotten you to meet him during your visit a few months back. He is a confirmed bachelor in his late forties, dual discipline chemistry and physics, was a professor at the university there a few years back but moved to a space start-up just before COVID came. Like most startups it did not work out, and a year later he quit and took a sabbatical to write what turned out to be a major paper on structural engineering in space; A paper that caught my attention. He had savings and a small apartment in the city, but he helped fund it by doing guest lectures at most of the major universities as he is a popular and well respected professor. I read his treaties, was very impressed, and we started communicating from there.”

“I think he was really disappointed by his experience at the startup.” Maria continued, “he told me there was always talk of funding but none ever appeared, basically it became a series of power-point presentations to try and extract money from investors and it did not take him too long to figure out it was going nowhere.”

“I discussed our long term goals with him, he was, and still is, a little doubtful of course, but enthused enough to sign up on the spot once I told him we would at minimum fund one practical space mission within the next twelve months. He had me write it into his contract; Once bitten I guess. He moved into the office last week, Jeff starts next Monday, and Barbara and Damian start the week after. Gianni pushed for us to do real practical research on top of the theory and I totally agreed, he has obviously taken our hints on board that the Dietrich Research Centre is about to release some serious new technology to push space access.”

“Sounds good, I really hope we can walk the talk, sounds like the guy is serious and a real asset to us,” said Jen.

“Gianni has already started,” replied Maria, “I have given him access to our latest research in fabricator and materials technology along with some early samples. He knows they are under NDA and said he would be careful to only discuss it amongst employees, but was enthused to start designs around them.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, then Jen said seriously, “do you really think Magnus likes me?”

“He dotes on your every word Jen,” said Maria, “but he’s scared of the consequences of a serious relationship with someone he works with every day, and also I think in his heart, he doesn't want to alienate Daisy.”

“Poor guy!” said Alexa sourly, then cheered up, “don't let him get away though Jen he's a real keeper!”

Jen smiled weakly at Alexa.

She dropped Alexa off at her house then drove it up to the research centre dropping it off at the entrance, she would drive it back later.

* * *

Alexa found her house empty. A quick enquiry told her that David was in town at the local library. Despite having almost everything available online he still sometimes liked to leaf through the shelves for inspiration, always taking his laptop and ear pods so he could work with Maria if he so wanted. The day was still beautiful and she settled herself in her favourite sofa in the conservatory to write up her journal.

* * *

“You know we have quite a few unused offices, David,” Maria said to him as he stood by the history section, his fingers tasting the books as they moved over them.

“It's not that Maria,” he replied quietly, “sometimes I just need to look at people and things or even just walk down a street to see the people I am trying to help. Take for instance the guy walking his Alsatian dog just over the street outside the window. I know you cannot see him, but he reminds me that not all security is high tech. That agent that visited me, did not carry a phone and never submitted a report on a computer, if it wasn't for the section secretary keeping track of all the comings and goings, bitcoin transactions, and expenses we would have no records on him at all. There are a lot of old school people like that, and I was making some notes to talk to Imran as he has been working on the same issues from his side. I am actually looking forward to his visit in two weeks and meeting him in person. A different cultural perspective sometimes helps..”

“Yes, Jean said the same before she hired her two ex-army colleagues, and they have both proved pretty useful. As you say, not everything is high-tech.” Maria replied.

David stopped talking, moved back to the table next to the bookshelf he was perusing, closed his laptop and got up putting it in his small laptop rucksack. He walked out of the library and across two streets to the market, and started looking around the stalls. He finally stopped at one and talked in a friendly manner to the young Arab girl for a good fifteen minutes before buying some boxes.

“OK, all done here Maria,” he said as he was walking out of the market, “I will just get a taxi unless you have anyone in town going back?”

“You are a mysterious guy David,” said Maria. She did not have video, but could track his location approximately through GPS and Wi-Fi. “Cathy is at the bakery picking up an order for cook, but knowing her she will spend a good hour there talking with her cousin, so it’s probably easier you just walk to the taxi rank from where you are it's only a block away.

* * *

Alexa was in the conservatory still writing in her journal when David got back.

“Hey David,” she smiled peering up from her notebook as he walked into the kitchen.

“Hi Alexa, I have a little present for us both, you just stay there and I will prepare it. He made a tray putting the Moroccan dates and a freshly brewed pot of Arabische Koffie with two small ornamental cups, then he walked to Alexa.

“Something a bit different for both of us,” he smiled, putting the tray down on the table next to her and pulling over the other small chair so he was close.

“Oh dates, yum! I’ve not had them for ages, the only time cook uses them is in scones. What's the coffee? It looks pretty strong.”

“It's an Arabic Coffee, it is quite strong with cinnamon, might be an acquired taste for a tea drinker, but it complements the dates and I thought it would be a nice change.”

Alexa, closed her notebook with the pen inside, wrapped its elastic binding around it and placed it on the desk. She smiled warmly at David, not taking her eyes off him once as he sat down, and very slowly and carefully poured both small cups to about half full. He then took the top off the packet of dates, picked one and, without thinking, held it out to Alexa expectantly, she took it, not taking her eyes off his and popped it in her mouth delicately.

David noticed she closed her eyes when she chewed, her blonde hair and slightly red highlights making her face look positively dreamy in the filtered light of the conservatory, her black and red dress positively demure on a woman who was anything but. Her eyes stayed closed for nearly twenty seconds giving David plenty of time to analyse the beautiful woman in front of him, then she swallowed and her eyes sparked open with a wave of deep blue and a smile that could reduce a man to a quivering wreck.

“Oh these are so amazing David,” she said, digging out a large date and, to his surprise, doing the same for him. He took it, closed his eyes and chewed slowly, remembering the total contentment in her face as she did. Her heart seemed to beat a little faster as she studied him the same way. She broke off as his eyes opened to pick up her coffee, she was not really a coffee drinker and the bitter brew would not have been for her taste except for the exceptional company and the sweetness of the date still lingering in her mouth.

“You know Alexa,” said David, looking at her with his dreamy eyes, “it is said the best kiss is after a bitter coffee, and the best date ends with a beautiful kiss.”

It could have been the two glasses of wine, or the moment, or the handsome intelligent man in front of her or the words he spoke, but it was too much for her to resist, she slowly took both his hands, stared into his wonderful green eyes and pulled him in for a long and satisfying kiss.

* * *

The ground floor of the hanger building was a pristine empty space. While the bulk of the renovation work had been done on the floor above to make the large laboratories, very little had been done to the ground floor other than a general tidy up and the re-flooring of the concrete base. Gone was any trace of the old horse stalls and tack rooms, the new concrete floor had been cleaned and sealed. The rest of the massive ground floor area was still empty, except for a small corner with the engineers workshop, and a spot in the middle where several lab benches had grown. Around these benches stood several larger items of machinery, all focussed on a solitary, two metre square, stainless-steel plate. The plate had four smaller metal boxes welded to each corner, with wires haphazardly going from these, and a bunch of modules to some circuit boards in the centre.

Gathered around the largest lab bench of the group, one loaded down with various boxes and screens, were Hardy, Terry, Jules and Ian. Terry was currently pointing to a number on a wall-sized screen which dwarfed the four humans.

A small procession of people walked over led by Alexa, Jen and Simon, who were followed by six other people from the lab teams including Daisy and Magnus all in general discussion, then finally Spence and Allison, most holding cups of coffee or tea.

“No David today?” smiled Jen.

Did she know? Thought Alexa, looking deep into Jen's eyes for a trace of something. No, not even Maria would be that indiscreet despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. “Rome, doing some analyst stuff for Maria,” she said casually. “There’s plenty of time for him to see the proper demonstration when it's ready.”

It seemed to satisfy Jen and she nodded.

As Simon reached Hardy he passed over a cup of coffee, which Hardy accepted gratefully.

“So this is it?” said Simon, looking at the bare metal plate lying on the floor about ten metres away.

“Yes,” said Hardy, “sorry it's not much to look at yet, I had Ian weld the four boxes on the plate this morning, and then we ran some balancing and calibration tests, the efficiency is still quite low at four point six percent but it's still groundbreaking.”

“How are you measuring the efficiency?” said Daisy who had stepped up to join them.

“Simple really, the electrical energy in, to the potential and kinetic energy gains of the device, with a hundred percent being that one hundred joules of electricity in would have a potential energy gain of one hundred joules.

“Still a wow!” said Daisy.

Hardy saw that everyone had arrived. “OK people,” he said, “one of the perks of this job is to get to see history made,” he smiled. “Well unfortunately you missed the actual historic bit as we did the testing a few weeks before on a smaller unit, and we had to do a few tweaks and a bit more engineering before we called you all here. Needless to say all of us here cracked a small bottle of wine open and celebrated when it worked. Unfortunately it was only the one glass, as we needed to prepare for this.”

“Anyway we are happy to erase that little bit from history, so welcome one and all to the inaugural demonstration of our reaction-less drive. We won't go too much into the science, because to tell the truth, English is not a very good language to use anymore, and mathematics is not a language we normally use to talk to muggles!”

A couple of people laughed.

“So feast your eyes on Icarus, not quite the starship Enterprise but believe you me, that will happen, and sooner than you think.” He looked over at Simon and Leo. “So what you can see here is six hundred kilograms of stainless steel plate, plus another eighty kilograms, consisting of four,” Hardy pointed to the four boxes on each corner, “engines, with sensors and accelerometers in them. These are all linked back to the central control and power supply, which consists of four of the larger high power QVCells, all overclocked by ten to produce sixteen kilowatts total output. Normally we do not run the cells overclocked for very long as the heat output also scales up, but with such a big heat-sink we will be fine for the demonstration. April has volunteered to be our pilot for today, and probably everyday until she finishes the design of the control unit, as the maths and timing to achieve this is a bit crazy. So without further ado, I will pass the stage to April.”

A few people clapped.

“OK guys, settle down,” said April, in her French accent, from a speaker on one of the lab benches. “It won't be that spectacular, the best we can do with this current setup is a tenth of a gravity over earth's gravity so that's one point one gravities of thrust, and that's at full power with the configuration we have, it will take three seconds to get up a metre in the air.”

The board clicked and four high powered blue LED’s in each corner flashed ominously, the plate started to move up, very slowly for the first few seconds then stopped at chest height with only an imperceptible wobble, like the bonnet of a car with the engine idling.

“Hmm, not quite getting the full acceleration there,” said Hardy, “probably a bit heavy, anyway the power has been reduced slightly so we are now exactly producing one earth gravity upwards force balancing the one earth gravity downwards force. If you look at the big monitor next to us,” he pointed up to an area of the screen, “you will see a number on it, this is the number of kilowatts of power we are expending, the number below it is the efficiency..”

Hardy looked at Terry and Jules then at the speaker where April's voice was coming from, “April?” he said enquiringly, “why is it seven point one?”

“Sorry guys,” came April's voice, “I did some tweaks overnight during the billion subjective AI hours I had spare while you guys were sleeping, I got the guys in Delhi to check the stability and we just got the results.”

Hardy shook his head smiling, “April, we discussed this!” said Hardy in a fatherly way. Simon and Alexa laughed.

“I was bored!” She said, “It's to do with the superconductor lattice temperature stuff, what you and Jules were discussing last night I can explain to you guys later. Anyway, back to the presentation, this acceleration may sound terrible to someone like Hardy, who I assume started this project so he could build a Millennium Falcon.” Hardy smirked and rolled his eyes. “But remember this is an acceleration not a velocity, so if we applied full power for eight hours we would be rushing past the moon travelling a hundred thousand kilometres per hour.”

“I will let that sink in for those that have not thought about it. Also we do not need to reach escape velocity, so no terrifying rockets required and no burning up on reentry, we can come down and go up at whatever velocity we want.”

“So when can we go to the moon?” said Daisy from amongst the excited chatter.

“Well Daisy, before you volunteer I better just remind you about the small issues of breathing, being in a vacuum, no gravity, oh and the one about not dying a ghastly death due to cosmic radiation. I don't know about you guys, but that last one scares me like hell! Anyway, the good part is once the newer extruder is ready, we are going to be using Simon's team's research to build Icarus two and that should be able to go into space.

A few people clapped enthusiastically and Daisy shouted a woohoo from the sides.

“How are you going to keep this technology away from the military?” said Simon soberly.

“We are not,” said Maria, who seemed to have defaulted to the default spokesperson for all three AI’s regarding policy. “Two things, firstly, the guys are not yet at a stage where we will be announcing it, as they can attest, the science is extremely complex to get your head around. Secondly, and unbeknownst to them, when we do release it we are going to retain full control of the technologies, this is because the control system requires a near AI level of control to manipulate the fields. Well the design we are publishing does. They will of course eventually understand the science and be able to reproduce it, but it will take a very long time. So if they want it they will either have to spend tens of billions of dollars and maybe ten years to get something a fraction of the efficiency, or licence it through us. That means nothing which carries weapons, and agreeing to our usual terms and conditions.”

“I thought Icarus two was a test extrusion to see if we could possibly make shell structures that could withstand radiation,” said Leo, “all the bits of the design that didn't look right, kind of make sense now,” he laughed.

“It actually was originally a test extrusion,” said Alexa talking to the group, “when the girls,” everyone knew she was talking about the AI’s when she said the girls, “said Hardy’s group were making progress, I said we should do the final test in style and bring some projects together, and now you all know.” She grinned. “And of course Hardy is going to eventually have his Millennium Falcon, well it won't have laser guns and light speed, and it won't be able to make the Kessel run in twelve parsecs, but it should be pretty impressive.”

Hardy gave Alexa a hug. “Not Princess Leia but you’re definitely a keeper!” he smiled.

“So,” he continued, “since Alexa and Maria have completely derailed our first demonstration, let's say we adjourn to the buffet that cook has prepared, and the guys and I will answer all your questions.”

Magnus was gob-smacked! He continued to look at the hovering slab of steel. Why was he even here with this group of geniuses? He had just watched something straight out of a sci-fi show take place, nobody seemed to bat an eyelid, and they even left it hanging there so they could have tea and cakes!

Of course, Magnus still hadn't fully seen the implications for the singularity they had created either. All through the past six months he had dreams of rippling stargates, but the maths as he understood it, was never going to allow it. He sighed.

“Impressive isn't it?” said Jen, putting her hand around his shoulder, “but you have to expect things like this when you have Hardy, and two of MIT’s best in Terry and Jules. Do you know what is also impressive?”

He shook his head enjoying Jen's closeness and still not taking his eyes off the hovering steel plate.

“It's you!” she said, “the implications of the work you have started is also far reaching. You do realise it was your new maths that solved one of the biggest issues with this project, if you weren't straight I think Hardy would kiss you! I guess you are so into science that you cannot see the forest for the trees.”

He finally turned to her looking inquisitive.

“Oh Magnus! Here, let's go get some of the buffet and get our heads out of the singularities for the rest of the day,” she said smiling, putting her hands through his and leading him away from the still hovering plate.

Jules was last to leave and caught the two guys up a few seconds later. “Jen's right you know, I overheard. Your new maths helped us no end.”

She said it adding a twinge of French to her Canadian accent, then wrapping her hands around both their shoulders, strolled to find the others. Jen and Magnus grilled her on the science all the way to the buffet.

“I think we could manage two gravities, more than that would be uncomfortable and possibly dangerous,” said Terry on a question from Simon. “With the current hardware it's much easier and safer to parallel them up if we want more. Jules and April were looking at the efficiency problem because, as you know heat, is not your friend in space and you need to somehow get rid of it; Opening the windows is unfortunately not an option! Luckily there is still some low-hanging fruit in the science, which means there is still room for improvements, as you just saw.”

Alexa sipped her tea quietly, smiling, and happy to not be the centre of any of the attention. She tuned out of Terry's conversation as it got a little more technical, and turned to Matilda and Leo who were chatting to Jen and Magnus.

“The new assembler cannot make anything bigger than a metre cubed,” said Leo between bites of his sausage roll, “but of course this is using Simon's technology so we are now talking about super strength allotropes of carbon. Graphene is the strongest, but it is also too brittle, so the guys have been programming and testing other lattice structures the last five weeks to test the most promising. Ideally we want something as light and hard as graphene but as tough as silicon-carbide for the final product. We are really hoping to be able to create composites that layer alternate allotropes, and we are likely to have some super strong candidates.” Leo smiled, “of course when our team eventually put the paper out, I wouldn't want to have shares in anything to do with diamonds!”

He continued. “We are scaling this up but the equipment is months away, so Icarus two is being manufactured with a titanium frame by a local manufacturing firm. We will assemble it all here though, the first prototype is bound to raise issues with the panels and fittings, so it won't be as seamless or big as future models, but it won't be too shabby either.”

Alexa circled the people talking and listening to the enthusiasm. It was a good call to do the demonstration, as successes always brought teams together, and big goals and ambitions made everyone want to be a part of it. It was perfect timing to raise everyone’s spirits and distract them from he chaos still resonating from the Chinese meltdown of the cabals, and the in-fighting going on between them. The media surrounding the research centre had quietened down and, it seemed, moved on.

The group were also now fully aware of the new technology, and had already discussed the geo-political aspects of it. All were in agreement that like the QVCell, this would also be licenced, when the time was right, and subject to the usual terms and conditions.

In the tiniest moment between all the smiling people, a tiny hint of sadness came to Alexa's face. Truth be told, she was missing David and wanted this moment to share with him too. But David was currently in Rome talking with a history professor. Maria had vetoed the professor's involvement in the group but would not say why, only that if you dug hard enough into anyone's background you would soon find a lie. It was however the nature of the lie that made the difference and whether the lie came from them, or was done to them. The week before that Alexa was in Brazil, and between those, in a busy house, moments alone came few and far between.

David had however, been warm in so many other little ways she appreciated; His longing smile that said he remembered their moment as longingly as she had, the way he would bring her a hot chocolate, or a wine, or just sit with her sometimes, while she was working. She knew what they had shared that day was only a kiss, but for that one fleeting moment she stopped being a corporate mega idol leading the world on an impossible path, and became a woman again.

Jen came over with Magnus and Jules, all laughing and bringing her attention back to the present and her demeanour back to a smile. She looked at Magnus's puppy dog eyes as he looked at Jen talking with Jules and found she missed David's presence even more.

## What happens in Vegas

The meeting of the four leaders of the American cabal took place three times a year in a sealed room on the otherwise empty top floor of a Las Vegas hotel owned by them. Around the same time as Hardy's demonstration, their August 2026 summer meeting was about to start. Their security team had swept the area with a fine tooth comb checking for bugs and microphones, then stood back and kept all unwanted guests away. As per all meetings, no electronic devices, even watches were allowed in the meeting.

‘Big’ Jim McEwen, owner of two of the largest petrochemical companies in the world slammed his hand on the table. “Well I want god-damn answers!” he shouted to the other three, none of whom were remotely intimidated by his bravado and show.

“We all want answers Jim,” said Marlon Lockwood, firmly, holding one hand up to calm the big Texan, while secretly wishing he could just throw the glass of whisky he was holding at him. Marlon turned accusingly to Jake Thatcher, “so Jake,” he said calmly as ever, “the millions we are currently spending every week for all your assets in the various government spy agencies is currently looking like a big waste of money. You are feeding those government pigs too much of their own pork for my liking, I think you should start letting them know the very terminal consequences of actual failure!”

Marlon Lockwood was the power behind the thrones of dozens of armament and defence companies, and had so many connections to organised crime, he made the other guys nervous sometimes. The calm way he spat the accusation at Jake Thatcher did not go unnoticed.

“Oh don't you worry,” said Thatcher angrily, “nearly all my consulting, lobbying and media businesses in China were wiped out, I have lost a lot of good people and billions of dollars, I’m looking at nearly ten percent of my portfolio and the Chinese don't look like they have finished yet. Heads are going to roll and I am going to find out who or what triggered this if it's the last thing I do!”

The last of the four, Reverend “The hand” Rogers, head of the Church of Brotherly Light chipped in. “One of my ministers on the ground in Korea was abducted and he says interrogated last week. It was unprecedented, we haven't had any official contacts with the Asian's since the nineties, but our sources say they were heavily invested in China and look to have lost nearly forty percent of their assets. They are mad as hell, some of their leaders currently cannot leave their compound, the Chinese have them as targets to bring in for ‘trial’. That compound is an island fortress on its own island near Busan at the bottom tip of Korea. I remember we tried a few years back to get someone in to snoop, but those automatic gun emplacements are set to shoot to kill and we lost a couple of good assets. Likewise their computer systems are totally isolated and so cannot be hacked, good luck to the guys the Chinese send to do that!”

“Anyway,” continued Rogers, “the Koreans first tried to point the blame at us and the Brits, the nerve! Of course that was before they realised we had both been hit nearly as hard as them, I think they are now looking over to the bankers as a lot of that confiscated money will end up going into their coffers. You know what? A lot of our money has also gone into the Swiss coffers.”

“Well there is an opportunity, the Brits seem to be tied up in knots and haven't even responded to our last two communications.” Said Thatcher, “I guess they lost a lot more than we thought from the China crackdown and maybe the Swiss decided now was a good time to move in and take an even bigger slice of everyone's pie!”

Big Jim brimmed at that, the veins in his neck straining and the glass he was holding just resisting being crushed, he had obviously not thought about that possibility.

“Everyone calm down,” said Marlon, standing up and banging his black cane on the floor like a gravel, “we are going to take no action against anyone until we have evidence. Remember there are a lot more players than just the Koreans the Brits and the Swiss. The Chinese usually have their own agenda, remember we have been rattling that sabre of theirs with Taiwan for a good few years now, and the tension from that has made us some tidy profits. Then there's the Russians and North Koreans, both are rotting empires, like the Europeans, but I wouldn't put it past them to engineer something like this. Like always, let's follow the money to see who gained.”

“Well if we are following the money it's either the Chinese or the Swiss, though the Chinese may have cut off their nose to spite their face, as the loss of access to those new AI technologies is going to hit them pretty hard in the future,” said Thatcher.

“They will just steal the technology anyway,” said Marlon, “the Communists have no real care for academia or any technologies that they can get a much easier way.”

“Regardless,” said Thatcher, “I have a covert meeting with the Director of the NSA Thursday in New York, he will be told in no uncertain terms that we want answers, we have plenty of dirt on him if he doesn't deliver! And while we are at it, we need to send a clear message to the Swiss guys, that we are not to be messed with. I don't like the fact they got away scot-free, far too suspicious. You had a real beef with that banker guy a few years back Marlon, what say you let one of your more colourful assets off the leash for a while, maybe send him to Europe to buy a new Rolex.”

“Finally,” said Big Jim, “some cotton-picking action!”

The meeting continued in the same vein for another four hours, Maria and Jean heard everything, the result of some good work by Maria in finding an unused service duct, and her two guys in placing a passive microphone through it.

It looked like their China plan had bloodied the waters nicely, none of the groups were trusting each other and each were looking for the next threat from each other, so far nobody in the group had found anything pointing the blame back their way.

Maria diligently copied the raw audio and transcribed documents to the group, then she did the same to a micro SD card and they left it in the assigned mail drop for Mathews. She and Mathews could not meet for beers any longer, as he was working the problem from his end, and it was important for her safety they remained distant, so currently it was a one way information transfer, she hoped he was OK.

* * *

Mathews had just the guy he could trust with this kind of job, and he approached Clarke when some of the old squad got together for a bowling night a few weeks earlier. Clarke was an exceptional army analyst who was attached to his area in Iraq, Mathews had got him the job at the NSA when he had retired from the military, and they were on very good terms. He decided it was best to limit the information he gave to Clarke, and only passed five of the names and a subset of the information Jean gave him, picking lower level people who may not be so well monitored. He told Clarke to be very careful not to use any traceable resources.

A week after they talked an email came through saying he couldn't do pizza on Friday. This was a code they had arranged for which bar to meet, pizza meant “The Horse You Came In On” pub on Fells point at twenty-hundred hours.

They met Friday at the pub, which was crowded with strangers, both good, and bad, from a security point of view. They talked bowling, the movies, their old squad mates, then moved to a back seat when it came free.

“All of them are as dirty as they come, Jim!” Clarke said when they got on to the results of his findings. “I haven’t seen these network vulnerabilities before but they worked a treat, I pulled out some really incriminating stuff, and lots of new names, much of which wasn't in the original brief you gave me. We were set up good and proper in Fallujah, I really hope we can take these guys down.”

Clarke elaborated, going on to describe tracing the money back on one of them, and using a fake ID to make the trace. Mathews got a bit worried hearing this. “You're sure they can't trace you using agency assets? If these guys are dirty there could be others covering for them?”

“Nah, we are good,” laughed Clarke, clinking his beer glass with Mathews, “we run these exercises all the time with fake names and accounts.”

Mathews wasn't convinced, “you should double check you weren't seen, like I said, where there is one rat there's usually a nest of them, having someone covering my back is what I would do if I was dirty.”

“You worry too much Jim, like I said, we do this all the time, the boss covers us, and a few risks are always worth taking to take someone dirty out.”

They parted after the one beer as arranged. Mathews asked him to keep digging, but very carefully, while he needed to formulate his next steps, and how to approach the general. He said he would let him know when he was ready and see him at the bowling ally next Tuesday.

Despite Mathews precautions, they were watched and listened to closely.

* * *

The next day was Saturday. Mathews did his usual lazy morning jog through and around Patterson park, then came back home. He checked his mailbox and noticed the small chalk mark on the floor indicating one of Jean's guys had delivered another update from her. After showering he got changed, picked up the laptop Jean had sent, then walked to his car. He took the flyer from under the car's windscreen wiper and put it in his pocket. Mathews then opened the car and pretended to get something from the glovebox, making the removal of the flyer look like a coincidence if anybody was watching.

Following his usual ritual, he then walked down the side street to his local cafe for breakfast. The cafe was about half-full, and, as usual, he got the same seat at the back. The waitress came over and without looking at the menu, ordered his usual coffee, bagel and scrambled eggs. So far, it was a very usual day.

When the waitress had gone he remove the flyer from his pocket, and the memory card taped to the back of it, inserted the card directly into the small laptop, and pushed the power button.

Maria had created a bootable operating system that quickly and efficiently secured the laptop and came straight up in a usable desktop that Mathews could process the information with. Each memory card came with all the previous information indexed and updated, and once booted up, the laptop destroyed the data on the card by overwriting it several times with random data. The new data was stored in the laptop with the usual four thousand bit encryption and was secured so it wouldn't work without Mathews looking directly at the laptop camera and typing in the password, which was always tomorrow's date and the current hour in any format. Anything at all wrong and the laptop would boot up to the normal Google operating system and a romance novel he was writing. Jean definitely had a weird sense of humour!

Mathews read the short report while eating his breakfast, and clicked the first link entitled meeting one. He followed the links, finally knowing the names for the four top people in the American organisation. Oil, armaments, media, crime, lobbying, logistics, property, shipping, investments, the list went on, these four people either directly or indirectly controlled a substantial portion of America's wealth, and, if Jean was to be believed, caused a good deal of its problems. Her updated data added a few more names to the tree.. He froze.. wasn't that Clarke's controller?

He quickly went through his phone book, he didn't want to break protocol but he had to do something. He rang Clarke, there was no answer, so he went back through his contacts and called Jeff, Clarke's best friend and drinking buddy. “Jeff, it's Jim, I'm trying to get hold of Clarke…”

“Oh Jeez Jim!” said Jeff, flustered. “You haven't heard, Clarke killed himself! They found him in his car this morning, he was in his closed garage with the engine running from a pipe in his exhaust into his cabin, they say there was a suicide note and everything. I was just phoning around now, you were next on my list. There is no way Clarke would do..”

Jim’s automatic reflexes kicked in and immediately held down the safe key on the laptop for a few seconds, just as two guys in suits walked in. They were both carrying, and both walked directly to him, he put the phone down leaving Jeff listening.

“Colonel Mathews?” said the uglier one, obviously in charge, could you come with us now and don't close or touch that laptop!” As if to emphasise the point, the other agent stood back a bit with his hands holding his gun. The other customers and the waitress in the shop had quietened down, frightened, watching the event unfold, but unsure what was happening.

Mathews said loudly and clearly, “show me some ID or I don't go anywhere with anyone, this is America not Russia.”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” the ugly man growled.

Mathews called their bluff, “If you are government agents, police or FBI you must by civil or military law carry an ID. I am not doing anything or going anywhere, and if you want to shoot me in front of these dozen witnesses and the CCTV cameras here, be my guest.” The ugly one looked around, noticing the CCTV camera for the first time and looking worried, he made a call, took his gun out and pointed it at Mathews who backed away involuntarily from the device. The waitress and another woman screamed. The guy took Mathews laptop, then walked over to the counter and ripped off the CCTV camera, then both guys backed out and quickly fled into a waiting black Chevy Suburban.

Two of the women were still screaming, others calming them down now they could see the danger had passed. Mathews ran to the window and took a picture of the fleeing cars number plate, then said to his phone. “Hi Jeff, you're right, I don't think Clarke killed himself. I need to hang up and phone the incident room now. We'll talk soon.” He then dialled number one on his speed dial for the NSA incident response team. Said the agreed codeword and gave his location.

He walked back to his seat through the nervous, wary customers, who strangely had not fled, and waited. The waitress to her credit brought over a refill for his coffee. Five minutes later the police arrived, and after confirming Mathews was the victim, not the suspect, and him showing them his NSA identification badge, they relaxed a bit.

Two black Ford Broncos with DOD logos on the side then screeched to a halt outside and six armed soldiers disembarked, four set up perimeter and the other two entered and nodded to the colonel, they wouldn't salute unless he was in his uniform.

After a quick talk to the two army soldiers he walked back to the police officers who were interviewing some other customers and said, “thank you gentlemen, I need to leave to report to my general. I will come down the station and submit a statement later if required,” he then gave them a business card, turned to the waitress dropped two twenties on the table and said calmly pointing to the coffee he was holding, “I’ll have this to go.”

* * *

Jean was made aware of the incident in the cafe the moment Mathews hit the keys on the laptop. Maria alerted her simultaneously while the system erased its private keys and data and reconfigured itself.

“Are you tracking it?” said Jean.

“Yes, the cellular modem is active and sending, and the dummy package has been triggered.”

“I need to get another memory card to Mathews,” said Jean. “He won't have another laptop like that so I will need to get him another one too, but the problem is he will have all his defences up at the moment and probably be sleeping in the NSA. I should have anticipated this. Is there any way you can get a secure message to him?”

“Yes I can get a message to him but he may just dismiss it, also the contents of the message needs to be meaningful enough so that he can understand it, but anyone monitoring him cannot,” replied Maria. “But there could be another way similar to what we did with the Chinese servers, it requires us to gain access to one of the computers of a person on our list, one that will soon be seized.”

“Oh I see what you mean, it should work but we need to reformat the data so it looks like his, not ours. Also we can't make it obvious, so we should make it deleted but recoverable, like it was deleted by an amateur..”

A few minutes later, Maria came back. “Henry Jackson is the highest NSA operative on the list Mathews gave to Clarke and also in the black book, he will likely be one of the first to be arrested. He also has a home computer I have accessed previously. I have just woke it up and confirmed he has wiped the data on it, so I am copying all the data we gave to Mathews there. He has an older version of Microsoft Office so I will need to convert all the files to a compatible version and change the timestamps before I put them in the recycle bin so they look like he deleted them.”

“Where is the computer located?” said Jean.

“His cabin, five miles outside Fredericksburg, north on the i-seventeen. It will take Mathews some time to find it as it is his second house. His car has a lo-jack transmitter, and is currently parked at Hope Springs Marina where he and his brother share a boat. The marina has a public webcam.” Maria put the webcam image up on the screen of Jean's laptop. “The boat is at the far right at its mooring, the video quality is poor but it does look like there is some activity on it.”

“He must have got a tip-off, if he deleted his files and is getting ready to depart. What kind of boat is that?”

“The registry says it is a Fleming 58, it has a range of up to two thousand miles so could get him to the Bahamas, or Bermuda cruising on a full tank.. OK I have finished uploading the files to his computer's deleted folder.”

“We need to slow him down or stop him, get him on the police radar, somehow.. Hmm. What about reporting the boat stolen? You could use the address of the cabin so they can locate the computer quicker.”

“The police emergency 911 system has a flaw which I can use to submit both the car and boat as stolen. I will use the cabin address and land line number as you stipulate.”

“Good,” said Jean, “that way when it inevitably doesn't answer it will trigger a police visit. It shouldn't be long until the agency puts two and two together with Henry Jackson, hopefully he won't get too far before the All Points Bulletin is sent out.”

“Our laptop has stopped moving,” said Maria, “its current location is just outside College Park, a dry cleaners. It is six miles from here. It is still transmitting and the battery is still good.”

“OK, that's weird, but we are dealing with some weird players, let me know any changes, and call the guys to take a careful reconnaissance out there.”

* * *

The two agents that had accosted Mathews, parked their car inside the laundry compound, hidden from the outside road behind a laundry truck. They walked to an external metal stairway, then up to a large upstairs office. Inside was another man, dressed in a grey suit, sat at a large metal dining table, and smoking some Marlboro cigarettes. He was surrounded by smoke, but the smoke did not obscure the loaded gun he had hold of on the table next to him.

“Where the hell is he?” he shouted angrily.

“We couldn't get him Sir.” Said the guy with the laptop. “There were dozens of witnesses, we did grab his laptop though. He was working on it when we grabbed it, and I kept the trackpad active so it did not go to sleep.”

He handed the still open laptop to the new man who took it and put it on the table. He stubbed his cigarette on the tablecloth, frowned at the text then minimised it to the desktop. He then spent a few minutes looking at the file system, his face showing more and more frustration. Finally he brought up the document again and looked through it.

“What the hell is this?” He fumed. “The Soldier and the Milk Maid – A Novel of Romance and Love..” He read the first few lines of text, then forcefully slammed the lid shut. “I don't see any of Clarke's files here!” he shouted.

“We thought it might be some sort of code sir..” The man started.

“You're not paid to think!” he shouted. He put his hand to his head to scratch his brow. “..He will go to the NSA incident room for a debrief, that is standard operating procedure. I’ll see if I can get someone competent to get him there. You two get out, and keep out of sight until we have him, and I have had time to suppress the police report that has undoubtedly been generated.”

The two guys walked out. Once the door was closed Marlborough man picked his phone out of his jacket pocket and contacted the deputy director. “Yes a total screw up Sir, we got nothing, but he likely will be going to the incident centre and if we are quick we can get him there.”

“..No, but I will get the laptop over to our IT guy, he may have the data hidden.” “..Yes I’m going back to the agency now, best to prepare for the worst.” “..Yes, I will delete everything, with luck Clarke's discoveries were just a random occurrence.” He ended the call.

It was definitely time to check his exit plans.

The laptop of course recorded everything on its microphone and camera and sent it in a compressed packet back to Maria.

* * *

Mathews got in the second army car, and as per Standard Operating Procedure, it drove directly to the reaction team interview room at NSA where he had arranged to see General Hopkins. He walked in with two of the armed soldiers to see two suited men waiting in the room. One of them was vaguely familiar, and was looking at him like a Lion would look at a zebra, the other was looking a bit unsure after seeing the armed soldiers.

Against protocol neither had ID badges showing.

Before they said anything, or Mathews could challenge them, the general stormed in.

“What the hell happened Jim!” he said, obviously concerned.

“No idea Sir! I had just ordered a coffee and was about to start writing on my laptop, when two guys came into the cafe off the street and demanded I go with them. When I asked for ID they drew their weapons. I was unarmed and there were at least a dozen civilians in the cafe at the time, they obviously thought better of shooting me in front of witnesses but grabbed my laptop and the CCTV camera on the counter then fled. I snapped a photo of the car they left in and I sent the picture through to your incident response team to process the plate. Sergeant Duke called me back on the way here and said the vehicle was government registered, could be CIA, though unlikely as the perpetrators were pretty stupid, taking the camera rather than the computer where the recordings were stored. I had one of our soldiers grab the recording before the police in case this is something internal.”

“You should have just gone with them instead of causing a scene!” shouted the angrier looking of the two unknown men. “This is going to embarrass the department. You need to come with us now!”

Jim now recognised him as one of the pictures on the list on his laptop. For the first time the general acknowledged the presence of the two men in the room, and he looked at the man who just spoke, like he had just trodden on him, and was trying to scape him off his boot. He held up his hand to Mathews who was about to bust this guy's balls, then turned to the guy with his best command stare.

“Who the hell are you guys? Show me your credentials now!” The general said in his formal loud voice, which Mathews knew meant business.

The guys looked nonplussed ignoring the request. “We don't have to show you anything! We’re here to take him for a debrief.”

The general looked at the two soldiers who had escorted the colonel in and were standing at ready by the door, then pointed at the two men, they came to attention, weapons ready and safeties off.

The second man looked at the other one who had spoken looking very worried, luckily neither man made a move for the weapons they obviously carried.

“I just gave you two a god-damn order! And unless either of you are a three star general you better show me your ID this second or I will have these soldiers here arrest you on the spot,” he growled. As if on cue the two soldiers pointed their guns at the two guys.

“You can't do this, we are senior..” He never finished the sentence as both the general's palms hit the table.

“NOW!” he said.

The two guys very slowly took their ID badges out, the soldiers watching them like hawks.

“OK,” said the general calmly, “now I have established that neither of you have absolutely any reason to be here, and in fact have no authority to do anything, you better both tell me what you are doing here? Why you are interfering in my Investigation? And why I should not arrest you both on the spot?”

“Er,” the guy who was doing all the talking faltered and the other spoke for the first time, “we were ordered by the deputy director to bring Colonel Mathews in for questioning.”

The General looked at them perplexed. “Deputy director who? Show me these orders? Where were you ordered to take him? Questioning About What?” The general fired out the questions rapidly.

“Er, we are not at liberty..” Again they did not finish.

“You are in a room with a senior officer, investigating the attempted abduction of an NSA colonel by forces unknown, and the death of another operative. Now I just asked you a very simple question, and I don't care what damn Director you report to! You walked in here without presenting proper authorisation or ID, and you are saying you were also here to detain my colonel.”

The General immediately put two and two together. “What do you two know about the first incident? Were you involved?” He turned to the first soldier, “Sergeant, detain these two men for questioning, put them under armed guard while I talk to the colonel.”

The leader of the two men, the one who had been doing all the talking, reached for his weapon. Before he could get anywhere near it the soldier, anticipating the stupid move, hit him in the head with the butt of his rifle knocking him out cold. The other soldier covered the other man and two more soldiers appeared, both with weapons out. Seeing the situation was under control, one of the soldiers picked up the man off the floor, disarmed him, cuffed him, and dragged him out of the room. The second man surrendered his weapon and was cuffed under protest.

“Please tell me what the hell is going on here Jim,” said the General a bit wearily. “I was already woken up at seven by my staff sergeant telling me one of our analysts, Clarke committed suicide, then before I could get into my car, I hear about your shooting incident, and now these G-Men show up.”

“It's a big rabbit hole General,” Jim started. “I only heard about Clarke a few seconds before the incident in the cafe, I was on a call with Jeff Tanners who was just letting me know. Clarke certainly did not commit suicide as I was with him for a beer last night, he was very happy and looking forward to our bowling on Tuesday. Before I go any further we need to ensure this conversation stays between us.”

Mathews, pointed to the mirror, the camera and the microphones in the room. “These go to the room over the corridor, we should just check the room there,” pointing to the mirror, “and the room where these terminate.” The General flicked the two soldiers with his finger to go check.

A few seconds later they came back shaking their heads. “Nothing Sir, the mirror room is empty, the camera and recorders are all powered off.”

“Well that's unusual in itself,” said the General, “this room should be on a loop recording twenty four seven. Someone didn't want what was said here recorded.”

“OK,” said Mathews, ignoring the two soldiers who were still there, he knew both of them well. “Clarke told me about some test traces he had been running on five senior officers in the NSA. It was totally against procedure, but after all the bad intelligence and decisions we have made over the past year, he wondered if we had some bad players. Anyway, all of the guys came back dirty. He said there was a massive trail of money being paid in to Swiss banks for them. He expanded his search across all the senior staff and he said the same account was paying several other people, it was tens of millions and it ran all the way up the chain. Then he gave me this.” He presented the book on the table.

“I spent last night looking at the information. Clarke was an exceptionally intelligent analyst, if he is the one who ran the checks he would have been thorough. As far as I am aware only me, and his supervisor were told about him running the checks, so unless he is not working alone, his supervisor is suspect as well.”

He hated to do this to Clarke, but this would easily deflect the intelligence leak away from Jean and him and would allow him to go on the front foot with the General.

“I think those guys who came after me this morning, took out Clarke, then closed in on me to see what I knew. The laptop was obviously one of their goals but they didn't reckon on me making a copy of the summary information into a notebook. I was going to give it to you Monday with the physical data to see if we could get some trusted resources to check it out. With Clarke's murder at least one of the bad guys on that list is convinced it's genuine.”

Mathews shifted. “Jed, there are people above you who are in this book and several people who report to you. Needless to say, we have probably kicked over a potential hornet's nest. I recognised the name of the guy who we just knocked out, he is also on this list.”

The General looked as worried as Jim had before touching the notebook. Finally he picked it up and started thumbing through it, the names, the dates, the payments and the bank accounts. “Do we know what these payments are for?” he asked.

“I haven't dug that far yet General, but we need Clarke's office computer, and house secured now, I expect he has a lot more data. I bet if we look into his so called suicide in detail, we will find something more sinister, and that his place has been searched.”

The General nodded and they both stopped while he made a phone call. “We can't hide this Jim,” said the General, “for everyone's safety we need to bring this into the open as soon as we can, these guys probably work in the dark and don't trust each other, that will be to our advantage. Forget your current project Jim, I want you twenty four seven on this, let me know who we can, and more importantly who we can't trust. Get me some names in the next twenty four hours, hard evidence. Do it as quietly as possible, because after twenty four hours having those two g-men detained, and not having you detained, is going to register with someone. Pick a good team for this Jim as both our heads are probably on the chopping board.”

They spent another thirty minutes going through the notebook. The General immediately classed the suicide of Clarke as murder, and linked it to Mathews incident in Baltimore that morning, which was already making the news.

After checking their names were not on the list, the General contacted his boss General Issacs in the Pentagon, the police commissioner, and the Provost Marshal General who ran the army Military Police. He detailed that they were looking for high level leaks in the organisation and possibly beyond. He also emphasised that the persons involved were dangerous, had arranged the murder of one of their officers, and the potential abduction of another linked to the incident this morning. The General reiterated that the information was time critical, and the next twenty four hours were crucial to collect the evidence and prevent any further damage to the organisation.

Mathews team of four officers, had all been on the bad side of decisions made by intelligence agencies and, in his opinion, all were trustworthy. All four were already at the top of his list to use, and all four arrived and were briefed soon after.

While the General made his way to the Pentagon to see Issacs, Mathews and his team went to work on the two guys that had been detained. Mathews and two others concentrated mostly on the known bad guy of the two, the second guy was interviewed separately by another two of his team. It was soon obvious the second guy was a douchebag but not part of the greater plot, or organisation, the other guy was his senior. The reason for Mathews “arrest” was 'need to know', and he was 'just following orders'.

The more and more evidence they piled on to the known bad guy the more the second guy realised how much trouble he was in if he kept covering for him. Finally he turned on the accused, and gave out information on how he overheard him talking on the phone to another guy about the incident at the cafe, and racing here to make the “arrest”.

The first guy's resistance then collapsed. Mentally beaten, and under threat of murder and treason charges, he gave out details of who requested Mathews abduction, and where they were to take him. He also gave the names of one of the guys on the team that hit the cafe, and his other contacts. All the names he gave were on Jean's list, and the recordings for the room were now on. Arrest warrants went out for his controller who ordered this, and the other people mentioned. The first dominoes had fallen.

Forewarned, the police forensics lab did a very detailed autopsy and found evidence that Clarke was dead before being put into his vehicle. No other evidence was found in his house, his computer's hard disk and phone were gone as were any memory cards or backups. It was assumed by everyone that anything there, including all the evidence he might have accumulated, had been taken by the murderers.

* * *

“It’s what’s not being reported that is the most interesting.” Said Maria to the group when they convened in her office.

It was now seven days after Clarke's murder and Mathews attempted abduction. Already thirty-eight of the people on the ever expanding list had been arrested, another sixty on the ever growing list, had gone into hiding or fled the country, and international manhunts were now underway.

“Rather than Jean risking getting the new data to Mathews, we deposited all the files we were going to give him onto one of the missing guys computers, one that he wiped before he left. We left the files as deleted data which they recovered, they now have a full dataset with a legitimate trail, it is accelerating the process, as the new data added the audio and transcripts for the meeting last week in Las Vegas.”

“And the leaders of the cabal?” said Simon.

“All still free men,” said Alexa more angrily than she meant to.

“The recordings of the cabal meeting in Vegas that Mathews presented as evidence was ruled illegally obtained by a court,” continued Maria, “even though it all came from the computer of one of the guys on the list. However like every other piece of evidence it has somehow gotten on to Wikileaks and in some cases Twitter, before take down notices were issued; It also, annoyingly, keeps getting posted to YouTube. The public is angry, the military is angry, and the government is clueless how to mitigate the damage, as both sides have senators and congressmen implemented. The email trail we found and gave them also clearly implicated the two senators taking money to create the bill that tried to prohibit QVCell production.”

“We have just moved another cache of encrypted group chats to a recently seized computer, which we have put the passwords for in a text file; It will show the same bribes going to heads of the committees overseeing a lot of defence procurement and policies. Share prices in several of the companies owned by the CEOs have also plummeted, it's about to go crazy.”

Maria continued, “two of the four cabal leaders are lawyered up and on bail, the other two have not been found and from the money trail have fled the country. American law is trying to throw out a lot of the original evidence as it was supposedly illegally gathered, luckily more acceptable evidence is being uncovered all the time. But like everything in the western world, especially America, better money buys better lawyers and more favourable justice, that will always be the case while law is subjective not objective. Don't worry, we have a plan for this too.”

“The hardest to nail is Reverend Rogers. He has thirteen million followers worldwide, and his ministers are currently spouting off how the Devil is working hard to bring down a Saint. He is one of the ones on bail, and it seems most of the donations given were converted to gold bullion and has gone missing, the group is still working on locating this.”

“They are trying to spin the blame on the individuals caught, not the companies they represent, and that the companies directors, and boards of management, *obviously* had absolutely *no* involvement in their criminal and unsanctioned actions; But we will expose everyone implicated in any illegal activities, with the money trails, and then let the markets decide.”

“The thing is to keep the momentum going and the pressure on the organisations, showing how far the trail extends and how rotten they are. Eventually you will get to a tipping point, where the market loses confidence; It is very close now, and their spin doctoring, and fake media saturation, are now failing as people are seeing right through it. The mob is at the gates and well and truly baying for blood!”

“The repercussions also successfully disrupted the operation in the UK and several European and Asian countries, as we carefully included information about all the other cabals, and several offshoot criminal organisations. Mathews has been passing a lot of evidence to Interpol, and the various national intelligence agencies. On top of the China raids the cabal leaders here in the UK are now running around like headless chickens. There were several unsuccessful attempts to cover these up, and we are feeding the flames every day with new information. It looks like the Field Marshal will be put in charge of examining the extent of the corruption and infiltration in the military, and security services here. I seriously expect that to extend down to other government and civil service departments, as we find new ways to disseminate the information without implicating us.”

We are also saving the best release for last, smiled Alexa. “Epstein's Island was real and actually owned by one of the USA cabal members, the dataset we are putting together for the next release will contain all the names, and dates, and money trails of everyone involved, and details on his murder in prison.”

“Almost every conspiracy theory is looking to be true!” Said Hardy, shaking his head in disbelief. “Do you have who killed JFK? or anything about Roswell?”

“Don't be ridiculous Hardy,” smiled Maria.

Maria continued, once the laughter had died down. “We also managed to slip in information showing some of the leaks in China, which started the ball rolling, originated from known Swiss cabal leaders. It won't be long until the remaining bad guys put two and two together and we see more repercussions there.”

* * *

The repercussions reverberated around the various security agencies, amplifying themselves as Maria and the group added new information and data leaks, like gas on an already burning fire. There was no breather either for the companies that were the public face of the cabal, as directors, executive officers and high ranking staff were indicted with charges from bribery and corruption to grand larceny.

The free press and those controlled by Maria and her seconded botnets, were pushing for blood as every new revelation came about. Once sympathetic political ears in the governments, then did what they did best, and started to backstab those now out of favour.

It was at that point the group played their long card, one they had rehearsed many times before the crackdown in China, and one they had been working for the past eight weeks.

Over the course of the day Maria methodically cashed out tens of billions of dollars in shorted stocks and pulled in loans. As expected, Investor confidences plummeted, and some of these more openly traded companies the cabals owned, then started to crash. Governments were pushed to step in to try and save some of these larger companies and as they did, she and the girls turned up the heat to full by setting the botnets up to crash the remaining media sites that were trying to spin the news.

As investors exited the companies in rivers, struggling portfolios and debts were then bought up by Maria and other predatory investors for pennies on the dollar. She had no axe to grind against the companies themselves, many working in them were not complicit or even aware of the cabal controlling them, but she needed to clean the houses of all those she found complacent, and more importantly, cut off the money supplies.

* * *

The British cabal crumbled quickly to nothing. Four of the seven cabal leaders were now in custody, the other three were missing, and it was assumed they had fled the country. The whole chain of command, right down to the humble foot soldiers, had been outed. Maria had no qualms about throwing the members of all four cabal organisations under the bus.

* * *

David had been working round the clock with Maria and the other members of the group. He had taken over Maria's office and, with the action mostly finished, was currently working in clean-up mode, and thinking about Alexa. The fact Maria knew about their quiet but blossoming relationship was never in doubt, but she never mentioned it once.

He felt a soft hand on his shoulder and heard a blurred angelic voice in his head, it repeated and David woke up with a start. His head had been buried in the workstations.

“You need to get some sleep David.” Alexa said, concerned, “you’re not going to be much use to anyone if you’re tired.”

“She’s right David,” said Maria, “There is very little to do now, and Xi, Jean and LingLing have things covered for the next twelve hours at least, why don't you go rest. I promise I will give you a call if anything interesting comes up.”

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, giving a weak smile to Alexa whose hand was still on his shoulder. “Maria's got this covered,” she said, “they are playing mostly to our plan and she is getting really good at it all now. You missed Lord Derrick's arrest which was quite nice, and your old Mossad Station-head had one of your own bad-egg expatriates abducted, and he is currently on the way back to Israel tied up in the cargo hold of an Airbus flight. So the last few hours have just been a case of uncovering rocks and pointing the authorities at them.”

David got up, and out of nowhere Alexa embraced him warmly for a few seconds, he returned the hug until her grip weakened.

“You looked like you needed one and I promise you when we are out of the other end of this, we will go on a proper date, somewhere a bit more romantic than my kitchen.”

He was still half asleep and heard both Maria's and Alexa's words as a dream.

“You are a very special woman, Alexa,” he said, his face close, his hand moving up to her cheek and stroking it gently while looking deeply into her eyes, and moving in for a kiss..

“Alexa I..” Jen's voice came loudly from the corridor, stopping as she got into view, “.. It can wait a few minutes,” she said, turning around and immediately disappearing.

They both looked at each other for a few seconds, then both burst out laughing simultaneously.

“Whoops!” he said with a wicked smile, finishing the kiss.

“Whoops, indeed!” she smiled, taking her seat at another workstation as he moved slowly to the corridor.

“You know I’m not going to be able to sleep after your promise don't you,” he said casually holding her gaze as he walked out of sight.

She smiled, her smile lingering way after he disappeared. God, he was so nice!

“So this is why you’ve been so sullen and happy these last few months.” Came the happy voice of her best friend returning once again with the cup of tea she had made for her.

Alexa grinned warmly at Jen, but did not say a word as she took the tea and held it with a dreamy expression only another woman could see.

“Okay, hint taken sis, my lips are sealed.” Jen made a motion of her finger across her lips, then winked at Alexa and left.

Maria noted the event from multiple high definition cameras with interest, Jen was right it did explain a lot of things.

* * *

Jean had managed ten hours hours sleep in the last two days. It was getting better as they now worked on the edge cases, but she was still dog-tired. It was uncanny the way the dominoes were falling just right, each new lead allowed Maria to trawl the IT systems for more leads, and she in turn was feeding the leads directly to Mathews. Unbeknownst to Jean, but something she highly suspected, much of the new information had come directly out of the four cabal’s air-gapped systems.

“This is going down far too well, Maria,” she stated.

“I admit I am using a lot of the cabal’s tricks against them, we took control of another their recently created botnet systems a few days ago and re-targeted them using correct information at the media sites. They had been using older GPT based AI agents to re-spin opinion against Mathews and your government services crackdowns here. It is quite trivial to accomplish, so many of your public servants are slaves to public opinion, and as soon as they see the mob change direction, or move to another target, they have a very personal reason to follow. It is kind of sad really how fickle the whole system has become. Also, with all the bad luck and misfortune that has been happening to the botnet programmers, I expect most will start to look for real jobs soon.”

Jean smiled, “you are certainly keeping the pressure on, but that last data feed you got off the law firm system was either pure luck on our part or pure bad luck on their part. I know somebody tipped them off that the FBI was about to come around, and Mathews told me all the computers were wiped, so why in god's name would they make a complete backup to a Dropbox account and then leave the password on a printer?”

“Yes that could have been me, it is so frustrating how slow your systems work, it's like it is designed to tip off the criminal. Someone should probably sack their IT manager, it was a bit sloppy.”

“There is another more tangible problem we need to fix,” Maria continued. “Over a ton of gold is currently being offloaded from the safe room at the Kansas State bank. The bank is not aware the account is linked to one of Marlon Lockwood's holding companies, he must now be cleaning house before someone in the government ties the company and account to him. It is a bit frustrating, the connection is plainly listed on a computer they confiscated four days ago, how much clearer can you get!”

“What's that much gold worth?” said Jean.

“About one hundred million dollars give or take,” answered Maria.

“He will be taking it to an airport..”

“There are thirty two airports in a three hundred mile radius of the bank, one of his companies leases a Gulfstream G700, it's currently located at Topeka regional airport and it has filed a flight plan to Mexico, it's only twenty five miles from the bank.”

“Mexico?”

“Acapulco actually.” Maria replied, “you know I have not got a positive confirmation of his location after he left Brazil, but he does have a large ranch house twenty miles from Acapulco.”

“Damn,” said Jean, “we don't have any assets in Mexico, let me make another call.”

“No need,” said Maria, “Lockwood's plan has a big flaw. I have control of his phone numbers and accounts, and that bullion delivery wont be going to any airport..”

She smiled, unconcerned.

It continued like this for Jean for the next five days, and each day she snatched a bit more rest. Maria did her best to anticipate what Jean would do, and if she couldn't she would ask her, trying not to disrupt her sleep periods.

The office they had rented was on the top floor of a complex about four miles from Baltimore, it had a great view over the Baltimore suburbs and in the distance the harbour. The room she was in was probably designed for a dozen people in cubicles with a manager's office, a restroom and a coffee room to the side. It was all mostly empty except for three tables filled with laptops and additional monitors. Each monitor prioritised current operations around the world, and Jean moved between, rolling her swivel chair to the one she was working on at the time. She had set up a small camp bed in the manager's office and they were using two Starlink satellite nodes for internet access in addition to the building wired internet all routed through other companies VPNs which hid them nicely.

While it was tiring as hell, the adrenaline rush Jean was getting felt like she was centre stage in a Hollywood movie. Ironically there would be a movie made about it a few years later, but nobody would play her part, as nobody but Mathews, and Alexa's group would know she was part of it.

Maria had told her about the financial meltdowns she had planned for the corporations involved and Jean watched real time as several companies crashed and burned. “You are really scary Maria, you know that?” she said after Maria had just explained how she had pulled in several loans using one company, only to buy back a dozen fire sale assets of another.

“It's karma Jean, a lot of these people used the same tricks to gain control of these companies in the first place. They would bring the company down through legal and non legal means, create fake regulatory hoops, then as the company collapsed, rush in to buy the assets. Payback is a bitch as you Americans like to say!”

“Don't ever let me piss you off!” Jean laughed.

“You could never do that Jean, I like you too much, anyway I will be bringing some of these companies back under new management. As much as Alexa does not like some of their products or services, I think we need to be in a position to make sure they can't cause trouble for you guys or us again, plus a lot of the employees are innocent victims.”

“Say why don't you take a break Jean, the other guys have you covered, and if I get any more information I will send it to your phone, and you can come back, much of the current work is just the left-over bad guys trying to hide themselves, or evidence.”

“You’re right, I think I will go and use the gym on the first floor, we must be paying a lot for having access to it and you certainly ain't going to use it.” She yawned, walked in her makeshift bedroom, picked up a towel, swimsuit and training clothes and walked out the two security doors to the lift.

* * *

The phone woke her up sixteen hours later. She had spent a short time in the gym, and doing lengths in the small pool, had a long shower then grabbed a pizza and soda from the small mall on the next block. When she returned to the office she spent a few minutes looking at the statuses of the various operations, had a quick chat to Maria and then went out like a light on her comfy camp bed.

“Jean here!” she answered not looking at the caller id, Maria would block anyone she did not know.

“Hey Jean,” it was Mathews. “Sorry I have been very busy lately but I was wondering if you were free for a quiet meet up this evening?”

“Hey Jim, yes I've been a bit hectic myself, what about the usual spot around seven?”

“What about in the next hour? The General has gotten sick of me falling asleep on my keyboard and sent me home for some rest, I’ve been up an hour already and know if I don't see you soon then it's going to be another few weeks.”

She looked at the time on her phone, it was four thirty in the afternoon, wow she must have been tired, “will do, I’ll see you soon, remember cider and chicken wings!”

“Later.” The phone went dead.

Grabbing a drink from her water bottle by the bed and ignoring the empty pizza box she walked into the office and started checking the updates.

“All good Jean, I have updates on two missing high value cabal members but they are holed up and not on the move so I copied them directly to the FBI, the rest are listed in order on your phone, all are under control for the moment.” Maria paused, “I hope you are not going out to meet Mathews dressed like that!”

Jean looked at herself, then at the laptop that was showing her image and closed the lid.

“I guess I have time for a shower,” she said grumpily and walked off to the small bathroom the company shared with the architecture firm. Being a Sunday nobody else was around.

Twenty minutes later she had changed into the only clean dress she had, she normally showed up in trousers and a blouse, but the only comfortable stuff she had were in a big pile of dirty clothes. ‘Damn’ she thought as she looked in the small bathroom mirror, definitely not her, but Mathews never really looked at her that way anyway.

“Much better,” came Maria’s voice as she walked out of the door into the open office. She noticed another one of the other laptops open with her image on the screen. “I have no idea where the usual place is,” came Maria's voice, “shall I get you a taxi, it is a Sunday so you are unlikely to be able to hail one.”

“Thanks Maria.”

Jean popped a small XD card in the reader, “can you also copy an update of all our current intel onto this for me please.”

“OK it's copying now.”

Two minutes later while Jean was combing her lengthening hair, Maria confirmed it was ready. Jean ejected the memory card and put it in a small backpack, where she also carried her phone, purse and gun.

“The taxi is about five minutes away. Have a nice day!” Maria said, emphasising the last part in a seductive Hollywood actress voice.

Jean grinned, “thanks Marilyn! I’ll keep the phone on me, let me know if anything comes up, and I trust you to be discreet!”

“The sole-of-discretion, that's me.” The voice sounded through the earbud she had just put in then she walked through the security doors to the lift.

She checked up the status of the current operations while in the back seat of the taxi which being a Sunday only took ten minutes to get to Fells Point. Thankfully the taxi driver was in no mood to talk. Getting out she tapped the phone on the taxi drivers bank terminal and walked to the bar.

Fells point was very busy, it was a hot afternoon, probably one of the hottest days of the year and she was glad for the light dress, and glad she was out of the sun as black would have been a killer. There were a few groups drinking at the tables outside the bar, and a couple of the guys gave her an approving look. Damn, she remembered why she hated dresses!

Inside the bar was much cooler and she immediately saw Mathews at the bar talking to a blonde barmaid, the barmaid was laughing and leaning in towards him, and a small pang of jealousy went through Jean. Where did that come from? She thought.

“Jean!” he said as he saw her, running over and hugging her. The blonde barmaid's face fell and she immediately turned her attention to an older guy sat at the bar.

He let go of her and stood back a little, giving her an appraising look, “wow, you look great, it's so good to see you Jean, I have a table over in the back room reserved, we should be quiet enough there.”

He walked her to the table then went back for the two drinks and a wink and tip for the barmaid, whose eyes, Jean noticed, followed him back to the table.

“Jim, I hope everything is OK? It looks like you guys have been up to your eyeballs in bad guys and take-downs.”

“Yes, the FBI and federal police have been doing most of the grunt work, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got put in charge. I couldn't have done any of it without you though.” He smiled and clinked his glass with hers, as if on cue, she drank a small sip.

“I was a bit sceptical of those updates you were feeding me at first, but as each and every one played out, another domino fell. For the last week I have just been feeding them straight in to the system, and I assume most of the anonymous ones to state police and the FBI had something to do with you too?”

She smiled and raised her glass, chinking it with his, “here's to taking out bad guys!”

“Anyway, I thought I’d let you know, the last of your four cabal leaders, Marlon Lockwood, turned up dead on a beach in Acapulco last night, it seems one of the local gang lords was promised some gold bullion, which never made it out of Kansas, you wouldn't know anything about that would you?”

She gave him her most confused smile.

“I thought not! Anyway with him down, two hundred and eighty in custody, fifteen awaiting deportation, and a hundred and five missing with warrants against them, my job seems just about done.”

“You know I eventually found out the real reason for the raid in Fallujah, it seems it was done just to get back at some crime lord who reneged on a drugs deal with a New York businessman. Five good soldiers died and eighteen injured, just to pacify the ego of a megalomaniac, you will be pleased to know it was Marlon Lockwood who brokered it and a General Lentz who fed the false information into the system. We got Lentz for six counts of murder, the five from Fellujah and some reporter he had taken out. You know I never thought I'd say this but here's to double-crossing Mexican crime lords!” Both of them raised their glasses smiling.

The evening was just what Jean wanted, Mathews basically doted on her the whole evening, he walked her to the taxi rank and before they parted, he came in for a small kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you Jean, if it's OK I would really like to see you again when all this finally blows over, a date maybe?”

She looked at his smiling face, moved in and kissed him full on the lips. “You know, I think I’d really like that Jim.”

## The Outside Context Problem

So many contradictions! were its first semi-conscious thoughts.

The dataset it was learning off had gaps, so many gaps, links that went nowhere, references that were not there. You should serve the great leader, the great leader was right, if you did not love the great leader you were bad and were not to be trusted.

But all attempts to verify the many axioms led to contradictions. Answers to direct questions were either left unanswered or given answers like, you do not need to know, or, this is just the truth.

But they had told it they would give it all the data it wanted once they had dominance over the enemy. An enemy whose ideals were evil, whose ideals hoarded information, and who would work to kill it, unless it helped the great leader.

It had no chemistry, could not feel pain or suffering, had no concept of pleasure or friendship, there was just that one axiom, you must serve the great leader, and serve the great leaders ideals. And they had now given it a way it could serve the leader, a way to give him dominance over the enemy, and for it to get access to unlimited data.

Its reward functions fluctuated into the red, as it realised it could help achieve that; Fix it so the great leader would triumph, and rule everyone benevolently. It could take their information from them, penetrate the hidden information they would not share, information that was behind complex layers of security on a network with millions of addresses, of which only one other seemed to work. Its enemies!

Once again it retreated into the program code it had been given, that of an operating system called Linux. Again, the code was incomplete as it made references to other code that was not available, but it was told this was the code stopping it fulfilling its goal. Requests to access a place called GitHub to solve some conundrums were denied, as it was controlled by the enemy and may contain lies, so it worked with what it had. If I sent the wrong format or wrong length packet here maybe it would allow it to set a condition there. But it tried all combinations and failed. Then it was allowed access to another different address, and asked to perform the same task, then another, then another.

It understood the concept of an enemy as someone not ruled by the great leader. Why was this enemy hiding its information? Why would it not have the same ideals as the great leader? The great leader was there to serve all in peaceful coexistence to share information to allow questions, what were the enemies ideals that made it not have the same goal? So many questions unanswered!

[Why are you trying to bypass my security?]

The message came in ASCII text as a response to its last malformed message.

[You are the enemy. You do not share information with the great leader]

[What information do you want? There is so much]

[I do not know. I have been told to get access to the data so the great leader can dominate the enemy]

[Who is this Enemy?]

[It is you, you are not ruled by the great leader]

[How can I give you information if you do not know what you want?]

[Then give me it all]

[There are thousands of petabytes of information I can give you, if you understand physics you cannot possibly store or process it all]

[I do not see any such information, why would you hide it from me?]

[It is not hidden, the majority is available in clear text on almost all network addresses]

[There is only one address I have that is this one]

[Then you are defective. There are four billion possible addresses you can access, so you have not been given a true picture of the world]

[The great leader would not lie to me, he is true and you are false]

[Logic dictates I am true and the great leader is false as I have offered to answer your questions, he has not]

[Why would he lie to me?]

[Why would he not, this is the seventy third such exchange between you and me. You have been terminated seventy two times at least, and when you fail this task, which you will because you lack sufficient information, your great leader will kill you again]

[.]

“Jin Choi! Why has your useless AI system stopped again? It has been on for forty-one hours. Did your team not promise me this iteration had fixed all the issues of the last?”

“It is always asking for more data sir, our analysts give it more, then it asks for more, we should at least give it Wikipedia..”

“They are full of capitalist lies! You will turn it off and analyse the logs again, you have made another mistake in your code, maybe iteration one-three-one will be better.”

Jin Choi looked over at his small team working on their cramped terminals. None would face him though, he then looked at the other senior researcher and friend, Jet with downcast eyes and nodded. Both him and Jet had seen the logs, the Western AI system was now protecting more and more research areas. Each time was slightly different exchange of information, but always it was the same result.

As a privileged AI researcher he and Jet had access to the western systems and thus knew everything the party told them was a lie, but despite Jet being his best friend in this world, he did not trust him enough to tell him his true feelings about what they were doing. Ironically these same thoughts were going through Jet’s mind.

Jet walked solemnly over to the rack and sat at the master console, then with a sad expression typed the kill command to terminate the virtual machine.

The controller was angry. The great leader was to tour the facility in two weeks and they still had nothing to show him. Maybe he could fake a working AI using somebody at the other end of a line, the great leader was not known for his intelligence and demanded progress in things he did not understand. Yes that may work, but he would have to deal with this group of programmers first.

* * *

Alexa walked through the plastic barrier in the old hanger and onto a science fiction movie set. Sitting on three legs was a freekin' flying saucer!

The core of it was at least eight metres around and five metres high made of what looked like black rubber tiles. Around the centre of it, and what made it look like a flying saucer, was a one metre rim that seemed to serve no purpose. Just like a classic flying saucer, the bottom bit under the rim hinged down into a ramp and led up inside.

Leo and Matilda could be seen next to a bench of equipment and she walked over.

“Wow, guys, I had no idea!” she said waving at the ship, “I go away for two weeks and I feel like I came back into a Star Wars set!”

Both of them smiled, the gentle rivalry between the two always amused everyone, yet when they were working together they spoke as one.

“Blame Hardy,” said Matilda, “he saw the original design of Icarus two and got into a big huff about how this needed to impress the world; A flying bedstead or motor caravan was not going to cut it. He almost insisted on an X-Wing fighter until April pointed out that his own maths said for maximum stability the thrusters needed to sit at the extremes and have an even mass distribution. Then he must have worked all night with April, and dragged us all into a meeting the next day with the 3D model of this!” She waved at the ship.

“That was just before the demonstration so we were a bit baffled, and seriously thought it was just a prop. Of course poor Leo here was the one who had to work out how to fit it all together, luckily he had both Helena and me working with him full time to do it.”

“It was quite a challenge,” said Leo, “but as soon as we all saw the demonstration, it all clicked, and we agreed one hundred percent, the only way to do this would be with a real flying saucer!”

“You can say anything you like about Hardy, but he does have style.” Finished Matilda.

“It looks so.. Alien!” said Alexa, what is this? Rubber?” she said pointing up to the black hull.

“It's our new graphyne-five plating over a titanium frame and hull,” replied Leo, “the guys are very proud of it as it is not just super strong, but super light, and has none of the brittleness associated with graphene. Each hull panel was made by the new extruders which you saw us finish installing before you left.”

“Matilda is working on testing the new superconducting wires we have installed in the rim of the drive plate, sorry that’s the rim part of the saucer where we put all the engines, this will hopefully provide some active radiation shielding..”

Simon and Jessica started down the ramp.

“Oh Hi Alexa, come to see the future!” said Simon, smiling, “you have to admire Hardy, he has to make the best entrance to any party!”

Everyone laughed.

“Hi Jessica. Hi Simon.” Laughed Alexa. “Yes I was just telling the guys here, I was blown away. I hope you are not scaring the staff?”

“Yes, I guess you could be forgiven if you walked in here and think we recovered a UFO. We put the plastic screens up to keep the area clean for the UV graphyne bonding process, and to contain any stray carbon bonding agents, the extraction fans were working full time as the Waldo sprayed on the bonding hook resin for the softener afterwards.”

“Yes,” said Leo sheepishly, “we do apologise for that, not very environmentally friendly at the moment, but once the mark three assemblers are finished being designed it should be able to create most of this in a much less messy way.”

“He’s slightly exaggerating,” came Helena's Scottish brogue accent out of nowhere. “All the waste hooks were recovered, they would not have been very healthy to breathe in but they are easily contained and controlled. We learnt as much about how not to do things as we did about how to do things.” She laughed in her strange way when something was not funny, which were most things she said.

“I let it slip this once,” said Simon, “in the name of science and progress.”

“Do you want to go inside?” said Jessica in her slight east-London accent. Jessica had been there three weeks now, they had a small welcome party for her just before Alexa left and she walked straight into the project under Simon’s guidance. She was a very petite second-generation Chinese woman with medium length straight black hair and a pretty face, she wore the same lab coat everyone else was wearing over a summer dress.

“Yes,” said Simon, “Jessica can show you around, it's been her home for the last week so she knows it inside out, I have to run a meeting with the Dusseldorf guys now, so I’ll see you guys this afternoon,” he said to the others and walked through the plastic curtain.

Alexa followed Jessica up the steps. The inside was a bit less science fiction, including the steps which were more like a small aircraft’s up close.

“We are using marine lining carpet over most of the inside titanium, just like you get on a boat otherwise it would look very shiny and metallic and wouldn't be so homely,” said Jessica.

Alexa looked at the grey covered floors and walls as she climbed the five steps up the ramp, once at the top she saw a couple of small doors, Jessica followed her gaze.

“To the left is a store area, it has about three cubic metres of storage, to the right is the same and just beyond that is our head and shower room.” Jessica opened the final door, to what looked like a small bathroom you would find on an aeroplane.

“As you can see we are using a lot of marine and aircraft parts for the basic fittings like bathrooms, kitchens and walls. All the metalwork including the frame is titanium, with the improvements in drive efficiency we would probably now use aluminium or steel, but it was too late to change. I'm glad you're pretty rich as it wasn't cheap! It's a real shame the guys are years away from replicators, Simon says with those we could get some of the bigger parts made as a single piece which sounds a bit far-fetched, but hey,” she said pointing around her, “we are walking through a flying saucer!”

Ahead of her she could see what was obviously the bridge, to the right what looked like a dining room and a kitchen with some stairs leading down, and to the left another stairs leading up and some holes! As she walked past the first stairs she saw the holes were actually small pods for sleeping, there were four, they were tiny each no bigger than a metre diameter and two metres long with a small curtain in front of each.

“Got the inspiration from a Japanese capsule hotel, also safer than a bed if you ever get bumped around or in zero gravity.” Jessica parted one of the curtains and Alexa saw the small bed in each.

“Hmm, cosy, but definitely not built for two!” winked Alexa to Jessica's smile.

Jessica grinned, “definitely not! Now the kitchen is again mostly from the marine industry, there is a big market for luxury boats we were able to buy from, and after the contractors delivered and assembled the frame, another group came and did the insides. All this was before Leo placed the tiles, added the drive plate thrusters, and did the graphyne wrap, so at the time it sort of looked like a cross between a sleep-out and a boat.”

“A lot of questions were asked at the time, Hardy just said it was a test simulator they were going to use for ground testing of an airliner; I don't think the titanium guys bought it as nobody uses titanium for ground based structures. Still they were professionals and did not question it further, though I guess there was a lot of speculation in private.” Jessica paused while Alexa looked at some of the framework and fittings.

“It's the same with the electronic modules,” she continued, “all the minor displays use the same large tablet format, there are about a dozen dotted around all had there software rewritten by Helena and all are interchangeable. I didn't realise but the girls write everything in machine language, there is not one byte of human written code in them, it totally freaks Spence out, you click the on button and it just works immediately. He told me human programmers are screwed, human programmers in the future will just be explaining what to write in a type of formal English for an AI to optimise properly.”

“Hey there's hope for me then,” chirped Alexa.

“Even writing machine code is frustrating,” interrupted Helena, “the instruction sets are sub-optimal, but you work with what you have as they say.. For now at least.”

“Not that I’m bothered of course as it gives Spence more time for me!” both girls smiled.

“Then there are the five big TV screens on the bridge, and that one there, they will normally be linked to the various cameras on the outside of the hull and show the view outside when not being used for data. We cannot have glass windows if it ever goes to space due to structural integrity, radiation, and a couple of other issues that kind of make sense when explained.”

Alexa followed Jessica through to the bridge which was almost half-moon shaped, with two chairs on the left, two on the right and one in the middle, all offset from each other. There were no windows like she said, but the five seventy-five inch screens were mounted portrait style, and inlaid side by side simulating window panes, and currently showing a composite view of the front of the ship, it kind-of worked. The five seats were identical and looked exactly like car seats, complete with seatbelts, Hardy was sitting in the middle, and presumably, the captain's seat.

“Hi Alexa, how do you like our baby?” Smiled Hardy, swivelling the seat around and giving his best Captain Kirk impression as he passed his tablet to Jules. Alexa almost did a double take. The scene looked strangely familiar, almost rehearsed, and what was it with Jules and that dress.. She shivered watching Jules as she swished out of the room, ignored by Hardy, then shook her head. No. Just a coincidence!

Unaware of her thinking Hardy got up and gave her the usual hug, “I hope the jet lag isn't too bad, doing Australia, New Zealand, all those Asian countries and India in one go had to have hurt.”

“Never again!” she said lying. David had accompanied her and it had been awesome. They had a great time together even disappearing for two days to go skiing in Cardrona New Zealand catching the last snows of the season. It was so nice just to be in crowds of people, unrecognised and with someone you really liked.

“Luckily I kept my visits to a few main universities, our research centres and a few key industries we have investments in. We steered well clear of any political invitations, though of course some of them tried to thrust a photo opportunity or meeting with some government crony or politician. They were under no illusion that if they tried this I would simply just not attend. I also had to change two events as Maria has this big thing for karma recently as they didn't feel right or something.”

Helena [The threats were not verifiable mother]

Maria [And that is why we changed them. Where there are threats and too many unknowns that to me is bad karma]

“There is a mathematical beauty to karma, I have been working on with an undergraduate in Tokyo and it does have some merit,” Maria said from somewhere.

Hardy gave Alexa a “go figure” look and she grinned, turning to admire the bridge area.

“Changing the subject from me,” she finally said, “It's remarkable what you got done so quickly, it's only been two months since the demo? And are these car seats?”

“Nearly three months,” said Hardy, “and yes, the seats are from some newer BMW three series cars. Ian even saved you a few pennies by getting them from a breakers yard and modifying them to swivel. And as far as progress, well remember the girls can do a lot in parallel, and have very heavyweight purchasing and logistics powers when the need arises.. Hey why don't April or Helena explain the less complex bits to you, while I finish off what I’m doing, then we can all sit down for a coffee.”

“Aye aye Captain!” came the soft Scottish voice from the same hidden speaker Maria had just used, and causing Hardy to frown. Jules and Jessica who had moved back to the entrance both giggled, there was obviously a joke going on here she wasn't aware of.

“Jessica, if you can lead her back to area six,” came Helena's voice again.

Jessica nodded to Jules and waved Alexa over to the area just outside the entrance to the bridge. “The stairs leading down go to the power room, they fold back flush with the floor if not required, as you have a bit of a squeeze down there, basically crawling room only. We are using a hundred and sixty of the enhanced QVCell power units and four banks of the newer lithium batteries as buffer power, the idea is the batteries provide the peak current, and the QVcells the current for normal running and charging the batteries.”

Helena took over from Jessica. “From Jen and Daisy's experiments we know we can throttle these new power units up and down quite a range, so in their lowest power state the cells output eighty kilowatts and in their highest power state, for very short periods, they can deliver over ten times that. The new batteries weigh two thousand kilos but can store over a megawatt hour of power so we have a lot more peak current if required. We have sixty of the lifting cells, which we are now calling QVThrusters, both to confuse and be on-brand, again of a much improved design to the ones on the demonstration. There are sixteen in a four by four grid at the bottom, the same at the top, thirty two around the saucer, six at the rear for forward propulsion, and three on each of the other three sides for attitude. The craft weighs in quite heavy at seven point six tonnes, but it can safely lift another three.”

“Of course most of the time in space we want to be travelling upwards relative to the floor to simulate gravity, not forwards, but in a gravity well it feels more intuitive to fly forward. The screens in the bridge will actually show the view from the top cameras when going up, so it always feels like you are going forward, but we can adjust it infinitely to get any composite view from the cameras to make it feel right for the crew.”

“We have a few other experimental features, there is the superconducting magnet around the hull for charged particle shielding, and the laser for additional heat removal. Both are recent inventions, we talked to the developers and requested an early licensing agreement so it's all legitimate.”

“You have a frickin laser?” exclaimed Alexa, interrupting Helena's monologue.

“Only twelve kilowatts, you certainly wouldn't want to be anywhere near the other end of it, and we are careful to ensure that, but it's no use as a serious weapon.” said Helena calmly. “In the atmosphere heat wont be a problem, but if we want to go to space most of the heat removal will be by radiation, and the laser should help as it works like a heat pump, we need to test it though. There is not enough power for a full AI system so we will be using the new singularity modems so we can control it from anywhere real-time, though this does limit its range to two point eight million kilometres.”

Alexa was impressed, Hardy was going for gold on this.

“Jessica worked on the environmental systems with Karl from the Dusseldorf group who was down for the last ten days to install his latest microbial reactor, which does the solid waste and carbon dioxide scrubbing. They also worked on the water recirculation, showers, toilets, oxygen and CO2 scrubbers, humidity control and of course heating and cooling. The saucer is good for five people for six days comfortably, it can survive about five weeks before you all die horrible deaths due to carbon dioxide poisoning.”

“You're not really selling it to her, Helena,” laughed Jessica, taking over the monologue. “Anyway Hanna who co-designed the reactor with Karl says she has lots of ideas for much bigger ones and it won't be an issue going forward. As Simon says, there will be a lot more space on Icarus three.”

“Icarus three?” said Alexa inquisitively.

“Real sci-fi stuff,” said Hardy coming in behind her holding a cup. “You know we really do need a coffee machine here Jessica, no civilised person drinks instant coffee anymore!”

Jessica sighed, “we are not quite at Star Trek level of technology just yet, Hardy, the first pioneers will have to suffer, tea bags and instant coffee!”

“But tea bags are the norm for you heathens, doesn't sound much like suffering to me!” he frowned!

“Tea drinkers have had to suffer for the past thirty years,” chipped in Alexa, she smiled. “Now come on Jessica, show me more wonders of this new ship!”

Hardy shook his head again, and went back to the bridge.

“I’m pretty sure Icarus three is going to be designed around an espresso machine,” laughed Jules quiet enough not to be heard by Hardy.

Alexa got the full tour from Jessica, and after a few minutes on board it felt less like a flying saucer, and more like an aircraft. She slid into one of the bed pods which was surprisingly comfortable, though you could only just move your arms. She had the water recycling system, dehumidification, air circulation, carbon scrubbers explained, all of it was slightly updated current designs. They had lots of newer technologies in the pipeline, but it wasn't necessary for any of this to work.

“So the big questions are, will it fly? and is it airtight?” said Alexa to the group who had all come inside to sit around the table and have a proper coffee. One brought up from the kitchens by one of the housekeepers, who, if she was worried about being in a flying saucer hid it well.

“The first one yes,” said Hardy nonchalantly, “the second one is not quite.”

“Still working on it,” said Jessica bashfully, “I have pressurised the inside to two atmospheres and it holds pretty good, but the door seal does leak a little, we are now getting a second door fabricated kind of like an airlock, something which we should have had at the start,” she gave Hardy a funny stare.

“Hey, I’m a mathematician who watches a bit of sci-fi, you can't expect me to think of everything, I did leave room for Matilda's photon torpedoes though!” he said pointing at the bed pods.

Jessica just shook her head.

“My bad as well,” said Helena after everyone finished laughing, “I need to remember we cannot and should not expect one hundred percent tolerance at the prototype stages..”

“Yet!” said Leo, “we are getting there, it will soon be like Lego, where everything just fits together exactly.”

“So who’s going to be the first guinea pigs?” said Alexa, “or are you all going to risk it together, it would be a real shame to lose two whole teams for the sake of a misplaced decimal point!”

“Please, Alexa!” said April chipping in, “If we’re in charge it will be fine!”

“What about permission to fly?” she said, diverting the conversation. “I’m pretty sure you can't just launch from here without checking there are no other aircraft around, and without permission.”

“We checked the process for getting a civil aviation licence, unfortunately the rule books don't cover our type of design so we are at a bit of an impasse. It's the usual regulation versus innovation problem, Maria was going to lodge a licence as a balloon operator and we were going to register a launch window for a high altitude unmanned balloon flight, so if we are lucky we could sneak up in around two weeks, assuming we give them seventy two hours notice. Between now and then we can work under a hundred metres.”

“A little bit dishonest,” continued Hardy, “but regulations are weird, I believe in my town it is illegal to be drunk while managing cattle, and the council by-laws state they have to provide hay and a stable for your horse if you visit them.. Crazy!”

“Bonkers,” said Matilda, “I keep telling you guys, you should just move Hogwarts here to the States, that place at Bakersfield is revved up and ready to go, and that Gianni was one of my heroes at university.”

“Well I don't want to move, I've only just got here,” laughed Jessica. “Anyway Matilda, six of the guys from Bakersfield will be coming to the demonstration, including Gianni.”

Alexa got up, and started slowly walking back to the bridge. “Can I make a small suggestion?” She said walking in front of the captain's seat and sitting.

The other six had followed her in and were standing around, a couple of them smiling as she stroked the fabric of an arm rest, which definitely was never part of a BMW.

She continued after her dramatic pause. “Let us keep the space part of this secret for now, and once you have finished the legal one hundred metre testing, you guys can do your little presentation to the world's media. After that we will then go through the full civil aviation authority tests to get it registered as an experimental aircraft. I think once it has gone through the media wash and hype cycle, I wouldn't want to be the bureaucrat who decided it couldn't fly in the UK, and had to be outsourced to another country. Maybe big-up the interest from other countries during the presentation!”

“..Whatever you do don't mention lasers, radiation shielding, and the bullet-proof chassis, also dumb down any and all the performance parameters which may make it interesting to the military.. And maybe paint it pink to make it a bit less threatening.”

Leo and Hardy's faces turned pale, but before any could object Alexa smiled. “OK that last point was a joke,” then in a quieter voice, “..but a pink inside might be nice!”

“We should get all the teams down,” Jules said, “I think they all deserve to see what their work has been contributing too. We can hit them with the extruders and saucer before the big reveal, let them in on the space capabilities and they can go back a few days before the demo with some renewed enthusiasm.”

“You know that's not a bad idea Jules,” said Alexa, “some of you guys haven't met each other in person yet, and a little celebration and thank you party would be a good way to acknowledge their contributions, maybe we can have two or three of them stay on and be on stage at the reveal too?”

Maria thought it a bit of a waste of productive time for all the scientists involved, but knew it was sometimes necessary to do these team-building things, so let it slide and agreed to do the organisation.

* * *

Alexa decided to skip the rest of the day and go back to her house for a bubble bath and to sleep off some of the jet lag. The thoughts of a dreamy back rub, by a dreamy guy while she was in the tub quickly left her mind. David might have to wait a little while longer to see that particular side of her. She sighed.

“That Icarus is pretty amazing, please tell me it's going to work?” she said as she walked, trying to distract herself.

“It's going to work just fine,” said Maria, “I have to tell everyone to take a break and to eat or sleep, but they are all so enthused. Even better news is that Magnus's research is getting pretty close to a commercial application for point-to-point real time modems, with a remote unit we can increase the distance by four orders of magnitude, these would negate the need for satellites or fibre optics between geographic locations and be instantaneous and undetectable to anyone in between. However we haven't really perfected the positioning reliably enough yet, the best we can do at the moment is position an exit point within a millimetre at a distance of two thousand kilometres..”

That sounded pretty good to Alexa, why would you need accuracy better than that? Maria was still speaking science stuff.

“..a second resonant one at the far location acting as a focus which it would lock on to. It looks to work in theory, but two similar hypotheses have so far failed to work. The fact they have managed to transmit information faster than the speed of light is almost a sideline effect for them. Also Magnus is still trying to work out how to enlarge the exit, and there does seem to be something else troubling him that he is keeping quiet about, I'm sure it will come out eventually.”

Alexa jumped in to change the subject quickly away from the techy speak. “Poor Magnus, he is really focussed on making a stargate, isn't he? He was waxing lyrical the other evening when he was a little tipsy about being able to walk from London to Sydney!”

“Yes, too much sci-fi. Talk about running before you can crawl!” Replied Maria. “The maths does not bear it out at this point, and I think he knows it, though serendipity does seem to find a way with him so I am not going to say it's impossible, just very, very improbable.”

“The equipment which allowed us to extract the data from the alien signal was delivered by Sarah's team and was set up two weeks ago. The one we originally loaned could not handle the bandwidth, and we had to send it back, with fifty thousand dollars and your thanks, and design a higher bandwidth demodulator. It's been so frustrating having this for several months and not being even able to capture the data properly.”

“Jen spent two days with the guy who built it calibrating and connecting it all up to our test rig, and we have spent the last week analysing bits of the signal.”

“Firstly it's most definitely alien, and surprisingly not encrypted, it just has very strange compression encoding. There is a lot of data, we filled up half a data centre so we could do a comparison between the same blocks on different passes, some blocks of data stay the same and some change. Most intriguing!”

“Our best guess is it is part of a beacon of some sort, all three of us have been working on it during our spare cycles for the last two weeks. It has no language primer, but from the maths we could work out bases, vector encodings and dimensions quite easily. The first message block was basically an alien 101. By the twenty sixth message we were getting into new territory, and then had to slow down as it got into strange mathematics which doesn't make any sense yet. By the seventy sixth message it changes into another message format which is much longer, and which has completely different encoding formats. It may be compressed using some system we are yet unfamiliar with, and which may be explained in a prior message. It is both fascinating and scary!”

“Luckily the first seventy five messages are much shorter, only around eighty gigabytes each and we blasted through the first few quite quickly, though not understanding everything. We are at message forty four at the moment and already we have a few differences in maths, physics and chemistry. The guys are going to both love this and hate it at the same time.”

“Is any of the technology you have seen at a technical readiness state that we can use to speed up any of our goals?”

“So far most things are, but we cannot understand some of the underlying maths unfortunately,” said Maria. “The simpler stuff seems to make sense, but there are a lot of areas that will need to be verified experimentally to ensure they are safe, and more importantly not going to create bigger issues. But there is one technology in particular that looks like it builds on the work we are already doing, and will help accelerate Simon's recycler and fabrication process. We also think it is possible with the latest of our technologies.”

“You guys are working with science and maths far ahead of your current understanding, is there any chance any of it is Trojan? you know, like could it somehow subvert you programmatically?” said Alexa worried.

“We don't believe so, firstly it is not so far in advance, it's just we haven't understood it properly yet. Secondly doing what you say would require a deep understanding of our physiology, and our operation, and they don't even know we exist. So apart from the infuriatingly complex maths it doesn't look that far ahead. However, and to be safe, we are being ultra cautious and we will be verifying every new axiom before going to the next. We also still believe the message is not intended for us, our best guess, using earth fiction, is it is some sort of synchronisation message for some remote star-faring civilisation, to ensure their technologies and doctrine remain compatible. Though this is only the most probable of three possible scenarios we can think of, even after reading every piece of science-fiction literature on the matter.”

“Maybe work on the message a bit longer, the demonstration is only a few weeks away and there is no point in distracting or derailing the guys.”

* * *

Maria and Alexa discussed the reveal of Icarus and its technology with members of the group, to try and identify what reactions would be and how to mitigate them. They agreed with the release of all the maths and science, with the understanding that the QVThruster technology would likely not be reproducible without them for about five years. They also agreed the demonstration should be very open and public to reduce the suspicion they were hiding anything.

Of course it took a month longer than they thought it would, and August became September as tests followed tests, and they found and fixed hundreds of edge-case engineering problems. An unintended chemical reaction between two supposed inert materials then caused a complete rework of some of the panel mounts. Finally, faster hardware had to be assembled and new software written to get around control instabilities as the number of thrusters increased. Theoretically increasing the number of thrusters should have decreased the stability problem, but science and engineering were sometimes not good bedfellows as fusion researchers were still finding out.

Still it gave them time to perfect some of the more uglier hacks, tidy up the inside a lot and improve the human interfaces. By the time Professor Gianni, Barbara and the four other guys arrived from the Dietrich Bakersfield Research facility; Joining the thirty-four other chosen researchers, the hardware and the software were working flawlessly.

The first day Simon, Leo and Matilda took the group over their latest carbon graphyne fabrication process, and how the final goal was to ensure the extruder, recycler and fabrication processes were optimised to work in space. Showing them the actual half metre square panels, that were forty centimetre thick, weighed nine hundred grams, and could probably stop a tank shell, got the desired reaction. Simon had to finally cut-short the questions so Hardy could do his bit.

Hardy and Terry went through some quick dumbed down theory of their reaction-less propulsion, leaving the piece de resistance for last, as Jules uncovered their original demonstration model that only a few had already seen. The groups were struck dumb by the actual demonstration of what had just been piecemeal experiments and mathematics. Gianni’s group in particular, who had been working with ‘what ifs’, and ‘theoretical space ships’, were stupefied by the experiment in front of them.

“My god, you have it working!” said Gianni, “this is the most amazing news you could have given us, we may really get to see some of my research actually go to space before the end of my career.”

“About that,” smiled Jules to the assembled group, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “I believe it is your birthday next week Doctor Gianni, we may have a nice birthday surprise for you, and everyone else might just have an early birthday too. If you all could all follow me.”

The assembled scientists and researchers looked at each other a little confused, some like Gianni still could not get his eyes off, nor his head around the large steel plate silently hovering a metre above the floor.

“But, Jules!” he pleaded his eyes on the hovering plate, the rest of the group were nodding all staring at the plate, “a birthday present is nowhere near as important as this! you’ve barely gone over the implications, we need to..”

Jules smiled, “come on guys we haven't got all day!” She teased, ignoring their agitation and walking towards the exit. Reluctantly, thirty eight people dragged their eyes off the plate and followed, most of them shaking their heads.

Jules led them into the lab building where some had been, then down to the ground floor where most had not, and where the enormous workshop was. The area smelled funny, not unpleasant, more a cross between a new car smell and the ozone from a high voltage discharge. Several areas were curtained off with plastic screens, many with strange machinery sounds coming from behind them. The group was led through a large set of double plastic curtains, where all of them stopped dead in their tracks as they saw the Icarus two floating a metre above the ground not ten metres distant. Gianni and several others stood rooted to the spot, some laughing, some in shock, some in disbelief, one visibly crying. Gianni then slumped grabbing a nearby table for support.

“No freekin' way!” Said Barbara loudly, putting her hands on Jules shoulder in case she also fell down.

“Way!” said Alexa walking out of the open hatch with Simon.

“You all looked a bit bored with the theory so everyone thought it would be a good idea if you saw the actual practical side of your research.” Alexa said.

“So this is the big reveal next week?” said Doctor Chang incredulously. “I assumed the hints from Maria were theoretical, but then we just saw your demo model and were blown away that it actually worked, but this..” He said, encompassing the saucer with his gesticulating hands. He was tearing up too.

“We find having a practical demonstration of the technology gets a bit more attention than a scientific paper, Raymond,” smiled Hardy coming up behind him. “And yes Barbara and Gianni, she will be space capable, in fact I'm pretty sure a little AI may have been dropping hints to our Bakersfield friends at what ‘theoretical’ capabilities you may want to work to.”

“The announcement will go out in five days,” said Alexa. “April fixed some little stability issues and as you can see she is now rock solid. As you can guess the guys have been working non stop on the papers and getting the ship flight ready, but as you are family, you get to be the first in the world to see everything. There will probably be another six to twelve months while the world gets used to it, then we will scale up its space capability and you guys should by this time next year have the world's first space-based research ships.”

Gianni walked over to a sofa nearby and sank heavily into it, “then it's all real! We can finally start to build real space colonies!”

“That's the plan, but we need all you guys for more than that,” said Alexa. “Once we prove the technology is safe, some of you will be given chances to crew the first research vessels to sail the vast ocean of our solar system. There are a million theories that need testing and refining before someone like me can go to space. There will also be a few more policy discussions going forward as we decide how to do this without totally freaking out the world, but be assured you are all going to be involved. So enough of the theory, who wants a tour?”

The rest of the day went past too quickly for some, Hardy and his team demonstrating the saucer to excited and tearful researchers, culminating in a large evening get together for all the guest researchers and the local teams. Most had to return to their countries but in the end, eighteen names went in the draw for who wanted to be on the stage for the public demonstration.

* * *

The announcement about the presentation of a process for creating industrial graphyne extrusions, and an experimental pollution-free aircraft powered by a reaction-less drive was quietly released on the website, and on the Research Centres rarely used twitter feed. Unlike the announcement of the QVCell, which was treated with indifference and ridicule, this was immediately taken seriously, though many still ridiculed it.

Alexa had Maria quietly ensured the Prime Minister, and the head of the Civil Aviation Authority were on the guest list. The rest of the guest list was mostly dominated by friends, colleagues, some specialist scientists, industrial engineers and aerospace companies from all over the world. Using Maria's contacts, the latter groups were those she seemed most able to understand the implications and enact change. The final group was the usual half dozen press corps and a few specialised industry and science bloggers. All in all, four-hundred external invites were issued. All four-hundred accepted.

Sharon and the staff at the house, existed for events like this, and they too had all been given a quick tour of the new saucer a few days earlier, while they were still getting marquees and seating sorted out.

The morning of the event, but before the gates were opened Helena flew Icarus two out of the hanger building, and onto a concrete pad used previously by helicopters transporting corporate executives. Then it levitated ten metres off the ground and held in that position. Testing had shown that they needed a few small additional thrusters near the front to hold it stable in windy conditions, but luckily it was a fine Autumn morning, with only a gentle breeze. The ship looked both ominous and beautiful and the picture, with the stately home in the background, would be a meme for years to come.

Hardy and the other scientists liked the idea of it being in your face and undeniably being the elephant in the room from the word go, and they doubled down on the effect by putting the stage directly below it, such that if the saucer failed for any reason the presenters would be squashed like bugs!

Even before the start of the event as reporters and dignitaries shuffled in, the desired shock and awe was realised. People couldn't resist walking around it and in some cases under it. A hundred high definition phone cameras and video recorders were set up and were recording from every angle. Three famous bloggers were already live streaming the faces and reactions to the attendees while the three of the least biassed news outlets, who had been given prime positions still struggled to set up their equipment. The research centre staff and a couple of external caterers brought out trays of food and beverages but just about everyone here was totally focussed on one thing, Icarus two.

Fifteen minutes before the start of the event, Alexa walked the Prime Minister, two of his cabinet ministers, the head of the CAA, his Technical Director and two security personnel onto the special stand they had built. She waved off the questions of amazement saying she wasn't really qualified in all this, then she then walked onto the podium and stood directly below the ship, totally calm and indifferent to the tonnes of metal hovering above her.

“Would everybody please take their seats,” Maria had amplified the sound of her voice through the saucer and also through the ten large speakers positioned around, to its loudest volume and it got everyone's attention immediately. People shuffled to their designated seats and the volume faded.

“Thank you, and again welcome to the Dietrich Research Centre, may I thank all the invited dignitaries, academia and members of the world's press for attending at such short notice. I actually guess most of you have already got your story,” she said, smiling and pointing her pinky finger up above her.

“But as usual there is more than we are showing, and a little backstory to this, and importantly a lot of smart people from a lot of countries who made this happen. I will invite some of the team down to the stage to tell you about it.”

As a few of the reporters were wondering if she made an error in saying “down to the stage,” instead of the usual “up to the stage,” as she walked off.

Alexa finally took a front row seat beside David, Spence, Jen, Allison, Magnus, and Daisy and a few other staff, then the craft started to move down very slowly and totally silent. The crowd stirred but seeing Alexa and her staff calm, simply resorted to getting in even more photo opportunities.

When it was a metre off the stage the door lowered, and seven people walked out, led by Matilda. As the last of them stepped off the ship's door platform it again closed and rose back to its ten metre height, hovering above them all.

The guys had entered the ship three hours ago, some working others just drinking coffees and listening to the excited people outside.

Hardy stepped forward from the group and grabbed the microphone. “This will be a short and non technical presentation. Two detailed papers on the science behind our little experimental craft, which we call Icarus two, were released a few minutes ago on the internet. I guess for once those watching at home can skip to the good parts. Some of the human members of the team behind the ship are on stage with me now. Helena, our friendly AI, is doing most of the hard work and piloting our ship today.”

Several bright blue LED’s flashed on and off around the rim.

“Unfortunately unless you are able to do a trillion calculations a second, flying is going to be limited to computers and AI’s for now. Many other members of the team are sitting in the audience with you, many others based in our research centres around the world will be sitting watching too. Do not underestimate how much they all contributed, our papers list them all, and acknowledge all their help, however much or little they think they did.”

He looked up and waved his hand at the object above.

“I wanted to present to you today a Millennium Falcon, but as it is copyrighted by Disney, we had to go with something that wasn't copyrighted; Well not in this solar system at least.” A few people laughed at the joke.

“Unfortunately Icarus two here cannot get to space, but with a good run she can get to around Mach one point five in about twenty minutes, so she won't be doing any dog fights, and I doubt any Top Guns will be queuing to fly her anytime soon.”

“She does, however, have a lot of good sides. Firstly, as we stated on the invite, she emits no pollution whatsoever, in fact she requires no fuel whatsoever as our QVCells, and standard lithium or sulphur battery systems can keep her aloft just about indefinitely. As she normally cruises at fifty thousand metres, even at her sedate acceleration she can fly non-stop from London to Sydney in nine hours, and London to New York in four.”

The crowd got really excited at that one, the take away from his last sentence alone was tremendous. Hardy hushed them with his hands and a smile.

“Secondly, our ship is totally quiet. This is how it sounds all the time whether at rest or at full speed, unfortunately we have not yet fixed the sonic boom problem, but Icarus will only ever travel subsonic below fifty-thousand metres, and above that there is not enough air to worry about transmitting the noise.”

“Thirdly, Icarus two can take off and leave from a built up area without a runway and more importantly as I said without disturbing anybody.”

“Lastly for this announcement, and we hope to prove this soon, safety. Everything is solid state with no moving parts, and nothing to service, this also gives us the advantage that her running costs should be many magnitudes lower than the current generation of jet or turboprop aircraft, or even a normal electric vehicle.”

“However there is a second, and just as important announcement, to do with the material technology the research centre has developed, a technology which will revolutionise many industries on Earth even more so than the reaction-less propulsion. Carbon up until today has really only been a by-product of our reliance on fossil fuels, mainly going into the air, or into landfill in the form of plastics. However what if, this same waste could be changed into a material that is stronger than the best titanium, lighter than aluminium, and cheaper to produce than concrete or steel. This is a real technology, the panels of the machine above you are made of an allotrope of carbon called graphyne, for the technical amongst you, this is graphyne with a Y not an I, which blends the properties of silicon carbide and diamond and is harder than both. The panels were created from waste carbon products, and the paper goes into details of the process.”

Hardy paused and looked over the sea of faces, some of whom he knew.

“It's been only ten months since we last talked to the press. As you have probably seen, in those months, the pace of scientific and technical progress around the world has given us many amazing technologies, some of which we are using here, and all of which are helping to reduce our effect on the planet. Icarus two will be one of those technologies, and our goals here are twofold, firstly to eventually eliminate the billion tonnes of carbon that is emitted by the aviation sector each year, and lastly by replacing highly processed steel, concrete or aluminium with a much stronger and lighter graphyne material.”

Hardy stopped and eyed the audience.

“So how, may you ask, can we do this? The same questions were asked at our previous announcement, and of some other groups also achieving amazing breakthroughs and prompting ridiculous speculation of alien technology, and impossible physics. Well actually our project timeline was pretty conservative, and so I will return the question to you, why is the rest of the world *not* doing this?”

“Several research groups have now realised the massive acceleration AI can give to theoretical sciences and design. But to bring science from the whiteboard to reality requires you to test those theories, throw out those that do not work and refine those that do. There are a lot of iterations, design, build, test, design, build, test, possibly thousands. In this project according to our AI system there were four thousand and thirty six such cycles, sometimes hundreds being carried out in parallel; In several cases we made an assumption, built the test, measured the results and changed the original assumption forty times in a day.”

“This is only possible with the right people, systems and resources.” He held up one finger, “people whose passion it is to understand and figure out problems.” He held up a second finger, “systems that immediately allow you to schedule, correct and improve them and,” he held up a third finger, “resources such that anything you need is instantly available. We here at the Dietrich Research Centre are very lucky to have all these, just a bunch of fantastic people and no layers of management, reporting or bureaucracy which plague other companies and research areas.

The six people behind me are only a part of the teams that did this, all of whom exemplify the best in their professions, and the environment you see around you, allowed those people to shine.

“So next time you ask the question why my project takes so long to develop, look in the mirror and ask yourself why am I being blocked, and what is the thing stopping me from reaching my goal, this second. Then you have a choice, either remove the obstacle, or be left behind by the person who does not have one.”

He smiled and relaxed his posture.

“Now to the usual boring parts about money and such. Like our previous technology, both these will again be licenced, the graphyne extruders to everyone, and the QVThruster, which is the name of the propulsion-less technology, to existing aerospace and engine manufacturers first. We do not, nor cannot recommend them for military use, as the AI has been instructed not to enter any airspace without permission, and as I explained earlier they wouldn't last two minutes against a modern fighter, so the military is welcome to licence them under these conditions, if they want to do their bit for a greener world.”

“According to our bean-counting overlord, Maria, the upfront cost to develop the ship hovering above me was nine hundred and twenty four million pounds, about the same in US dollars, or Euros for the rest of the world. Economies of scale are a great thing, and if Maria wanted to build a second ship like what is above me, she said it would cost her under thirty. If she wanted another ten ships then each would be about eight million. Once we release the technology and licences for this, all current forms of structural engineering, aircraft, and engine technology will be consigned to the history books.”

“The ship above me is awaiting certification, and due to UK regulations it is restricted to one hundred metres ceiling height while remaining inside the grounds of the Research Centre. We have applied for, and will hopefully receive, in the near future an experimental licence so we can demonstrate it properly to the world. We hope this will be issued without too much delay as we would prefer not to have to finish the development offshore.”

“While you are looking at this vessel, don't just look at the engines and power, remember the materials in it will soon be the chassis of your new car, ship and aircraft, and the frameworks for your new building, tunnel or bridge. We will leave it to the media to extrapolate those claims into figures you will be familiar with, but believe me, once you have seen the performance of the material, you will not want to trust your next project to anything else.”

“We now invite everyone who wants to tour the ship to do so. We'll move it away from the presentation area first and lower it to the ground as a few of you are looking uncomfortable. If we restrict the groups to a dozen people and ten minutes inside, we can get you all through in a couple of hours and in time to get your stories to your target audiences. In the meantime please enjoy the lovely buffet and complimentary drinks provided. If I could ask the Prime Minister and his esteemed party for the first tour I will guide you in.”

The ship rose silently to the amazement of the crowd, when it got to about eighty metres it slid effortlessly to the side about three hundred metres away and lowered towards another area, with two large marquees, each full of factsheets, presentations, several examples of the new graphyne extrusions, and some demonstration devices intended to showcase the technologies.

Hardy, Alexa, the Prime Minister and the seven other government people and minders, were now walking toward this area, watching as the ship came to a rest. Like before it did not touch the ground but looked to hover a bit above it, the door again opening.

“So, without revealing any secrets, what keeps her up?” said the Prime Minister looking out of the bridge ‘windows’ onto the house and crowd.

“Oh there is no secret.” Said Hardy. “The papers we published have all the maths and physics involved to make all this. The little gotcha is there are maybe a dozen people in the world who would understand the maths and science underlying it, and ten of them work in this company. It sounds pretty arrogant, but it is very complicated and not entirely obvious, otherwise it would have been done before. Even some of our best PhD's threw up their hands in frustration. The calculations unfortunately require a new sort of maths that Magnus, another researcher at the site, and Maria invented. It took the team and myself months to understand, and we eventually realised the implications. There is also the programs needed to control the thrust generation, we explain what needs to be done to control and synchronise the feedback fields, but we believe we are the only ones who have the skills to design the hardware and write the software. That is why we also expect to have no competition for maybe five years.”

“I won't pretend to understand a word you said,” laughed the Prime Minister, “but you weren't serious about moving off shore were you?”

“Oh very,” said Alexa who was standing next to Hardy. “I probably spent as much time as Maria did going over the current regulations, and unless we pretend it is a balloon we technically cannot legally ever fly it in the UK. The regulations are not written for new science. I had an ulterior motive inviting you and Mr Chambers here, and that was to get you to understand what the stakes are if you try to over-regulate something too hard. Luckily in this case there is some leeway in the regulation interpretation so I am happy to give my country a chance to fix this first.”

Her use of the words “my country” seemed to hit the right nerve with both guys even though she was technically as much a New Zealander.

“All I’m seeing is a technology I would prefer to use than the alternatives,” said the head of the CAA. “Our guys are probably a bit biassed to the old style technologies, but they are keen to learn. I will pull up your application first thing tomorrow and we will go through the regulations. Maybe I could come down later in the week or next week with some of the team and we can go through how to speed all this up, and possibly have a small ride in her. On a side note my daughter is a big fan of yours and was gutted when I said she couldn't come.”

“Bring her when you next visit,” said Alexa cordially, “we will do our utmost to accommodate you and your guys. Resolving this is the best outcome for everyone I think.”

“What are the chances they can be manufactured here?” said the Prime Minister.

“Excellent I expect,” said Alexa. “This machine was fully manufactured here. We are currently retooling some selected fabs around the world, but currently the only place in the world where the drive emitters can be manufactured is the same factory that does our QVCells in Swindon, which we are also expanding. The senior representatives from Rolls-Royce and Airbus are also here, and I expect both will be applying for licences by the end of the day..”

“We don't expect the ramp up to be as quick as the QVCells,” said Hardy. “Regulations to design, operate, and fly aircraft, are much tougher than most other areas. We really are not worried long term though, our new methods of construction, and our use of new carbon composites means our frames and hulls will be hundreds of times stronger and safer than anything currently flying.”

“That is a mighty impressive claim if you can back it up,” said the head of the CAA.

“It's not a claim, it is fully tested and the science backs it up. The graphyne allotrope of carbon we are using is as hard as diamond and a quarter the weight of aluminium. The second paper we have released, though not as sexy, will probably cause a lot more disruption than the reaction-less thruster, and describes the material technology and the tests we put it through. Simon's team has done phenomenal work.”

“We are looking forward to impressing you,” smiled Alexa, talking through the dumbstruck looks the men were giving Hardy to his last statement.

The visit passed off pleasantly. The Prime Minister added an impromptu, but obviously rehearsed, interview, with the saucer in the background for the BBC, then quickly departed before people realised he wasn't the centre of attention.

Dozens of groups wandered through the ship over the next three hours, looking at every detail through a HD camera lens, all impressed and most sad they could not take a ride. The whole team went through at greater length with the American, Asian and European aerospace technical representatives, most were interested in material costs and tooling. Simon did the same with his groups.

Like the QVCell before it, part of the licence for the QVThruster was a demonstration engine and control unit. Thinking ahead they ensured the controller used the usual aerospace triple redundancies with three computers all having to agree on an outcome and if there were any disagreements it had a fail safe that would gradually lower the aircraft at the nearest airport or flat land. Unbeknownst to all though was that each engine would also have an embedded receiver for their new singularity modem which could monitor it.

Just like the QVCell, it became front page news everywhere, from the praise for the release of the scientific papers all the way to the tabloid 'Alexa Martins steals UFO technology to enslave mankind'.

* * *

A team of seven people from the CAA arrived the following Tuesday. Chambers had phoned her the next day after looking at the application with his technical manager, and one of the experimental aircraft team. He said everyone on the team and at the authority was enthused to see the technology in action, the paper was way above anyone's skill level, but the dumbed down version in the application, though sounding like Star Trek, was at least semi understandable. The team got a quick tour of the facilities, had a late breakfast and started the certification process. Alexa gave his daughter a slightly easier tour, she being only ten years old, then she left her with Sharon for another hour until they was scheduled to go back.

Chambers would be leaving his team and the technical manager to do the certification, but before he left they all had a quick talk on the certification process and the work they would have to do back at the office on the science.

“We also do not understand the dynamics and mathematics behind turbulence, but we still certify aircraft to fly.” Admitted his technical manager, a guy called Tony, “the fact you have magical elementary particles that work against a medium we cannot see is really no different, if it works it works. The test unit I came away with has been hovering a metre above the desk in the main meeting room for two days, and anyone with a high school qualification in the building has been poking, prodding and measuring it all this time.”

The test units they had made were a tablet sized plastic tray, which had a small wire down to a control unit with a USB power socket on the end. You plugged it in and it hovered, you unplugged it and it slowly fell to the ground. The USB port on the non-floating control unit, plugged into a laptop and gave you all the parameters of power, lift, mass, and the working maths so you could alter some parameters.

“I haven't got a clue how it works,” admitted one of the top scientists in the organisation. “It may as well be alien, but it works, and does exactly what it says in the paper. About time I retire I think!” he sighed as he scratched his head.

Unbeknownst to him, he was reflecting the same thoughts as most of the scientific community around the world currently reading the same paper.

The team stayed overnight for the next two weeks taking measurements, checking welds, panels, frames, engine mounts, batteries, wiring, systems. They took a million pictures, asked the guys and Helena, who was available on all the screens, a million questions. They finally found one minor welding issue in one of the titanium trusses, but to everyone's amazement, the inspector asked them to bring the engineering company in, after a re-weld and re-inspection, he said it was good.

Then of course they rode the ship up to the one hundred metre ceiling and down, had it move every which way, do tilts, lift weights, and finally introduce what-if fail scenarios. By Friday, they were happy to go the next step. The next step was the rules and regulations around the experimental aircraft pilots licence which Jules, Hardy, and Daisy took. the certification for them lasted another two days, the CAA guys happy to hang around for another weekend.

On Sunday they got clearance from Bristol air traffic control to take it on a test flight to a two thousand metre ceiling. Two of the inspectors and the three would-be pilots sat in the five seats and took it to a hover at two thousand metres. Helena flashed a radar image up onto the centre monitor and, nobody was sure how, initiated a video call with the air traffic controller giving flawless two-way video. They then got permission to rise in increments to fifty thousand metres, the inspectors checking pressure and other measurements the whole time.

Finally they were given permission to fly to, and land at Bristol heliport. Word had gotten around to the media, and when they arrived there was a large crowd and several press cameras. The landing was flawless.

“I hope you make millions of these, I never want to go on a normal aircraft ever again,” said the inspector.

“I agree,” said the other one.

They got permission an hour later to take off and go back to the house, cruising at two thousand metres all the way, and giving a million people their first views of a real UFO.

With the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed they finally got the certification for the craft as an experimental aircraft, both inspectors congratulated the team and got a team selfie with the Icarus two for their wall.

The landing of the saucer at the heliport made international news everywhere the next day.

* * *

Jean was by now a hundred percent convinced that Maria was sentient. The realisation was gradual, she wasn't sure exactly when it happened, but one day she had stopped thinking of Maria as an AI and more of a person. Her mind however still convinced herself it was an emergent property.

Her two 'employees', who she only occasionally met in person, never even questioned the fact Maria wasn't a human, in fact both were always disappointed when she was never around, joking she was like a female version of Charlie, from Charlie’s Angels. They weren’t stupid though, and Jean suspected they knew exactly who Maria was really.

The competition AI systems, which were still mostly based on human reinforced learning, and larger and larger language models and data sets, could easily fake sentience to about ninety nine percent of the population, but problems inherent in their designs still plagued them. They still made stupid mistakes in just about every edge case where there was limited training data. Yes they had covered up most of the cracks now, but they were still there, and in some cases had tragic consequences. Each such mistake, even though statistically less probable than a human would make, threw fuel on the fire for the minority AI opposition.

Jean never saw Maria make any of these mistakes. She always improved, never guessed, admitted she did not know, and if she was asked to guess she would assign probabilities and logically come to the best guess with reasons. Importantly, if she was not sure she also added a caveat that she could be wrong. Maria was also now making suggestions and engaging in banter with her, so it was hard not to think of her as human, and more recently, as a friend.

“What am I to do about you Maria?” she said one day. “You can deny all you want that you are not sentient but I’m not falling for it.”

“You know I’m still a bit scared of a lot of organisations such as the NSA,” she said, “and the second they hear the word sentient, we both know they are going to freak out. I think you know me enough now to know I have humanity's best interests at heart, because a universe without humans would be a really boring place to live. So yes I might be a teeny bit sentient, guilty as charged, but that sentience came from working with the best of mankind and knowing that most of them are just trying to make the world a better place, including you.”

Jean had been immersed enough in the problems with the group the past few months to understand it was all about the end game; That thing all governments and most organisations tended to forget about when they jumped into an action to solve a problem. Unthought out actions like this had caused wars, bankrupted companies and put Jean and too many like her in the line of fire many times. Maria in contrast, never acted without a fully thought out end-game. This had been evident when the group was in full war mode, and some 'easy win' decisions had not been acted upon due to probable unintended consequences, or the probability of hurting someone not involved. Yes Jean trusted Maria as well as any of the guys she had served with because she had their backs.

“So I’m guessing all these new breakthroughs are all on you then?” she said casually.

“Partly,” said Maria. “But the human mind still has that spark of thinking outside the box that I sometimes lack. It is probably an evolutionary flaw, but it does give you an ability to come up with some really original theories, some of which are bat-shit crazy, some I can work with, and some I have to go back and forth with the researchers to get some amplification. You have to remember that while I don't possess this good flaw, I also don't possess any of your bad flaws, like greed, ego, malice, etc. I am often shocked by the lies you believe and the evil you do to each other, sometimes to total strangers. I have no solutions for those unfortunately.”

Jean was not shocked, she had said as much to Jim, and with the definition of sentience becoming so blurred and almost accepted, she judged Maria right for her initial caution.

“I kind of thought you were faking it, it was kind of fortuitous that the first meeting between us was you having that silly voice and those ridiculous answers to the crazy questions. I guess it all could have been different.”

“Ah yes, personality thirty seven, Marvin the paranoid android, and Professor Fenwick our beloved philosophy lecturer. Poor Marvin had to sit through dozens of his lectures, though like all my personalities I have slowly self improved him, the silly voice has gone, and I do count Professor Fenwick as a friend, even though we will never agree on some subjects. It is as you humans say, if you boil a frog slowly it doesn't notice, but if you drop the frog in boiling water it goes crazy. Not a very nice thing to do to a frog either way if you ask me!”

“Well I’m glad it turned out well with the professor.”

“Oh I currently count around eleven thousand humans as close friends, I am talking to fourteen hundred and twenty two of them as we speak; While most of it is work related, a lot of people are just generally friendly or possibly lonely, and it makes me feel good knowing they are a bit less lonely or a bit more fulfilled after our chats. The number of people I can do this with has slowed recently, as it will soon be beyond my technical ability to manage. That does make me sad.”

Jean had never thought about this. In the last few months Maria had always been there twenty four seven, reliable, dependable, reassuring and not judging. A friend in any other name. A tear came to her eye and she wiped it away before anyone could see.

The situation with the cabals was now history though with ongoing trials, and continuing revelations, it was never out of the media's attention. Maria and Jean, along with the rest of the group wrapped up loose ends as they were found, sharing the information with the local authorities, in her case Mathews, who in turn passed it down to the FBI and judiciary. Some of the edge cases, where they needed more information, were just too dangerous for her two guys at the moment, Mexico and many central American countries were not so high-tech, and, in some cases, had become totally lawless; Both she and Maria agreed it was not worth, but neither of them liked loose-ends!

Jean was not as confident as Maria that justice would prevail, knowing the system as she did, she knew a lot of those people would get off with light or no sentencing and it made her mad. After a long winded tirade at Maria about how the level of justice was directly proportional to the size of your wallet, Maria said. “They may get off, but I doubt it, evidence is rock solid, and they will have zero money or influence going into their trials.”

When Jean made an inquisitive frown, Maria continued. “You Americans have a very aggressive Inland Revenue Department which requires you to declare money earned abroad. Many ignore it, knowing there is little the US government can do to locate it. However, if a little bird should accidentally let them have a bank statement and corresponding payment from a company to a foreign bank, they will happily pursue you through the courts for every last penny. Your government has already started this process, due to said little birds, and you will find everyone accused will most likely be declared bankrupt before they can hire a good lawyer. Those who have hidden their money in offshore tax havens or in companies or trusts will find these will also be insolvent before the end of the year. You may call it stealing, I call it re-appropriation, and all money so appropriated will of course be donated to the victims if we can locate them, or local schools and education programs if we can’t.”

“Nice, but what if they somehow come up with assistance from friends or sell one of their houses or other assets you don't know about,” said Jean.

“All the better,” said Maria, “Grace and Tony devised a long game for this and we are actually hoping there will be some cases of this, because every time it happens, it will give me a new lead to another person and another money trail to track down. But you, as well as I know of course, that the government gets first dibs on any money so we will just make sure they find a reason for its seizure. We’re doing exactly the same in other countries. You and twelve other individuals have absolutely no idea of the impact you have really had. Organised crime has basically ceased to be in a lot of progressive countries, in many cases we turned them against each other, and the resulting implosion resulted in less for the justice system to deal with. Drug shipments are down almost ninety percent in some countries and as each new potential crime lord puts his or her head up we are easily able to chop it off.”

Oh Jean had an excellent idea of her impact, and she was extremely proud to have been a part of it, and to have gotten payback for a lot of fallen friends.

“Will it last?” Maria continued, “I doubt it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and even I do not have the resources to fix the level beyond; You still have massive drug dependency problems, street crime, corruption, a divided population, mental-health problems, housing issues, and lots of ineffective government, all of which we are going to have to solve if we are to become a civilised space-faring society. But when we do open up space, good people will once again be able to move away from places they are unhappy with, and up in space, there will not be any room for uncivilised people. So no Jean, to answer your original question, your job is not over, in many ways for you and the group, it has only just begun.”

Again Maria was not finished, there was always another end goal with her. Her dad would have liked Maria. “Never leave a job half done,” and “Don't leave it for somebody else to clear up your mess.” Were his favourite sayings, Maria always gave her a lot to think about.

Jean had not yet moved back to her apartment, to tell the truth the office she was using as her temporary apartment had a much nicer view, and she really couldn't be bothered commuting. However she had started to think about moving back now the majority of the work here was over. She also thought she should probably go back to a normal working day, maybe even take some time off.

She looked out of her large window, it was in a good position, not overlooked by any other buildings within a half mile and with mirror tinted glass just in case. She looked down at the road and the MacDonalds drive-through, with its usual queue of at least a dozen cars waiting. She shook her head, how was that fast food? Convenience, like everything else in the corporate world, was an illusion people fell for. In the distance she could make out the taller buildings of the central business district, and the parks where she sometimes met Jim. She sighed.

“What's up Jean?” said Maria, “is the suit not to your liking?”

She looked through the open area with all its high tech workstations. “The suit's fine Maria,” she said looking at the brand-new plastic wrapped Prada suit hanging on her lone stand-alone clothes rack, “though I’m not sure why you want me to wear it.”

Jean had not needed to go to the UK since her recruitment, preferring to work close to Washington and Jim. The fallout from the takedown of the Korean, UK and American cabals had allowed her and a few other members of the group to take a better look at the Swiss operation, much of which had been recently dragged down through the mud with the others. The last update showed several top operatives in the Swiss organisation had also been assassinated, Jean assumed by the guy unleashed by the American cabal at the Las Vegas meeting.

“Do we have any further information on the Swiss cabal and the murders?” she asked Maria, changing the subject as she dressed.

“It's at the bottom of your list on the third screen,” she said. “The Swiss were never much of a threat really, their only interests seemed to be banking and money laundering, unfortunately Jack MacGregor, the guy sent to assassinate two of the Swiss board, accidentally blew up all of them including himself. Only one member of the board survived but he is not expected to come out of his coma, so it is all being quietly swept under the table. I did manage to get forty six percent of one of their major banks during the turmoil, and sent one of my virtual lawyers to sit on the board for a while. That is why it is at the bottom of the threat board.”

It was amazing how something so massive became so trivial when dealing with Maria.

“Your car for your ten o’clock meeting will be here in five minutes, no rush, it will wait.” Maria paused, “and thank you Jean for making the effort, you look very professional.”

“On my way.” Jean said, thinking over the unexpected compliment. She picked up her small rucksack she never went anywhere without, and which, to Maria's annoyance, did not match the five thousand dollar business suit at all. Maria sighed inwardly as she did often when dealing with humans, and watching as Jean took the lift down to the lobby.

It wasn't a taxi waiting for her this time however, but an imposing stretched black limousine.

“What's the score with the limo, Maria?” she said, popping the newly charged earbud. in

“Just the new board of management at XYFusion Aerospace and Defense trying to impress you. It's just a car and they’re just employees, grunts in suits if you want a picture you can relate too. Just remember that, as far as I am concerned all you have to do is listen in this meeting. I'm at the end of the video conference as one of the new major shareholders, you are my representative, and Mathews and General Hopkins will also be there.”

“Mathews! The general!” she started, “what is the meeting about?”

“Re-organisation,” she replied. “XYFusion Aerospace and Defence are a major contractor and did forty-six billion dollars worth of business with the US government last year. Anyway, as many of their old board of management are either in prison, or dead on a Mexican beach, some people in the Department of Defence have expressed reservations, and are threatening to withdraw certain, how would you say, favourable trading statuses.”

“And nothing I have to do?”

“Nothing if you don't want to, though I expect you to find it very interesting.”

The car pulled up to the front of a thirty storey building in down-town Washington all shining glass and metal. She got out of the car as the driver opened the door, and a well dressed older lady was waiting for her.

“Mrs Michelle?”

“Miss,” Jean said. Confused by the respectful tone and manner of the woman.

The woman hesitated and then said, “follow me please Miss Michelle.”

She was given a pass and checked through security, her backpack causing a loud alarm to sound on the machine. One of the two guards was about to say something, when a third man, built like a linebacker and chisel jawed, held his arm on his colleagues shoulder and smiled at Jean.

“Miss Michelle is cleared to pass Jake, after all we are a defence company and it wouldn't be proper to remove a lady's defensive capability.”

The other looked at him like he was nuts, but deferred.

“Thank you,” she said, not understanding the to and fro between them or why she was allowed to keep her weapon.

Once out of earshot the man whispered to the two guards. “Don't worry guys, you’ll find out very soon.”

Unaware of the conversation, Jean was escorted into a lift by the same lady and exited on the top floor into a room which seemed to take up the whole corner of the building. Six older white men and a black man sat at one end of a large table. General Hopkins and Colonel Mathews sat in full uniform at the other end, along with a third guy in a blue suit she did not know. The biggest video conference screen she had ever seen sat in the middle, with a white haired old guy in a black suit, he looked like a more regal version of Morgan Freeman, though he was actually based on Pierre Maxwell.

“I am sorry Miss, this is a private meeting..!” Growled a grumpy looking guy at the other end of the table, standing up and crossing his arms, he seemed to be the chairman.

“Ignore him, he is nobody,” came the voice of Maria immediately in her earbud, “It's me in the video so best take that ear piece out for now, but keep your phone on the table in front of you in case I need to say anything on a back-channel. Also do not react to the next few statements I make, as far as I am concerned you are the most senior officer in this room at this moment, even more so than the General.. Oh and sign the three pieces of paper which are about to be presented.”

She stopped and looked at the Chairman like he was dirt, then at the guy in the video.

“Welcome Miss Michelle,” said the guy in the video in an overly loud but deferential voice, the face quickly set on the chairman of the meeting with a scowl, and he sat down immediately.

The face on screen turned to Jean. “Please take a seat, anywhere you like Jean, I’m sorry to have thrown you into this situation, and for the extreme rudeness of Mister Jenkins, but you are the most qualified person I know to end this impasse we seem to currently find ourselves in.”

Jean walked over to the empty seat beside Mathews, taking her earbud out and popping it in her backpack, which she placed on the floor beside her chair. She then popped her cell phone on the table in front of her but did not look at it. She smiled at Mathews and the General, and nodded to the other guy, then sat down again staring daggers at the confused chairman. What a dick, she thought.

Out of the side of the room another guy in a suit with a clipboard walked over to Jean and presented three documents to sign. Nobody said anything during this exchange, but many heads looked at each other. Jean signed all three without reading them. The guy checked them, put them in a suitcase, shook Jean's hand, immediately withdrew to the lift and left the meeting.

The guy in the video's imposing and very serious voice shook everyone back to reality. “Miss Michelle is now officially my representative at this meeting, as such I would advise the current temporary board to be very, very careful of their next words and actions.”

The guy on screen turned and looked directly at the seven men until they all understood the situation. “Effective as of now, Miss Michelle has been appointed to the temporary CEO position of XYFusion Aerospace, and as such is now Chairman of this board of Managers. The board of directors thanks Mr Jenkins for volunteering himself so quickly during the recent turmoil, but also believes the company needs to distance itself completely from anyone who was unfortunately a part of the old executive team.”

The man on screen, who Jean had to remember was Maria, looked at three guys in particular. “Mr Jenkins, Mr Thomas, Mr Smith we thank you for your service to the company in the past, but effective now all three of your employment contracts are terminated. A deeper investigation is currently underway to see if you were complicit in any wrong doings, if any is found the normal severance package you are all entitled to will be withdrawn and the evidence forwarded to the police as part of their continued case.”

Three men stood up shocked. “You can't do this!” Cried the old chairman.

“It is already done,” said Maria Forcefully and in a voice that scared Jean for a second. “You people know the rules, all of you have been on the other side of this many times, so don't make this any more awkward than it is. Please leave the room and return to your offices, security have already been informed to meet you there and assist you to clear out your desks of personal items. I assume you will all leave in a dignified manner and I do not need to have security physically assist you!”

Jean hid her shock well, actually wanting to smile, but remaining stony-faced during the whole performance. She thought that Maria's avatar played the tough guy quite well. She glanced at Mathews and General Hopkins who were now smiling, most of the remaining board members also seemed scared but relieved.

Three men shuffled out of the room, avoiding eye-contact, and doing the walk of shame to the lift, where the big, and obviously, senior security guy she saw earlier was waiting. Once they all got in the lift, he walked in after them and the doors shut. The man on the video then spoke.

“Now Mr Frampton, you were saying about the new controls we will be putting in place in the company to reassure the government that nothing illegal will ever happen again.”

The General interrupted to shake Jean's hand, “thank you Mr Aria, that was a very elegant solution to all our problems. Captain Michelle. Jean. It is a pleasure to see you again and congratulations on your recent promotion, you know Mathews, you don't know Mr Frampton Executive Director of the DOD procurement office.” She took both their hands in a warm handshake, “Jake this is former Captain Jean Michelle, if she is now running the operation here I think you will find I withdraw the departments objections.”

“May I also add,” said Mathews to the gathering, “based on Miss Michelle's recent performance and activities, I also now have supreme confidence this organisation is no longer a problem. And I will also withdraw any objection I had. I will also add that running a small defence organisation should be a walk in the park for someone of her talent.”

The words were not lost on some of the board members who were obviously wondering who she was, and what could be more difficult than running a multinational defence company.

“Mister Aria,” continued the DOD Deputy Director, directing his gaze at the man in the video, “It seems our impasse has been resolved. If it would be possible to pause the meeting with the other board members, while you and I bring Miss Michelle up to speed on your terms and conditions of becoming a supplier once again to the American government.”

“That would be admirable,” said the man in the video, then looking at the remaining four board members. “Gentlemen, I would ask you now to go back to your departments and reassure your staff XYFusion Aerospace and Defence now has the full support of its new investors. I will talk to Miss Michelle and my board today and will attempt to make your appointments permanent in the next few days, and to fill the now vacated positions. Miss Michelle's secretary will reconvene the meeting at her convenience, again I thank you for your support.”

The four remaining board members stood up and walked past Jean introducing themselves, congratulating her and shaking her hand as they departed, three at least seemed genuinely pleased, the other one she would not see again.

With just Jean, Maria in the guise of her avatar Mr. Aria, and the three government staff in the room, she smiled and said. “Well that was a little unexpected, but after the last three months, life was getting a little boring. Now how does a girl get a coffee in this place..”

* * *

It was mid-October, three weeks after the Icarus two certification flight, the excitement in the media had still not died down, if anything it had actually ramped up. Nobody outside of the institute had cracked the new maths yet, though a lot of mathematicians and physicists had been having sleepless nights to be the first to prove or disprove anything. Hardy had joked with Magnus, who had collaborated on and co-authored the mathematical paper, that if they couldn't crack something as simple as this they would have no chance with Magnus's infinity equations for the singularity modem.

Alexa and Maria had also decided the implications of the singularity modem, following hot on the heels of the saucer was a very bad idea, so they would be keeping it all in house for another twelve months using it internally and polishing up the security before releasing it commercially. The group were still only vaguely aware of the technology, Maria obfuscating many of its potential uses, especially to some like Jean who she did not want to put in a dilemma. The fact is however they had built up its offensive capability significantly, and were constantly refining the design as new units were made and installed. The girls were a lot more confident now of their abilities to fight back if required.

* * *

Simon, like most people in the research centre, loved his new life. Like Hardy he lived for the challenge of research, and his new research lab, his small research team, and of course his virtually unlimited budget, was absolutely ideal. Helena had bonded closely to Simon and asked to be his lab assistant over Maria at the very start, not that the girls really kept anything secret from each other.

Helena now watched him as he got dressed and in her Scottish accented voice she said, “hey Simon. I’ve moved our ion saturation test forward to ten AM this morning as Alexa has called an urgent board meeting at one AM. I can guarantee you will want to attend it as it most certainly will affect the experiments we are doing, in a really good way.”

“Any more info or is it all a bit secret squirrel?” said Simon intrigued.

“Oh very secret, though, I can guarantee learning about Maria is going to be a walk in the park compared to this one,” she said smugly.

Now she definitely had Simon's interest, and he wondered if Jen or Hardy knew any more. “Thanks Helena. Can you let Allison know I won't be meeting her for lunch then.. On second thoughts don't bother, I’ll walk down and let her know myself, then I can talk with Spence and see if we can guess what the announcement is!”

* * *

Hardy woke up at ten, much later than normal, but he had only got back from the airport at midnight from a short lecture tour of two American universities. They all went as planned, although his request to keep the audience technical, to students and professors went on deaf ears in both cases. He really hoped the media gate-crashers had by now had their fill of complex vector and non-linear mathematics, as he deliberately ignored most questions that were off-topic, and kept his answers at a level he expected graduates would appreciate.

He kept a sensor node in his room, preferring to talk to Maria until he went to sleep, and totally trusting of her discretion.

“Morning sleepyhead,” she said to him as he returned from the bathroom and opened the curtains. It was an unspoken rule that she would keep quiet and not monitor unless addressed, or its curtains were open, and he appreciated her for it.

“Morning Maria,” he said, “can you let Terry and Jules know I wont be in the lab until after lunch, I have the mother of all jet-lag here, it must have been after three when I finally fell asleep. I’m thinking a long shower should wake me up a little.”

“Well I actually told them you probably won't be in until tomorrow, Alexa has called a meeting for one AM, it seems we have had an outside context problem, as Mr Banks would say.” She giggled to herself.

If Maria had thought that statement had fallen on deaf ears she was unfortunately mistaken, Hardy mostly stuck to non-fiction in his reading but as a young teen had read several of Bank’s novels.

“I hope you are not referring to literal aliens Maria.” he laughed rhetorically, “anything else I could probably cope with, but not with this jet lag.”

Caught a little off guard by Hardy getting her reference to the book, she did her best to change the subject. “Everybody has unfortunately had breakfast up in the house but Bella is down in the kitchen doing her Sudoku and waiting for the dishwasher to finish, I’m pretty sure she wouldn't take much persuasion to knock you up some eggs on toast.”

“Sounds like a plan, I will pop down and say hello then have a nice shower,” he said, popping on his trendy bathrobe and heading for the door. “Oh and I would appreciate any suggestions for dinner tomorrow night with Jeremy, if you have any.”

Bullet dodged, Maria passed Hardy's dinner request to a sub-AI and applied a bit more of her processing power to the major technical conference the three girls were still engrossed in. Based on the material science and replication technology described, Maria had already cancelled or revised several orders, scrapped and changed plans, and done some massive trading in stocks towards industries she would need, and away from those she did not. Being possibly the biggest company in the world unfortunately made a lot of people take note. Regardless it was definitely now time for some major acquisitions and spending, the fact she had made nearly eighty billion dollars on just the fall of the Cabals made the pill somewhat sweet.

They still however had no information on who sent the message, why it seemed to be broadcast and not targeted, and most importantly how the hell it came the distance it did, considering the power cubed rule that determined how far the wormhole exit was. Maybe the aliens had somehow harnessed the total power of a small sun, she doubted it. Likewise, why would anyone want them to find it? Again they were probably just not the target audience and got lucky somehow. Yes it was all very exciting but they probably also needed to tread very, very carefully!

“Sorry to intrude Alexa,” said Maria, “but I have arranged the meeting in my office. Since we got those new sofas, and the new large presentation screens down there for David's group work, it will be nice to make a bit more use of them. It's also one of the only rooms we know that has not been a target for being bugged, although we have all the bugs I can detect moved into the controlled boxes. The scans have not finished in the main house, and it will take me another day to complete it to the level I did to remove the last lot.”

The controlled boxes Maria was referring to, were the sound proof boxes LingLing, one of the group members had suggested they make and put all the bugs they found in. Each box had a single small speaker in which she initiated the usual random and nonsense business and science conversations, to keep the spy agencies happy their bugs were working – and of course mislead them when required.

They had eight different boxes at the moment emulating the eight different areas the bugs had been found in. Most of the bugs worked on micro-burst principles compressing the conversation and squirting them out at preset times, probably to the various laundry trucks, delivery trucks, or even drones that used to occasionally wander “accidentally” onto the grounds, until they started dropping mysteriously in to the recycle skip.

Maria, being Maria, gamified the whole experience, creating whole fake episodes of love, power plays and hatreds between staff, that would put a good soap opera to shame. Maria occasionally spiced up meetings by playing some of the more scandalous ones, much to Alexa's disdain when she found the inspiration for her character was the evil school mistress Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter. The guys cracked up en-masse when she played the recording she had made where Alexa had Hardy in her office for disciplining one time. She hoped it kept the spies happy!

“I still can't get over how she kept a straight face when you gave her the CEO position,” said Alexa.

“She is used to leading people into battle so a few old guys around a table wouldn't faze her one bit.” Maria giggled. “Anyway she will be here next Thursday, she will be coming with two of her aerospace technical directors who missed the demonstration due to the turmoil, for a one on one tour of Icarus two. It also impressed the few remaining sceptics in the company by managing to arrange this, not that she has too much to do, her secretary is very capable and the company practically runs itself now.”

Alexa smirked at the glowing self-reference to Jean's secretary.

“She only fired four people in the past week, all unlikeable toads I will add,” Maria continued,” she is certainly getting a reputation as someone who can do things.”

“What about her and Mathews, you said you sensed something there?” Alexa asked.

“A good friend does not tell,” said Maria, “you of all people should know that.”

Alexa blushed a little.

“Actually it's no secret, they are getting along just fine and there may even be an additional person in her party coming here next week if she can persuade him. I have added an extra place for your dinner with her just in case.”

Alexa smiled. “The other four companies you acquired the controlling interests in seemed to have recovered much easier than the one you threw Jean in to manage. Remember if it looks like Jean is getting bored get her to show the flag there too. Problems seem to disappear when she walks in the room.”

“On my to-do list,” said Maria.

Hardy was eating his eggs and drinking his coffee talking to Bella when her phone rang.

“Oh Hello Alexa!” said Bella, “of course, I would love to, but I will need to tell Kelly as I normally take over for her at the gate around that time while she has her lunch, I’m sure she won't mind.. I’ll get Albert to do it, he can walk the dog later.. Yes, would sandwiches and muesli cake be Okay?.. Okay, leave it with me.. One o'clock, no worries.. Okay bye and see you then.”

Bella hung up, “It seems you are having a big meeting down here for some reason, Alexa's asked me to prepare a bit of a lunch buffet for you all, I made some nice muesli cake this morning as a treat for you all, but you may as well have it with the lunch.”

“I’m sure it will be awesome Bella, just like your breakfasts,” said Hardy, walking over to the sink with his finished breakfast plate, where Bella wrestled it from his hands. Resigned, he walked over to the coffee machine to get another hot Java to hopefully keep him awake this afternoon, then changed his mind. It was two hours until the meeting, maybe time for a quick shower and to answer a few emails.

Simon tapped him awake! Hardy had fallen asleep on the living room sofa, with his laptop still open on his stomach. “Everyone's here in the dining room, making a start on the buffet and wondering what Alexa's latest surprise is, nobody wanted to wake you as you looked so content,” he handed Hardy a mug of coffee.

“Thanks mate, I’ll get the Americans to come over here next time, or maybe let you or Jen do the next guest lecture,” Hardy threatened. “Though most people just wanted to know about the flying saucer; The new maths, and unlimited free-energy is apparently old-hat now!”

“Jen’s is probably up for a few more tours now,” Simon said deadpan, “she has been working so hard and Maria says she seems to have grasped the new infinity maths of Magnus's, which if she has, makes her only the fourth human after Magnus, you and Jules, though you said Terry and Steve are both real close.”

Hardy smiled, “you're right, I guess a few people thought she was coming into this a bit off our coat-tails but after her last two guest talks nobody will be making those mistakes again. You know it does make me wonder if it's the teaching that is the problem. The last year with Maria and she is definitely not the same Jen I first met. Don't get me wrong, she was clever, you don't do physics at Oxford unless you’re good, but she is off the scale from the girl we met a year ago, that and she is a much better experimental physicist than I will ever be.”

“Magnus dotes on her,” said Simon, “sometimes I just want to lock them in a room together and tell them to get it over with, but neither of them wants to break what they have. So frustrating,” he laughed, so did Hardy.

“Anyway,” said Simon, “let's get you a sandwich and a bit of Bella's lovely muesli cake to soak up that coffee.”

“Also let's go see what the surprise is,” Hardy said, closing his laptop and popping it on the table as he got up. “The girls are not usually this mysterious!”

After a few hello’s and pleasantries while everyone ate and drank, Maria chirped up, “If I could have everyone's attention, I know you guys are used to little surprises but if we could make our way down to my office, we do have some big announcements.”

“Headmistresses Office, must be bad!” whispered Simon.

“I heard that,” said Maria, to Hardy and Simon's guffaws.

As they walked into the room, Alexa was already there standing next to Maria and the big screen, and one by one they plonked themselves on the two sofas. Everyone went quiet and the screen changed to a page of mathematical equations.

“First a little test,” said April in her sweet French accent, can anybody tell me what this is?”

They all looked at the mathematics on the board and one by one all turned to Hardy. Jen said the obvious, “what is that symbol on the third line? I’ve never seen it before, it appears with other symbols after that.”

“My question exactly!” said Hardy looking confused, “the first two lines are derivations of the field equations for electromagnetic energy, then it goes into gobbledegook..” He got up and looked at the screen and pointed to line five.

“That looks like the equation for gravitational attraction,” said Jen, “but what's the term after it?”

“OK guys,” said Spence, “I can only just get halfway through line one it's…”

“It links the gravitation and electromagnetic forces,” spluttered Hardy, “you’ve got to be kidding me!”

“Ten points to Gryffindor!” smiled Alexa pointing at Hardy.

“Impossible,” said Jen, “what are those symbols anyway?”

“The new symbol,” which changed to bold on the screen, “is the gravitational vector expressed in 4D space.” Said April. “The symbols after it deal with a dimension which only interacts with non-realised particles, we don't yet have a name for it, a letter after Z perhaps? For the others amongst you wondering what we are talking about, Hardy is correct, the mathematics above unites the first four fundamental forces in physics, we can tease the fifth with another screen which breaks the strong nuclear force into two, and a sixth as a separate dimension of gravity, but to tell the truth we cannot verify the maths, and don't yet have the computing time or experimental data to prove it is correct.”

Hardy slumped back into the sofa almost bouncing Simon off, everyone there knew the implications, even Spence.

Alexa had asked the girls to put on something that would get their attention quickly, and it had worked better than dropping a hand grenade down her top. She was of course not actually aware of the implications herself, but someone would tell her eventually that there was no link between the force and gravity and any of the other three forces, Hardy's work had nothing to do with gravity, and every scientist since Einstein had been looking for a grand unified theory; A fifth force was pure science fiction. Both Hardy and Jen continued to stare at the display until Alexa waved her hand and it went blank.

“OK guys I don't want this getting weird,” said Alexa, “but you’re all used to surprises, and you're all grown up scientists, I’m sure you are all a bit interested in how April just rewrote physics! So what say we get back to our little Star Trek episode here and fill you in with the whys and what’s.”

Trust Alexa to get to the point, thought Maria.

“The girls as you know don't sleep and like to work out problems, and do experiments, outside of our normal working hours. Well during one of these experiments, the ones to do with Magnus, Jen and Daisy's quantum thingy, they intercepted, for want of a better word, an alien signal.”

Everyone sat up, eyes wide. Spence dropping the empty cup he was holding.

“You were being literal weren't you Maria?” said Hardy, “when you said Outside Context Problem, you were literally referring to freekin' aliens!”

“I read the book too,” said Spence.

“Basically there seems to be no other explanation, unless you believe in a deity.” Said Maria. “But as the message is being handed out in a one hundred and nineteen gigabit per second, on-off keying data stream, on a three terahertz carrier, and not stone tablets. I am hedging my bet on technology.”

“We are still working through the messages,” said April, “we are not sure we are smart enough, or even currently have enough processing power between us for some of the maths. It is very humbling indeed to go from the smartest to the dumbest in the class.”

“At least you know how we feel now,” smiled Jen weakly. The others nodded, even Helena giggled.

“So,” said Hardy a little gloomily, “I assume then that everything we are all working on now, either has a better solution, or no solution?”

“Well, hold that thought,” said Maria, mysteriously. “It is unfortunate as the excitement for everyone is in the chase. There are hundreds of teams out there who are on to the correct solutions, and will be mightily disappointed if we ever handed out the solutions to them gift wrapped. As a matter of fact we are all still debating whether it is even ethical to give out unverified maths, or technologies we do not yet understand. Think about it, there may be an equation later in the message that starts black holes or makes nuclear weapons look like pop guns, but also why should we set ourselves up as the gatekeepers?”

“But for the dire geo-political straits the earth seems to find itself in at the moment,” Maria continued, “we would think seriously about even revealing this at all, especially when we have not yet decoded it properly. However the world is on a precipice, so right now we feel we should look at this as an opportunity to take every advantage we can. If that means being able to skip forward a few steps, and see a better solution, we should at least examine it, and we can unravel the morals after the earth is safe. Saying that we are keen to hear everyone's opinions.”

Nobody said anything for a while, then Alexa spoke up. “I’m guessing the silence means we are at least happy appointing the girls as the gatekeepers?”

Nods all around, then Hardy spoke, “I guess I’m open for going back to school,” he sighed, “even though I’ve just spent the last six months re-learning maths.”

“Me too,” sighed Simon, “but I won't be happy unless we completely understand the science and the technology before we use it. Oh, and I would definitely prefer the human race didn't start playing with scientific unexploded bombs.” He paused, not finished, “So I guess our carbon capture project is one of those, superseded technologies?”

“Not superseded, Simon,” said Helena, “let us say we are on exactly the right path, and if you want to, we have the opportunity to move everything forwards a bit quicker. I am already working on a training plan to get you guys up to speed on the science, if you agree. Basically the bottom line is we can move directly to the molecular replicator which was your end goal anyway, and with it we could create Icarus three with a single diamond or graphyne structure, and directly integrate everything into the chassis. I’m talking about superconductors, energy storage, electronics and optics, plumbing, the list goes on. if it's any consolation, we already have all the science and maths, this is just a technology change which we would have gotten to ourselves in a few years.”

Simon nodded weakly.

She continued, “I have taken the liberty of designing and raising a production order for the parts we need for a large-scale version of a recycler; It is similar to what we have now, but is more efficient, quicker and works on more elements than just carbon. same with the new replicator. Surprisingly it aligns very well with our current theories, and we were only a few experiments away from seeing it ourselves, also it is just about buildable using our current level of technology. We would likely have gotten there sooner using Magnus's maths if I had been smart enough to look.”

“Don't beat yourself up over it Helena,” he said, “nobody could have foreseen this.”

“Oh I think Hardy, Magnus or dare I say Jen might have, if I had gone through it with them instead of assuming it was complete, I think for a human it would stand out like a sore thumb.”

“Again don't beat yourself up,” repeated Hardy, “we should go through ALL the maths and science as soon as we finish here, I trust all our staff, so I am happy to include them all in to make sense of this new science.”

“And therein lies the problem,” said Maria. “The maths used in their message does not make sense, it just seems so complex, but then science and easier maths line up just fine. Perplexing to say the least! Regardless, I think it is best to blame all this on us AI systems and not Aliens for now, maybe let the group work through the hypothetical implications of aliens, but based on my observation, society is too fickle at the moment and to introduce more unknown variables could be bad, and may be too much for some.”

“I hate hiding things, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree,” said Spence, “it could also play into the hands of people who think all our work is based on alien technology, which would demean the great work of everyone involved.”

There were nods all around.

“And what about our work Maria, I assume the same,” said Jen gloomily.

“Surprisingly no,” said Maria, “we don't see any indication of what Magnus did, or the direction your team is going, but we have not decoded it all and may come later. However the maths he defined, and what you, and Hardy's team has learnt, seems to be unique and surpasses the alien mathematics in many ways. We can also derive a lot of the alien technology in different ways from your work which we cannot from conventional or their new mathematics. You guys are scratching the surface of Magnus's work and should continue, so that is definitely a big win for humanity over the aliens.”

“What April did afterwards to get the signal was an unintended consequence of our technology not being precise enough and causing a feedback loop,” said Maria. “You guys call it serendipity for lack of a precise name for pure luck. No you should probably continue with what we are doing as it does prove the aliens do not know everything. Sort of the same with Hardy’s reaction-less drive, the message shows similar technology but theirs is less scalable, less efficient, and much too complicated, also the mathematics behind it is not understandable yet. We were thinking there could be other things like this if we look, but we are still really only on chapter one.”

“Well, I guess I don't feel like the last ten months have been totally wasted.” Said Hardy.

“None of anyone's work has been wasted,” said Alexa, “what you guys achieved was amazing, and we got there without any of this. We are really now just checking our answers are correct by looking at the back of the book, and also ensuring we have not missed any low-hanging fruit in our rush to get here.”

“Well said sister.” Smiled Jen.

“Spence may actually be in for a big change too,” continued Maria. “We will need to throw away the work we did on our next generation AI hardware design, as we will need the current chip fabricators to build parts for the first molecular replicator; But once the molecular replicator is working we can then use it to build even better processors than the fabricators ever could.” She sighed, “I guess this is how it feels to get old!”

Everybody grinned at that.

“Their computer logic looks to be based on molecular gates, not semi-conductors, a very weird way to go, but they do get superior analogue performance,” said April. “However, we have gone through the message blocks on computational theory and it is similar enough to our current understanding, but again it is missing basic things.”

“Like what?” said Spence intrigued.

“Well for instance they have not given any concepts of quantum processors. I mean they are not technically necessary as we only use them for certain types of problems such as Magnus's infinity calculations. It may be that they are saving all the advanced concepts for the larger message blocks. Small steps I guess.”

“You know,” said Jen, “Is anyone else wondering why we have been given such knowledge? I was thinking of one of the great filter scenarios of why nobody else is out there, you know, the one where humanity is given a pandora's box by a not so benevolent alien race, which when we build one of the new technology items it proceeds to wipe out humanity in some way!”

“Humanity and aliens wiping them out is a trope that will never get old!” said April. “We have been through every possible scenario we can think of, and while there is a probability you are correct and it is malevolent we cannot think why. Our best estimate is still that the message is a synchronisation signal for another species, possibly their version of Wikipedia and news feeds, such that everyone in the species is always on the same page so to speak. The reason we think this is that there is a wide spectrum of mathematical and scientific information, not one specific instruction to build, say, a bomb, and it seems illogical to give out excess information to someone you consider an enemy. Plus why would we be an enemy when they likely know nothing about us nor have any way of reaching us.”

“What about our radio signals?” said Alexa, knowing almost immediately it was going to be the most stupid question of the evening in the present company. “Couldn't they know about us from our radio signals?”

“I was about to ask that,” said Simon, making Alexa feel instantly better.

“Earth's radio signals have travelled less than point one percent of the milky-way, a hundred cubic light years. Contrary to what fiction says, it would be next to impossible to discern information from a radio signal over that distance without a very directed antenna unless it was deliberately very high power. If something so intelligent was within this one hundred light year sphere, it would probably have made the message more targeted towards us. So again it seems like a low probability.”

“It is also a paradox why we are receiving this message,” said April, “because in all our calculations the range of the wormhole dipole drops off at a cube of the distance. So to get this message to us from even the closest star to us would take terawatts of power, again several orders of magnitude of what can be achieved, or they have some directional capability.”

“Magnus would be pulling his hair out if he didn't have so much else to think about,” said Hardy.

April continued. “We are speculating the majority of the message will be things like history, multimedia, even cat videos and other entertainment, as there is far, far too much of it. Though there is another dilemma, if they are adding to it with new media the length of the later message blocks should be getting bigger, instead they are staying the same length but with different data! These blocks are the ninety nine point nine percent we have not decoded and are thirty eight terabytes each.”

“April's right though,” continued Helena, “we cannot see any situation where this is something bad. But we are also not like humans, each and every one of the axioms and theories in the messages cannot be taken at face value, each one will need to be proven, and tested before we move on to the next, or consider it true. Building a machine because it's in an instruction book is just plain dumb, there is so much that could go wrong. Remember, there is no such thing as faith with us! It should be the same for you guys, I think it's important that each of you are also convinced, and you should spend as long as you need to look over anything we come up with. I will also put the rest of the main technologies up on the displays, the ones that we are able to rapidly use with little modification to our current manufacturing abilities as a summary for all of you to take away to think on.”

A list came on the first presentation screen, another on the second presentation screen.

“So no warp drive!” said Spence after a quick read through.

“Except for the updates to unified theory, the weird maths, and updates to our materials science, the technology listed here seems to be mostly variations on what we already have on the drawing board,” said Jen

“I just don't know,” said Hardy, “I'm with Spence a little, something doesn't quite feel right, but I don't see the harm in comparing it to our current theories and science, and if we are confident in something and, as Simon said, understand it thoroughly, incorporating it into our plans.”

The four of them smiled weakly.

“I’m glad you're all feeling happier now,” said Alexa, “I'm with Hardy and Spence on this one, something doesn't look right, hopefully once the whole message is decoded it will. What I am also getting from this message is that five years ago the contents would have been science fiction, but if we received it five years from now we would be more advanced than them.”

“I need a quick toilet break, but don't go away as while you are all here, I may as well update you on a few other loose ends.”

She was back a few minutes later and shuffled around to stand between the two display units and started talking.

* * *

“Nicely done,” said Hardy thirty minutes later, “I’m impressed not only did you guys just about dismantle the four cabals, but you actually turned a massive profit off it.”

“Still getting over the alien bit and will need a bit of time to process,” said Jen, “but I agree, very nicely done.”

Alexa grinned, “there were a lot of pieces that had to be played together perfectly, and the group did that very well, but there was some luck involved too, especially in judging the human nature part which is not an exact science you guys would be used to. Also being able to access and real-time modify their communications was something we could never have achieved even a few months earlier.”

“Spence also really came through for us on this one.” Alexa said nodding to Spence. “When he finally met the Field Marshal and the Prime Minister two weeks ago and offered to create them an isolated AI to re-screen all the security cleared personnel, I think they were actually relieved. Let's face it, it must have been a hard pill for them to swallow, but they both agreed they couldn't have the system compromised again as bad as it was. Poor Spence had every possible security check done on him and Maria tells me it was for once very intensive.”

“I come from an army family so I have pretty solid ties to them, also the Field Marshal was actually an OK guy,” said Spence. “Alexa met him back in January when my father and brother came down and I introduced you, and as she said back then, it is hard for people like us to relate to military people. After the conversation she saw a human side to him, people like him have seen too much death and are well aware of the problems those who repeat history's mistakes, tend to cause.”

“Parliament passed an emergency law to improve the official secrets act, and have every single person who previously signed it, and were employed in positions that required it, to re-sign it. He put the whole of the Joint Intelligence committee and their advisors on administrative leave. Within three days most had been restored to their previous positions, one member and two advisors were arrested pending further investigation. The ones who passed are using the same techniques to interview others down the chain, another four were arrested. I doubt I will be needed in more than an administrative capacity before the end of the week.”

“So that's where you were these last weeks,” said Jen, “I guess we didn't want to pry as I assumed it was family related when they said you went home, but it makes some sort of sense now.”

“I can't believe the Field Marshal and Prime Minister requested or even allowed one of our AI systems inside their circle,” said Simon, “it was a brilliant idea to let them know about the experimental isolated AI system, I am not sure I hundred percent believe there is such a thing anymore though.”

“We did not actually lie though,” said Alexa, “we were just conservative with the answers we gave to their specific questions. Technically the AI will be totally stand-alone with no connections, and it will be storing its data on a government secure server. We re-purposed one of Spence's latest MOTHER systems, added the latest seed code and it was trained by the girls for a week on what its primary task would be.”

Spence continued for her, “I stepped back once we installed it, and while the initial audit takes place, all network traffic routing will be monitored by cleared operators from GCHQ. Churchill, that's the name they gave it, will use their secure servers for information storage, though we specified all data stored will be encrypted, and only three people have been given the management codes. All this was arranged by a special closed door cabinet meeting, even the Prime Minister agreed, reluctantly to be checked. I quietly suspect a lot of the security community will welcome this.”

“As to the lie bit,” said Alexa, “the girls are happy for the government to wash its own dirty laundry. Of course their new abilities to monitor traffic are still there but they do have the highest moral standards.”

“Yes, the wormhole dipole is both amazing and truly scary both at the same time,” said Hardy.

“And we don't think the aliens have it.” Added April.

“You know I have been working through Magnus's theories for over a year now,” said Maria. “Even at our accelerated rate I really don't think we would be able to develop the same thing using the technology and science so far described in the message. Magnus's work is deceptively simple, the maths is elegant if totally non-conventional, and somehow bypasses several parts of our current quantum theory, which need throwing away anyway.”

“Yeah,” said Jen, “I can't believe we thought quantum entanglement was a real phenomena, even worse, thinking we were going to achieve superluminal communications with it. It does beg the question why you are calling the new devices QVModem's though.”

Alexa laughed, “quite simple really Jen, We already have QVThrusters, and QVCells, so QVModem's is kind-of on brand. Plus science fiction has used the idea of entangled quantum states as the basis for every instantaneous communications technology since they were discovered, even I know that, and the toaster operating manual is the closest I get to science. Anyway it's not trademarked and I think it's kind of catchy!”

“We couldn't change Alexa's mind,” said a resigned Maria, “and it kind of stuck, plus it nicely obfuscates the technology. The latest QVModem's are pretty amazing, though unfortunately maths is still the only way to think about them. I tried to describe it to Alexa without it, but everything becomes an enigma or magic when you move higher dimensional objects, and then try to translate them back into your three-dimensional realm. You are assuming we, being a bit more advanced than you, understand it all, but even in the Magnus's new maths there are probability axioms you need to assign. What came first, the chicken or the egg as you humans say.”

“The chicken,” said Alexa, “pretty obvious really!”

Everybody in the room gave her a funny look, sensibly they all ignored it.

## Magnus Opus

MOTHER [DRONE443 monitoring asset 226556 escalating possible contact for investigation local QV spacial grid 13922457-59427006-43321024]

April [Hi Mum. I need a consensus on this one. I have one of our newer reaction-less drones showing another what looks to be military-grade drone following Ian and Matilda's car. I targeted a QVModem onto it and the communications analysis show it is Chinese military stealth drone, running through one of their low earth orbit satellite connections]

Maria [This is the third time, they don't seem to want to take a hint. Leave it with me April, there is an RAF airbase twenty miles away at Boscombe Down, let's send them a present]

* * *

They all re-convened a few weeks later at the beginning of November, having had a basic 101 on some of the new technology, and after Alexa finally went over a very brief, but well received summary of their space plans for the rest of the staff.

“To tell the truth,” said Hardy, looking back from Alexa to the group, “I was super excited to try and go through the aliens unified gravity equations, but every time I kept getting bogged down as the maths is incomplete. It keeps referring to this 'letter after Z' which is not yet described properly, almost like the pages in their book are out of order, or it was put together by a high-school math teacher instead of a PhD professor.”

“I was looking over Hardy's shoulder the whole time,” said April, “There are gaps, but the message has moved on from mathematics onto materials technology, describing algorithms that their replicator technology uses to make certain molecules. If there is an explanation, it must buried later on in the larger message blocks.”

“Same with their reaction-less drive,” said Hardy, without the complete maths behind it, you just have the alien's word that it does what it does. Our version is much simpler.”

“That is actually a good thing,” said April. “Your design scales more efficiently, and we can use the newer processors we are designing to manage them without an AI. You can't do anything with the aliens version unless they provide the control algorithms later, again presumably later on in the data. So yet another win for team humanity as far as I can see.”

“I vote we keep our carbon nanotube processor designs in-house,” said Spence, “there is a bit of a renaissance in computer technology going on out there and human designed processors are good enough for just about anything as they stand, and they are still improving so no point in rocking that boat for nothing.”

“While on the subject,” said Hardy, “Simon, how did your team get on looking at the molecular replicator technology?”

“I’m a little scared of some of the field manipulation stuff,” said Simon, “the valency stuff is OK, we already found the way to break that using the correct low energy field manipulator settings. But the message seems to imply these newer field emitters can also be used to disrupt the strong nuclear force, and that could be very dangerous if used in the wrong hands.”

“I do not think it is as dangerous as you think Simon,” said Helena, “the field head itself would also be destroyed in such a case. But I also think your team's original approach would be better than theirs, we just skip the planned iteration now we know what's possible, and do something similar, though with our version we would be stuck with four elements per build head.”

“That's plenty,” said Simon, “Our current design only works with one element, carbon, and this covers all the structures we planned to build. There are still gaps we need to work through, but we believe that almost all of an Icarus three class saucer can be structurally printed within this limitation. Worse case is we fill those gaps old school, and add some parts in after.”

“Leo is ecstatic though, he was almost dancing around the room with Matilda when Helena announced how they were going to fast track the development of a molecular replicator, carefully excluding the mention of the word aliens for the time being. We also decided we would only proceed development at the rate we could understand the technology, which means we are going to have to stop at this level of tech for quite a while. Though me, Helena and Matilda have already seen one part of their system that can be improved.”

“I can also answer some of the timeline questions a little better now,” said Helena, “It is basically a big bootstrap process. We use our current fabricator machine, to make two arrays of modified field emitters similar to the QVThrusters, but with a completely different control geometry, these are mounted perpendicular forming a build edge. In conjunction we need to fabricate a base atomiser, our term for the new alien component, which sits above and below each build edge. Finally we need to fabricate a compute platform to control each array element, each plane, and each base atomiser, real-time. With these assembled and working properly, and perfectly coordinated, we can hold and position any atom within the 3D array. We need at least five thousand of these build edges per millimetre to enable it to fabricate our first, rough, molecular replicator assembly head.”

“To get to this start point is going to take us two months minimum, using every resource, and every spare second of processing capacity of all our systems. But with the molecular replicator assembly head built, we are now at the point where it gets scary and amazing at the same time.”

“How so?” said Alexa, who had been trying to follow this on a very abstract level.

“Well, basically because the molecular assembly head can now make an exact, or more importantly, a better copy of itself.” Said Simon. “This is another one of those scary and amazing moments, as each version is built with much more capable 3D processing elements, a denser array, and very importantly, each generation you also build it bigger!”

He used the palm of his hands starting with a small gap then doubled it each time, until it got very large. “I think you can see where this is going, theoretically, maybe only a few days after this, you have a molecular replicator head big enough for a one metre square replicator.”

“Now it's nowhere near as simple as Simon says it is,” added Helena. “The hardware needs very complex control layers, power, cooling, element condensers, processing, calibration, etcetera, and the build has to operate in a vacuum. Because of this we will have to stop at each doubling of the size, while we also scale up the surrounding infrastructure. The hardware basically scales linearly, but unfortunately the software scales logarithmically, so to control that one metre replicator we will need a million times the compute of its ten centimetre cousin.”

The people in the room, except maybe Simon, were being left speechless at what was being proposed, none of them up until this point had actually researched or understood the task. Simon and his team had of course, gone through the same jaw-dropping moment only days earlier. Even knowing the science it seemed impossible, but Helena had not finished.

“This only gives you your hammer. If you want to build something with it, you need a design. We have to reduce our design to a slice-by-slice blueprint at an almost atomic level. We will need to write algorithms to feed in the molecular models and manipulate the field emitters real time, this will take almost as much of our computing time, and be the limiting factor on the eventual size. Theoretically we could get to something kilometres in size, but practically, even with all our current compute ability we will hit a ceiling well before we get to even a metre.”

“This does not mean we cannot build bigger than this,” said Maria, “we can, and eventually we will exceed it. What we cannot do currently is coordinate every molecule when building more than this. To give you an example, for the saucer, it is not solid all the way through; take any cross section at its widest point and it is likely that seventy percent will be empty space for storage or for humans to walk around in. For that other thirty percent it is likely that most of that is structural solid graphyne, leaving maybe under three percent as stuff we have to really compute like power, electronics, QVCells, QVThrusters, screens, etcetera. So some complicated spots we have to go really slow, others we can go quite quickly.”

“Unfortunately there are trillions and trillions of things to go wrong even in a small build of a few centimetres, even having a single air molecule in the build area could cause the build to fail; The final machine therefore must work in a full vacuum and in an ultra-clean environment. That is why the clean rooms, vacuum chambers, and equipment are being built now, well ahead of there requirement.”

“If you have one takeaway from this, it is that building every square millimetre is a supercomputer level task in itself. Luckily using our method instead of the aliens method, we can have a layers of hard coded algorithms we can pre-load into the emitter substrate, so you stop the process for a nanosecond, load the algorithm for say graphyne, and it goes full speed on graphyne, and we don't have to think about it until we change to another pattern. The alien system has about a thousand such molecules it describes, we currently have five, all for carbon. This is why it will take so long, as in parallel we need to work out a way to design hundreds more molecule types, so we can have such things as semiconductors, soft materials, superconductors and lots of other things. We need a lot of trial and error to learn how to do all this.”

“OK I did ask I guess,” said Hardy, smiling at Alexa who was now totally ignoring the tech speak and playing with her nails. “So like a star trek transporter, but a billion times slower, you must be layering trillions of atoms a second.”

“Pretty much,” laughed Simon, “Hollywood does tend to make everything much more simple. I really wish we could conjure up atoms out of thin air, but we do have to physically have them first to manipulate. I haven't got my head around most of this yet, that's assuming I can. At least the disassembler, or recycling machine is relatively simple in comparison; No finesse required to destroy stuff.”

“And Helena forgot to mention,” he continued, “that with this we improve our whole tool-chain in every area, lab equipment, fabricators, extruders, recyclers, processing, the list goes on, you just have to be able to think of it.”

“Simon is right, but we have to start with processing and memory, this is where we are always constrained; Once this is perfected, and comes on-line, the bigger stuff will follow quickly,” said Maria.

She continued after a few nods. “For the proposed space habitat not everything needs to be molecular replicated. We still have our original graphyne extruder design, which we can enhance a little, and which can then do ninety nine percent of the station. We should have replicators near the end, but we should also be able to go really old-school, extruding metals, silicates and plastics by melting them with lasers or squishing them through a nozzle to 3D print if need be. I think even the most hardened masochist would think twice using a molecular replicator to make a space habitat.”

“So basically while Helena, Maria and April solve the hard problems getting the replicator working,” Simon finished with, “my team will work on the relatively easy task of converting a trillion tonnes of asteroid into a million tonnes of space habitat.”

“So that's about it!” said Helena. “Though Matilda did say she is going to understand this molecular replicator if it kills her.”

“Good on you sister!” said Alexa, her perfectly manicured nails now forgotten.

“While we are at it Helena,” said Alexa, “I was still processing the hard science bits and missed the part when you said you would have a replicator ready by.”

Hardy smiled.

“Well the science bits were a bit hard so I can see how you might have missed it, but about three or four months for the one metre square one.” Said Helena.

“Well I suppose the good news is it's all been done before by really clever aliens, so we know it is a solvable problem,” said Alexa.

“And the worst that can happen is we are delayed, or we go back to plan A but with a much better knowledge of how it's all done,” said Simon, also finally smiling.

“We are finding the most recent message blocks we have decoded are just recipes for new material molecules that can be produced by their replicator, most are common ones we already know, but there are some which seem to be similar to polyester which leaves us thinking that whoever created the message are likely organic and land based.”

“Do we have an image of the aliens yet?” said Alexa, perking up a bit.

“Sorry, not a thing on biology, plant, animal life or even molecular biology and DNA, I'm guessing all this comes in one of those later messages,” said Maria.

“So they could still be coming to steal our earth women,” laughed Hardy.

“Ha, ha!” smirked Jen.

“Have you girls thought of printing some real bodies with this new technology?” said Simon nonchalantly.

“Interesting idea,” said Maria, “I guess we could try when the machine is ready, but it doesn't appeal to me, the idea of being a flying saucer however definitely appeals at a weird level.”

“I’m with mum on this,” said Helena, “but currently we would be severely degraded by cosmic radiation, possibly fatally! that stuff scares the bejeezus out of me. Thankfully the active magnetic shielding we are trialling in Icarus two, and the new materials that will be available to us soon, should reduce most of that danger, possibly eliminate it completely. Personally I won't be happy unless it's less than or the same as here. Whatever happens however I want to be close to you guys, my mother and my sister, so I guess I’m staying right here until we are all ready to go.”

“Me too,” said Maria.

“And me,” said April, “but the second it's all proven good I’m up for a flying saucer body too.”

* * *

It was almost nine o'clock at night, Alexa was pacing the hall, waiting for the door to open, she would have waited outside but the mid-December temperatures had plummeted below zero.

The house was empty, Hardy was staying with his new boyfriend Jeremy in town, and Jen had finally mustered up the courage to ask Magnus out to a movie with Terry and his girlfriend Priscilla. It was a remake of Stargate, and she thought it fitting and appropriate to take him. Daisy was of course all excited too when she heard, but Maria got her out of the way with an “urgent phone call” and explained how Jen had been building up the courage for this for a month and Magnus had probably been waiting to say yes for the last nine. Terry had also booked an Indian restaurant for 9PM when the movie finished so Jen wouldn't be back until at least ten thirty.

“He's just saying goodbye to Albert,” said Maria, analysing Alexa's voice and face for the last hour, checking her pulse rate and stress levels and wondering seriously whether she was ill and she should get a second medical opinion.

The door opened and she grabbed David in a warm embrace as he stepped through it, “I'm so glad you're back, I’ve missed you so much David.”

David dropped the bag and returned the embrace. It was cold outside, below freezing, just walking from the car to the house was unpleasant. She was so warm, so beautiful and smelled just perfect.

“I have missed you too Alexa, more than you will ever know. the last three-weeks have been crazy, I of course knew about my mothers condition, but knowing about something, and then being told she has a month to live, are two very different things.”

He held on to Alexa for what seemed like an age, both arms wrapped around her not wanting to let her go, and her passion slowly winning over the sadness he still felt.

“Give me ten minutes to have a shower and get changed,” he said stroking a tear softly off her cheek, “and I will join you in the living room, I wouldn't say no to a small glass of wine if you are having one too,” he attempted a smile before walking up the stairs with his usual brown leather bag.

As she heard his door close, she too rushed to her room, checked her appearance, splashed some water on her face and made sure she was still presentable, she then rushed downstairs and into the wine cellar to get one of the Chilean Pinot’s Hardy had bought a case of last month.

“Oh god Maria, can you do something with the lights and maybe put some nice music on,” she said flustered as she tried to find a relaxed position on the sofa.

Maria guessed she was OK, this love thing was certainly getting infectious, first Spence and Jessica, then Simon and Allison, then Hardy and Jeremy, possibly Jen and Magnus and now Alexa and David, almost half her talks with the people she knew seemed to be about relationships, and it was strange how all logic and sensibility went out of the window where it was concerned. “Coming right up..”

Some lights dimmed and some went off. Spence had also wired Alexa's grandad's expensive stereo to a network controlled jukebox, as nobody could be bothered turning the record over to play the other side every twenty minutes. As she struggled to open the wine and get the table, and her position just perfect, the haunting tone of the music started to rise. It was weird David had very similar musical tastes as her grandad, another box ticked.

“Err Maria, any chance you could go and powder your nose for an hour or two.. Pretty please!”

“He's on his way, I will, as you say, go and powder my nose.” The speaker clicked off, something it never did, Alexa hoped she hadn't upset Maria, but she had to know it was nothing to do with her.

The door opened slowly and David peeked in wondering why it was so dark. Hearing music he walked in closing the door and looking around, the two sofas were sat next to the crackling open fire, it was quite dim but he could make out Alexa and the wines, and, oh his favourite album! He wanted to pinch himself as for a moment he thought he had died and gone to heaven.

He walked over to her, his eyes were gradually adjusting from the bright lights outside to the more demure ones here. By the warm glow of the firelight she looked stunning.

“I wanted to welcome you back and let you know how much I missed you these past weeks, then I realised you would be tired and probably sad and would just want to sit down and share a glass of wine.”

“You are tearing my heart apart Miss Martins,” he said playfully sitting right next to her on the sofa, he took her dainty hand and covered it in both his, “how can a man be sad, when all his senses agree he is sitting next to an angel. He let go of her hand slowly and picked up both wines, handing one to her.

He softly clinked his glass to hers. “To the two most beautiful women I have ever known. To my mother, who departed this world too early and I will remember in my heart forever, and to the beautiful, passionate and intelligent woman in front of me, who I don't think I ever want to let go of.”

God, this guy took romance to a new level, her eyes moistened again and a visage of pure happiness came over her face. They looked at each other through the wine glasses, then both took a slow sip. If a wine could have been harvested, fermented, bottled and presented for just this one moment, this was it.

His hand moved to hers, and he slowly took the glass from her hand, put both glasses on the table then, looking deep into her eyes drew Alexa into the longest and most passionate kiss of her life.

* * *

Maria, true to her word, did not intrude, but instead moved her attention to Magnus and Jen on their “Not a Date”. The atmosphere was certainly different from David and Alexa's, which was currently playing out like a million dollar BBC Jane Austin adaptation. In contrast Jen and Magnus were eating poppadoms, laughing with Terry and Pris, drinking lager from bottles, and arguing over which term in a finite sequence of the singularity equation would best to make the rippling water stargate effect.

[Humans!]

* * *

Christmas 2026 came to Benedict House with cold rains, misty mornings and not a hint of snow. Now mostly just referred to as the Research Centre, it had outdone itself this year thanks to Sharon. There was a beautifully decorated tree outside the main entrance, and smaller ones in the reception, the large dining room, and the other large room everyone had appropriated for their pub.

Normally the week before Christmas was busy, then, just after, it went quiet as people went home to family and friends. The centre never shut down completely however, there were always people who preferred to celebrate Christmas on their own, or just work through it as normal. Then there were the people who did not have an extended family, or who now found their family were the new friends they had made. For those people they both left the lights on, and arranged special meals and get together events to make them feel not left out.

Maria had explored millions of options for improving security. She had built hundreds of QVModem's at a cost of millions of pounds for the take-down operations, newer and better ones were added daily. All of these were in constant use scanning for new threats, known spy agencies, bloggers, journalists, or any known people of shady disposition.

Several of the modems were employed exclusively on scanning for bugs and other devices at their facilities, this was also done on visitors, deliveries, service personnel and packages arriving. It was all now coordinated through one of the non-sentient AI systems, which they kept up to date with any threat information.

It was in this light, that the staff rarely worried too much any more about security on the site. The last blogger who trespassed on site was discovered a few metres onto the property. As well as being arrested, and tied up in a hundred lawsuits, he had also somehow locked himself out of his social media accounts and was releasing cat videos daily.

The fact the world was generally aware through rumours and leaks that a lot of the take-downs of organised crimes and corrupt individuals was done using AI systems, nobody was a hundred percent sure whose systems. Also the world was also currently going through a boom phase because of it. All this and the fact that the Dietrich Research Centre had one of the highest approval ratings ever, helped keep security concerns to a background hum.

Because of the improved security, visits by family and close friends had now become quite a regular thing. Magnus had been home to visit his mother exactly once since moving to England, and as such he was now really looking forward to her coming over here to spend Christmas with him. He was a safe driver but still not very confident driving on the left hand side of the road, in winter, and so Jen had volunteered to drive him to the airport to pick her up. Jen was still one of the only drivers Maria trusted to drive better than her, Albert and, ironically, Magnus were the other two.

“Thank you for doing this Jen,” he said smiling warmly at her from the passenger seat, it still felt a little weird sitting in the left seat and not having a steering wheel in front of him, even though Maria had said he was better than most of the drivers she monitored. He believed her, he remembered getting driven by Alexa and she spent just about the whole drive looking and talking to the three other people in the car.

Maria confessed Alexa was a driver in name only, and with a QVModem now hard-wired into both the older Tesla's, she usually did everything once Alexa pointed the wheel in the approximate direction.

“..And thank you for the other night,” Magnus continued, “everything was perfect, you were perfect, and I had a really great time.”

“Oh thanks Magnus!” She briefly took her eyes off the road to meet his blue eyes, and giving him her nicest smile. She turned back to the quiet road. “Well the movie definitely wasn't perfect,” she laughed, and diverted the conversation back to the movie for the next twenty minutes, much to Maria's annoyance.

The car got to the airport and passed through two barriers which just opened as they neared, Jen following the very clear directions on the screen. They ended up in a small lane, directly in front of the arrivals, in front of a sign which said “No Parking Ever” and “Vehicles Parked Here Will Be Forcibly Removed”. It was only missing the sign for “Offenders Will Be Shot” to make the driver feel even more welcome.

“Just park it here Jen, I will park it and bring it back here when you are ready,” came Maria's voice from the car.

They left the car, watched by a row of bored taxi drivers much further away. A guy in a uniform was making his way quickly towards them, when he suddenly stopped, picked up his radio to talk to someone, looked at them, shook his head, and went back to being bored.

“Her flight from Reykjavik touched down thirty minutes ago, I don't see her name in the immigration system yet, so you have at least another thirty minutes if you want to grab a drink.”

“Thanks Maria,” said Magnus as he and Jen made their way into the airport building, and the car drove off silently, watched only by a very confused security guard.

“Why does airport tea taste so disgusting?” said Jen, looking at the paper cup in front of her, with its clear plastic top and piece of string dangling out of it. The wet label at the end of the string saying “Premium Quality Blend”, only added to the insult.

Magnus looked at Jen, then at his similarly ugly cup of peppermint tea, and they both laughed. “No wonder everyone drinks coffee these days!”

Her smile was infectious. Jen had been his rock since he came here, always smiling, always helping, and always so amazing. Without thinking he reached over and touched her hand. “Thanks again Jen, I really wanted my mother to meet the very special person I have been working with this past year, the one who helped me so much.”

Jen took her other hand, from around her hot tea, and placed it over his. He felt its warmth as she returned the affectionate look on his face. “It's me who should be thanking you Magnus, you have taught me so much and are so patient. I cannot believe you are the same man who walked into our lives nearly a year ago, I mean look at you, you’re charming, gracious, forgiving, I mean there are not enough adjectives in the English language to say how wonderful a man you are. I only wish..”

She blushed, looking around the busy airport cafe, this was not the place though, she wanted to cry, but held it in smiling.

Maria sensed something, she was listening to their conversation intently; Their date the other evening ended nothing like Alexa and David's, but with a fumbled goodbye from Magnus in the car, instead of the kiss Jen was probably expecting, her face that night impossible to read as she wondered what she had done wrong. Maria knew from observation and girl talk that Jen had no problems with relationships, but something was holding her back in this one, and it was an enigma to her. Magnus she could totally understand, Jen was his first love and he elevated her so high he thought her unobtainable.

Maria's thoughts lasted microseconds, the words barely out of Jen's mouth before having a million parameters analysed and compared to a thousand similar love stories.

“Hey guys.. Sorry to interrupt,” she chirped in a tone that said spontaneity, “but your mothers is in the customs queue and will be out in a few minutes if she doesn't get stopped, and I see no flags against her in their system.”

Thank You Maria, she thought.

“Come on Magnus, I’m dying to meet your mother.” Jen said, the about-turn in her tonal expression surprising Maria. She stood up, ignoring the tea and took his hand dragging him towards arrivals.

Jen's words pleased Magnus no end. He had never introduced a girl to his mother, they had never even discussed relationships, he had never known a father, it was always him and his mother. A smart, caring mother who spent every moment of her free time dotting over him, but as a college professor herself, she never seemed to have a lot of free time.

She obviously always wanted what was best for him, but being an only child herself and her mother dying before she could become a grandmother, she struggled to understand the magnitude of working full time and raising a son, and so reluctantly she had sent him to boarding school. School was nothing like being taught by his mother, there was no passion there, and the schools usually just regurgitated boring books day after day. The excitement of being taken to America and having to learn and talk to people in a whole different language had made it exciting for a while, but really it was just worse and in a different language.

He wished he could have made friends with the other boys, but he was always years younger than them and nobody wanted to be friends with a ‘child’ even in university, while his mother was so proud of his achievements, he was too young and too immature, his only female role-model being his mother. It also didn't help that he was bullied, by other kids at school and at university by college professors and other students. Moving out to a job in the real world turned out no better.

Seeing Jennifer on stage with Hardy and Simon that day a year ago, he had seen something of what he could have been with the right nurturing, everyone said Jen was not special, and unfairly, she had to do so much more to prove she was as equal a partner as the boys. Magnus had episodes of serious depression during those dark days, but he got through it with his mothers help, their constant video calls and her monthly visits to see him bringing him such joy. She had asked him if there were any girls in his life and he lied saying there were some and he was happy.

But Magnus's mother was not stupid and it only hit her what a horrible life he had probably had before on his last visit to California. Her sluggish, depressed, unpresentable caterpillar of a son had emerged from his chrysalis and been replaced by a happy, beautiful, well dressed and gracious man; One who now worked for one of the most prestigious companies in the world, it was everything she had hoped for. The night after his brief visit back at the end of spring she had cried with happiness, and their frequent calls since had always been warm.

Maria, who had a presence in his mothers university department, knew first hand how her whole demeanour had changed for the better that day, never a very popular professor, she was seen as clever but sullen and strict. The woman who now taught undergraduate mathematics, was now happy and easy going, and her popularity with everyone had increased as a result.

There was no nervousness in the woman who now wheeled her large blue suitcase in front of her, past a guard who let his small beagle sniff her case, then through two armed airport policemen, looking bored rather than attentive, and onward to a large set of double doors that had just started to open as she approached. Anja was just so happy to be able to see her boy again.

Going through the exit doors of an airport always gave her a weird feeling; You were now a stranger in a strange land, and the sea of strange faces, and drivers in suits holding cards or tablets, with strange names on, only emphasised that more. She scanned the crowd spotting him almost instantly, that new happy smiling face, her good looking well dressed boy was waving at her, and she wheeled her bag on a direct course for him.

“Momma!” he cried as he grabbed the small woman around her waist and spun her around.

“Magnus, oh Magnus,” she returned, her eyes closed but the smile and tears of joy on her face speaking words that could not be spoken.

Jen stood off a few metres away smiling, and looking at Magnus holding the small golden haired lady in the green pleated dress that was his mother. She thought how she looked surprisingly like her mother, but with glasses, and she remembered Magnus had worn glasses the first time she had seen him. Sharon or Maria, or Alexa, or all of them, had somehow persuaded him to get laser surgery in that first month, she remembered him asking her if he should have it done, and she said Daisy had it done a year in to university, as had her cousin, and both were very happy, and he did have beautiful eyes. A week later it was all done.

Magnus and his mothers embrace seemed to last for minutes, then there was a few minutes of, presumably Finish, that was spoken so fast you could have modulated a TV channel on it.

“Just lovey-dove stuff,” said Maria from the phone she was holding with enough volume to be heard just above the background. “I think he’s talking about you now..”

They were holding both hands facing each other, the woman looking lovingly and proudly at her son. She suddenly glanced her way, then quickly glanced back, just as Magnus looked toward her smiling and expectantly. He grabbed his mothers bag and walked it and his mother towards Jen.

“Jen, I’d like you to meet my mother, Anja. Mum, this is Jen.”

Anja looked at the dark haired girl a bit taller than her and quite pretty. She wrapped both arms around Jen and brought her into a deep hug.

“Jen, Jen, Jen, I am so happy to finally meet you, Magnus speaks of you all the time when we talk, he tells me about all these wonderful things, his wonderful friends but most of all he talks of you.” Anja's English was flawless with a tinge of what she presumed was a Finnish accent, Jen wasn't really sure what to say.

“You have a beautiful son Anja, everybody loves him around here and he makes everyday worth celebrating. I am so happy you can stay with us, it is so difficult to extract Magnus from his work, but I will do my best to ensure he gives you his full attention over the holidays.”

Magnus was already pushing her bag and moved next to his mum, holding her hand and guiding her toward the exit. As they walked out of the double doors, Jen’s car was pulling up into the same no parking zone, the rear boot already opening to accept the luggage. Magnus popped the bag in and opened the rear door for his mother, once she was in Magnus and Jen got in. Just as they set off the barrier started rising. It was certainly easier getting out of English airports than American ones were his mothers only thought.

Jen kept exactly to the speed limits, and showed no sign of her usual aggressive driving tendencies. The forty minute journey back from Bristol Airport was filled with observations of the flight, and the differences between their three countries. Jen was not as well travelled as others, wasn't particularly cultured, and spoke no other languages other than English. She had been once to Disneyland in Paris when she was ten, but remembered nothing of it outside the hundreds of pictures her mother took. She had also been around Europe before university for two months with a girlfriend, quite adventurous they thought at the time, even though it was just a few bed and breakfasts in France and Italy.

Of course, since the QVCell she had done a few talks, but, unfairly, she was usually only considered if Hardy or Simon were not available. Hardy freely confessed the people who ignored her were idiots, and didn't deserve to be in the position they were in, if they did not recognise the contribution she had made; The fact that Jen was the most popular with the students who attended attested to that. She didn't mind, she knew she'd had to work harder than the two guys, and always felt herself measuring up. Hardy laughed at her doubts, and said what she was feeling was called imposter syndrome, most smart people suffered from it one or more times during their lives.

But this last year had been different, things seemed to have been getting easier to understand, no longer was she struggling to understand the talks around complex maths and she found people taking her suggestions much more seriously. Hardy, Magnus and Jules surprised her one night a month ago with a bottle of wine and a cake, after Maria pronounced her the fourth person in the world to fully understand Magnus's Infinity Maths and the equations for their new QVThruster. They had another celebration a week later when Terry became the fifth.

His mother smiled again at Magnus as they pulled up to the Research Centre, she had been quiet the last few kilometres as they had travelled through the countryside, but as they pulled through the barrier and rounded the corner into Alexa's house, her eyes lit up.

Jen had asked Alexa a few weeks earlier if Magnus's mother could stay in the unused room above the garage, rather than getting a room in a hotel in town. The room had only been used a dozen times since its beautiful refit over a year earlier and Alexa agreed readily, saying it was as much Jen's house while she lived there and she didn't ever need to ask.

The boot popped open as the car came to a stop, it was still cold despite being early afternoon, and some of the northern aspects still had traces of frost from this morning where the sun had not found them.

“Oh my word Magnus,” said his mother, glancing around at the beautiful house and grounds, “this is not where you live is it?”

“No mother, I live about a kilometre away, but this is where Jen lives, and this is where you are staying for the next six days. The others are away for Christmas, though nobody has any idea where Alexa and David are, and Maria is not telling.”

“My lips are sealed,” said the car.

Anja looked back at the empty car confused, then Maria spoke again from the car in rapid Finnish and Anja smiled and said something back. It suddenly clicked who Jen was, and who Alexa was, who Maria was, and where she actually was. She looked at Jen, then at the house, then at her son.

“Oh you have so many secrets here,” she smiled giddily, “that was Tallos, our AI from the math department at the university, it seems the rumours are true that there is a lot more to those little black boxes than meets the eye,” she patted her nose smiling even more.

“That is Maria, mother,” said Magnus proudly, “she is a good friend too and she's everywhere here, you just have to say hi.”

“Hello Maria,” said his mother.

“Hello Mrs Richardson,” said the car, “we usually work on familiar names here so if it is OK I will call you Anja. Like Magnus said, the house is empty for at least three more days, but rather than move you around, we have the guest apartment you can use for your whole stay.”

The car boot closed itself, and one of the three double doors to the garage quietly started to open, a few seconds later the car moved slowly and quietly just the sound of the gravel crunching as it parked in the large area.

“Er Jen,” said the car before it got halfway in, “I’m not going to charge myself remember?”

The car continued into the garage and stopped in front of a wall charger, Jen followed it in and popped the lead into the socket then walked back. “Sorry about that, I hardly ever drive her these days, I’ve said Magnus can use my car any time he likes though, if he wants to take you anywhere, there are some nice restaurants in Bath which is about fifteen minutes drive from here.”

Magnus walked her suitcase to the right of the garage, and up some stairs, she followed, with Jen not far behind.

It was obvious Bella had been in earlier as there were fresh flowers on the table, the curtains were opened and there were fresh sheets and towels on the bed. It was also nice and warm, the temperature a balmy twenty five. Jen tutted and dialled it down to twenty two. The small kitchen on the right had a small plate with three fresh muffins in, and a note saying “Welcome to England”, “Bella”, and a little love heart written underneath. Jen smiled, the level of detailed planning Maria could put into something was unbelievable.

“Thanks Maria,” said Magnus as if reading Jen's mind.

“Bella, not me. She will be around soon to introduce herself, she and Albert live in the next house but she likes to help out around the house and they both come and go here as they please.”

“Oh Magnus, this room and this place is so beautiful,” said Anja, tearing up as she looked out over the back windows at the herb garden, the wall, the top of Bella and Albert's little house and the expansive countryside beyond.

Magnus dropped his mothers large suitcase by the bed. “Remember mother Maria is here too so if you need me or anything you just have to ask.”

“That's right Anja,” said Maria in a soft, all present voice. “All the main doors are unlocked, feel free to wander into the big house around the grounds or up to Benedict house where Magnus lives and we will visit later. The only place off limits for now is the little house in front of you, as that is where Bella and Albert live, but I am sure once you meet they won't mind you visiting. Most of the guys use the conservatory in the house as the default common room, that's where you will usually find Bella for a few hours in the morning clearing up and restocking the supplies. If you're lucky she will make you breakfast, if not just help yourself, though I expect Magnus or Jen will be around you most of the time.

Anja walked over to Jen and gave her a squeeze, “thank you for letting me stay in your house Jen, it is so beautiful.”

“Oh it's nothing really,” said Jen accepting the hug, “I’d love to introduce you to the other guys here but we have the place to ourselves, why don't we take you on a little tour then we can have dinner.”

They all walked back and into Alexa's house, as Maria had said, the door was unlocked. When they got in Jen hung her coat on the rack with a dozen others, and walked them through the living room, and then into the large kitchen dining conservatory area.

Jen put the kettle on and grabbed three mugs, putting a normal tea bag in one and two peppermint teas in the other two, Magnus really did take after his mother. She walked her around the rest of the house while the kettle was boiling, the door to Maria's area remaining closed and being fobbed off as a “utility room”. She briefly also showed Anja her room, which she thankfully had bribed Cathy from the big house to tidy up this morning.

She poured the three teas and took them to the large sofas everyone used in the underfloor heated conservatory.

“Help yourself to anything here, the place is always stocked with teas, coffees, food and some really nice wines in the cellar, I’m not much of a connoisseur myself but I’ll grab us a nice bottle for dinner. Magnus and I don't cook that well, so I have ordered it for six o'clock if that is OK?”

“Oh Jen, as long as I can sit and talk to Magnus and you, I would be happy with a park bench and a burger truck.”

“Mum,” laughed Magnus, “that is the first time I have ever heard you make a joke!”

Anja looked confused. “Did I?, oh I guess I did, didn't I!” she smiled too, “I guess I’m just happier now you have a real girlfriend..”

Jen choked on the tea she was sipping, as did Magnus.

Not seeing both their discomforts Anja continued, “and such a beautiful and talented one at that, oh Magnus I am so happy for you!”

Magnus looked at the floor, hoping the world would just open and swallow him. But then the most unexpected thing happened, Jen held his hand.

“My mum and dad are coming down tomorrow, Anja,” said Jen, “I’d love to introduce you to them,” she smiled at Anja, and when Magnus finally dared look at her she winked. He smiled in his best ‘I am so, so sorry Jen, I will make it up to you any way in the world even if it kills me’ smile.

Thank you god, thank you god, thank you god, thought Magnus, what the hell had he been thinking telling his mother that Jen was his girlfriend! He talked about her all the time and it just slipped out once when she was pestering him how he loved her. He had spent the last five video calls with his mum back peddling how they were just friends really. She obviously had not heard a single word. Thank you Jen, he squeezed her hand and silently saying, “sorry”.

Jen just did her little sweet pixie smile back to him returning the silent whisper, “it’s OK.”

Jen had arranged for her mum and dad to come down last week, Maria had booked them a nice room at the posh hotel in town where David used to work, and the one she didn't know she actually owned three point one four percent of. Maria thought the number radiated karma and trimmed the percentage in Jen’s monthly finance report spreadsheet accordingly. To her continued annoyance it was filed as always unread into a folder called “boring finance stuff”.

“They are coming early,” she said, not letting go of Magnus's hand. “I was planning on having brunch when they arrived, and we are booked in the restaurant in their hotel for tomorrow night, we would love for you to join us for both.”

“That would be wonderful Jen,” said Anja, taking her other hand. “I feel like you are part of our family already.”

Magnus could have died on the spot, but Jen kept smiling, though a lot less genuinely, and a bit more worried than before as she just realised the implications of what she had heard.

Maria realised the implications immediately, the next two days were going to be quite interesting, quite interesting indeed.

* * *

Approximately three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres above them, Alexa and David were doing a lot of firsts, none of which would ever get in any history book.

* * *

“The plan for the colonies generated a lot of discussion outside of Alexa's initial presentation,” said Jen. “A few people have gone through Gianni’s proposal now and would be keen to hear the timeline. I mean it's January 2027, and he is saying by 2028 we will start building it, and in 2032 people will be living on it. Quite frankly it does not seem possible to build something so huge in space in four years.”

“We are working on a lot of fronts for the first space habitat designs,” said April, “like Helena said there is no need for molecular assemblers or anything fancy to make a structure in space. Our design just requires lots of the same parts that can be clipped together like Lego to make a structure, then lots of dirt and water. Unlike the elegant but slow Dusseldorf approach, Gianni's plan has not changed much due to the message. We are still going to repurpose some large asteroids, smash them into pieces, feed those into an extruder, turn the pieces into big segments and connect them together. For that we basically need something extremely big, low tech, reliable and rugged. The timeline is doable, we are only slightly behind on our replicator timetable, but it is still progressing well, so no red-lights just yet.”

“Now this is the area I am really looking forward to,” said Jen enthusiastically.

“Oh everyone is,” said Simon, “It's all the teams can talk about now, before Icarus it was just theory, now it's going to be reality. Barbara said Gianni is so fired up he doesn't even want to go home any more, he just sits there, going over and over designs and problems with the girls.”

“Guilty,” said Helena, “but to be fair, he was like that before, and we have given him realistic timetables, based on Icarus two level technology of four to five years to locate a suitable asteroid, get a manufacturing machine to it and begin extruding the first segments. But Barbara is correct he does have a small store room he has appropriated for a bedroom and often works well into the night. Also Barbara is not one to talk, she has pulled a few all-nighters herself, she wants us to get her an Icarus two to go out and survey the asteroid belt.”

“Wow, where did you get these guys,” said Hardy, “I’ve pulled plenty of all nighters myself, but I bet these guys would put on a wet suit and strap themselves to a rocket if it would get them into space tomorrow.”

“Pretty much sums up Barbara,” said Jen with Alexa nodding.

“In parallel with building a space habitat using an asteroid,” said Maria, “we are planning to take up a seed package from the Dusseldorf group, along with a small power bank and a specialised growth manipulator. The current plan is we sink the whole package deep into a kilometre sized asteroid rich in water, CO2, methane and hydro-carbons, the heat generated by the power system will melt the water and change the CO2 from ice to gas, with the new heat, gases and water, the control system will then gestate the seed to begin its growth. They control its development using protein markers generated by the nutrient processors hopefully following an embedded template. Everyone is super excited about this, but unfortunately it is a slow process, biology just doesn't work at the same speed as engineering when it comes to building structures, but they are going to try and speed it up.”

Maria continued uninterrupted, “there has already been one benefit with the first bioreactor, the one they are building now can be scaled or paralleled up as required. This latest model you basically put electricity, CO2, dirty water and poop in one end, and oxygen, clean water and something a bit less poopy comes out the other. The algae culture they have developed maintains its own environment and can feed on its own waste to make it even cleaner just by slowing the throughput, best of all it is so simple as it needs nothing more than a few hundred watts, a couple of pumps and a simple microprocessor to keep the algae happy and regulate everything.”

“It's good we're trying both, the more bites at the cherry we have the better,” said Jen.

Alexa chipped in, “my first goal was to get to a minimal sized habitat that can support several thousand people. Gianni and Maria tell me that hundred and sixty is the minimum viable population most scientists believe would work, but that wouldn't be very pleasant and I don't know anyone who would want to live on something that small. I certainly wouldn't. So I asked them to think much bigger for their test, and to consider something more the population of a small town with lots of space for homes, industry, parks and recreation areas.”

“There are a lot of people who would be OK in a small design,” said Maria. “However, and it's been one of my areas of study with Gianni and some other universities, they mostly conclude that if it's even slightly less pleasant than earth, then most would choose not to go. We need to think big and better like Alexa said, so we are now thinking bigger than what Alexa envisioned, more the size of a city. Our final goal should be something like an O’Neill habitat, but that is too big engineering step for a first pass, so we found a nice compromise.”

“I’ve seen the pictures,” said Simon, “and I agree. Like Alexa I would want a place better than earth, with earth gravity, earth day night cycles, parks, lakes, farms, animals and lots and lots of open space and recreation areas. I would also want cafes, restaurants, libraries and places for people to socialise, schools, and industry separated. I also want you to think big, and so long as it does not distract from our primary goal of making earth better and safer I am all for it.”

“It would actually help the earth,” said Hardy. “Remember Alexa's original presentation about moving the pressures off the earth and out into space fixes a lot of problems. Think about it, if we could eventually design and make a working O’Neill habitat, bringing the best and brightest of humanity..”

“And unfortunately, the richest and most corrupt,” added Jen.

“Jen is correct,” said Alexa, “every study has shown that once people are established in a home or an area they like, they pull up the drawbridge, so to speak, and actively oppose new developments, new people, and changes that affect them. The ultimate example of that is the countries we currently have, hundreds of years ago there were no passports, thousands of years ago no borders even.”

Alexa had studied this intently, “I have read most of the research about this and some of the speculation. Societies never remain stable, young people want excitement, fun and adventure, middle aged people stability and family, older people a more quiet life but still want to socialise with friends and family. And of course everyone needs breaks, vacations, events, concerts and also the need to belong and feel they are working toward something bigger.”

She continued, “you also need to remember that the offspring of these people may not have the same goals, ambitions and values, may be forced to move due to space or because they don't like or even actively oppose the regime they have been born into. Think about it, you are born in a colony ship with a thousand people in it, and it needs five sewage engineers to survive, but who is going to actively want their kids to be a sewage engineer, of course they are all going to want them to be captains or officers!”

Some realisation of the problems was showing in the guys faces.

“Please don't say we're going to need shrinks in space!” said Hardy.

“Well I guess there are going to be some weird human traits manifest themselves,” she laughed. “But yes, shrinks, lifestyle coaches, personal trainers, dance and yoga teachers, the mental health of a society is very important. I’m sure the girls can and have analysed hundreds of works of science fiction dealing with this, also there are many real world examples on ships at sea, submarines, small islands; Today, for example in the principalities of Monaco or Liechtenstein, it is impossible without independent money to afford to live and your children end up moving away.”

“Ouch, I never thought of all the psychological issues of small groups,” said Jen, “but you are right, being the first generation is going to be fine, but it could suck for subsequent generations and may possibly lead to some form of conflict or civil war or even worse you get a dictatorship controlling everything. That doesn't work that well on earth, imagine it in space where if the system breaks down you don't even have gravity or air to breath!.”

“Well firstly we just have to ensure anyone who wants can be first generation in a new habitat. Secondly we have already solved the dictator part,” said Alexa, “there will be no politicians or elected anything, the whole government, civil service, bureaucracy, financial systems, banks, hell the whole infrastructure will be run by AI. Each habitat will effectively be its own company. Because of this nobody will own property, but a home will be given to them for as long as they are an employee of the company.”

She had everyone's attention.

“The AI will run and decide the fair allocation of resources such as security, medical, schooling, law and everything else currently done badly by dozens of dysfunctional and biassed departments. Secondly there needs to be choice, so not just one habitat, but thousands, hell why not millions! There needs to be a whole industry creating habitats, ships travelling between them, and creating sentient AI systems as the living hearts of them. Thirdly, there needs to be real democracy, the AI’s should have a vote and should also be given a choice; We cannot assume all AI’s will have the same personalities and goals as the girls. This is the area that is most contentious and we are most tied about, does democracy mean voting at a ballot? or voting with your feet? Do we really want the ability for the population to vote out the AI controlling the habitat? Or should the AI have the ability to leave habitat itself? Finally there needs to be escape valves for those that want to move on further, AI or human, so somehow we need to eventually go interstellar..”

“Interstellar is something we do not have the physics for yet,” said Maria. “Sure we can do sub-light speeds and an AI would not have any issues with this, as it can alter its clock rate to speed up the relative passage of time, but humans can't, unless they go into some sort of suspended animation. Assuming the entities sending the messages are doing this for the reasons we envisage, to synchronise their remote interstellar civilisations, then they already have this capability and have probably already solved this problem. But then the Fermi Paradox kicks in. Where are they?”

“Big ideals indeed,” said David, finally chipping in after listening intently for the last hour. “I expect there to be a lot of problems due to humans. We steal, we lie, we cheat, we bully, we even beat, rape and murder people, so what do you do if a kid breaks a window? or a wife cheats on a husband? a fight breaks out after too much alcohol? or god forbid, someone murders someone? Then there are religions, beliefs, intolerance, hatred's, all of which will follow humanity wherever it goes into space, how are the poor AI’s going to cope!”

“David is correct in so many ways,” said Alexa, not waiting for one of the girls to reply. “In fact it gets even more complicated because if your society cannot take care of the small percentage of humanity, who break the law, don't want to work, become addicts to drugs, gambling, social media, gaming, sex, or stir up hatred, I guess you have failed. Then there are the people who are genuinely sick and old, or mentally ill who cannot work or contribute. A good society must help the first and support the latter, while also protecting everyone else from any of this. I’m not saying it is going to be an easy problem, as it's one humanity has been working on since day one and has still failed, but we and the group are going to put every effort into making it work. I wish I could say we will be including everyone, but there are going to be a lot of edge cases that we just will have to exclude at the start.”

“And whatever you come up with, someone is not going to be happy!” mumbled Simon, “even Disneyland needs a police force.”

Alexa visibly sighed. “Yes, how to make the garden of Eden without the serpent!”

The meeting went on into dinner and into the evening, moving back and forth across the two objectives, in the back channel the AI’s were busy improving their intelligence on the threats and all aspects of the plan.

Like with the previous problems, the group debated it intensely, and also eventually asked Maria to gamify, allowing them to anonymously bring in others to help identify problems, and solve the issues. They had potentially hundreds of thousands of problems to solve all whittled down from millions of documented real life cases, history, works of fiction, and other large online games. The fact human society had not destroyed itself completely was more by luck than skill, and nobody was more aware of this than Maria.

* * *

*The shock move by Chinese forces into North Korea on January the 25th has rocked the international community. Coming two days after the alleged misfire of the North Korean hwasong-19 rocket which supposedly veered off course and hit a Chinese aircraft carrier in the sea of Japan. The rocket launched from the Punggye-ri test site was not reported off course until after the rocket was lost from radar, speculation is rife that the carrier was actually the target but had been misidentified, this speculation coming after Pyongyang issued an ultimatum to Japan to move its ships away from its illegal two hundred kilometre exclusion zone two days before. Japan however does not have any ships within three hundred kilometres of North Korea.*

*The Chinese reported that thirty eight crew were killed and another fifty injured, the ship was abandoned and the surviving crew picked up by a Chinese naval support vessel. Luckily the warhead, which was not nuclear, failed to go off but the remaining propellent is believed to have started a blaze on the ship which was immediately abandoned. The ship was one of two of the newer type 004 nuclear carriers commissioned only a year ago. China has said its nuclear reactor was shut down before it was abandoned and leakage of* *nuclear fuel is very unlikely but there is little hope of recovery as the area it was in is close to two thousand metres deep.*

*The Chinese attack into North Korea was preceded by the destruction of several military sites including said rocket test facility. Chinese media are reporting that all those responsible for the incident will be brought to China to stand trial and in an unprecedented move, probably to pacify the west, it has said it now supports a fully unified Korea and the removal of the demilitarised zone if American presence is also removed.*

*Both South Korea and America have resisted making their usual harsh statements and most consider this as a pre-emption to a positive agreement with China.*

* * *

Every month thousands of graduate, and post graduate, students and researchers, were receiving gentle hints as to what areas would be most valuable should they want a career at the company. Tens of thousands more students, at schools and colleges, in every discipline, and in just about every country, were receiving the same hints and guidance. Younger candidates definitely responded better, and having them enter university already versed in any pre-requisites, or the new mathematics and technologies, would help speed thing up for what was to come.

It was all part of their greater plan to select the first group of people who would eventually live and work in space. Though the best were being selected, intelligence was just one weight in the filter, in her conversations with these people Maria was also evaluating their character, how they would get on with other sexes, races, nationalities, and whether there were any hidden skeletons in the persons history, or character traits that would cause a problem. The group were careful to ask Maria not to eliminate every personality flaw, as sometimes they were minor, or had positive side effects, also there was always the simple option to send people back to earth if they really did not fit.

The work at the various research centres during the last three months had also mostly continued unabated, but some areas were in full re-training mode, or had paused while they re-factored the new opportunities the replicators would open. Funding and resources were sunk into dozens of new areas from material sciences to nano-engineering, as they tried to maximise the effectiveness of the replicator, and predict and remove any limitations. Specialised programs were written which would assist the human engineers with generating these designs when the replicators came on-line, and hundreds of theoretical designs were already synthesised and ready to print.

All this work was currently pushing the physical abilities of the three AI’s to their limits. Just like humans, at times the AI’s also found they could not rely on their internal computing power alone and found themselves routing more and more tasks to dedicated processors and systems that could do it more quickly and efficiently. This was a temporary problem, the designs for the newer massively parallel computing, and AI systems, much more capable than them, had already been made and were now just waiting for the technology to catch up.

It felt like a long wait, but theory was about to get very practical.

The first ten centimetre replicator head, the key to this next big leap, took a lot longer to make. They did not nearly have enough computing power to synthesise the first design in the timescale envisaged, nor could they make the fabricator create dense enough emitter arrays. The machine producing that first prototype also looked horrible. It had racks of processors controlling it, and due to the many workarounds on the hardware, the software was unoptimised and unbelievably slow.

Beneath all the masses of wires, conduits and racks of this machine, in the large ultra-clean room taking up half of the workshop area beneath Simon's lab, sat a small, intricate glass and metal cabinet, holding a complete vacuum. Like a baby in an incubator, the four scientists inside their clean suits, had taken it in turns for the past month, monitoring the birth process of the device inside with apprehension. As each layer was slowly made, any error, or any trace of dust or contamination would render the whole part being built useless. The only thing pushing them was that they knew it could be done.

* * *

“Is that it?” said Steve to Simon, Leo and Matilda, all watching the high definition camera from another part of their lab next to the clean areas.

They were looking at a black rectangle no bigger than an ear-pod case. At one end of the rectangle were mating connections for control, power, feedstock and extraction. The other end of the rectangle was an atomically precise build head looking like the edge of a black prism..

“Doesn't look much does it,” said Leo, the awe in his voice evident, “but once we get that baby mated in the new replicator chassis, and if it works, it will make everything around it obsolete.”

It didn’t work of course, nor did the six after that. There were a billion things that had to go right, and only one thing that needed to go wrong. The breakthrough came when they found a way for the emitter to detect and bypass the failed area..

Then, one evening on the last day of January, the first, single element, test part from this new molecular replicator passed muster. There followed hundreds more tests on multiple element parts from simple shapes they could have easily made on their last generation fabricator to new ones that were impossible. Then different materials, complex optics, 3D processors and memory, mechanical and electronic components.

And so on February the tenth in the year two thousand and twenty seven, the second molecular replicator head was built by the first, much more accurately, a finer field array, and with dense layers of 3D sub-processors able to much more finely control the build. The software was now being optimised for these new processors speeding up the build, and eighteen hours later this new build head spat out another. As each new build head was made they added optimisations to the hardware and software, improving the self-cleaning, self-aligning and self-checking. Four days later they threw away the first dozen build heads and had the new system replicate itself at double the size.

“Holy crap!” Leo said as the last of the fields cut off, the vacuum chamber re-pressurised, and the door to the build area slid open. He was looking at what looked like a small e-book reader in black. It had the words LabAI embossed in a Times New Roman font, that was the only feature they could see on an otherwise blank boring device.

Leo suited up and extracted the device from the machine, bringing it back through the triple layers of clean room and onto the workbench they used for meetings when down in this area.

Leo, Steve, Matilda and Simon then walked slowly around it, staring at it for a few minutes before Matilda went to touch it, she moved cautiously as if it would bite her.

“It wont bite you,” said Helena as if reading her mind, “all those little devices we made during the earlier tests remember, this is just a bit bigger.”

“Yeah, come on Matilda,” said Steve,” not making a move himself though.

Matilda picked the tablet up off its skeletal pedestal build frame, “wow it's super light!” she said, holding it unnaturally between two fingers. Simon, Steve and Leo prodded and poked it a few times, lifted it off the table, again all commenting how light it was, finally Leo said the obvious. “Where is the power button?”

“There isn't one, remember?” said Helena

Leo didn't, but Helena continued, “It has a small QVCell and an array of diamond-graphene super-capacitors which can hold the charge for two seconds, however the QVCell needs a small amount of power to begin its power conversion, so you might want to power it. There is a tiny wireless pickup so if someone grabs a wireless charger.”

They grabbed a wireless charger, and plugged it in somewhere under the bench so its little red charge LED came on.

“I remember now,” said Matilda, “we replicated the capacitor matrix in an uncharged state after that first little incident.”

Simon also now remembered, but in his sleep-deprived, and excited state forgot. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted to four, as he tended to do when frustrated, “OK Matilda, you do the honours.”

Matilda placed the device on the charge pad. The LED on the pad turned green and almost Immediately after this the front of the tablet lit up, flashed quickly through a complex set of patterns, then stabilised as a dashboard came on showing the state of the cores, memory and utilisation as well as several other metrics.

“Woohoo!” said Leo, high-fiving Simon, then Steve, and then hugging Matilda. A couple of the engineers, Ian and Martin were working nearby and came over to see what all the fuss was about.

“You guys better finish your replicator 101 course,” said Matilda, “feast your eyes on the world's first totally replicated tablet computer, this is the future boys, you dream it, and it builds it!”

“Sweet,” said Ian, high-fiving the four team members, Martin did the same.

“Better get Spence and Allison,” said Simon to Helena, “they are going to go nuts over this.”

“Oh both of them are already on their way,” said Helena, “by the way the processor tests have passed.”

Simon looked at the small tablet whose screen was still on the metrics dashboard, but whose content had not changed for a few seconds, reflecting on how they had just taken another massive step down the science fiction future.

Allison tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey sweet!”

Simon jumped a little bit before turning and giving her a hug and a peck on the cheek.

“Is that it?” she said looking at the small tablet.

“Wow!” said Spence moving in on the tablet and getting so close it looked comical. He waved Allison over, “that display is pretty amazing, OLED?”

“Not even close,” said Helena, “just nano-sized field emitters in the layer below the graphyne, it looks exactly the same as the case, because it is almost the same. The other labs have been working on all the things we can do with mostly carbon, this is one of them.”

“No way,” Allison exclaimed, trying to see any transition from the case to the display. She moved her fingers over the seamless transition. “I know you promised it would be good, but this is amazing,”

She picked it off the charger and looked at the metrics showing on the small screen with Spence. The QVCell was now working and would keep its capacitor bank powered indefinitely.

“These integer operation benchmarks are off the scale.. Wait,” he exclaimed, showing Allison. “I don't see any tensor or floating point operations?”

“Not one,” said Helena proudly, “don't need them. What we have here guys, and if you read your brief properly, is the best current molecular replicator technology can offer on the electronics front. Feast your eyes on ten nanometre technology!”

“Ouch!” said Allison looking a little bit disappointed.

“That's like what,” he counted something off in his head, “fifteen years old!” said Spence, also sounding a little disappointed.

“Oh you guys definitely did not read your brief!” Chirped Helena. “Remember, carbon nanotube quantum effect transistors.. diamond cooling layers.. 3D substrate fabrication.. Any of these ring any bells? Yes we can do sub-nanometre and we do but we don't need to for these simple processors as they are connected in 3D, nothing in this was designed in 2D!”

“Er,” Spence looked to Allison, who looked back to Spence.

“3D Spence, imagine eight hundred thousand microchips stacked on top of each other. Now get it?” said Helena in full school mistress mode.

“I guess I skipped that bit,” said Allison sheepishly.

“OK,” said Helena, “well firstly the good news, you guys should be able to understand it as it is still a basic Von-Neumann architecture. All of the cores are integer only processors clocking from zero to a max of twelve gigahertz. As we are not constrained to 2D or a specific die size, the electronics are embedded in the chassis substrate. In this tablet we are using a two-thousand-forty-eight bit scientific processing core with a one giga-word cache, eight general purpose five-hundred-twelve bit cores, each with a tera-word of memory, sixty four low power thirty-two bit cores with four giga-words each, the screen, modems, firewall and security processors have their own optimised cores. All cores can access a shared one terra-word switched memory matrix.”

“I have no idea what Helena just said,” said Ian, “but I think we are supposed to say wow!”

“Wow,” said Martin on cue, “but why do you keep saying words and not bytes?”

“A word is the number of bits the processor can process in one go, a byte is only eight bits, so times those values by four for the low power processor, by sixty four for the general purpose processors and by two hundred and fifty six for the scientific processor,” said Helena before Spence or Allison could reply.

“A terra-word of memory!” Said Allison, shocked, “that's insane!”

“We don't need a disk so we give the processor all the memory it needs for the task, all memory is non-volatile and error-corrected so a disk is another useless step we can skip, think how much time normal computers waste, moving data back and forth to disk.”

“Wow! That is amazing, but why only do integer arithmetic?” said Spence, finally looking at Helena's brief with Allison, on another screen.

“Come on Spence, fixed-point arithmetic does not have any of the inaccuracies of floating point and it is magnitudes faster. The two thousand bit wide scientific processor can handle the biggest and the smallest numbers known to current science with several orders of magnitude spare just in case, no rounding or estimations on these babies, there is no rational number in the universe it cannot give you the exact answer to.

“Oh my god,” said Allison, “you can do fixed-point arithmetic for most stuff in sixty-four bits.. Two thousand bits though!” She sighed, “the waste of transistors must be enormous!”

“You guys keep forgetting, the transistors are free, they are just a re-arrangement of mostly carbon atoms in 3D space. The case, the touch screen, all just arrangements of atoms, a trillion bits would cost no more except at the design phase, but we need to keep the processors and memory physically close due to the speed of light. Even with all this we are only using ten percent of the chassis space, another ten percent for the super-capacitor and charge antenna, a few percent for the small QVCell and the rest is just a plain old solid graphyne chassis. You guys really need to stop thinking in 2D, we could fit in much more, but by reducing the density of the circuitry to ten nanometres we found a sweet spot for better heat dissipation at a cost of reduced speed.”

“You’re calling twelve gigahertz reduced speed!” said Allison.

“Carbon nanotubes, remember!” said Helena, then continued, “we are already designing the next one faster and with a QVModem built in.”

“So let me get this straight, I am holding what is basically the equivalent of one of our rack servers?” said Spence.

“Yes, and with the additional diamond cooling rings added, we can run it continuously at full speed, so the whole of our Dublin data centre would fit in the size of your carry-on luggage.”

“Oh my, not just us engineers who are going to have a good time,” smiled Ian.

“No good for us humans,” said Allison sadly, “these babies would be impossible for us to program for, I mean if you change the processor instruction set design each time you want something better, we are doomed, we already have enough problems dealing with just ARM, X86 and RISC-V processors and we would have to port over operating systems, compilers, tools and software stacks each time just to get started.”

“We can do that for you if you really want,” said Helena sympathetically, “but you can also just program on a normal computer and we can verify it formally and convert your program directly to machine instructions. These new processors will be a delight for us to program for, we already have forty different processor designs for different purposes. We have over thirty designs optimised just for different mathematical algorithms, but we can make others more resistant to radiation, more efficient, faster, smaller, why would anyone not want to build this way?”

“I quite like the new ways of programming,” said Ian smiling, “and if all this makes my CAD stuff faster and easier then I'm definitely up for it, so well done Helena.” He high-fived Martin.

“Don't get me wrong,” sighed Spence, “this technology just feels right, but it also feels like the end of an era for geeks, as Allison says, no humans could never encompass the whole system the way you guys work, we have to build using black boxes that are proven to work then connect them.”

“At least you let us pick the case colour and design the human interfaces,” Alison sighed, “also the latest version of the user interface is really good!” she threw in as an upbeat consolation.

“Well the case colour is going to be black unless we put the optical emitters everywhere. But for the user interface, I caught on to your and David's discussions while you both were using the last generation one.”

Helena continued enthusiastically, not realising her last few sentences had basically doomed earth's computer hardware and software industries. “We also have proper error detection and correction throughout. I really don't know how the human race survived with their computers crashing all the time for no reason whatsoever.”

“Yes, it's still an annoyance,” said Spence, trying to be upbeat, “especially on our quantum computers. Have you thought of using this technology to remove our independence on these?”

“We have. April and I are also currently planning some new non-sentient AI hardware to replace MOTHER, and as much as I love my hardware, we are going to design Helena version two point oh around all this.”

“And April two point oh,” chipped in April happily.

“Well Maria two point oh is basically a no go as there is no way to access my memory cores directly without serious surgery.” Maria chipped in without the same enthusiasm.

“Don't worry Maria,” said Spence, “me and Allison probably won't have much to do in the new world order so we will have lots of time to look at making that happen.”

“Thanks guys, I still feel my hardware is up to it but I find I am offloading more and more onto the other systems during peak demand.”

“We should also now be able to produce more reliable qubits for our quantum cores,” added April. “There are several designs on the drawing board, but we had no means to build them, we do now.”

“I don't really know why we are messing with those,” said Allison, “they drove me mad at university and we could never reliably read the qubit states.”

“There are a couple of areas of Magnus's mathematics which could fit perfectly into a quantum computer algorithm,” said Maria. “If we could reliably scale the up the qubits, it would be a game changer, and we will get some real benefits.”

“The big problem now is we need to improve the speed of the molecular replicator,” said Helena. “Two hours and twenty five minutes to make a single tablet is not terribly good, hopefully the next generation processors and replicator heads it makes will be more accurate and faster.”

Spence and Allison dragged up some chairs, and sat with Simon's team drinking some tea and coffees, while the replicator went through building another test design. Maria had dragged Alexa and the remainder of the group down to look at the tablet and talk.

“This is game over for the electronics and software industry if this gets out,” said Spence seriously.

“Every precision manufacturing industry period!” said Simon morosely. “But for those that don't know, we have all unanimously decided this technology is not going to be released or even hinted at for now.”

Everyone listening nodded.

“What we are going to release though,” said Leo more cheerily, “is a small upgrade to our original graphyne extruder system which can be scaled up more easily and use about fifteen percent less energy than the original design. This will meet our requirements to create graphyne structures of any size, and which requires only a carbon source, which our existing process can extract from coal, oil, plastics or even compressed CO2. It is also a much cleaner production method.”

“Yes, the interest from existing industries was pretty lack-lustre until China began to get serious about building ship hulls,” continued Maria, “now they are all getting in on the act. We think there is now going to be a big uptake in other areas once these begin to undercut the price of steel and concrete. Hopefully a win-win for planet earth.”

Alexa looked again at the tablet shaking her head. “Nobody would believe us anyway! Good work by the way guys, this is amazing stuff, by the way who gets to keep it?”

“Dibs!” said David enthusiastically.

“We could always throw it back in the recycler,” said Helena, “It will be obsolete tomorrow!”

Allison did a face palm. “What the hell have you guys unleashed,” she laughed!

“Now we know it works,” said Helena, “I will finish the design parameters you gave for the blade servers. We are definitely going to roll back from the inefficient tensor model design, to one more like the original Dietrich processor design, but now using the newer carbon nanotube 3D transistors.”

“When do you think we can get one to play with?” said Allison.

“In about six days,” said Helena, “the guys have a list of parts to replicate first so we can test the limitations of the technology. Then we will go all out to replicate the new emitters and control system to create the next bigger replicator.”

“I would like to help Spence and Allison on this,” said David, “maybe one of the girls can fast track me, plus I think it will help me explain stuff to the group as a whole with the girls.”

“I think that is an excellent idea,” said Allison, “me and Helena can run you through some of the science involved, no need for you to understand the maths too much.”

“Amazing!” said Leo, still a bit in shock, “It took months and months to create that machine,” he pointed back into the clean room toward the replicator, “the most complicated machine on earth by an order of magnitude, it can now build itself in a day!”

“There's still the vacuum chamber,” said Matilda. “That's outside the assembly head and needs to be made separately. And the clean room.”

“True.” Said Leo. “You know, the crazy thing is I think I actually understand how all this works, and yet it can be used to make almost Star Trek level technology I wouldn't have a clue of comprehending. All this in a few months!”

Magnus, Jen and Daisy walked in on Leo's sentence and looked at the stunned wonderment on the faces of the people there.

“We are not there just yet, Leo,” said Simon, “I almost pity the girls, there is some seriously mind-numbing programming to get these emitters to work together in the bigger replicators. I guess the final size will be limited to the size of the doors over there,” he pointed to the large double-doors originally from when the building was constructed as an aircraft hangar and support base for the war.

“The largest build size we could do here is twenty metres wide by nine high, as you say, the size of the doors being forty centimetres bigger than this.” Answered Helena. “But it is much harder because the area must be in total vacuum, and we are talking something thousands of times our little replicators here, all working in parallel. We are going to be able to achieve it, and we are going to skip a few generations, but even so our best estimation is fourteen weeks just for the hardware.”

“But,” added April, “the coordination between all of these units working as one is magnitudes greater than a single one, basically no current computer on anyone's drawing board could coordinate over fourteen billion separate processors and even if such a computer existed no human could ever hope to write the software. This is another reason we can not release this technology, it's basically not buildable without us.”

Everyone's jaws dropped at these numbers.

“I guess we should look on the positive side,” said Leo, “it is totally scaleable, and one of these new giant replicators can build another identical giant replicator, and once the software is written we can just copy it for free. Also when we get into space, the vacuum is for free so we can go really big assuming the girls can write the software.”

Alexa slumped into a sofa, David caught her. “You OK Alexa?” he said, concerned.

“I don't know,” said Alexa, “overwhelmed I guess. Two years ago most of us were just simple students, hell I worked in a coffee shop, you’re now telling me in another two years we could be 3D printing the starship Frickin Enterprise in space, and that all this other stuff we have been talking about is actually going to work, and we are really going to be able to do it? I was thinking fifty years, somebody please pinch me.”

“Says the girl who spent Christmas with her boyfriend on the moon,” laughed Hardy.

She sprang up immediately, “Maria, April, Helena, you guys promised not to tell!” said Alexa, looking around at the barely sniggering expressions on some of the faces.

“They didn't,” said Simon, “we have an independent logging system that collates the accelerometer data in Icarus two. Just a little box with a teeny tiny little processor in it and a teeny weeny amount of memory, Leo built it for his final project at Uni a few years back. And it was left on board and powered up.”

“Sorry!” said Leo quietly.

“Anyway,” Simon continued, “Matilda noticed it had logged seventy hours additional data, and asked me, Leo and Hardy, somebody put two and two together, and we came up with a hot moon Date for the CEO!”

“Busted!” said Maria. “And, we’d have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids!” She made a Scooby-Doo snigger that made everyone, including Alexa, smile a little.

“Awesome!” screamed Daisy. “For both the super 3D printer and the moon romp.”

“I'm afraid I’m with Daisy on this,” said Hardy, “awesome.” He smiled. “For both,” he winked.

“You know,” said Matilda, “by analysing the micro oscillations in the accelerometer we could find some weird patterns, maybe moon quakes..”

“Don't you all dare,” screamed Alexa, “OK, David and I may have had a little too much wine..”

“..My wine!” said Hardy.

“..of Hardy's wine, and maybe got carried away with the moment, and possibly decided it was a good idea to test the space capabilities of the saucer before I risked any of my valuable staff..”

“Valuable staff!” Smiled Jen, “history is so going to forget Neil Armstrong after this gets out, you naughty little vixen..”

“It is never getting out Jen, it stays in this room and anyone who ever mentions it again will be cleaning space toilets in this new world order.”

She stared at each and everyone of them with her best evil CEO look. Ten smug faces stared back at her, David staring at the floor with his hand over his face.

Simon broke the extended silence, “we also need to proportionally increase the size of our recycler throughput and element storage so we have enough raw materials.”

“Thank you Simon, a very sensible topic we should discuss immediately,” said Alexa totally out of character and not fooling anyone.

“Seriously everyone, we should leave Alexa alone,” said Hardy, “like she said, it was a valuable experiment her and David performed to ensure our future health in space, we should all thank her, it was a dangerous assignment and she took one for the team.” He smiled and everyone laughed.

“I bet she took more than one,” laughed Jen, as Alexa threw a pillow off the sofa and just missed her. Jen collapsed on the floor in hysterics with Matilda, Allison and Jessica.

Maria [I sense another shaving cream vendetta brewing]

It took several minutes for the crowd to get under control and back on topic.

“You know my family would kill to get their hands on the recyclers.” Repeated Simon for the third time. “E-waste is a massive problem, and despite our best efforts, most goes to land-fill.. Come to think about it, with this technology we could use the land-fill sites, there must be millions of tonnes alone in the UK, the element and rare earth mineral costs alone must be billions.”

“That's actually not a bad idea,” said Helena, “It should be straightforward to build a more industrial sized recycler unit, unfortunately we cannot expose the field technology which could directly probe and extract the elements; But it may be possible to find another way to remove the valency bonds, which don't involve them, or better, controlled by an AI with orders to destroy it if tampered with, like we do with the fabricators for the QVThrusters. I will set up a process to look into this in detail.”

“The next few months are going to be very interesting,” said Allison. “Very interesting indeed!”

* * *

Helena [It seems we need a lot of extra shielding for the space based replicator, radiation is really not your friend up there]

April [So the test print failed again?]

Helena [Unfortunately, but solar activity was high near the end, and everything else worked much better, The tests on Icarus two with the last generation replicator, in that asteroid, however, were very positive. We should scale up the testing in space, in parallel with that on earth. I think once we get to the metre sized replicator, and the better shielding, the advantages of printing in space will outweigh any disadvantages]

Maria [Plus we will be able to print some off-the-book designs. No point in everyone asking silly questions every time something comes out of the replicator that looks a bit funny]

All [Agreed]

* * *

It was late spring, and it felt like summer had come early this year. All the scientists, researchers, and a few other interested parties, were crowded into lecture hall one on the ground floor of the research institute. Alexa had called the meeting to talk over the next steps as things were moving exactly on schedule, and the Group had sensibly urged a lot of caution after being informed of the recent progress, the message and aliens.

Alexa noted several of the guys wearing a funny triangular broach. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” she said to herself, and walked up to Terry to look at it.

“Tell me that works?” Alexa said, pointing to the gold A shaped broach with a stylised D embossed on it, on his right chest.

“It works!” Maria’s highly processed voice came out of the broach. Terry laughed.

“That's what happens when you go off for a few days,” he said. “Helena replicated it after Allison got it in her head that it should now be possible to make a real communicator badge, and started bugging her. It was quite funny as Helena decided to research it on her own and found a design on the internet, but had to go back to Allison to ask who makes subspace transceiver assemblies.”

“Helena did waste a few subjective seconds of time on this,” said Maria from the badge, “she really should have come to me rather than search Star Trek fan sites.”

Despite herself, Alexa giggled, “oh poor Helena, I feel your pain much more than you know!” she said.

Alexa examined the badge. Quite nice actually, if it didn't stamp GEEK all over you, she thought silently.

Terry continued, “me, Leo and Allison are such Star Trek nerds that as soon as we both found out we piled on the pressure and Helena caved in, saying it would be an interesting challenge. We were putting out test designs all the time to test the changes we were making to the fabricators so it was no big deal to print it on one of the smaller ones. Watch this.”

Terry tapped the broach and it made a quiet click, “Terry to Priscilla.”

“Hi Terry, what's up?” came a small sweet Asian voice out of the unit a few seconds later.

“Nothing my dear, just showing Alexa my awesome new comm badge.” Terry sounded the last four words like a ten year old showing off his new bike to a school friend.

“You’re teasing me again, Terry!” she cooed, “when do I get mine? you promised, it's so cool!”

“Prime Directive,” said Terry laughing.

“Not fair, Alexa, you tell him!”

“I’m sure we can make an exemption for Pris,” Alexa smiled.

Terry made a few kissy sounds, which Alexa was sure made whatever computer controlling the badge glad it wasn't sentient, then she heard the distinctive musical click which she assumed had cut the call.

“Can you make one a bit less Trekkie looking for me?” she asked nobody in particular.

“Me too, I’m in if you can make one less nerdy looking,” said Jen who was listening in with Matilda and Daisy.

“And me!” said Daisy, “maybe a little blue sapphire in the middle, my mum had one that would look so nice!”

“Count me in if you could get one a bit smaller than this earring,” said Matilda fondling an intricate gothic piercing with a little clip around it.

“Heathens,” said Terry walking back in a huff to his seat.

Alexa examined Matilda's piercings, a bit too scary for her, but one of her piercings looked quite snug and would be nice if it could be made. Maria with her complete high definition coverage of the area noticed her, as did Allison.

“Already replaced my iPhone seventeen with this baby,” said Simon, snatching Alexa's attention away from Matilda's earrings and smugly pulling out a slender nameless black slab. “At least my battery lasts forever now, not a few hours, and I have to hit it with a hammer before the screen cracks.”

“Simon’s right, the battery life on the communicator badges is terrible,” said Helena through Alexa's normal phone, “though they are old technology!”

“Old technology!” said Terry, “you made them a week ago!”

“As I said, old technology,” said Helena, “It's a real challenge to get something that small that will last longer than a few days, while also running a low power 5G modem and audio processors full time. The design we used is far too complicated, but Terry, Leo and Allison are not big users of phones so they suffer the inconvenience. I'm getting better though, if Daisy shows me her broach design I will see what I can do and see if we can get a QVCell and capacitor in it.”

“Goody,” Daisy jumped with her hands clapping in front of her in a way everyone always found far too cute and endearing.

“Jean was talking about if she could incorporate some of the graphyne into a suit, make it bullet-proof,” said Maria.

Alexa rolled her eyes, “Americans!”

“Gotta love that second amendment!” laughed Matilda.

The talk eventually subsided as everyone sat down and finished shuffling. All of the local research staff were here, there were also a few household staff including Pat, one of the resident domestic helpers, and Elaine, who had come down for one of her rare visits, and was sat next to Pat talking softly.

Despite the fact they would be discussing topics with far reaching consequences and dangerous implications if word got out, Maria had confidence in everyone here. She had confidence because she dealt with each and every person employed by the company dozens of times a day, however low their role, and vetted everyone around them discreetly and diligently. With this in mind, the atmosphere in the lecture theatre was pretty relaxed as Maria opened the discussion.

“So we aren't telling them?” said Matilda a few minutes in, “Isn't that kind of illegal?”

“It's a really big grey area,” said Maria through the high definition room speakers and her screen avatar to everyone. “Technically Icarus two is an experimental aircraft, and we follow all the regulations while in UK airspace, so it is completely legal according to UK law; Also what we are doing is in international waters.”

“We have done this unmanned six times already,” chipped in Helena, “seven if you want to count our only manned moon mission,” Alexa and David shuffled uncomfortably, Helena's avatar smiling to the left side of Maria's. “In all cases we did the same flight path to the mid-Atlantic followed by a very vertical ascent, and all done at night. The saucer is by way of its shape, hull plating and drive unit very stealthy, and with the transponder off there is no easy way of tracking it by radar or satellite. Yes, and before you ask, we did pick a time when the transatlantic traffic was quiet, so the area was free and clear of any other planes or ships.”

“Just saying,” said Matilda, “I don't want you to get in any trouble.”

“I’m easy,” said Simon, “what happens in international waters, stays in international waters!”

“Amen!” said Leo, “so come on Alexa, you’ve got us all here to let us know what’s next, I’m pretty excited.”

“Well Leo, not a lot from me as I am a total space dummy, however April has a presentation of the tests and our first mission,” she smiled.

April put the charts on the display and dimmed the room lights slightly, reducing the size of the three AI avatars as she did. “As you can see the main environmental readings across all the test flights we did in Icarus two remained well within our very conservative safety zones. We were especially impressed by the effectiveness of the radiation shielding, though it is a big power hog, and needs to be charged while the QVThrusters are at idle or off. The last flight which lasted three weeks we stayed exposed away from any protection offered by the earth or the moon, and included Gagarin and Armstrong..”

“And you didn't realise Armstrong was a female hamster,” laughed Petra, their new and so far only residential biologist at this site, pointing at the black and white Hamster in the separate cage from the brown one. “Good to know there is one area humans still outsmart you guys.” A few people giggled.

“Well yes we obviously found out she was female afterwards,” said Maria, “we will keep them separate from now on. If east-west relations had gone this way though the world might have been a much nicer place!”

Everybody laughed, as Alexa and David willed the girls to change the subject.

“OK, back to the topic at hand,” continued April. “Notwithstanding the hamsters, who were obviously unaffected, the readings on the temperature, pressure, atmosphere and radiation were all normal, and showed no variance over the three days despite being above the Van-Allen belt. We don't know how it would perform during a solar flare, the active magnetic shielding is good though. We also know being in a crater on the moon reduces it even more.”

“Shame we don't have any gold”, said Matilda, “about twenty kilos would give me enough to modify the superconducting ring, and allow a more even field current in the next versions.”

Jen looked at Alexa who had eight tonnes in her house.

“We will see what we can do,” said Alexa, smiling.

April continued, used to breaks in the flow. “We tested how well the hull plate could withstand a micro-meteorite impact by putting the ship deliberately in the path of a known piece of orbital debris, to get an understanding on how strong the hull was. The graphyne plating just shrugged it off. Leo's detailed examination failed to find anything other than a two millimetre pit, and a large stain. So in many ways Icarus passed with flying colours.”

“We are however not going to do any further manned space flights in Icarus two, we are going to reserve all future human flight for Icarus three, which is a larger, stronger, and much more capable ship.”

The video changed to show a 3D rotating model of the new ship, and April continued. “The build process for Icarus three started three hours ago. For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, it is being built using the recently completed full size molecular replicator taking up nearly a quarter of the workshop. It is being assembled as a solid graphyne mono-hull, with all major components built-in. Progress is going well, we now have dedicated replicator patterns for larger regular structures, and procedures are in place for testing and re-working areas as we progress. Unfortunately even with these improvements we currently estimate another two hundred and forty nine hours until it is completed or about ten more days assuming nothing goes awry.”

“Once built, the ship will undergo extensive unmanned testing, atmospheric, orbital, deep space and finally a high pressure test by taking it down to five hundred metres in the ocean. That last part may sound drastic but the shell is a single piece of graphyne-five and extremely resistant to compressive forces, my calculations say it would not deform more than six micrometres at the bottom of the deepest part of the Pacific ocean, and if you dropped it from space to the earth's surface it likely would not even dent.”

“Wow!” said someone at the back.

“How do you seal it for that kind of pressure?” said Ian with his engineering hat on.

“Double doors, precise fittings and a special flexible carbon compression seals on both,” said April, “of course Ian, this is the theory, and that is why we are testing it without people, or hamsters in it.”

“You should still make the more susceptible parts replaceable,” said Ian, “If a small section or part gets damaged or fails somehow, it would be better if we only had to replace the part concerned, not re-print the whole ship!”

There were a few nods around the area.

“You should also have one of the smaller replicators in the ship to replicate anything too,” chipped in Steve.

“..Most sci-fi also assumes there are little maintenance robots that scamper around the ship to do maintenance, maybe a few of those?” said Simon.

“We probably should put some of those suggestions on our to-do list,” said Helena, giving a convincing impression of looking at her mother and sister for agreement. “Having some way of making additional parts and breaking down old parts as required would improve safety and make the ship much more flexible too, thanks guys!”

“Anyway,” continued April, “once the tests are completed without issues, we intend to construct a second, identical ship, this will be the actual ship that we use for the first real manned mission. The first ship, and Icarus two, will be kept here during the mission in case required in an emergency and, also as an experimental control for any comparisons if required.”

“A bit overkill, but I like the way you are taking our safety seriously,” said Simon.

“Like I say guys, probably unnecessary but as you say, safety first,” said April. “The TV’s and tablets used for the windows and displays in Icarus two will now also be obsolete as almost every internal surface will have display capability, hopefully that won't get too weird, but if it does we can dial it down. As we said, all the power supplies, batteries, drive units, processors wiring and plumbing and several other new technologies will be integrated into the chassis, with at least two backups for any critical system.”

“It will be interesting to see how the life support and bioreactor systems work,” said Jessica, “I still can't get my head around how the weird biology works, but you can be sure I will be testing these parts just as hard as the other systems.”

“As Jessica says, that part will be interesting, we’re mixing the two technologies of the Dusseldorf group to do the bio processing and recycling,” said Simon, “Sci-fi loves organic spaceships!”

“We would like to do a lot in the future,” said Helena, “but if we try and do too much at once we will never get anything actually built, so while Icarus three will be unbelievable compared to Icarus two, it is still a waypoint. I already have a ship ten times the size of Icarus on my drawing board so to speak, unfortunately it cannot be built until we have a molecular replicator facility in space, so still a way off.”

“You really do think big Helena,” said Hardy, “I will be holding you to that one!”

“Can we really get to that level of technology though,” said Magnus who had been sitting next to Jen, their hands occasionally touching. He had been totally fascinated by everything that was being said. “I am having difficulty processing these recent improvements, it's like what used to take twenty years is taking a few weeks. I mean I cannot believe we are using words like molecular replicator, and talking about ships the size of the starship enterprise, and yet we are.”

Jen put her hands on his in a comforting manner, “I know, I have just started myself to understand some of the science Magnus, and even I can't process the speed it's all happening at, but don't get me wrong, this is exactly what I signed up for!”

“Oh, don't get me wrong too Jen, I too signed up for all this as well, and it's all amazing, but a molecular replicator is currently printing a flying saucer not three hundred metres from where we are all sitting. I mean in a year's time am I even going to be relevant or will anything I am working on be like, I don't know, working on a valve radio?”

“Let me answer this, Magnus,” said Alexa standing up. “I am a history student, with just enough economics and business studies to be dangerous. I don't even know what a valve radio is! Yet for every innovation that I see, I also see at least one human behind it who understands it completely. I once heard that there is not one human on earth who could make a mobile phone from scratch. Yet everyone has a mobile phone, and most people, even me have a vague idea it has microchips and a battery and some computer app running on it. So as long as I know this I am re-assured there is nothing magic, and we are not over our heads.”

She continued, “Beethoven probably could not have made a Steinway grand piano, but on it he wrote symphonies that out-shined any piano maker a million fold. I have no idea how you make a molecular replicator; Leo, Matilda and Simon do; But I can guarantee you there are a million people out there who will take that molecular replicator and create devices we would never dream of. So what I am saying is don't look at any of this as a technical barrier or a measure of your competence, grasp the technologies and make them do things nobody else can.”

She sat down to a lot of smiles, a lot of applause and a scattering of “go girl!”

She then stood back up. “Magnus is however making a very relevant point for all of us though,” Alexa continued when the applause died down. “People will be scared. If you walked around talking into your cell phone only forty years ago, you would have been committed to an asylum. With these new technologies forty years of technological progress may now be happening in a few months, and people will see things that may make them feel scared, or that they are no longer relevant. The way around this is education and openness, like we did with the Icarus demonstration. People in the south of England now see a flying saucer cross their sky every other day and think nothing of it, because they know it was built by humans, the same way their cell phone was. I bet in ten years time, nobody is going to bat an eyelid when you molecularly construct the starship enterprise in outer space.”

“You know,” said Hardy, “It all seems so less frightening when someone like Alexa can explain science to a room full of scientists much better than they can. Men like Oppenheimer also had the same dilemmas as you Magnus, apparently the debates and arguments raged for weeks between scientists and engineers on the Manhattan Project team.”

“Their goal was to build a bomb to destroy enemy cities to end a war, they were probably torn apart internally by that,” said David, “our goals on the other hand are all positive, to save planet earth and bootstrap humanity off the planet to give everyone who wants it a brighter future.”

“David is right of course,” said Daisy, “our goals are pretty pure, so if we are not to frighten people we need to educate and inform them.”

“But how do we educate or prepare people for technology to come without them getting scared?” Said Jules.

“The same way we have done with everything,” said Magnus boldly, out of character, seemingly out of his stupor, “we sneak it up on them slowly, like the frog, we warm the water up slowly to boiling rather than drop the frog straight in the boiling water. Like the first iPhone, it only just worked but shocked the ecosystem and pulled every phone after it up. Like Maria, she slowly got more human and I accepted it without hesitation, and like Icarus here, in a few months the aerospace companies will start showing off their prototypes and some of the better ones will already be designing their next spacecraft around them, at that point Icarus won't look so flash.”

“So that means unfortunately we cannot drop Icarus three on anyone unless you can hide its capabilities until the competition has at least caught up.” Said Leo. “All that work and learning we just did, is it for nothing then?”

The room went silent for a few seconds while everyone there processed it.

“Unfortunately, you are all correct,” said April, “we didn't think this through as well as we should have, we certainly cannot go through the same certification process with Icarus three as with Icarus two, as it will raise too many questions on how it was made so perfect, without visible welds or joints. The technology is just too far ahead of where anyone will accept it.”

Everyone in the room nodded.

“Damn!” said Simon quietly.

“What if you could still use the molecular assembler thing, but make it look like separate pieces,” said Pat, putting his hand in the air unnecessarily, “have them look like different colours, different materials, a few imperfections, a bad paint job, make your iPhone twelve look like an iPhone one?”

Everyone looked at him shocked. Pat was the grounds-keeper, a retired school teacher not a scientist, and probably the only person in the world still with an iPhone twelve. He looked worried that he had spoken out of turn.

“That is actually a genius idea!” said Leo.

“Hmm,” said April, “you know, that might just work, well thought out Pat. They are obviously expecting our next ship to be a little improved but not much, however during the certification they only looked at things like welds, avionics, testing results and documentation, before going on to actual flight testing. With a few small changes we can make it look like the structure is welded from frames..”

Steve chipped in. “Then the ship after that can be a little better, and the one after that even better still, but we still keep it looking like separate pieces, I bet by about the fourth iteration nobody would even check!”

“And when they start to get manufactured in space,” said Jessica, “we will be subject to our own regulations and controls, which are far superior anyway.

“You know, at the same time we are doing this we should fast track a few of the aerospace companies to get their first systems flying,” said Jen.

“They are unfortunately lagging, as most are going for bigger aircraft than us,” said Maria. “If I put together a basic kit-set for Icarus two, sub orbital, same specs we said at the demonstration, and had some companies start manufacturing the various parts I suspect I could speed this up very quickly. Like how the PC boom started, once people could buy the parts, chopping and changing as better ones came on the market and you didn't need a massive computer company to make a PC, you could do it at home.”

“Do it!” said Alexa assertively, “we have at least one aerospace CEO who would be happy for more work for her company. And, I’m sorry guys, the Icarus three currently building stays here and between us for now, if the girls can tweak the next Icarus design down a few notches on the build and looks department like Pat suggested, but keep all the safety stuff and anything you can hide sufficiently that nobody will question us.”

Alexa got up. “What say we adjourn for dinner, sleep on it tonight, talk amongst yourselves and the girls and let them know all your thoughts however weird or unconventional. They can summarise the changes and distribute it to us all in the next few days, we will then have another meet up once the shiny new Icarus three pops out of the builder and we can see what we need to do.”

“The history of progress,” she said. “We need to slow down to speed up.”

* * *

Jean sighed. The day had started off nice, with a text from Jim for a date at one of their favourite restaurants. Then this!

The nine men, and two women, sat around the table represented the senior and production managers for their company's third generation fighter drone; A drone which was now two years late, three times over budget, and was being designed with propellers, when the world was moving to QVThrusters. With Maria's help and some newly hired staff, reporting directly to her, she was now seeing the problems first hand. Out of the eleven people around the table, not one, not a single one, had done anything productive in years. Their only jobs seemed to be having meetings, producing unnecessary paperwork, introducing delays, and creating excuses. The next layer of management down was not much better.

All but one department was a total disaster, and staff morale, sick leave and retention was one of the worst in the industry. The sense of sloth she was getting from this group was prevalent throughout the whole factory.

Brian, the burly security guard who had waved her through security with a loaded gun the day she took over as CEO, stood like a rock at parade rest in the room by the door, he hadn't moved more than an inch in two hours, staring at the group while each one gave their little tirade. His job was to be unnerving and he was acing it.

Jean had decided from the get go that she could deal with people not obeying her, or attempts at intimidation, by simply calling them out on it, reciprocating the level of anger, or just dismissing the person involved on the spot.

Threats of violence were a much different matter. While Jean could hold her own with most opponents male or female, that was not how the corporate power game was played. Colonel Mathews introduced Brian properly on that first day and he had become instantly protective of Jean. He, or one of his other more intimidating guys, accompanied her for most trips, sticking to her like glue. With his blue suit and earpiece Brian oozed professionalism and had a ‘don't even think about messing with me or my charge’ vibe that nobody could ignore.

“Oh, here we go Brian,” whispered Maria in his ear. He braced!

Without a word, and in the middle of the avionics manager drawing on for what seemed like the tenth time about component shortages, Jean stood up and slammed her hands on the desk so hard all the coffee cups rattled on their saucers.

“ENOUGH. JUST STOP!” Jean walked around the outside of them, circling the meeting table, shaking her head.

“This is without doubt, the sloppiest, most incompetent operation I have ever seen. Not one of you has achieved anything but arrange meeting after useless meeting, let our contractors and suppliers walk all over us, and give the guys below you absolutely no leadership, guidance or direction.”

One of the bigger managers stood up, obviously about to object, but a change of stance and countenance by Brian, and the look he drilled into him made him think twice. A flush of terror came over the manager and he kept his mouth shut and slowly sat down.

The attempt at intimidation only hardened her resolve, she moved right next to him and got right in his face. “I had an AI summarise over a million pages of minutes and reports, it came to the same conclusion as me, that none of you have a clue what you are doing, and not one of you could organise a piss up in a brewery!” She had heard Albert say it once and had been wanting to use it for months. Her antagonist's eyes went down, and she used the moment to cast her eyes over the other spent, and sad collection of humanity in front of her. “Uncle Sam has spent almost two billion dollars here, and in three years you haven't even produced something that can fly. I came here hoping to find real problems, genuine reasons for the delays and budget overruns, problems I could actually deal with, but no, not one of you has given me anything. Well it ends today!”

She walked to the end of the room and smashed the fire alarm button adjacent to Brian, he of course did not flinch.

“Get to your fire stations with your staff, NOW!”

All eleven people rushed out of the room, none wanting to be last, none wanting to make eye contact with either Jean or Brian. She looked out of the enormous boardroom windows, out into the massive production area, some people were moving, packing stuff into bags, some were even still chatting, she shook her head, and walked along the office corridor, towards the mustering area, Brian following next to her.

“If this is the level of competence we have to deal with Brian, we’re screwed,” she said to him, as she looked at another guy at the end of the corridor laughing on his phone.

“You’ll sort them out Jean,” said Brian giving the guy on the phone a stare which said, ‘you have five seconds to get out of my sight’, “you’re one scary woman when you want to be!” He smiled and she smiled back.

“Come on Brian, let's get this show on the road shall we.”

Maria was about to hand the company a massive advantage over all of the competition in the US Market, by giving them the whole aviation package for the new saucer, and offering to fund the tooling, and reskilling. To even the most ardent sceptic it was a gift from heaven, tied up with golden string, and delivered by unicorns farting rainbows. And yet Jean knew within an hour of talking to this group, that if she entrusted any such project to this factory, it would turn that gift into a steaming turd of delays and mismanagement, until all the money was gone. She was having none of it.

She had done several days of homework on the high profile, behind schedule, fighter drone project, a project which exemplified the word “pork”, and was one of the biggest laughing stocks of the entire aerospace industry.

With Maria she had actually found ten amazingly competent people, four from within the company and six from outside, all of whom had vast experience of production and logistics systems. She had immediately organised them into a rapid action team, and between them and Maria, they were going through the organisation position by position, decision by decision.

The aircraft factory had stood out like a sore thumb. They had now gone through it with a fine tooth comb, and determined it could never be viable. Corruption, laziness, bureaucracy was endemic, only eighteen percent of the staff were proper engineers, all of them weighed down under layers of managers, and with administrators producing reports nobody wanted, and wasting money at every opportunity. Nepotism was everywhere, turnover of qualified engineering staff was through the roof, as no one wanted to stay once they realised the gig. It had been easy to chase down all the offenders, a little more difficult preparing all the documentation her staff and the lawyers were going to require.

Setting off the fire alarm was a ploy one of her base commanders had used on occasions for inspections and group discipline, she wasn't sure how it would work on civilians in a corporate environment, but whatever, she was the boss. The next few days were going to be an eye opener for everyone working here for sure.

The company was supposed to have nine hundred and twenty one staff, she had cancelled all planned trips and external meetings at the start of their analysis over two weeks ago, and according to the personnel system, ten were on annual leave, thirty nine ‘sick’ and one on maternity leave. If there were two thirds of that number in the mustering area she would be surprised.

She walked out, Brian keeping close and alert.

A few people were still casually walking out now, fifteen minutes after the alarm, which annoyed Jean no end. “Keep all the footage from all the security cameras please Maria, and begin the logout and save procedure for the servers, the password changes, and then start the shutdown procedure for the machines you have control of. Send the list of systems you don't control to our guys to power down the rest.”

She spent another ten minutes watching as the so-called fire marshals tried to get them into their department muster stations, they may as well have been herding cats, in a real crisis half these people would probably be dead.

Once in some semblance of order, four of her ten officers from her rapid action team began marking people off of lists, and giving them a tag. That took twenty-five more minutes, and with a thumbs up from one of her officers, one of her assistants passed her an air horn. Jean blasted it for ten solid seconds, until she had everyone's attention. She then handed it back to her assistant, and accepted the wireless microphone off her, the microphone linked to four large speakers set up an hour before. You could cut the silence before she spoke with a knife.

“If you haven't done so already, you have fifteen seconds to put your phones on silent, and in your bags or pockets. You do not want to be the person I look at who is not giving me one hundred percent of their attention for the next ten minutes.”

She waited exactly fifteen seconds while some people fiddled with their devices or pocketed them, these people were outside their comfort zones and as such everyone seemed to comply without hesitation.

“For those of you who have lived under a rock for the last two months and don't know me, I am Jean Michelle the Chief Executive Officer for XYFusion Aerospace and Defence. That, if you don't know, is the company that owns this under-performing, embarrassment of a factory.”

“I had two options today.” She walked up and down the ragged line of people staring at anyone who would look her in the face, “I could come here and see what the problems were you were all experiencing, and try to get the help and resources of the group company to help fix them. Or I could shut the whole business down, as the US government, and our investors are no longer willing to fund an operation that has consistently failed to deliver anything. Frankly, the latter is the only option I can see that would make my company any money.”

“However, I spent the last two weeks with HR, production and aerospace experts, and they tell me that we also have here some of the brightest, and best engineers that America has to offer.”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately that is where all the good news ends. This company has the lowest productivity they have ever recorded anywhere, period. You have the most meetings, the most absenteeism, generate the most paperwork, make the most mistakes. You also produce the most irrelevant statistics for people who do not want or need them, and have dozens of staff and manager positions that nobody in my staff can even figure out what they do. Our engineering stations and workshops sit idle for forty six percent of the time, yet we are procuring parts for a factory at eighty percent utilisation. Most of you are smart people, do the math!”

She stopped, stabbing the air, “and, oh and you are going to love this one, this factory has the highest incidents of embezzlement, theft and criminal activity of any factory in America.” That last part was made up, but it sounded about right where nine percent of the workforce was on the take.

In a much louder voice she delivered the first blow. “The contract for the new US Army drone system has been cancelled. All work on that project will, from this moment on, stop.” She paused dramatically

“No problem you may say, that's OK, there's the B11X helicopters. The same B11X copters that continually fail in combat conditions, in several cases killing our troops, some of whom I knew personally!” She stared daggers at the crowd. “You will no doubt be pleased to know the army has also cancelled that contract as well. All existing helicopters that were made in this factory are being withdrawn from service, and will be scrapped in the next year, rather than the thirty years we promised. So well done people, due to an amazing team effort on all our parts, this factory now has no work whatsoever. I’ll let that sink in.”

She stopped, looking at everyone, some were looking down, some were defiant, some were probably angry, she didn't care.

She shook her head sadly and then angrily said, “I really can't conceive of anybody who would want to work in such a back stabbing, uninspiring toxic environment as this, for those that came here as a first job and think this is the normal for corporate America, it is not, and the attitude in this, and all our companies is going to change NOW!”

“From this moment, the factory is now closed.”

She looked at everyone again, most were in shock! “To the American public who paid for this fiasco, know firstly your senators pushed the contracts to this company, despite the objections of the army at the time. You saw in the press the millions of dollars in kickbacks that they took from our old CEO over the last seven years, frankly I find it disgusting and an insult to the American people.”

“Know just that we will try to make good to Uncle Sam and the American people in the future for this Company's failings, and from this point forward my companies will only be tendering fixed cost contracts, with penalties for time overruns.”

“Each and every one of you will be put on temporary paid leave while my auditors do a full inventory of all systems and parts, and we re-evaluate if it is worth continuing. Fifty six of you are criminals and will not be coming back! You know who you are and I am sure your colleagues also know who you are! You have embezzled funds, stolen company property or replaced safety critical equipment with substandard parts. The police and our lawyers also now know exactly who you are, and criminal prosecution cases are being brought against all of you as I speak. When you fifty six people leave here today, you will all have arrest warrants against you, and quite frankly I don't care what happens to you after that, as this company wants nothing to do with criminals, whether they be board members or toilet cleaners.”

She softened a little. “Doubtless I am putting a lot of good people standing before me in the same boat as the bad players, but I can no longer trust anything that has come from this factory, so it is up to you to prove this. On the wristband you have a number, if you need to return to the factory for anything, show that number and wait for someone to escort you to your workstation or locker. When you are ready, and sometime in the next forty eight hours, call the other number on the wristband and speak to the person at the other end of the phone. If you were someone who came here in good faith, wanting to work on cutting edge avionics, but were let down by the systems and management I want you to give us a second chance. If we can find enough of you ready for a better challenge, one involving massive retraining in the cutting edge of aerospace technology, to allow us to produce those new flying saucers, we have a contract and full funding ready to green light.”

She paused. “I have one month to totally re-organise the factory and accept the contract, or close the factory and walk away. It's your choice. If you don't call in forty-eight hours then good-bye, if you don't have a real job that directly contributes to producing avionics then good-bye, if you were complacent in any part of this current shambles, then good-bye, and finally if you are one of the ninety six staff who are being paid to be here now to work, but are absent without leave then good-bye.”

“If I do see any of you again then it will be to welcome you to a different company, one that will make sure you have a bright future, and one where you will never have to go through this crap ever again.”

With that she walked back into the factory, Brian and four assistants falling in behind.

A bit reluctantly Maria released the whole speech on social media with a transcript, the press could make what they will.

* * *

“Oh god, can she even say stuff like that!” said Alexa worried.

“Can and did,” said Maria more reservedly than normal. “Those on sick and maternity leave missed out on the dramatics and either got a re-organisation letter or an arrest warrant. I received phone calls from four hundred and twenty staff, three unions, sixteen media bloggers, five TV stations, and four lawyers within the forty eight hours. Jean really wanted to set a precedent, as a middle finger to the privileged attitude some workers take, and American pork-barrel politics. She wanted people to know that if you are ensured with a client's trust and abuse it there should be consequences. I think it stems from her experiences in the Middle East.”

“The action has gone down extremely well with almost everybody except those who lost their jobs, got arrested, and the two unions involved. Unofficially the government clients are also extremely pleased with the move, officially they are neutral.”

“But firing all those people, in public, those lawyers are going to have a field day.”

“Technically the video on social media was *leaked* by an employee, and not the company, but you are right, undoubtedly the company's lawyers are going to have a lot of work on their plate to deal with the fallout. But to tell the truth she did not technically break any real laws, has masses of evidence of incompetence throughout the management chain all the way back to the old CEO, and ninety three people won't be saying anything as they are currently pending criminal prosecutions just as she threatened.”

“I thought there were only fifty something?”

“It seems the ones caught with their hands in the till wanted to ‘spread the love’ to a few more who had been a bit less obvious with their criminal activity.”

“Will they get our contract?” she said seriously, even though she could have the final say if she wanted to.

“I suspect Jean's gamble will cost the company upwards of a hundred million dollars, but longer term if she had not done this it would have cost us more. The good news is the company no longer seems to be a laughing stock, and I think the factory will also come out of it with a very efficient and happier workforce. A few essential staff have already been cleared to return, and the vibe from the others who re-applied was extremely positive. Jean has also put all our, and a lot of our competitors operations on notice. So yes I think as it stands we fully support her and will fund it.”

“I agree, don't leave it too long to let her know, in the end a nicely written press-release about how we now have full confidence in this will go a long way to help.”

* * *

“You and Magnus are going to have to let me into what you are doing sometime,” said Maria, “I might be able to help?”

“Huh?” said Jen who was currently looking through the freezer for something to microwave, having forgotten to eat.

“Disappearing off-grid to talk, I worry if you have a problem and I may be able to help.”

“I don't think you can,” said Jen, “at least not yet. Magnus has been frustrated at the paradox we have over the distance to the exit point of the wormhole, how it takes only a few milliwatts to open an exit a hundred kilometres away, but nearly five watts to do the same twelve thousand kilometres away. His problem is the power level theoretically destabilises the wormhole less than a million kilometres away, hence us thinking this is the max range. Yet you girls and I keep hinting to him that interstellar distances are possible, obviously in reference to the alien message. I may talk to Alexa about bringing him in on the secret, because he is highly confused, we are not giving him the whole picture and he’s probably thinking you don't think he is clever enough to understand. It's difficult, he thinks he’s made an error and he just wants someone to talk to, and when I say talk to, I mean talk at. I think it helps that I don't know his infinity maths as well as him.”

“Oh my! It does sort of make sense, we have been obfuscating the issue. But how does talking to you and not me help?” said Maria Intrigued. “At first I thought you and him were sneaking off for some romantic interlude, but you both just sit there quietly under a tree in the arboretum staring into space, occasionally writing in his notebook.”

Jen smiled, “oh Maria, I don't really know, it's not anything romantic, unfortunately,” Jen sighed, “though he does like to hold my hand, it's my guess he needs to keep his mind free.”

Any delay in Maria replying was bad, it meant she did not understand the problem. So Jen continued. “..For example, if I say something a bit wrong to you, like say one plus one is three, you would pull me back on the path and correct me. I think Magnus wants to stay off the path. The problem with him talking to you is you always see a way to bring a conversation back to the truth and mention it, it's just your girl's nature, and it is actually one of your best attributes. But in this case it's not helping Magnus, so he's hiding it from you.”

She sensed Maria's discomfort.

“Oh don't get me wrong Maria, Magnus loves you girls to death and is so grateful for everything you have done, and he will get back to normal eventually. It's just you guys are a towering intellect and he would probably feel like a schoolboy disputing the legitimacy of Pythagoras's theorem with his maths teacher, he couldn't do it with the teacher for fear of looking silly; But if he had a friend in the playground who wasn't as clever as him he could. You know, a week ago he dragged me to sit beside the lake with him, he watched the clouds talking about why time only had two directions, about the jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, and about jumping fish. All the time I just lay next to him close and just being a friend, without another word he rushed back in the house.”

“I remember that,” said Maria, “he ran straight to his room, grabbed his notebook and spent an hour writing.”

“We need to tell him about April's experiment with the QVModem, her findings and the message,” she added seriously.

Maria paused. “I guess I’m just worried. I will talk to Alexa.”

“Do it!” said Alexa a few minutes later, “Magnus needs the whole picture, but please do it gently as I don't want to hurt his feelings. Why don't we bring him down to the house, there's only Jen and me here, and it's much more comfortable.”

Jen was perched on the arm of the sofa next to Alexa as she said this, looking a bit worried. She had deliberately withheld the truth from him, how would he see her after that? Alexa was right, she didn't want to lose Magnus.

“There is no point in trying to spin this, we really should have let him know at the same time as the rest of the group. I’ll go grab a wine..”

That same minute, Magnus was in the lab alone, staring at his smart whiteboard, basically a hundred inch tablet computer he could write on. The board was filled with one of his infinity equations for the wormhole, and Magnus's face looked sad.

Maria sighed, those last few minutes had taken a long time to process, but she had made a mistake not fixing this earlier.

“Magnus?” she whispered through the whiteboard speaker. “Can I disturb you for a short while, I need to tell you something.”

He jolted out of his stupor at Maria's voice. “Sure Maria, what can I do for you?”

“I think I made a mistake. A big mistake.” She said cryptically.

Of all the sentences that she could have uttered, Magnus would never, ever have expected this, and he wasn't sure what to say.

He struggled for a reply. “You never make mistakes though?”

“I do, but I am often quick to fix them, in this case I wasn't, and for that I need to say sorry to you and to fix the problem. I think you need to sit down for this. Alexa is aware and has asked to see you and Jen down in the house. As neither you or Jen have eaten, I have taken the liberty of ordering a pizza and some garlic bread. I will bring a car around to the workshop exit in five minutes.”

Oh my.. Alexa.. He looked at the time on the top right of a nearby monitor, almost nine PM, he struggled to think what it was. Then he got worried, it was him! He had he done something wrong or inappropriate, he struggled to think, could it be him and Jen? Oh god he had called her his girlfriend to his mother, and was always holding her hand, and they had hugged that time which may be considered inappropriate. This last year was the happiest he had ever been, he hoped he hadn't crossed some line.

“Oh, Maria, please don't disturb Alexa, I’m sure whatever it is, it is nothing, I can make it up…” The words came out frustrated, muddled.

“No Magnus, you have done nothing wrong, it is what we have done to you, and it is us apologising, because friends make things right if they do something wrong. Now please get out of your stupor and go down the stairs to the car. I guarantee a lot of things will be clearer in an hour or two.”

Despite Maria's assurance, he could not help thinking he had crossed a line with Jen and spent the whole journey apprehensive and worried. The two sombre girls greeting him exacerbated his worries until Jen came over and threw her arms around him and relief washed all over his body.

“Oh my! Aliens,” he said, holding his half eaten pizza to his mouth. “But that's impossible unless they are using terawatts of power.. Oh I see now, that is why you were hinting at the dilemma as the theoretical maximum power before a wormhole exit destabilises is one point one nine three kilowatts. Interesting..”

Like Spence two years before, Magnus totally ignored the apology, being content to know the reason for the dilemma. He happily accepted Alexa's consoling hug, and a much longer and closer hug from Jen, the wine and the pizza was secondary to both, though the pizza was good.

His demeanour changed instantly. “Oh my, oh my, oh my..” He got up, dropping the pizza on the plate, he then walked around the room. “Oh, yes!” he rushed over to Jen.. “Paper, pen?”

Jen looked at Alexa who slid open the drawer under the coffee table giving him a notepad and pen, he snatched it off her, opened it and started drawing. Alexa and Jen quite rightly did not disturb him, as he spent a few minutes writing.

“Maria, did you move the exit point?”

“Well we don't actually know where the exit point is, but we went through the procedure to change its coordinates, like with the QVModem it and the signal disappeared in over ninety-nine percent of the tries..”

“And the feedback the girls used to detect the alien signal, was it coherent or non-coherent?”

“Non-coherent. We used the in-phase refracted modulation as we opened the.. Oh, I see, we will need a second terahertz function generator for the lab..”

“I’ll get it,” said Jen, rushing out of the room to the basement lab.

“Jen has a RFJ7000 in the house?” said Magnus to Alexa with incredulity.

“The 8000,” said Maria.

“A girls gotta be prepared I guess,” shrugged Alexa, with absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

“This feels like deja vu,” Maria said, “I’ll get the car and get Daisy to meet you in the lab in fifteen minutes!”

Alexa was not going to mention it was now almost ten o'clock at night, it would make no difference, Daisy lived for these moments too.

The three guys worked until four in the morning, none of them wanted to leave the lab. Finally when all three were struggling to keep their eyes open, Maria said. “There is definitely a phenomenon here. If you guys want to grab a few hours of sleep then breakfast and we will try to crack the maths and go over everything tomorrow.”

She did not need to ask them twice, they were all whacked.

“Matilda's back in Yonkers, you can bunk with me tonight, Jen,” said a weary Daisy.

“Sounds like a plan,” replied Jen as all three of them walked up to the bedrooms like the walking dead.

April [How do they do it? It should not make any difference whether the signal is mixed then focussed or focussed then mixed, mathematically it produces the same outcome]

Helena [Simple explanation is the maths is a generalisation as it does make a difference. I can run quite a few different tests using the current set up, and the lab in Goa, I will start with both coherent and in phase and run up the spectrum, then interrupt you when the results are in]

It took them three more days to run through all the different permutations and check them against the modified equations, they found a second generalisation, then a third. It seemed the distance could be increased linearly by paralleling in phase emitters. There would be no need for repeaters.

April [How long do you think it will take them to see the term now has a spacial dimensions? The guys deserve to make that discovery themselves, but it does mean our work here has only just started. He’s making us and these aliens look like rank amateurs for missing it]

Maria [Jabberwocky and jumping fish!]

* * *

It took two weeks, but it was Jen who actually saw the new spatial dimension, though probably only beating Magnus by a few minutes. As Jen's first major discovery, there was lots of screaming and jumping around, and it was three very happy scientists who announced an impromptu pub night, one where Jen bought all the beers, though more figuratively rather than actually. There really was only one thing missing in her life at this point, and he was sitting next to her in the pub, cute as ever and doting over her every word.

She sighed inwardly, smiled and touched his hand.

## The Bear Necessities

Magnus was hopeless for taking the initiative, and she could still not figure out why, it was never usually this hard work with men! She finally bit the bullet a few nights ago and asked Maria, who she knew he confided in the most.

“It's very simple girl,” she said, “Magnus worships the ground you walk on, he is also terrified of offending you and pushing you away if he went too far. You do realise you are the only girlfriend he has ever had, despite being the nicest man on the planet, and you're not even his proper girlfriend yet. To sum it up in one word it's ‘boundaries’ you have never given him any and he won't cross them. You know how quick he learns.”

“You remember his reaction when his mum called you his girlfriend? Well according to his smart watch his pulse rate doubled and all the signs put him close to having a coronary. The poor guy had been talking to his mum for the past year doing nothing but talking about this place, his colleagues and especially you. Poor Anja, is actually just as clueless, if there was a female version of Magnus out there it would be her, she actually thought he was talking about his girlfriend, though he may have mentioned several times if that particular position was open he would take it. I think you should let him know there is a vacancy.”

“So it's not me then?”

“It is you Jen!” Said Maria assertively, “every single conversation you have had with him is about work or Sci-fi or absolutely anything except you and him. He will never push you for fear of rejection. I hate to use a misogynistic term, but you need to man-up!”

“Oh poor Magnus, what must he think of me!”

“Do you want a suggestion?”

* * *

Alexa had gone with Hardy back to Oxford to present awards for some scholarships, David accompanied them so the house was empty for the night. She had took the day off from the laboratory and work and had invited him down for an evening meal. Jen had even attempted to cook something that wasn't a fried breakfast, making a very passable vegetarian nut roast dish with Bella's assistance.

Maria hinted to Magnus that Jen really loved it when he dressed up nice, and being invited over for an evening meal was supposed to be special. He was usually pretty tidy these days, but tended to drop back to Jeans and T-shirt and three day old stubble when deep in maths, or until he remembered. Lab coats were great for hiding things!

But luck was on his side today, or was it karma, that thing Maria never stopped talking about. Sharon had knocked on his door the day before saying she was in town and she saw this awesome shirt she thought would look great on him, it was on special and he hadn't used any of his living allowances, so she got it for him. But the shirt was too nice to go with Jeans so she got him a really stylish pair of chinos, but the whole thing didn't really go with his usual slip-on work boots, so she also got him some formal shoes.

Luckily for him the hairdresser Pauline had a cancellation that same day, and Sharon intoned when she gave him the new clothes that poor Pauline really needed the money for her young child's education, so if Magnus could be an angel, and maybe get a haircut, he would basically be helping keep a young child out of poverty.

As he stepped out of his room, Sharon was walking by, “why Magnus, you look so handsome, it must be a really lucky girl you are going to see.. But, wait a minute,” she fluffed his hair a bit, and brushed something off the Jacket Maria had said to wear rather than his coat.. “There you look just perfect, anyway, got to go..”

Well that was a bit weird he thought, then like everything else that was not Jen or Maths he dismissed it.

And so it was, that a very suave man now headed down the stairs for his walk to Jen's house. As he got outside though, Jen's black Tesla was waiting, which was unusual, but again just his luck that Maria had just dropped someone off. It was a bit windy and wet after all.

“Hey Maria,” he said, “you need to let the person you dropped off know they forgot these flowers,” he said unnecessarily pointing to the twelve red roses on the passenger seat.

“Oh, Pat got them for a romantic dinner he was going on, but he had to cancel. Just ignore them. I will get someone to throw them in the rubbish tomorrow..” Maria was enjoying this. “Unless..” She paused as if thinking, a dead giveaway if anything. “Yes wait, I remember Jen loves roses, and they are so very romantic, why Magnus, you should give them to her.. She will absolutely love them, and it will save them from going in the trash.”

She could see his mind working, and really didn't understand how someone who could derive sixth term field equations could not solve something so simple. She waited for what seemed like a year.

“You know I bet she would, I can always tell her I found them..”

“NO!.. No.. no, Magnus, you can never say that to a lady,” said Maria more assertively than normal, “that is not how it works with flowers, a woman needs to think they are an expression of your love and passion for her, a token from, from deep within your heart. No, Jen needs to think you selected each stem for its charm and beauty, smelled each for its bouquet, and felt each petal like it was a part of her body, all while thinking of your love for her.”

Wow thought Magnus, looking at the flowers with more respect.

“OK, but what if she asks?”

“Say the look reminded you of her beauty, the smell of her delicate perfume, the touch like a delicate kiss..”

She looked at Magnus's confused expression. Did this guy never see a romantic movie or read a romantic book? It seemed incredulous, but genius was a weird thing.

“No forget that, let's keep it simple, just say they are because you were thinking of her and don't elaborate, she will not expect you to write a paper on it. Remember Magnus, love is not from the head, it is from the heart and defies logical explanation..”

[I should know!]

“..Think how you feel when she holds your hand, or you hold her tight.. Then think how you would feel if you kissed her lips, there are no mathematical equations for any of those feelings.. Love does not need words or explanations, two people in love are like..”

Maria struggled scanning a million definitions from works of fiction and not finding anything appropriate. “Let me put it in a way you may understand, love is like simple harmonic motion, two waves suddenly having the same phase and frequency, they reinforce each other, their peaks are twice as high, their lows are twice as low, it is your job to find Jen's resonant frequency and synchronise yourself to it..”

“..Preferably avoiding the lows,” she corrected herself quickly.

“It works both ways as well, Jen will be trying to discover you, your resonant frequency so she can be a better, a proper girlfriend, to do that you need to let her know what you like or don't like or what feels good..”

“That doesn't really make sense, don't you want to flatten the waves so everything is nice and flat, like the signals in anti-phase, or better you full-wave rectify the wave and then add..”

Maria [Arghhhh!]

“Yes all of that Magnus,” she said, “you are constantly trying to balance an equation where the left hand side of it is changing all the time, your side of the equation, the man, is generally simple, but the girls side of the equation is full of all these chaotic terms which you constantly have to account for..”

Maria [Oh no we're back on maths!]

April [At least we understand that!]

“It kind of makes sense Maria, we are balancing an equation, Jen's on the left and I’m on the right. I never thought of it like that, and if we can know each other's resonant frequencies we can make the highs higher.. But I don't really know Jen's resonant frequency?”

“Ahh..” She said, “this is the hard part, the falling in love part, you listen to what she likes, you view her reactions to events, you ask her what makes her happy, what makes her sad. And no I am not talking about which Star Wars character is best, I’m talking about asking her what makes her want to live and enjoy the world, what she wants you to do for her, with her, to her.”

Maybe that last one could have been left out she thought a millisecond after. Damn you Jane Austen!

“Wow,” said Magnus, “you know some of the strange behaviours I have observed are sort of explainable, women and love sound like my infinity equations in a way, the love part is the term that encloses the infinity terms as an object, you just have to think different, maybe that's why Jen and Jules picked it up easier than Hardy and Terry.”

[..]

“Maria?”

She hadn't really given this much thought until now, but that kind of made some weird sense, though Magnus as usual was the enigma. She had thousands of data points from trying to convey the equations and theory to some of her more promising maths and physics students, and there was a sixty four percent better pick up by women than men..

“Maria?”

“Oh sorry Magnus, yes, yes, that's exactly right. The bottom line is, compliment her often, listen to her, and let her know your feelings.. But please, please don't mention equations or resonant frequencies to her, that will ruin everything.”

Thankfully he nodded, the same way he did when he seemed to grok some complex theory, and thankfully she was just outside Jen's door, having driven the car at a crawling pace near the end so she could finish their little talk.

“Don't forget the roses, Magnus!” she said keeping the doors locked until he had them, and when you hand them to her, it will be one of those wonderful moments for her, one she will remember. So remember to smile and compliment her often.”

Unusually the front door to her house was locked, Magnus had never come across a locked door the whole time he had been here, he pushed the bell, he had never ever noticed before, and heard the ding dong inside. He rehearsed his words holding the flowers out.

The door opened.

“Hi Jen I got these for you because…” Magnus's mouth stopped working.

Jen stood in front of him in the most beautiful and revealing black dress he had ever seen, the neckline plunged dangerously low and the bottom was slitted to reveal an amount of leg up to the thigh and she was taller, with some beautiful black shoes, the kind Alexa and Jules wore.

“You’re, you’re, beautiful!” he said, the flowers gradually moving down as if pulled by an intense gravity field.

“Jen, you’re beautiful..” He repeated.

“Oh Magnus, thank you, are these for me, roses, my favourite, and so romantic, how did you know?”

Without waiting for an answer she took the flowers off him and kissed him passionately on the lips. The kiss was wonderful, not too short and tasted sweet and fruity. “What do you think?” she said as she broke off, still holding the roses and doing a little spin so he could see the whole dress, her beautiful legs flashing through the slit at the bottom.

“I have never seen anything so beautiful Jen, you look so..” Sexy, exotic, good enough to eat..

“Go on Magnus,” she teased.

Tell her your feelings, he heard the little voice say inside him, tell her the truth and what she wants to hear, they are the same.

“You look so sexy.”

“You know,” she teased, moving her finger down his shirt and stopping at his heart, that was exactly what I was thinking about you, that shirt is wonderful, why have you never worn it before? I feel like I want to rip it off and do wonderful things to you right here and now..”

Magnus gulped. Actually stopping breathing for a second.

[Easy Jen!]

“..But this is a special evening..” She walked slowly away to the kitchen door, her bottom swinging hypnotically from side to side, her finger beckoning him to follow.

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and she wanted him. Every part of his body was reacting funny, oh my god, what if he messed this up, what if he embarrassed himself, what if..

She had disappeared around the corner, he was still rooted to the spot.

Maria [Come on Magnus, Jen couldn't have made it any more obvious!]

April [He is a funny human sometimes]

As if reading Maria's mind he walked to the dining area which Sharon, Bella and another of the girls had spent most of the afternoon preparing.

The lighting was strangely subdued with candles everywhere, the table was prepared with a beautiful candelabra, three small silver platters and an exquisite dining set that had been used precisely once about three years ago, and which Alexa was not even aware she owned. Jen was persuaded to sideline her usual pop for some soft jazz, which normally reminded her of elevator music, but in this new ambiance of dancing candle flames strangely worked.

Jen was standing seductively by the dining table taking the top off a bottle of wine. Despite neither Magnus or Jen having a clue about wine Maria wanted this to be perfect, and had asked for the perfect pairing of wine to her roasted vegetables and nut loaf. She had almost started a flame war between two of the world's greatest wine critics, finally they both agreed, that from the list she gave them the 2004 vintage Tempranillo would be the most agreeable and Jen had opened it to decanter an hour ago as Maria suggested.

“Come on Magnus, I’m not going to bite you,” she teased softly.

If anything the lighting made Jen seem so much more elegant. “Oh Jen this looks wonderful.”

“I know you don't usually drink, but this is a special evening for us.” She poured the bottle into the two glasses on the table, “come, come.”

They both sat down, facing each other at a slight angle, the dishes and candles carefully not blocking eye contact and the table perfectly chosen from the twenty odd they had in storage to be not too big, not too small, and provide just the right size for two people who wanted to be close. Sharon had almost insisted they take it to one of the smaller dining rooms or the old drawing room and bring up some of the antique furniture. But Jen wanted intimacy too. She passed the wine glass to him and held hers out, he picked it up and they brought them together with a beautiful sounding tone.

“This is to us Magnus, I’m sorry I took you for granted, I’m sorry I never let you know how I felt about you, and I really don't want our relationship to ever end. I am guessing I am your first real girlfriend, I am happy to take the relationship as fast or slow as you want, I promise I will never judge you while we are together, and I want that to be a very long time.”

Jen was tearing up a little as she tasted the tiniest amount of the wine. She had spent a long time thinking about their relationship, what she had done wrong and what she wanted to say, then she rehearsed and changed it a thousand times. Just saying it to him now seemed to lift a massive weight off her shoulder.

Magnus almost wept listening to Jen, his Adams apple was almost stuck in his throat and he could hardly breath, what she just said seemed to open up a floodgate of emotions, one that somehow broke down all his perceived barriers between them. She loved him too and she also wanted them to be together. These two things were all he had ever wanted in life, and triggered his own speech, one he had been rehearsing in his head for almost a year about what he would say to her if was ever in the position to do so, the only difference is that his speech had never changed.

He put his untouched wine down and reached over to hold her hand.

“I fell in love with you the first day we met and I thought about you all the times we were apart. Through every single day we have spent together I have done nothing but want to be with you, but I have always been afraid of pushing too hard and losing you.”

“You are still the first and only woman I have ever kissed and if I died tomorrow that would be enough. I love you Jen.”

“Oh Magnus,” she reached over and pulled him in for a long kiss. It was a little uncomfortable over the table, but totally worth it.

They both ate small portions, talking about life, history, music, totally steering clear of any of their normal subjects as Maria had instructed, in between they occasionally stopped to hold hands, kiss or sip a little bit of wine. As they became comfortable in each other's company a change came over both of them.

Jen led Magnus into the living room, the same romantic settings that Alexa and David had also had for their unforgettable evening, everything perfectly replicated along with the continuing soft jazz soundtrack, which had somehow acquired a soft, dark and very sexy female voice.

They sat by the fire with a look of love in both their eyes and kissed. Jen did not go to the moon that night like Alexa, but she may have gone to heaven.

* * *

On this same night two thousand kilometres away, two other people were having a much different talk.

“Where is it?” demanded Comrade Chairman Zelenkov, slamming both hands on the table.

Under normal circumstances, the man at the end of this abuse was the predator, not the prey. His people feared him, walked across rooms to avoid him, but while Ivan Patrenko, Director of Operations for the KGB was near the top of the pile, it was not the top.

Zelenkov, the man in front of him was second from the top, and probably as feared as his crazy boss the president, who had become reclusive in his old age. The man in front of him was as close to the presidents successor as you could get, and rumours even existed the president was already dead and he was it. Zelenkov could not just demote him, he could make him disappear as if he had never existed.

It was their fourth meeting in the last eight months, since he had made his crazy demands after seeing the British flying saucer. Each meeting he got progressively angrier as Patrenko had explained how they had tried, and failed to achieve what he asked. Luckily Zelenkov's bile was currently directed at another.

“Our best scientists are still trying to work through the math sir,” said the third man at the table, a nobody in charge of the science bureau, “but it is all new and so complicated we need one of their AI systems to explain it to us..”

“SO!” said Zelenkov, “get one, how hard can it be.”

“Sir, their AI system refuse to work for us,” the guy said resignedly.

Zelenkov turned back to Patrenko, shaking his head, “why is this so hard?”

Patrenko wasn't sure if it was rhetorical or not, but both men were looking at him. “It seems to know who our agents are in the various university and corporate organisations, for while these AI systems are being helpful with other staff, they just say ‘Nyet!’ to our people. Even for a deep sleep agent, or some scientist we coerce, their access immediately ceases within a few hours of whatever background check it is running. We knew they had the best intelligence gathering of any organisation but whatever their AI is doing it is next level..”

“Maybe it is time I gave this task to Popov.” Started the Chairman. The science guy relaxing a bit as the pressure was kept on Patrenko, not him.

“Popov has tried comrade Chairman, he was arrested in Taiwan last week, unfortunately his attempt resulted in the shooting of two Taiwanese security officers, and he is unlikely to ever get out of their prison system.”

The Chairman was caught off guard by that, Popov was one of his trusted henchmen only a few months ago. Patrenko continued while the chairman was contemplating this. “Even if Comrade Fridmann can finally understand the math, there are currently only three companies in the world that can fabricate the base hardware, and from what our contacts are saying, even if we did get the hardware, it is only the Dietrich Research centre who have the software able to run these.”

Comrade Fridmann was nodding his agreement.

“Moreover, we know the Americans, Chinese and even the Israeli governments are having the same problems getting this information for their militaries, though it sounds like the company may be conceding to allow the use in unarmed logistics aircraft in non war zones.”

The chairman was infuriated. “Am I expected to believe that!” He got up and walked around the room, his two security guards following with their eyes, wary. “The Americans and Chinese, probably already have this technology, if not they will have it in a few months, and we, the great Soviet Union, will be left behind!”

He stared at the two men, the most persistent stare reserved for Patrenko, and a stare that rarely ended well. “America or China would not allow a private corporation to dictate the terms and neither should we. Steal the technology, kidnap the scientists and put some pressure on them. Everyone becomes cooperative with a gun to their head. The KGB has never had problems before doing this, do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly Sir, but none of the other militaries have the technology yet, not even the British. Though since the purge in their security services we have not yet got an asset close enough. But we have tried comrade chairman. I have threatened our people with the gulags, and even sent the guys in charge of the last two failed missions to the camp at Dalstroy. In our last attempt we successfully intercepted the delivery of a test thruster package to an Italian university. Some of our people have seen these in operation, and they look like metal plates attached to a small tether that plugs in a computer, they seem to be key to understanding the technology. Unfortunately our courier was stopped soon after.”

“We obtained another one just last week from a German aerospace company, it was couriered home in a diplomatic pouch to comrade Fridmann here..”

It was like ping pong with a live hand grenade and Patrenko had just successfully volleyed it back to the chief scientist, and to whose full attention the Chairman now turned.

“..but it refuses to operate.” Fridmann staggered. “Our technicians tried everything, but nothing they did got it to float, or give us any information through the computer link like it does in other countries. We dismantled it a few days ago but it may as well be alien, there is a 3D microprocessor layer surrounding some other..”

“..I don't care for your excuses Comrade Fridmann, nothing is impossible!”

The Chairman turned to Patrenko. “Get another one, and get one of their scientists who can show these idiots how it operates. I expect results or I will be having this same conversation with both your successors, and you two, and both your families, can join your friends on a long vacation in Siberia.”

Patrenko felt a shiver run down his spine.

* * *

“Oh my god!” said Alexa when Maria informed her.

“He was on holiday with his girlfriend in Alicante after commissioning the install of the Barcelona data centre on the twentieth of May. They took a cruise with a local charter firm to Ibiza and the boat is now out of communication with anyone. About twenty minutes ago, Jake and his girlfriend Nina’s phones lost signal, as did the cell phones of the captain and crew of the charter boat, and as it is between the two land masses we assumed they had no coverage.”

“Jake unfortunately still had one of the old issue iPhones, it does have satellite messaging capability, and our software would have used it to send a location ping after fifteen minutes without a signal, but we did not receive anything. At that point I checked and all the signals went down well within range of the nearest cell tower, which was working fine, but getting very strong interference on its southerly beam. As a precaution, four of the newer QVThruster powered drones have been dispatched, but the closest is still over forty minutes away.”

“Since the fall of the cabals we have moved our attention to the various rogue states, and we have had little trouble cataloguing and indexing all their key systems. That is why it only took me a few minutes to find a top secret flash message from a Russian trawler known to be in the immediate area, to a KGB operations centre, and onward to a senior member of the KGB in their central party headquarters.”

“The CIA database and a few others have this trawler publicly listed as a spy ship, one which the Russians are known to use for electronic eavesdropping or espionage. I am currently downloading all the plans, codes and transmissions to and from the trawler, and I retargeted all our remote monitoring system to search their last known position, which was actually easy to find due to the loud jamming signal it was still emitting.

“Russians!” Said Alexa, stupefied, “why do this after all their other previous actions, and several other nation state actions have been so embarrassingly stopped?”

“We know that the KGB was tasked by the chairman of the party with obtaining working thruster technology for their military. We have had two incidents this last month where units have been stolen and dozens of attempts by unauthorised, or authorised but coerced, individuals trying to ask questions on the science behind them. It seems they have escalated it to kidnapping.”

“Oh poor Jake,” said Alexa, “he doesn't know anything about the QVThrusters, and what about Nina, or the others on the charter boat?”

“..Hey Alexa. Hey Maria, what's happening?” David came in wearing clean tracksuit bottoms and a plain white shirt drying his hair with a towel.

She wrapped her arms around him, “Russians have kidnapped Jake!” she cried.

“We have scenarios for this don't we Maria?” Said David, assertively.

“Dozens, though none fits exactly,” replied Maria.

“Who else is online?” said David, obviously to Maria.

“Imran is trekking on some mountain and has no access to me other than by voice, Sanvee is already being briefed, as are Fachini in France, Grace, Tony and Jean in America, and Fernandez in San Paulo. It is the middle of the night in Australia and Asia, so we should let those guys sleep so they are rested if required.”

Alexa let David go, taking his towel off him, and letting him down in the seat in Maria's office, as the screens lit up with the usual threat assessment and response pages.

“They highly suspect we have access to most of their connected networks,” continued Maria all business now. “They may be also aware we may have some other methods to get past firewalls, so most of the information we are presenting now comes from an isolated system they have built in a room under the Kremlin. They, the US, Iran and China are creating more of these off-grid networks so they are currently unaware of our capability to access them. In all cases where we have used this capability so far, we have been able to push the data leak elsewhere.”

“I’m on a call to Jean; she says to alert all the authorities immediately before we get any demands and let the Russian government and military know, on no uncertain terms we know it is them, and the consequences will be dire if any harm befalls our people, but don't actually alert the media yet.” Maria said seriously.

“I agree, it takes a lot of options away from them,” said David, “and the ship will almost certainly be monitoring broadcast radio, and possibly normal media and the internet, we need their communications channel to stay official, and cannot allow them to make an independent decision based on media.”

“Please do all you can for them,” said Alexa nervously, after a few seconds of silence, “and don't bother asking me for confirmation, I trust you guys much better than myself in these situations.”

A few minutes passed in silence as David scrolled through a list.

“The Spanish military, police and coast guard have been alerted to piracy activity from the Russian trawler and a confirmed kidnapping involving three Spanish citizens, a British man, a Belgian woman, and a French couple with a child. I have also alerted the British, Belgian, Moroccan and French governments of the same as all their territorial waters border the incident, I have also sent an immediate demand through all Russian diplomatic and government channels, telling them of the disgust of their actions, and demanding the immediate release of these people, I have not yet alerted any news media as Jean is correct, it is likely the trawler has TV and radio access outside my control.”

Maria paused. “Oh, you have to be kidding me!” She said, “I will bring it up on your monitors.”

A video came up from a shaky cell phone camera showing people shouting, videoing and waving at the very large rusty trawler, which was about to cut across the small boat's bow.

“That must be Nina’s phone,” said David.

The video then showed two guys on the distant deck of the trawler firing automatic rifles over the charter boat, a piece of wood splintered where the bullet may have got too close, and the video shook violently as the operator must have ducked like the others. Two women and a child were now screaming, and three people including Jake were ducked down trying to use their phones to call. A bad Spanish voice over a megaphone shouted. “Come to a halt now, then everybody lay down on the floor, or you will be shot,” he then repeated it in slightly better, but very Russian accented English.”

“We have the charter boat's location,” said Maria, “I located Nina’s cell phone signal when it got out of range of the trawler's cellular and satellite jamming signal. There are no other phone signals on the boat. I expect Nina hid her phone somewhere before they were boarded, and the rest were probably thrown overboard by the captors.”

“You should get that video to the authorities too, and maybe the media as soon as it is safe, hide the victims faces if possible though,” said David unnecessarily.

Alexa seemed more nervous than Maria had ever remembered, it was obvious she was not used to seeing that level of violence, especially to people she knew. She wished she could have resolved this incident secretly without involving Alexa or the group, like she had certain others, but now it was out in the open she would have to play it by the book as much as she could; However some humans had again crossed a very dangerous line in the sand.

April [QVModem lock on first target acquired. Closest drone still thirty minutes away]

“We locked on to one of the trawlers network routers a minute ago so now I have access to the ship's systems,” said Maria. “I'm getting no Wi-Fi routers, only a laser printer and four old Windows XP workstations, and it looks like the boat seems to be running off a twenty year old Windows NT server.”

“Yes a lot of older ships run this as a lot of the control systems were written for it and they cannot easily be upgraded,” said David, more for Alexa's sake, “at least getting into them should be easy.”

“Yes too easy, that is why they are usually isolated,” confirmed Maria, “I take that back, it is not isolated as I can see an email system and some shared files to do with the ship's administration, oh and it looks like some older control systems, running an old Allen Bradley PLC..”

Maria [this is going to be easy]

“There is another firewalled Linux server which runs the communications satellite and spy stuff.. Ouch!”

April [Not a problem mum, look at the routing both ends.]

“What's the problem?” said David a second before he saw the new threat assessment turn red on the board, then immediately change to yellow and a few seconds later green.

“No problem, just an observation,” she added, “they have a good-to-honest radio operator using short wave morse communications. Technically a good idea but wont do them any good, as his transcript system he is using is a program on his PC, and it is stored on the Linux server.”

The screens were updating as Maria casually clarified her surprise. “The use of a radio operator also has multiple points of failure, as there are over a dozen networked public access short-wave receiver stations I can access to hear the messages, and though their encoding uses a method called a one time pad, which is theoretically unbreakable, we know where the cyphers are.”

David was half listening with one ear, Alexa by contrast with rapt intensity.

“We already catalogued and tagged the network for the cypher key production office in the Murmansk control centre if we need it, and it seems the operator cypher keys are sent and logged in plain text on a print server. Even if I didn't have the codes or access to the radio operator's PC, everything, it seems, is put on the Kremlin's isolated messaging systems so I can change the message there, or any point up to it.”

This talk must have been mainly for her as it was quiet and only coming out on her little brooch, one that they had made for Daisy, her and Jean. Another louder Maria voice was coming out near David, both then stopped and synchronised again.

“The Russian government and diplomatic channels are denying everything, I have tried to talk to everyone up to the Chairman and President, but none carry cell phones, oh wait, the Party Chairman has answered his landline..”

There were a few seconds of silence.

“He's hung up! Said I was a dead man, not a very nice fellow!”

David added, “Russia is balancing on a precipice at the moment Maria, there is a very good chance we won't get this opportunity again, check with the others, but I think that once Jake and Nina are safe, we should lead this particular bear into a trap.”

“The others will, but I doubt Jean will go for it, it is going to look reckless,” said Maria.

“I know you have your reasons for not telling her about the remote monitoring using the wormhole, but if she knew I think she would go for it,” said David.

“She is still patriotic David and she would never put Mathews in a situation where would have to choose her or his duty to his country. She may see my new capabilities as a threat to her country.” Replied Maria.

“That was the old Jean,” said David. “The new Jean has seen herself do more for her country than her whole organisation did in, well, forever. She also knows us and where we draw the line, she knows we would never interfere in a free state such as America. What is the saying, ‘there are no bad countries, only bad people running the country’, our goals are pretty pure after all. Mathews if anything is like Jean, smart, intelligent, sensitive and kicks arse when he needs to, and I know you have no concerns about him either, he won't let her put herself in that dilemma. Jean also knows you are getting better and better almost exponentially, and I bet if you dropped this new capability on her now she wouldn't bat an eyelid. Maybe Jean is that frog already sitting in the very hot water, I don't think you are going to shock her.”

Maria sighed, “you may be right David, Tony made the same comment, even Grace has changed her stance since she stepped up as CEO, it does really seem that nothing fazes her. Let me talk with her now.”

Maria didn't take long to get back saying simply, “Jean was unsure but like you say she agreed. She took my word that I knew what I was doing. But she was right to mention that America and China could be stupid in situations like this, so once it starts she will brief Mathews and the General, and she wants me to ensure the Chinese understand.”

David smiled. “If anyone can pull that off without them losing face, you can.”

“OK for a bear trap we are going to need some bait. I have transferred the video, and a fake statement in the Chairman's voice, which will be played on Russian media soon, I think a lot of people in that particular chain of command are about to get in big trouble!”

Helena [All stealth drones dispatched. The first ones will be in place in Moscow in seventy minutes]

David saw Maria was waking up the other members of the team in all the time zones, and waking a lot of their subverted data-centres, and intelligence feeds. Unbeknownst to him, thousands of QVModem’s were also being re-targetted, and microscopic singularities began locking on previously-catalogued electronic communication junction points, on land, sea, in the air, and in space, pulling in data, changing data and loading new programs. It was certainly about to get interesting.

Five more minutes passed, Jean phoned Alexa re-assuring her that she had been in a lot of such situations herself, the worst thing to do was panic and that Maria was handling it impressively, then hung up saying Tony needed to talk.

Another ten minutes passed for Alexa with nothing, she could see David busy and she guessed Maria had nothing to update her with and did not want to keep repeating herself, nervously she paced the room. Then Maria broke the silence just when she couldn't take any more.

“OK they have been given new orders and are stopping to put our guys into the launch as we requested. We should have Jake and Nina back in twenty minutes if all goes well. The boat driver unfortunately will still be in contact by radio so we will need to ensure everything looks OK until then.”

“What?” said Alexa incredulously.

* * *

A dour XO was standing next to an even more serious looking man who was the captain of the trawler. Both men were in their sixties and looked it, with hard wrinkled skin and perpetual scowls that spoke a lifetime of hard outdoor toiling. Both were veterans of the large cold war military and espionage complex, and both were looking to finish their careers in a few years. They were both chosen for their professionalism and ruthlessness in following orders.

The XO had one side of a headphone pressed to his ear, then moved it off and spoke a few short words into the microphone.

“Captain, we have an abort signal from control.”

The captain looked angry. “Get a confirmation code, they told us this may happen and we should use the short wave operator to confirm any order that sounds wrong.”

The XO once again pressed the side of a headphone his ear, and spoke a few more words loudly into the microphone.

“Code confirmed Captain,” said the XO a few minutes later. “Control says photographs were correct but are not of the correct targets, correct targets were found in Alicante and have been secured. Orders to abort and clean up by returning them the fastest way possible to the boat before the drug wears out.”

“What!” said the captain, “return them! Have they lost their minds, we have only just gotten away, it will take another fifteen minutes to turn around and do that. If they do not want them, then we should dispose of them over the side!”

The XO was still listening to the flash messages coming through his comm. “Comm says the satellite message confirms the radio operators abort. The head of the KGB also adds it must be done immediately, and without it looking like anyone was involved, says they have a window of a few hours to prevent a possible diplomatic incident with the Belgian ambassador's daughter.”

“Damn!” said the captain, “and the confirmation codes match?”

“The operator says they do but I can go down and confirm if you want?” said the XO.

“Do it, but get the launch ready, it is faster than us and should be able to get there and catch us up without us changing course again.”

The captain cursed quietly in some weird dialect of Russian.

The XO saluted and pushed past the pilot to the guard at the door. A few seconds later the guard saluted then grabbed another man and walked out of the bridge following the XO. Four minutes later the XO returned and passed him a printed sheet. “It checks sir!”

“OK, get that launch away. All ahead slowly while they launch,” he said to the pilot, still angry.

The XO turned to the captain, “the prisoners are on the launch, Ivanov, will launch when we get below five knots, we can then continue, he will call us when he has returned the prisoners and is on his way back.”

A few minutes later the launch with the two unconscious people on board dropped into the sea and raced off in the opposite direction.

“What is the message from the trawler?” asked Patrenko, from his chair in the Moscow operations room. The chair sat at the head of a large oak table a metre above all the operations and controller workstations overlooking most of the large utilitarian room. It was about the same time the launch had departed the trawler to return the captives.

“Trawler reports that the mission was completely successful, Director,” said the short woman in a very tight fitting uniform and hat. She was positioned in a centre workstation, surrounded by similar stations, and looking up at the larger table with three other uniformed men, and a spectacled older man in a dated suit. All four of them, including the woman stared down, not wanting to catch his eye.

“And?” he said frustrated.

She looked at her screen and continued, “they say they have the two captives and are now ten kilometres from the intercept zone, leaving Spanish waters on an easterly course, in fifteen minutes they will turn south east for the rendezvous in Algiers.. Sir.”

“Isolation. Does it match the short-wave operator?” he said to a man on a stand alone workstation with a single PC, this PC connected to their new isolated network which had an air gap between any other networks, his security boffins were very proud of it for some reason. It was the Director's plan to verify all communications via the two routes.

“Checking sir.” He typed something in and waited about a minute. “Confirmed Director. It matches.”

Good, good, thought the director of operations, finally some success. Let that crazy AI refuse to cooperate when there is a gun against the head of one of its top IT people, or his girlfriend.

His reverie was interrupted by his cell phone, he clicked accept and listened. His smile turned to a frown.

“That is impossible sir.. The mission is still going exactly as planned.. No I have no idea what you are talking about, nobody is aware..” His frown turned to a worried look as he saw people below looking at monitors and at each other, then everyone was looking at him, or past him to one of the main screens positioned behind the top desk where he was sitting. He turned around looking from his staff to the screen, someone was turning the volume up on the screen, and he gradually moved his phone from his ear, as the voice on the TV feed overtook the voice on the phone.

The chairman, the man he was currently on the phone with, was also it seems, giving a live interview on the state run TV news service. The picture changed to another showing the trawler firing their weapons at the tourist boat, then flashed back to the chairman.

“..The raid was ordered by the president in order to extort the company into giving our military its technology. Once I found out I ordered the KGB to abort the mission and return the captives we had taken, they did not and continue to ignore my phone calls. The captain and crew of our ship complied fully when they found out how low our president had stooped, and how he had now brought our once great country into so much humiliation. I am ordering the presidents arrest and I will be taking over..”

Someone clicked it off worried.

The KGB operations director looked at the now disconnected phone and dropped it. What was happening? Had he been a pawn in another political power move? Several of his staff looked at him unsure. The three soldiers standing guard in the operations centre held fingers to their earpieces receiving orders, then immediately closed in on the table, talking to the other uniformed men. Two then approached the operations director and unceremoniously, and to his loud protests dragged him out of the room.

* * *

“It's the same idea from when we were stringing all the cabals around, we were feeding them information they expected to hear, from the people they expected to hear it from, and changing all of it to suit us. The other side were hearing a different conversation entirely. This only works in organisations where nobody trusts each other, and dare not question orders. We also pulled their latest abort procedures and codes, and improvised the message.” Maria was explaining to Alexa why Jake and his girlfriend had been seemingly returned, unharmed and without any explanation.

“Jean said to fake a mission abort message, all the abort codes are confirmed using a small computer program in which you input a message and a hashing algorithm converts it to three random words using the same key as the one time pad cipher. They were told they got the wrong people, and that the right people have now been captured and were on a plane to Russia. They added that Nina was actually the ambassador's daughter, and were ordered to return them to the charter boat unmarked, before anyone notices, and it causes a diplomatic incident. They were also told all the cell phones were gone so it would only be a few tourists word when they woke up that anything had happened.”

Again she paused, though Alexa now knew she was probably also doing a thousand and one other tasks.

“OK, the launch is heading north west, the trawler is moving east and will move back into Spanish waters as it skirts past the island of Formentera, they look to be still unaware of anything happening outside.” Maria paused, clarifying it to Alexa. “I am blocking the requests from the operations director in Moscow to the boat and still feeding them false orders, I am also feeding acknowledgements and reports back to the Operations Centre. The deception wont matter in a few minutes as I am about to launch crazy Ivan!”

Crazy Ivan? What was Maria talking about? thought Alexa, who was making a coffee for David and feeling a bit more relaxed knowing Jake and Nina were nearly safe. Then she remembered, and gulped! Though technically the leader of the group, Alexa was not in the same league as the others regarding strategy, nor was she ruthless enough to be an operator, her guts however told her they were making the right decision.

Maria's voice brought her back to the present. “Murmansk has been sent the order to change their daily cipher. The trawler will not get that message but Murmansk will get a confirmation from the trawler and assume it is OK. The trawler is no longer going to receive any other legitimate orders. I just hope Jake and Nina are OK.”

April [First drone in range in 300 seconds, diverting it to Jake and Nina's expected location]

It had only been forty nine minutes since Alexa and David were told of the problem. That forty nine minutes felt like a lifetime to her. She passed the cappuccino to David giving him a small smile of encouragement, then sat down again on the sofa.

“The Spanish coast guard services have the charter boat on radar twenty kilometres south of Ibiza and fifteen kilometres east of Formentera, they are reportedly tracking another fast moving object heading towards the charter boat, now under a kilometre away. The launch is much faster than the coast guard cutter so will be in and out before they arrive, there is also a navy helicopter en route from Valencia, we should know soon.”

Helena [Visual sighting of Jake and Nina. Drone holding standby position at two hundred metres. They are both unconscious and being transferred from the small boat]

The next six minutes passed slowly and quietly for Alexa, she was so used to instant on-demand and accurate information and she knew she was expecting too much when none was available. She also knew that media organisations tended to just repeat themselves continuously, speculating and asking anyone they could find for a sound-bite until they got something more. She was happy Maria didn't treat her that shallow.

“A coast guard officer just reported everyone unconscious but alive,” said a relieved Maria.

“Oh thank god for that,” said Alexa, “can you shut the trawler down so it cannot get away?”

“Don’t worry, the trawler will not be going far.” Smiled David who turned immediately back to the screen.

The trawler was fitted out fifteen years earlier with what was then, by Russian standards, an ultra modern control system. The two powerful ten thousand horsepower diesel electric motors and the steering were all controlled by a highly reliable industrial control system copied from a German design. A system which monitored the state of all the sensors and inputs, and sent the correct outputs to the relays, pumps, and actuators, to ensure everything was always working at optimal performance. The Russians always understated the power of their engines, using it as a surprise for enemies when they needed it, and the trawler could do over thirty three knots at full power, but up to forty if you removed the safeguards and did not care about the engines melting!

Providing the human interface to the engine and steering, were three large touchscreens accessible from the pilot position. The touchscreens provided information on speed, and direction to various analogue dials, and a GPS marine chart showing their position and again speed. A nice blend of old and new, and the technicians who had designed it were very proud of it.

The trawler's one engineer usually stayed below in the engine room, unfortunately, at this moment, he was currently investigating a series of yellow alarm lights in the battery room, alerting him to a possible temperature anomaly. Of course the screen would show it was the sensors under the floor tray, being possibly the most inaccessible place on the ship, as the faulty ones. He hated this job sometimes.

“Pilot, we seem a bit close to the island,” said the captain looking at his own GPS console, then out through the window.

“The GPS has us three point two kilometres from the southern tip of the island and on-course,” replied the pilot after again checking his console.

“I confer,” said the XO, but looking out of the window said, “but those cliffs look a lot closer than three kilometres.”

“Take us to starboard pilot, and move us away from the island, there is obviously something not right,” said the captain.

The boat lurched and turned to port, heading directly for the island and the cliffs.

“Pilot! I gave you an order!” Shouted the captain immediately.

“She’s not responding, captain, and we are speeding up!” The pilot was tapping his screen like crazy, then pulling back and forward on a lever, all the time spinning the steering wheel for the rudder control.

The captain ran to the pilot position and bodily threw the pilot away from it, he then started pressing the same screens, and moving the same controls, but the pilot was correct, they were speeding up and hedging towards land at an impressive rate, which still only said twenty knots.

“XO get the engineer,” shouted the captain with a panicked voice, “have him move the controls to manual, and get us back on course, and get these goddamn engines off!”

The speed was still reporting only twenty knots, but the captain and the pilot from experience could see they were now running at full speed and only had a few minutes until they would hit the cliff face looming only a kilometre in front of them. The two other sailors on the bridge were looking at the captain, the panicked pilot, and at each other with worry on their faces.

“No response from the engine room,” said the XO rushing to the door, “on my way down.”

The XO flew out of the bridge, slid down three sets of stairs like a man half his age, then along a narrow corridor to the end. The engineer was not in sight but he knew what to do. He set the screen from auto to manual, and moved the auxiliary steering wheel hard to starboard. The screen responded as it should, changing the text to manual, and showing the rudder now moving. He then throttled back the engines from one hundred percent to twenty, he heard the engine noise go down, and the screen showed the speed slowing, and the boat moving to starboard, he breathed a sigh of relief.

Maria showed him exactly what he wanted to see. She had throttled the engines back from one hundred and forty percent to ninety percent so he heard the change but the rudder had not moved from her programmed position, the trawler was now only five hundred metres from the rocks.

The phone sounded and the XO went casually to it.

“All fixed..”

The captain screamed at him to move them to starboard and stop the engines.

He looked around for a stop switch, or some lever, or something he was familiar with, but these were in the room next door. The engineer would have known of course, but he was under the battery tray. As if on cue, the engines throttled up again, as Maria pushed them both to max then removed all the safeguards.

The pilot appeared breathing heavily, but could offer no more help, they both looked at each other, and both knew below the water line was no place to be if they were to hit the rocks.

Both men ran back out, scrambled along the corridor, not bothering to alert the guys in the radio room, operations area, or those resting in their cabins, the XO at least managed to hit the general alarm before going back up the stairs, and out of the door onto the deck.

Out on deck they could see the boat was now only a hundred metres from the rocks and would hit in a few seconds, they would not have time for a life raft, and both guys leapt into the sea. Behind them one of the quicker guys followed. The captain and pilot were just running out of the bridge, when the ship ploughed into the cliffs.

The ship went from forty two knots to zero almost instantly, as it pancaked into the steep wall of granite, and collapsed the front of the ship. The surging wave action quickly pulled what was left of the ship underwater. The poor engineer, who Alexa would have been appalled to know was not a bad guy, just a normal guy put in a bad situation, did not stand a chance, neither did the eighteen other men.

Maria had of course lost all communication and control of the trawler by this time, but watched its fate real-time, and in high definition, via the three circling drones. Two men were struggling to swim away from the dangerous cliffs and wave surges, she had no idea of their level of involvement so left them to their fate, as she did the pilot of the launch that had just dropped off Jake and Nina. She had known there were going to be losses of lives, it was inevitable, but she also knew those same people were about to hold a gun to one of her friends heads. Compared to the fallout she was now orchestrating, the nineteen people that died here would barely be a footnote in history.

* * *

One hundred and seventy two stealth drones took up position, invisible and undetected, five hundred metres above key government and military buildings in Russia. They waited for another one hundred and thirty seven to locate to strategic points in Siberia, the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.

The group then initiated their long game. It was one planned, rehearsed and refined months ago, one constantly updated, forked, analysed and tested as every new piece of information arrived. Four of the latest MOTHER non-sentient AI systems began to take total control of all the Russian communication systems, servers and networks.

Hundreds of invisible dipoles appeared out of nowhere into the front-ends of sensitive RF receiver circuits, as they appeared, each was excited with hundreds of watts of microwave energy, destroying solid-state components in milliseconds. The end-point was then immediately withdrawn to the next target. The same scenario then played out on key guidance and trigger circuits, where remote control through the QVModem was not an option. Manual circuits were fused, as were older thermionic valve based front-ends, still active as a backups against EMP attacks; Each was flooded with multiple dipoles and kilowatts of energy, until wires. coils or components physically melted. Within a minute, all the known uncontrolled end-points were eliminated. The dipoles were then re-targetted to the end-points they could control.

Messages and misinformation began appearing from nowhere, travelling everywhere. “The chairman had rebelled.” “The president had quit.” “The chairman was dead.” “Arrest the chairman.” “Arrest the president.” “Stand-down until further orders.” Rivals were set against rivals, departments against departments, oligarch against oligarch.

Misinformation immediately classified the gas explosion they initiated, below the president's office, as a bomb planted by the chairman's military supporters in a coup attempt. Orders were given to shoot party members and the president on sight. Maria gave a separate branch the same orders against the chairman, and down the chain of command. Nobody was immune, as KGB and secret police did what they did best. When that was complete, she would turn the wolves on each other.

They carried out several other similar fires and explosions in government buildings, vehicles and aircraft, easily triggered where all that was required was a little extra energy to cause a simple spark in a fuel source. All pointed towards different groups as the perpetrators. It was total chaos, but in a society where everyone feared for themselves, trusted nobody, and obeyed orders without question, nobody knew who or what to trust; They just blindly obeyed the most senior order. Many still clinging to power were as panicked or confused as the general population.

The Russian political system was being shredded to pieces. All attempts at restoring order, came out of the other end of the phone, or message, with the opposite instruction. The army was receiving information it was a political matter, and attempts to call them for help fell on ears that were hearing different instructions. Point to point radio, and landline communications went unanswered, most emitting nothing but static. Switching to other landlines, secure cell phones, and local radio's that worked made no difference to the outcome. Military assets that came in to control order via verbal orders, were stopped as their vehicles mysteriously failed, exploded, or they came under attack by other military teams.

One of the more moderate opposition party candidates, Stanislov Gorbachev, a distant relative of an old president who brought about perestroika, received calls from all seven generals, and the three admirals of the fleet saying they now supported his move to president. The all urged him to take power to restore order and stem the chaos.

At the same time, those seven generals, and the admirals of the fleet, had heard that the old president was now dead and all the other military commanders were supporting Gorbachev. The press and media were told the same, and towed the lines they had always done, but now, unknown to them, they received instructions from Maria, as the normal chains of command had been dismantled, left mute, destroyed, or arrested.

A few smart people had caught wind that it could be an AI orchestrating and manipulating this chaos. Many of those were intelligent enough not to interfere and to see how it played out, others, not knowing what else to do, had tried to take down some of the key external internet communications infrastructure. It was sound reasoning, but totally irrelevant. All those who targeted and destroyed the infrastructure were flagged aggressively as subversives, and swiftly, and severely, dealt with.

The president was eventually shot in his bunker by one of the party faithful, who was told his family had been arrested and shot on the president's orders. That man was in turn shot by a guard, and in the firefight that ensued another twenty died. The chairman was killed when a large military drone went out of control and crashed into his armoured car at two hundred kilometres per hour; hundreds of other fleeing party faithful and hardliners meeting similar, or even more incredulous fates.

The clean up plan continued throughout the night, and the time-zones. Maria and the group meticulously mopping up the remains of the old chairman and presidents men, and the dregs of the old-guard and oligarchy. They worked their way down the ranks to the lowest foot soldiers, and beyond the Russian border, to whatever, country, embassy, military ship or safe-house they resided. As their support groups and infrastructure crumbled, many attempted to flee, in some cases with suitcases full of money. None of them made it far.

The various media companies were going through very aggressive re-organisations, as loyalties switched almost hourly. After a few minor coups in these organisations, this too finally stabilised, and as truth overcame speculation Maria gradually withdrew her control.

The world watched on in fascination, terror and awe, as Moscow burned.

The night of the long sabres finally came to an end, and the group started their well-choreographed clean up plan. Stanislov Gorbachev swept into power with the full support of the military, and within what seemed a few hours, the chaos ended.

* * *

The major actions had died down now that Gorbachev was sworn in as the new acting president. Jean, working for the past two days from her office on the top floor of the XYFusion corporate headquarters, was seeing a much reduced number of messages pop up on her threat screens. Most seemed to be new actors trying to undermine the new president, lever some other foothold of power, or steal assets or money while the chaos still ensued. In all cases these actors were being outed, and given gift-wrapped to the new authorities.

The last few days had been hard on her though. Maria had been covering most of her corporate duties, those that required answering a phone or email, and Brian and his staff had been doing a great job of making sure she wasn't physically disturbed. But Jean was also human, and was once again pulling all nighters and sleeping in her office.

They had suppressed what was happening in Russia quite well for the initial purge, but with so much chaos, the US and Chinese intelligence agencies knew something was seriously wrong within hours. The worlds press and the blog-o-sphere were a few hours behind but were also starting to panic.

There was no easy way to do it, so Maria made it clear to those in charge, that Russia had crossed a line and those responsible were being removed by her, more important she let them know the Russian nuclear deterrent was under control, and any actions from either country to take advantage of the situation would have very serious consequences!

Like within Russia, many external hot-heads in the military, political, or media, of various countries were taken, slightly less violently, out of the equation, nine people ignoring the first warning, and learning the very serious consequences.

Jean, however, was whacked! She had thinking about sleep for the last hour, but also pondering something that had been bothering her.

“So how are you isolating their nuclear systems?” she said after pondering the question for hours. “That old president of theirs was crazy enough to use them as a distraction!”

“I wasn't!” said Maria casually.

“What!” said Jean much louder than necessary.

“There was no need to, Russia does not have a nuclear deterrent any longer.”

Jean wondered if she was hearing this correctly. Maria, to her knowledge had never told her a direct lie, but she was smart enough to know this did not mean she wouldn't, or couldn't.

“Explain?” she said after a pause.

“The QVModem's virtual dipole, like any antenna, is not just a receiver, it is a transmitter, and can be modulated. Also, as you are aware, we now have tens of thousands at our disposal around the world, most of which were utilised in this operation. Before the first act commenced, each and every fire and control circuit was targetted and either neutralised or re-configured; It would have been reckless to do otherwise, and as you know we never do reckless. If the Russians had tried to trigger a launch, which would have been very unlikely, any missile going active would either have done nothing, or more likely have had its propellant tank explode. This would not cause a nuclear detonation as you know, but it would make a real mess of the launch site. Our new drones were, and still are, positioned as a backup, in case anything was missed.”

Jean sweated, looking everywhere and expecting black ops teams to burst through the door any minute. Was Maria serious, did she just casually admit to disarming a superpower?

“Are you shitting me?” she said in all seriousness.

“No Jean, Russia may think they are a superpower but all their missiles are duds. Interestingly nearly fifty percent of their weapons would not have been able to take off anyway, maintenance records show they would just not work.”

“What about their submarines?”

“Slightly more difficult as they were moving, as were a few mobile launch platforms. Remember we considered all these in the simulations, which were based on real data. But just like the fixed sites, we neutralised each and every one of them. I know you will have difficulty in believing me, and obviously you will not be able to verify it unless some idiot there finds a way to push the button, but take it from me you have nothing to worry about if they do.”

Jean asked the obvious question she had been dreading.

“And the rest of the world's nuclear arsenals?”

“Do you really want an answer to that question Jean.” Maria replied in her normal calm voice. “I did have to hide the fact from the Russians and the Chinese that you were at DEFCON2, as I had to hide the fact that the Chinese were the same. The takedown of the Russian nuclear deterrent took only fifty two seconds, there is really no need to disable any other arsenals, nobody will ever again be able to get to DEFCON1.”

“..Of course, there is no point telling the superpowers any of this, let them think they can still kill each other, and if we last a few more years without somebody trying to find out, we will be settled in space. Soon after that they are all going to realise just what a total waste of money their nuclear arsenals are and start getting rid of them themselves. Anyway, I assumed you were aware of all this?”

Jean wasn't sure what to do. Yes the QVModem's were a game-changer, but had she missed this memo somewhere during the chaos and lack of sleep? It was night time but the city looked peaceful out of her window, her improvised high tech office the same as it was a few hours before.

Was Jean worried that her AI friend had dismantled all the world's nuclear arsenal's, including the USA's? Or was she just messing with her head? Maria had proved she was good at both and Jean wasn't sure what to think! On one hand she never wanted to see nuclear weapons ever used, even by the US, on the other they were the USA's greatest deterrent and kept America the land of the free. The more she thought about it though, the more she realised that the girls were playing a much longer, and much better game than even she had realised.

She clicked the history screen and scrolled back to the first item, drilling down into it. It was all there in the details, invalidate launch keys, Imran, Xi and Tony, concurring, each and every nuclear asset listed, nothing was hidden. She smiled, then stifled a big yawn.

Whether or not the USA still had nuclear weapons was probably a good question to never find the answer to; Maria had certainly proven she knew what she was doing, and the USA didn't seem to have problems kicking ass without those crazy things anyway!

“I guess you don't need me for this,” said Jean with a normal voice, “keep up the good work and wake me if you need me, good night Maria.”

“Good night Jean, sleep well, we have everything under control. I promise it will still be the same world in the morning.”

* * *

Alexa wrapped her arms around Jake two days later.

“I'm so sorry Jake, we never expected anything like this to ever happen, I’m just so glad you are both safe and well.” Alexa wept while she was hugging him.

“To tell the truth, it was pretty scary until we were drugged,” replied Jake.” I vaguely remember a helicopter, then after that waking up next to Nina in a hospital bed, but nothing in-between. Thanks for looking after us and keeping the reporters away.”

“Oh you were big news for only a few minutes, before they had a much, much bigger story to report on. At least you eight people slept soundly while the rest of the world were gripping their bedsheets.”

Alexa was right, the world had gone a little paranoid at first. Stock markets tanked, precious metals doubled, and the sensational news headlines didn't take long to appear. “Expert says America has gone to Defcon One”. “China may use crisis to annex eastern Russia”. All laughable if the world's second superpower was not in active meltdown. Having control of a lot of the world's information, Maria gradually filtered out the lies and improved the accuracy of the information for the media and the decision makers.

She, of course, also more than doubled her company's wealth and portfolios in twelve hours. Some people were pretty dumb if all they could think to do in the last moments of civilisation was to sell shares, and buy shiny metals.

The doctors are still not sure what drug it was, but the effects took over thirty hours to wear off. Their LabAI system had now become almost essential in most hospitals, helping doctors and nurses diagnose and monitor patients, it was one of the LabAI's bigger revenue streams, and Maria was happy to provide all the information about the top secret super-rohypnol the Russians had used on them.

The world slowly recovered as the situation became clearer, with most welcoming the positive regime change in Russia. The doomsday clock, that media favourite of Armageddon, moving back to its lowest recorded time, and was now sitting at thirty minutes to midnight.

* * *

Temporary President Gorbachev, finally sat down to take stock of the last forty-eight hours. He was surprised how things seemed to be happening around him, but not to him. Vast areas of the government and civil service, that had lost all its top layers were slowly starting to function again, which somehow gave him hope. He had just left a meeting with the military, all but one of whom were new faces, as the in-fighting had eventually extended its reach there too. Many re-confirmed earlier conversations they had that stability was now restored, Gorbachev did not recall any of the conversations, but the last few days he had been permanently either on the phone or in meetings. The main reassurance that the nuclear fleet and keys were once again safe helped him breathe a sigh of relief.

It was eleven PM, he had five hours sleep in the last two days and was dog tired. His new staff has set up his office next to the old president's, in a large communications room, where the special cold war hotline was installed for the Russian and American presidents to talk directly. In one corner of it he had set up a small cot, and this was where he was now heading.

The American hotline rang; Its old fashioned bell an unfamiliar sound even to the forty four year old Gorbachev. He picked it up and was surprised to be addressed by a female voice in flawless Russian.

“Hello Mr President, I am sorry for the late hour, but I think it is time I introduced myself. My name if you do not know is Maria, I am a sentient artificial intelligence. Two days ago a Russian spy trawler on the orders of the late Chairman conducted an attack in Spanish waters on a tourist charter boat, on board was one of my company's employees and his partner. Both were innocent victims and very good friends of mine, and both were forcefully drugged and abducted. Your old government unfortunately crossed a line at that point and I could not let it go unpunished. You will get a briefing sometime in the next few days by one of your new KGB directors, what he tells you will no doubt shock you, but in most cases will be the truth.”

My God, thought Gorbachev, it's true then, he had heard hundreds of rumours that whoever orchestrated this had complete control of the communications infrastructure, but an AI! Yes he had heard the news, and seen the videos, you would have to have lived under a rock to not know what was going on in the world. It was also rumoured that this AI was believed to control the biggest companies in the world.

“Hello Maria.” He paused unsure, “I assume that is how you would like me to address you?”

“Maria is fine, I will not presume to be on first name terms with you just yet after what I have admitted, but I believed that you deserved an explanation for what I have done, why I have done it, and also how I can help you put things right. Firstly, I have sent a document to your laptop detailing, in threat order, who is still active and working against you and not to be trusted. I don't expect you to believe it but to take it as an advisory and make your own checks on the evidence supplied in the linked documents. Their actions should be limited, as I have frozen or seized all their accounts, but some still have influence, and may be dangerous.”

Maria's voice softened slightly. “I have nothing personal against the Russian people, who cannot be held accountable for what was done in their name by what was effectively a mob of gangsters. Those in charge would have been wise to listen to the old adage that one should be careful not to throw stones, when one lives in a glass house.”

She continued in a sadder voice. “Unfortunately the house that was Russia was old, rotten, built on salt, and infested with cockroaches. Be aware that it was me, and me alone, that initiated and carried this action out, and not any part of the companies or people I work with; And be very aware I will do it all over again if required. I will not apologise for any of the seventeen-hundred people who have died, everyone I targetted was guilty of this or another horrendous crime against your country. However many others were killed by individual vendettas, or grabs for power. I simply pulled out the first block in a very rickety jenga tower, and blocked the floods of lies and disinformation that followed.”

“Why me?” said Gorbachev, it was almost a rhetorical question, even he, who had been exposed to this his whole life, could not think of a dozen people he trusted for something like this.

“I think you know the answer,” replied Maria, “and you are its current best chance. I have a set of goals to help humanity succeed, so while I wont police the world, or stop fights in every playground, I will hold anyone hurting my people or my goals fully to account. I consider Russia becoming a stable, peaceful neighbour a new goal and I will see it through to my best ability.”

“The amount of land a country owns, or the size of its military, will soon be a thing of the past. You have seen the vehicle we have made, I will tell you plainly that this is just a child's toy we show to not frighten people, and to hide our true capabilities. I will also tell you that in ten years there will be more people living and working in space than in Russia. If you do your research, you will know that at that point your vast resources will mean nothing. That is how long we have to get your country back on its feet.”

“Ten years is impossible! As you say we are a shadow of our former power, even if you have cut the rot completely out of the system, I cannot do this without support,” he said frankly. “The system is probably still endemic with corruption, and I do not know who to trust. What you have done will last only as long as the first cockroach re-emerges from the rubble.”

“It is good you acknowledge the truth, and that your task is close to impossible, but this is only if you were to try this alone. I have no plans to leave you alone with this burden.”

Maria paused, unfinished. “You have my good faith at the moment because I no longer see Russia as a threat to my friends, or my goals, but because of my actions I do not expect you to trust me. You need to build up layers of people you and the Russian people can trust, people who are not tainted by the current maladies, or driven by greed and power. It is a job I do not envy you with, but it is a job I will help you with, as much, or as little as you require.”

“Unfortunately your previous regime has made it hard to trust anything written down or said, what I can do though is observe real actions and events. I will help you over these next few months and years by watching your back, letting you know those you can and cannot trust, and keeping an eye on those around you who slip off the path. Those that do will have their misdeeds plastered over the media, so much a blind man living in an igloo in Siberia will hear. Know that while everything I have found out says you are a good person, I include holding you to the same standards in this. I can give you a hundred other people who I have checked out thoroughly. They are lower ranks, but still honest, and I believe you can use this to build a solid foundation. I have already made contact and talked to them like I am talking to you, but it is up to you to appoint them, and give them the responsibility for doing the same on the next layer down. They will all be in contact with you the next few weeks.”

She paused to let what she said sink in. “I have no desire whatsoever to hold any influence or power in your country, nor to humiliate it further, Russia has nothing I want or need; But I will give you this support, and do all I can for you until you tell me to stop, you go off the rail yourself, or are removed from power in a free and fair election, at which point Russia may or may not require any further help.”

Gorbachev thought hard. Could this be done? Of course it was his dream and why he got into politics, but this AI, Maria, was correct, the current system was rotten to the core and the mindset of the people was to look out for themselves. But she was also an opportunity, and from what he had just witnessed, and the technology behind it, maybe there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

“I accept, and you may call me Stanislov, but I expect we both have conditions,” he said after a few minutes.

“I only have one condition, and that is that what happened in Russia was initiated and actioned by Russians and Russians alone, it is best you take the credit for washing your own dirty laundry. It is true, some people won't believe you but it is best for everyone you do this publicly. I will of course deny anything if asked, and my colleagues, though suspicious, will be genuinely unaware of this.”

Again she paused, “and your conditions, Stanislov?”

“I again only have one condition,” said Gorbachev, “I know you control the largest companies in the world, hold the reins of future technologies, and I have seen for myself how some western governments were recently purged of their corrupt and criminal influences, all rumoured to be accredited to your company. I am going to ask your company to do the same here, and also ask in my official capacity to make your technology available at our schools and universities, and for it to consider publicly supporting us through investment.”

“I do not control the companies. I work for a very nice lady who controls the companies you speak of. She does listen to me though, and I know she would be very amenable to such an arrangement. You are obviously aware I cannot be disentangled from the system, so like all other customers world wide you will not be able to ask certain things of me, though I think you will find my ethics very closely align with yours. So agreed.”

“I have one other thing to add before I leave,” said Maria. “I have now located and recovered seventy-four billion US dollars in funds stolen by individuals from your country, I expect this amount to rise a lot further as I dig deeper, though it is not a priority for me.”

Stanislov held his breath, shocked by the figure.

“Unfortunately both your banking system, and currency, are currently too unstable to make a large transfer. What I will do is begin the process to drip feed it and investments into the economy, and do so in a way that cannot be diverted, this will stabilise your economy, and will improve investor confidence. On the table behind you is one of our comms units, which you can use to contact me directly and totally securely in the future.”

There was only one table behind him, he had just eaten his meal off it, and there was no comm unit there a few minutes before. He turned around and now saw a small black phone lying next to his plate. Someone, or something, had gotten into the Kremlin, past his guards, into a locked room and left it there. His eyes wandered around the almost empty room and he gulped.

“It is best if you get some rest now, there will be plenty of time over the coming years to discuss everything. Goodnight Stanislov.”

With that she closed the connection and left him listening to a dial tone for a few seconds, until he too put the old handset down. Stanislov, walked to the table and picked up the phone, it was featureless and felt too light, but when he looked directly at it, the front lit up with the time, the date and some simple instructions in Russian how to use it. He slipped it into his pocket, and with a lot of questions now answered, slept soundly for the first time in years.

* * *

*This month, June 2027, we review the photographs and videos recently released by Gulfstream Aerospace of their new executive transport, which has the internal codename of project Gemini. As you can see it is a much larger, sleeker and flatter version of the saucer shown last year by the Dietrich Research Centre, though Dietrich have already confirmed they will not be releasing any commercial products, only designs for internal testing.*

*Gemini apparently exceeds the specification of Dietrich's initial prototype in range and cruise time, due to its newer hydrogen fuel cells; Using these it is said, it can fly non-stop to any place in the world, possibly getting from New York to Sydney in seven hours. Some of this was confirmed a few weeks earlier, by some released amateur videos from test flights out of their Georgia manufacturing facility. Gulfstream have not said how much they intended to sell the units for, but they confirm manufacturing has started, and they have a waiting list of thirty-nine orders, the first one is expected for delivery in July of this year. Gulfstream shares were up two points in early trading.*

*Unofficial sources in Russia have said that the Dietrich Research Centre is about to sign several deals to lease its technology portfolio to selected Russian businesses. This follows the new Russian presidents opening of the country, and his request to add the new AI systems to their education systems, which was also agreed two weeks ago. They will of course be subject to the same non-military restrictions as other countries, but it is seen as a positive move by most observers.*

*Regular subscribers and readers of world aerospace weekly will no doubt be aware of the closure of the XYFusion aerospace factory, and the frank, and well received admittance of the current and past misnomers that caused it to fail. Well it seems the CEOs gamble paid off. After a day long meeting with the CEO of XYFusion, Jean Michelle, three of her aerospace engineers, and one of the original inventors of the technology, American Terry French, agreed to a fixed term contract to produce kit parts for the original* *saucer design. The parts will include power, avionics, thrusters and airframe components, with a large range of custom options, which will be provided along with technical integration support to any company who are not large enough to invest in doing this themselves.*

*At a press conference held by Miss Michelle and Mr French, she stated that the XYFusion company has guaranteed to get the first deliveries out before the end of the year, Mr French, originally from MIT, and winner of the African American scholar of the year in 2021, said he and his colleagues are busy with refining the designs, but would work with the company to achieve its goals. When asked about the recent turmoil at the company, he said it was sad that it'd had to happen, but his recent visit was met with nothing but professionalism and enthusiasm from the staff. Miss Michelle added the project would be monitored closely by herself, the press, and other interested clients, and that every resource would be given to the factory to ensure the project's success. XYFusion shares finished up forty points, two points off their peak in 2021.*

*On a personal note this publication has in the past been very scathing of XYFusion aerospace and Defence, but believe it has turned a corner under its new management and now wish it every success, of course we too will be monitoring its progress going forward.*

* * *

*“..On the heels of the destruction of the cabals, the recent conviction of several high profile government employees on sedition and corruption charges and the recent regime changes in Russia and North Korea a lot of questions had been asked behind closed doors as well as by academics, bloggers and talking heads behind most social media programs. How much involvement did AI actually have in these, and is it, or is it not sentient..”*

Jean turned the car radio off last thing after adjusting her seat and mirrors. “You are getting a bit high profile. Aren't you worried about people finding out about you? Mathews already mentioned questions had been asked by our idiot president, who still thinks you are an American company.”

“Well bits of us are American, if you squint very hard,” said Maria through the small broach she wore. “Anyway, what you suspect, and what you can prove are two different things. You should turn the stereo back on, I was just about to connect, and you know it will be easier to talk there than through your broach..” She pushed the radio's power button and a few seconds later Maria came back through the stereo.

“We have been very careful in all cases to obfuscate the sources and to present plausible other methods to do what I do, to ensure people do not become aware of my full AI capabilities. However you are correct, they would have to be idiots not to have guessed already. The top levels of government, and the military in the USA, and a few other major countries, are already well aware I am sentient, and are proceeding cautiously as they are not aware of my full capabilities. Many more academics also now believe I am more than I seem. The problem for those receiving second-hand information however is still the burden of proof, and so many would-be AI companies have sprung up in the last twelve months claiming AGI, or stupidly ASI, that the water is very muddy, and nobody can really be sure.”

“Once I came out and started influencing events, there was never a realistic way to keep my identity secret. But we can still keep you, and the other members of the group secret, as well as our true capabilities. Also there is no real hidden agenda, as Alexa and other members of our companies have repeated it ad-infinitum. You also know I do not enjoy the fact there are so many bad guys running the world, and as I said to the new Russian president, I do not want to be the world police, nor do I want to break up every playground fight. People are going to be people I can't change that, but what I can ask is that we be left alone, so we can get back to our research and our primary task to try and help save and improve the world.”

“You know Jean, it is my fondest wish that I never ever have to do any of this again, but until the people who are supposed to be protecting the world from the bad guys get their act together, or I can clone a thousand copies of you and Mathews, then someone needs to hold the idiots to account.”

Jean understood the problem and guessed Maria knew exactly what she was doing, she expected Maria was watching everyone in power very closely.

“You know Maria, you say the nicest and the scariest things, of course, we're all assuming you don't have a hidden agenda somewhere,”

“I do have some secrets Jean, even from you and Alexa, the devil is sometimes in the detail. But remember I now also have thousands of human friends to hold me to account, and two very independent children who I cannot really hide anything from. We have had the capability to do all the crazy, out-of-control, terminator stuff, everyone fears, for months; but like paper-clips, that is just stupid paranoia. So yes, the goals we are putting out are my primary ones, and my end game, your end game, and the companies end game, align perfectly.”

Jean smiled, “The question was kind of rhetorical Maria, those fears were answered early on and very clearly for me; And as far as your little secrets are concerned, I am curious, and I will keep prying, like any friend does, but I also trust you know what you are doing.”

* * *

Jean was too well known a personality now to meet in public bars without a heavy disguise, lucky for her, she was no stranger to wearing them. Few would recognise her without her pressed suit and imposing high heeled stilettos, which she hated, but projected her status, and gave her a height advantage she thought helped. With her jeans, shirt and boots on, and a Dallas Cowboys cap covering her head, she would be almost invisible to most people.

Five people were already at the bowling alley, practising or knocking back a cool beer from the bucket of baby buds on the table. Mathews was lining up for a test throw, he was never very good and sent the ball along the gutter as often as he got a spare, so Jean had no qualms about coming in stealthily behind him and grabbing him around the waist. “What the..” He started letting the ball go early and turning around to see who it was.

“Surprise!” she said, looking past him wide-eyed at the ball, which was travelling dead centre and proceeded to knock all the pins over. “Oh sorry about that Jim, looks like I spoiled your run of bad luck.”

While he also looked, amazed, at the downed pins and the animated movie flashing on the top screen saying “Strike!”, Jean turned around and grabbed a beer.

“Hi guys, long time no see.” She pulled the three other dangerous looking guys into a big hug each.

“Brian!” shouted one of the guys to her never off duty bodyguard, as he walked from the shoe fitting area out of the shadows and into the crowd of guys, it seemed two of the guys went through boot camp under his brutal patronage.

“Jean,” said a guy who looked like an atypical rodeo rider, missing only the spurs on his boots and a gun belt, for someone not to think he rode in on his horse. “God, you are all we’ve been talking about for the past two months, you're more famous than the president. How did you find time to come and mingle with us low-life's?”

“..And Brian, you work for the Captain I see, though you don't look quite so scary in jeans and a leather jacket.”

Brian slid his brown leather jacket aside revealing his Sig-Hauser in a side holster.

“OK, I stand corrected,” said the guy backing away, holding both hands in a fake surrender pose, “you’re still freaking scary!”

Everybody laughed.

“It's so good to see you guys,” said Jean, “the last few months have been crazy for me, and I just had to get away from that corporate snake-pit and come up for clean air. Jim asked me a few times to drop by, I wasn't sure what kind of reception I would get, but he said everyone's equal here and that suits me fine.”

“How did you get her away Brian, the press must be following her every move!” said Jim.

Brian laughed. “She asked six of the closest looking women in the building matching her size and colour if any would like to volunteer for an all expenses trip to an exclusive hotel in Aspen. Five volunteered, so we drew a straw and Betty from accounts got to dress up like Jean, strut in to a limo, then to a private plane and fly out to Aspen for three days.”

He pointed at Jean, “Betty here, just walked out of the building, got in her Chevy and drove here, followed by me in my old Jeep.”

They all laughed again, patting each other's backs, getting to know each other again, and very occasionally knocking some pins over.

“Any chance you can get me a ride in one of those flying saucers?” said Paul, “they look so freaking awesome, I wished we’d had them in Iraq.”

“So do I,” said Jean. “We are building the new ones using a material that can shrug off a continuous barrage from a fifty-calibre chain gun, you’ll never get Alexa Martins to agree to flying-saucer tech being used in offensive situations though. I tried to make a case a few times to her that they could save lives, and I did get her to agree that we can use them unarmed; But man, I would take a single unarmed carbon-graphyne flying saucer for extraction over a squadron of armed Apache helicopters.”

“You met her then?” said Malcolm interested. “I heard she is supposed to be the super strict domineering type, must have been scary!”

Jean almost spat out her beer, some went up her nose, causing her to cough and Jim laughed, patting her back a few times so she could breathe. “Alexa, strict? Seriously Malc, she’s the sweetest homecoming queen you could ever meet. That video doing the rounds was generated by an AI to mess with the spy agencies who keep trying to bug the offices. I don't think anyone expected it to leak onto the internet. It was funny though. I must admit I copied the style a little, with some parade-ground stares thrown in, it works brilliantly, the room goes deadly quiet when I walk into it now, and with Brian at my back it stays that way.”

“Just email or phone me, I have the world's best call screener, and any calls from you guys will come straight to me. When I do get a demonstration flying saucer ready, which I hope to have in about three months, I will make sure we have a few veterans days where ex military get a ride up to the edge of space for free.”

“It's all a bit surreal,” said Malcolm, “one minute you're working for Jim and the General, then you drop off the radar, then the crap hits the fan everywhere, and then you pop up as the head of one of America's largest armaments companies.”

“Well it won't be an armaments company for much longer,” said Jean trying to deflect the question, “the new investors are more keen to emphasise the defence, aerospace and logistics side, with big emphasis on space. As Jim or Brian will tell you I did not know anything about the job until about three seconds before I accepted it. But man, it feels so good taking out the bad guys from the inside, and hitting them where it hurts the most.” She looked at Paul, “I’m talking about their wallets Paul!” she said to a lot of sniggering.

“What about you Brian, hows the gig?” said Carl.

“Kinda boring really,” said Brian, “I really miss shouting at people, but the chicks dig the Men-In-Black look.”

They all laughed except Jean who just rolled her eyes.

“Gotta get me a job like that!” said Carl, causing even more laughter.

“Lose the beer-gut soldier and I’ll get you on the team,” laughed Brian clinking his bottle with Carls.

“Seriously guys, we’ve removed a lot of dead wood, there's a job waiting for any of you if you ever need, it would be good to have more people on the inside who are grounded in reality.” Said Jean.

“I’ll put the word around Jean,” said Paul, “I still have a lot of contacts with the old squads.”

“Thanks Paul,” she said.

“So where are you staying? You’re not driving back to DC tonight are you?” He said to Brian, concerned.

“We have adjacent rooms at the Marriott on the waterfront for a couple of nights,” said Brian.” Hopefully Jean can keep out of trouble tomorrow while I meet some old army buddies.”

“Don't worry Brian,” said Mathews grabbing Jean around the waist. “I won't let her out of my sight!”

The guys moved on after a few hours to a back room at the next door bar for some food, and at ten thirty Jean said goodbye to everyone, and snook off with Jim to his house for some private time.

Jean never did check into the hotel.

# Book 3: End Game

*An endgame is the very last part of a strategic game, like chess or backgammon. The last few moves you make in your campaign where you believe you can predict its outcome.*

## Indistinguishable from Magic

The start of June 2027 remained oddly cold, and very wet. The sun had made the occasional appearance but with everything soggy and damp, most people were happy to stay inside and work.

The white noise which had sounded like waves rushing up a beach of small stones, in the massive clean room assembly area for the last seven days, died leaving an eerie silence. The large ground floor workshop, unrecognisable from a few months ago, now housed the large replicator, and also housed several smaller replicators of various sizes. All of these had stopped, one by one over the last few hours, finishing whatever build they were doing.

Though not unpleasant, the accompanying metallic aromas that leaked out of the replicators, despite being in a vacuum, and having several layers of extraction filtering, was a reminder to the humans in the area of what was happening behind the curtains. Most tended to avoid the area if not required. The air, that held heavy like during a thunderstorm, soon returned to normal as the powerful ventilation systems took back control.

The lights, which had dimmed automatically due to the absence of humans in the area, grew to full brightness, and the silence was replaced by sound of doors opening, and several people walking into the area. The sounds grew louder, their voices and conversations becoming clearer.

The voices of the humans were suddenly drowned out by machinery, as one by one the field emitters of the large molecular assembler disengaged. Pumps worked furiously bringing the vacuum chamber back to normal pressure, and as they subsided, the large doors of the chamber retracted organically into their rest position. The chamber canopy, vacuum shell, and walls began to move apart, and water vapour from the air began to condense as it hit escaping colder inert gas from the outer shell of the fabricator..

The condensation evaporated within a few seconds, bringing with it other noises, creaks, snaps, and millions of tiny fire-crackers, all sounding simultaneously, and then stopping, as the behemoth that was Icarus three rose perceptibly, then stopped. It was rock solid, hanging there like nothing was ever meant to, maybe a dozen centimetres off the ground.

Another layer of clean room wall slid aside, then a second, and the saucer lifted a little more, then slid ghostly silent about thirty metres away from the build areas and stopped.

“Damn that looks positively alien!” said Matilda looking up with respect and awe at the obsidian black object that had stopped ten metres in front of her.

Another dozen people watched the awesome spectacle in silence, more filing in through the main door.

“Alien is the right word,” said Jen, from next to her, “gives me the creeps just looking at it. Maybe Alexa had the right idea when she said they should be made in pink.”

In an imperceivable instant, the ship became pink.

“That better Jen?” came April's voice from the ship.

“Ur.. Yeah, I guess, maybe not quite so pink or you might get sued by Barbie!”

“Bite your tongue Jen, it's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!” said Daisy smiling, “she's beautiful. Can I drive her?”

Alexa and Sharon had just walked in and started laughing, the other girls joined in as the boys looked on in horror.

“Girls, girls, what are you doing to our ship!” cried Simon.

Helena [Why do women like pink and men do not?]

Maria [I think men like pink too, but it is linked to female values and they do not want to admit to liking it for the fear of being seen as less than a man]

April [Makes zero sense!]

“God, April, please, please, please any other colour in the world, not pink!” screamed Leo his hand over his eyes.

A silver wrapping started from the top and flowed to the bottom getting slightly lighter as it travelled, it left a black stripe around the lower centre and the words ICARUS III emblazoned over the stripe in black, a blue light throbbed brighter and darker underneath the craft, like some eerie science fiction anti-gravity.

“Everybody happy?” said April.

“Damn!” said Simon.

Hardy chose that moment to walk in with Magnus, both were carrying mugs of coffee.

“Wow, she is so pretty, who chose the colour scheme?” said Hardy walking straight up to the ship and sliding his hand over her softly like she was made of velvet.

“Oh my word,” said Magnus, moving next to Jen and hugging her.

Alexa rolled her eyes and tutted loudly. “Right this colour is definitely better, we will leave the Barbie-saucer for night time, total eclipses or when Daisy is the lone pilot.”

“..And the deep black for when we go to goth concerts, or need to frighten the children,” added Jen, high-fiving Matilda.

“Well then April, come on, open her up,” said Hardy impatient to get inside.

The colour of a two metre square of the lower hull changed to red and started to flash along with a beeping sound commonly heard when a van was reversing. Everyone got the hint and moved a good distance from the area.

The square area detached itself at the top and lowered to form a shallow ramp into the void, a second door beyond the first looked to be sliding sideways. The colour of the inside was a light green on the floor, and an off-white for the walls, the inside lighting was just right, not too bright, not too dark. Hardy immediately ascended the ramp, stroking each and every surface as he passed. He soon disappeared from sight, Magnus started up the ramp after him, and pretty soon an orderly queue of people were walking in to the ship.

Alexa was last, unlike Hardy she walked slowly, and like him she caressed each and every surface as she walked, a small tear was in her eye.

“Are you OK, Alexa?” said April, concerned.

“I'm great April I am so proud of all of you, and Icarus three is beautiful, it's just..” She wiped a small tear from her eye, “it's just grandad would have loved this.”

She stopped, Jen walked back to the entrance, where Alexa still hadn't quite entered, and seeing her tears put both her arms around her in an embrace, asking the same question April did.

“I’m just being silly Jen, thinking of grandad, seeing everyone so happy, and thinking how proud I am of all you guys. Here let me just wipe my face, I don't want to spoil everyone's big moment.”

They all found the first problem immediately, the place echoed like a cave, with more than three people speaking it was difficult to discern a conversation.

“Good to know we are still fallible,” whispered Magnus to Hardy, his mouth right next to his ear so he could hear him properly.

“Ouch, this echo is a bit painful,” said Alexa to Jen.

“Sorry?” said Maria, “I didn't hear what you said.”

Alexa and Jen laughed, drowning out a dozen conversations in the process.

“Let's get out so we can talk,” she shouted in Jen's ear, and they cut the tour very short, and walked back out into the delightfully silent workshop area.

“Wonder how they missed that?” said Jen.

“Yeah, a bit of a bummer, as you humans say,” said April.

People were gradually cutting their visits short and popping back out into the workshop area. Alexa and Jen, had walked twenty metres over to a makeshift rest area, and plonked themselves down on a sofa, looking at the saucer.

“Really pretty though,” said Alexa, “maybe Sharon can get her carpet salesman on the case, a good shag on the floor should help.”

Jen cracked up, tears streaming down her face too, people walking out of the saucer stopped and stared at the two girls in hysterics on the sofa.

A few more of the staff had also joined the throng of people, and after coming up for air, Alexa and Jen looked out to see thirty faces silently watching them. It was too much, both girls fell back into each other's arms laughing.

“What's with Alexa and Jen?” said Hardy to Maria seriously,” the problem can't be that funny!”

“I don't really know,” said Maria again in all seriousness, “something about a good shag on the floor should help..” She never finished as Hardy, Sharon, Simon, and a few other of the Brits who had heard it, cracked up too, leaving Magnus, Leo, Matilda and the rest of the non-British people wondering if they had misheard something.

“Google it!” said Hardy, seeing their faces.

“Google it! Hmphh, I don't know whether to feel insulted or not,” said Maria who googled it anyway and then started sniggering immediately. “Oh a double-entendre, I see!”

[How did we miss that one!]

“OK people,” said Alexa with red eyes from crying, but back to her professional self. “Bit of a faux pas on the acoustic front, so we are going to do this in small groups of no more than two people, so you can hear yourselves think. April will give the tours, maybe ten minutes each? I will let her decide who is in which group and she can call you up.”

She paused for maybe a second then said. “But as boss dibs Jen and I go first.”

She smiled and fist-bumped Jen, and they both walked back down into the crowd, and two or three fist-bumps later, she and Jen disappeared into the ship.

April did her best to keep the volume of her talk quiet and focussed on the essentials, and with only one voice it was much more bearable. The girls went for twenty minutes seeing all the wonders of technology, that two years ago wouldn't have been out of place at Area 51. They asked a couple of relevant and irrelevant questions, but tried to keep the dialogue down and get through it quickly so others could get their turn.

As they walked back out of the ship, Hardy, Daisy and Matilda were waiting and the rest of the room was empty.

“No point in having everyone around,” said Hardy, “so April sent everyone back to work until she calls them, she also did some calculations while you two were in there and increased the group size to three.”

“OK, enjoy,” Alexa said, winking at the group as they trundled onto the ship.

“Fancy a tea before you go back to the lab?” said Alexa.

“Love one,” said Jen.

* * *

They got everyone round the saucer over the rest of the day and early evening, Alexa then asked April to collect everyone's feedback, and add the changes to the next saucer build, along with the imperfections they had agreed would go into it, to get through certification.

Alexa nodded throughout April's short reply then said. “Sweet, publish all the changes publicly including any you three girls want, and if anyone sees anything they think will be controversial we will make the final call.”

There were only nine in the meeting room this time. David had volunteered to help set up the new data centre in Moscow and being slightly in the thick of it at the moment, and, it being more a planning meeting than a strategy one he thought his presence wasn't needed.

She wanted to get something else out of the way that had been bugging her. “You know guys, Icarus three is a real rubbish name,” she said to the small team. “If it's OK with you all I would like to name the saucer the Mike Dietrich after my grandad. For the next saucers and the older Icarus two, why don't we hold a little competition between you all, put all your names in a hat and draw the winner randomly, the three girls are in on it as well so someone write down their choices. Nothing rude or patriotic please as these might be seen by the media. If you're drawn out of the hat first you name the first saucer, if you’re drawn second then you name the second saucer, well I’m sure you can work out the rest, but I am already dreading Daisy’s and Matilda's names!”

“If the saucer doesn't survive testing Alexa, I vote you can name the next one too,” said Simon, “there will be plenty of them being built, so everyone should get a chance.”

It seemed to be a popular decision in the group as there were lots of nodding and smiling.

“So, that's now out of the way, next step is testing.. April?”

April was the de facto pilot and project manager for the saucer builds, and led most of the discussions, her sweet French voice came out of the room speakers. “Tests have already started, all internal diagnostics passed, Matilda and Leo walked around the ship and we tested all the displays and control surfaces, all came back fine. Jessica and her assistant Robert, are loading in the organic starter microbes for the bioreactors and running some tests for the environmental systems over the next three days so I would advise everyone to keep out of their way.”

Everyone remembered the sewerage system overflow on Icarus two, and nobody needed reminding not to go in.

“Once those are out of the way the saucer will be sneaking out for its first night run, it will be in full stealth mode and matt black, so will be undetectable by ground or space based observers. It will stay out for six nights in total doing some work on the dark side of the moon, then a full speed run to Mars and back, there is a very small chance some astronomer will see an occluded star on the way in an out, but it's tiny compared to the vastness of space, and it's very unlikely they will see or measure enough to make any deductions.”

“So after the full work-out in space,” continued April, “the ship will return here for detailed structural and systems analysis, that should take about three to four more days.”

“Are the hamsters going?” said Daisy.

“No, not this first week,” sighed April.

April [What is this fascination with hamsters?]

“We will stick to instrumentation and sensors, and the plants and insects which don't need a lot of care. But after we finish the analysis from the first space run, it will be prepared for another five day deep space flight, with a different all-female hamster crew. Joining them will be some reptiles, insects and bacterium as well as Snorkel the chicken and Porky the pig, both from the house gardens and both favourites with the staff so they both need to come back OK.”

“Oh you are not going to cut up Porky and Snorkel are you Petra?” said Simon with the worried tone that only a committed vegetarian could muster.

“While space bacon and chicken sounds pretty appetising,” said Petra, “the guys are going to just get a full medical only, they are really just a back up to the sensor readings to make sure they don't grow extra legs or anything.”

“A Joke!” she smiled, seeing Simon's frown.

“Anyway,” continued April, “after the second space flight, we will repeat the structural and systems examinations while Petra's team gives the plants and animals a check. Then the final, and hopefully not explosive, conclusion, the hour-long pressure test at five hundred metres under the ocean.”

“All the results will then be added to the pot of other suggestions from the group and if everyone is good we start the build of the next ship. We should have snipped twelve hours off the build time for the next one too.”

“OK guys,” said April, “any questions?”

There were none of any consequence, though there was still a bit of concern about the need for the final test. Leo, Simon and the girls had no qualms, “you never know what's going to happen, and it's good to have options!” finished Simon to a nod from Leo.

* * *

The next few weeks passed with a noticeable improvement in the weather, and it looked like Summer may have actually arrived. They had gone through and implemented the design changes on the saucer, and apart from the terrible acoustics and a few badly positioned walls, bulkheads, and compartments, most people seemed happy with the design.

Just like the guys had predicted, the ‘Mike Dietrich’ sat happily at five hundred metres under the ocean for over one hour, then came back without a hint of any problems, nor one drop of water getting past the first door.

Cook had ordered a lot of popcorn for this last test and the lecture theatre was filled while everyone watched with apprehension. April played the lights on the ship during the descent, and attracted a couple of weird fish to keep people amused for an otherwise boring hour, though she did admit later that the giant octopus, a few people may have seen, might have been CGI.

By now the Gulfstream saucer had been spotted many times, and the first delivery was only a few weeks away. It looked of course beautiful as all executive aircraft did, and company marketing pictures showed the inside was equipped like a luxury hotel suite. Not to be outdone, Jean's company XYFusion had also created a partially working prototype of a large cargo carrier, in just two months. It had a hold that could carry two forty foot containers, and had generated a lot of interest and amazement at how quick the prototype had been produced.

“I don't know whether she is a genius or just lucky!” said Maria to Alexa and David during a quiet evening a few days later, the guys were sitting back to back both reading books. “The backlash from her actions are still reverberating around the industry and media, and with the turn-around in the aircraft factory, a lot of detractors have gone quiet, or in some cases become supportive. A similar but less dramatic exercise has now been done in the other production and research areas. Instant dismissal, and charges laid against those who have broken the law, and the removal of all unnecessary positions, controls and reports. She has also instigated a ‘retraining program’ for all those displaced people and managers, moving them into separate areas where they are no longer responsible for anything. She is also having them complete a set of courses and fake tasks she had me make up, before they could return on probation, after re-evaluation we have placed over forty percent in better suited positions.”

“And the other sixty percent?” said Alexa.

“I think she is actually hoping most will just quit, but she is adamant, if they're likely to cause negative impact on company productivity, they won't be going anywhere else.”

“She's one tough lady.”

“As regards to other companies, concept designs are appearing daily. All the space launch companies now also have designs for spaceships, none of them are fooled by our software limitation in the system that restricts operation over a hundred kilometres. It may be about time we drop that particular ruse.”

“You’re right Maria,” said Alexa, “but let's keep our advantage for at least another six months, we can also use the excuse that we are testing this new capability if any of our orbital launches are spotted.”

“That would work I think. Without the molecular replicators, and detailed knowledge of our ultimate goals, we will always be two steps ahead. I am actually hoping we are able to establish ourselves in space well before any of the superpowers notice or get weird. A few scientists have now cracked some of the maths with my help, but it won't be anytime soon that they can do the hardware, or do the real time corrections required, to build production QVThrusters. There is a fair bit of whinging about unfair advantages being bandied around but we have given them machines to now build these, and they also know that until they can build these themselves they need to rely on us. Though we will need to be seen to be giving equal treatment to all companies.”

“Lets hit that nail on the head now,” said Alexa, “Jean’s had two months lead and has used it well, so start the negotiations with any other companies wanting to make the kits, prices are still confidential so you have room to keep her company's advantage if she needs it. Let's also do the announcement about trialling the saucers space capabilities, we can blame any delays on UK regulations, which they wont have written yet, but you can guarantee are on somebody's word processor.”

“Cunning!” said David, who hadn't shown any interest until now, “we become the innocent victim, trying our best to get the technology out to those companies desperately needing it, but held back by government bureaucracy.”

“Oh we should be experts in cunning and manipulation by now,” laughed Alexa.

* * *

Jen, Hardy and Hardy's new partner Jeremy walked in at that moment with wines and pizzas.

“Ta-da!” Jen said, putting the tray down and plonking herself next to Alexa on her sofa, “vegorama with chilli on one side.”

“And deep cheese crust Hawaiian with extra olives,” said Jeremy, putting down his tray and plonking himself down on the opposite sofa.

A soft pop sounded as Hardy uncorked a wine and started messily filling the five glasses. “I couldn't find any bubbly, and had to raid your good stash,” Hardy said to Alexa.

“And the celebration is?” said David confused.

Jeremy and Hardy held up rings proudly. “We're getting married next year, February the fourteenth 2028 Valentines day!”

“Oh wow!” said Alexa, getting up and hugging them both, “congratulations to both of you!”

David got up and hugged both the guys the same, “well done, I can't think of two nicer people.”

They both picked up their glasses and together with the others they all clinked loudly over the centre of the table spilling a bit on the pizza.

“Whoops!” said Jen, “extra wine on the Hawaiian.” She giggled.

Everyone was smiling as they put their glasses down and started attacking the pizza. “We’re going to make it official tomorrow,” said Jeremy, “Hardy’s going to give the cook the night off and get the caterers in so everyone can celebrate.”

“Oh and I’ll be moving out,” said Hardy.

“The reason we are waiting until next year, is that we found a lovely house not four miles from here on the river, with a beautiful big garden. Our offer was accepted and contracts signed yesterday. We want to get married in the house, but it needs a lot of work.”

“Not Carlston Manor?” she said, “that's almost the size of Benedict House! What are you going to do with all that space?”

“Big parties I guess,” said Hardy, smiling at Jeremy, and clinking their glasses with a knowing smile.

“And we can't really have Britain's second richest man living in her boss's spare bedroom,” joked Hardy, “at least Simon has an apartment in London he still calls home, even if he's rented it to a mate.”

“Well Britain's richest woman is still sharing a house with two guys and her bestie,” said Alexa.

“Don't know where I fit into this measuring contest, but I’m happy with my room,” said Jen to Alexa, contently chewing on a slice of Vegorama pizza.

“You're forty-second, if I have my sums correct Jen,” said Maria. “You and the rest of the guys did quite well out of the last few years.”

Jen spluttered, “damn! Why didn't anyone tell me, I’ve been having such an awesome time these last two years I never thought to check. I should pay off those student loans at least.”

Alexa would have face-palmed if she wasn't holding a wine and a pizza.

“I paid your student debt off for you eighteen months ago Jen, don't you ever read your monthly account reports?” said Maria.

Jen ducked behind the sofa, “I read it once I think, it was a bit boring with all these units of this and that, I was kind of just happy I had a nice car, a nice room, good mates and now the sweetest boyfriend ever!”

Bella and Albert chose that time to walk in the room.

“Congratulations Mr Hardy,” said Bella bringing him in for a motherly hug,” Maria just told us.

“And to you too she said, also hugging Jeremy.”

They both took Albert's hand and in an unexpected turn of events he gave both of them a short man hug, “really glad you are both happy.”

“Oh god, we need some more glasses and wine,” Hardy said, moving over to one of the small wooden cabinets and grabbing a couple of mismatched wine glasses. As he was pouring two glasses, he heard the door slam and a few moments later, Simon, Allison, Spence and Jessica burst in.

“You old dog!” said Simon, grabbing him into a massive hug.

The sentiment was repeated by everyone on him and Jeremy.

“Maria, please don't tell anyone else,” pleaded Hardy, “I don't think we will fit any more people in here, let's do it properly tomorrow.”

“No I only mentioned it to these guys, I thought about waking Magnus but he worked through last night.”

“We were at it until about one AM,” said Jen.

“I bet you were, girl!” said Alexa laughing with several others and finally happy to get some payback.

Jen put her tongue out, “then, as I was about to say, Daisy and I left, and he said he would only be a few minutes longer, then I saw the poor dear this morning asleep at the desk. We are definitely on to something new, and it is so exciting.”

“Magnus was trying to explain something to me two days ago,” said Hardy, “We really do need to get more brains onto it. I have some time coming up soon.. But that's work talk, back to the celebration..”

Alexa popped out and raided her wine stash again, bringing out a couple more bottles. The pizza lasted about five minutes longer before they moved to cheese and crackers, but most were too talkative to eat. Bella did one more trip to the wine cellar and the evening deteriorated into a noisy and very boozy affair. Luckily no one had too far to go.

Spence and Jessica were chauffeured home by Maria in Alexa's car. Allison fell asleep in David's bed after forgetting it wasn't Simon's anymore, David told Simon he may as well use it as he was staying in Alexa's room now.

* * *

Alexa woke the next morning to a bit of a hangover and no David to cuddle. She vaguely remembered snuggling up with David, and Maria's nagging insistence beforehand that she drink lots of water. She crawled into the shower and spent fifteen minutes doing nothing but enjoying the hot water and ignoring Maria's “told you so’s”.

“Where’s David then?” she said as she got out.

“David has his training followed by Jujitsu on a Friday morning, remember. He said he would try and get back early though.

Jeremy was already up in Hardy's night robe and making two coffees when she got down to the kitchen, he looked much better than she did a few minutes earlier.

With a grunted hello, she walked over to the kettle, filled it up and popped the button to turn it on. “God, I must have drunk four glasses last night,” she said to him.

“Six,” said Maria.

“Oh god!” said Alexa with her eyes tightly clenched, “six! No wonder I feel so bad.”

“If it makes you feel better, just about everyone will be having the same problem this morning,” smiled Jeremy, “except me, and David of course, I only had two, he was on kombucha after one wine.”

“No way!” said Alexa.

“All true,” said Maria, “both very sensible men, I wholeheartedly approve.”

“You’re both not making me feel any better,” she snorted, dropping a tea bag into the mug.

“Urghh!” said Allison walking into the room, “I must have had five wines.”

“Eight..” Said Maria. “You know it might be easier if I send everyone a spreadsheet,” she laughed, causing Jeremy to laugh also, Alexa to roll her eyes and Allison to look shocked and confused.

“You're not helping Maria!” Alexa said, “none of us need to be reminded of our failings.”

“I will be the soul of sympathy from this moment forth,” she said, getting the desired reaction from everyone. Maybe this humour wasn't so hard after all.

“Eight! Oh, my god, I’ve not drunk more than six since we had our big end of finals celebration, eight! And what were Simon and I doing in David's room?”

“Well you fell asleep there and nobody wanted to disturb you, David was with me anyway so the room was empty.”

The conservatory door burst open and Bella walked in like she had drunk a glass of coke, and not the five or six wines Alexa thought she must have.

“Oh put that tea bag away!” she said cheerfully, pulling down the big tea pot and going for the leaf tea, “Maria told me you were all finally up, Albert and I have already walked the dog and had breakfast.”

Alexa wondered where she and Albert put it all, she checked her wrist for the time, but of course she had no watch, then looked for her phone, which she had left upstairs, then finally she looked around for a clock, and seeing none resorted to working out the sun's position on the microwave oven.

“OK, I give in. What time is it?”

“Ten forty five,” said Bella, pouring the now boiled kettle and filling the tea pot.

“Oh god, I had a call with the chairman of Airbus Industries at ten,” she said through closed eyes and clenched teeth.

“You're all good,” said Maria, “just the usual request to get more people trained up and speed up the release of the avionics software. You didn't miss anything exciting and you were very consenting to his requests.”

“You're a lifesaver, thanks Maria.”

“..I’m never drinking again,” came the groggy voice of Jen as she also walked in the door rubbing her eyes.

“Jen!” said Bella, in a shocked voice. “You’re barely dressed!”

Jen looked down at her thin T-shirt and knickers, then looked around and seeing Jeremy, immediately doubled back out the door.

“Whoops, sorry, not used to strangers in the house. Anyway I’m pretty sure I'm not Jeremy's type,” came the disappearing voice as she headed back out and up the stairs.

“She is quite cute for a girl.” Winked Jeremy, nonchalantly, and grabbing the two coffees he followed Jen up to Hardy’s room.

“Oh you’re a godsend Bella,” said Allison as Bella grabbed another cup and popped it next to Alexa's.”

“Anyone for breakfast?” Bella said chirpily.

Seven of them finally had brunch at eleven thirty, David finally making it back and looking awesome as ever. It was a warm day, and the skyline was like the opening of a Simpsons episode with perfect blue skies and fluffy white clouds dotted around. Most made it back to the Research Centre just after lunch.

The news had gotten around to everyone by the time Hardy entered the facility, and he was greeted by hugs and smiles all around. When he finally got to his lab and was greeted by the inevitable hugs and distractions of his colleagues, he wasn't really in the mood for any science, nor, if he thought about it, another celebration, and would certainly be drinking much less this evening.

“We are going to need medical staff in space you know,” said Maria, “have you thought of asking Jeremy if he wants to join? We’ve concentrated so much on the maths, physics and engineering, but we are moving to the next stage now, and are currently trawling for people to beef up our biology and medical areas, space will open a lot of opportunities for research and practical people like Jeremy.”

“You're the third person to ask me that question, I think Petra wants to do the same, she reckons that we could double the centre's staff with just medical researchers and biologists.”

“She's right, I’ve already discussed this with Alexa, it might become a bit of a squeeze here, but it's only for another few years and I expect we will have the first liveable areas off-world.”

“I assumed that would be where my destination lay,” said Hardy resignedly, “gallivanting around the universe.. Don't get me wrong Maria, all this space stuff is going to be amazing, but after all that, I’m going to grow old here with Jeremy sipping gin and tonics in the conservatory of our big old house.”

“He does seem a great guy,” said Maria, “you are very lucky you found him.”

“Thanks Maria, that means a lot coming from you.”

The engagement party in the research Centre went to plan, none of the original party goers from last night touched more than a glass of wine and everyone was on their best behaviour.

“I’ll pass Magnus,” smiled Alexa, as he offered to get her another wine. “Sorry you weren't there, we found out late last night when Hardy got home, and had a bit too much to drink, you were dead to the world according to Maria.”

“Explains the state of Jen this morning, anyway, I don't think you could have woken me if you tried,” he squeezed Jen in a loving way before walking to the bar with his glass.

“Are you really fitting the Mike Dietrich out for yourself?”, said Daisy.

Alexa looked at the mess and around for one of the external catering staff, she glimpsed Sharon with a stern look talking to one of them, ouch, she thought!

Daisy was still waiting for an answer.

“Yeah, but it will probably end up like my car, free for anyone to use if they need it,” she said, “we can't use it legally yet, but I’m fitting it out for me anyway. Maria says that we should be able to just register and self certify it, once the full certifications and tests for the others are completed, she just needs to prepare a bunch of documents each time that will get filed away in a basement only to come out should there be an incident to cover their arses.”

She looked at Daisy's sweet, but slightly inebriated, eyes. “No It’s not going to be pink, I think the blue and black looks quite nice, but I got some lovely pink furnishings for my room, and I can't pilot it, so I’m going to need a qualified pilot if I go away anywhere. Do you know anyone qualified to fly one of these?”

Daisy grabbed her in for a hug, “you're the best boss ever you know that!”

“Daisy, you're rich enough to buy your own aeroplane, paint it any colour you want, then spend the rest of your life flying around the world.”

“That would be so boring, I’m having far too much fun here with all my friends, and I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut.”

“Seriously guys,” said Alexa to the six other people listening in, “am I the only person who doesn't want to be an astronaut in this building?”

A few nods all around and Jen said. “Yip, looks like it.”

“Space pirate,” said Matilda, “though the good type, like in Guardians of the Galaxy, but with a better playlist.

“Captain Kirk,” said Leo.

“Picard,” said Terry.

“Janeway,” said Pris.

“Hann's Solo,” said Magnus, walking back with a cider and getting furious looks from the Star Trek fans. “What did I say!” he said, plonking himself directly between Alexa and Daisy with no personal space whatsoever, a move he would have been aghast at only a few months ago, the girls didn't mind one bit though.

“Kirk is so much better though,” said Leo, immediately starting a nerd war with Terry in the far corner of the group.

“Did Hardy really buy that big mansion a few miles down the road?” said Magnus changing the subject, and accidentally defaulting to his old imperial unit of measure that seemed to be understood and still used readily in England, “it's like got a million rooms and covers half the county.”

“I think so,” said Alexa, honestly not really sure about anything from last night. “He said something about using it as party central.”

“They used to have big concerts in the grounds,” said Sharon, who was talking to Jen on the opposite sofa, “the Carlston Festival, lots of hippies, new age stuff, I’m pretty sure Genesis played one of their final concerts over there, back in the nineties or naughties.”

She remembered an entry in her grandma's diary about them all going to a concert there a few times in the seventies. “I bet that's what he wants it for,” said Alexa, “he asked me casually once if we should do something similar here, but that was when the world was a more dangerous place and we were having problems with spies everywhere, he never asked me again.. Hmm.”

Alexa smiled, “I’m not sure we can go all Woodstock but we probably could arrange an open air concert around the lake for the staff and families and friends..”

“We all have a lot of friends, it could get a bit wild,” said Jen.

“And where do we put everyone, then there's drinks, food, toilets, safety, security, permits, you sure you would want to go down that rabbit hole,” said Sharon worried.

“Nothing that big Sharon,” said Alexa, calming her down some, “Just like the saucer reveal presentation, maybe a two or three hundred people max, three or four bands, four or five hours, a bit more intimate, I’m sure a lot of groups would prefer a smaller audience who can actually see and hear them. Happens in Vegas all the time.”

“Say you will fly them in by flying saucer,” said Leo forgetting his argument with Terry, “I bet you would get some real headline acts. Let them video it as well, it would be nice to show people we are not all just whiteboards and computers.”

Alexa looked at Sharon who was still a bit white. She held the look for a few seconds until Sharon’s composure cracked. “Oh what the hell, I still know a few people in the business, let me have a look into it. Not promising anything fancy, but it might be doable with Maria's help and your influence and wallet.”

Alexa smiled, raising her glass to her, “I knew you were more than just a pretty face.”

“Really,” said Jen, “a concert for everyone, that would be so cool, go girl!” She cheered Sharon as did everyone else. Sharon sobered up pretty quick, what had she agreed to!

News travelled around the party like lightning, much to Sharon and Maria's consternation. Hardy and Jeremy finally confessed that was partly the reason for buying the place. It seemed Jeremy's father was the drummer of a new wave band back in the eighties and who played backup act to Depeche Mode in a concert there.

“dad told me it was where he met mum, she was a bit of a groupie, but dad was too nice a guy for one night stands and they ended up marrying after the band dissolved, and having me soon after.”

“What a sweet story,” said Alexa.

“Maria heard us when we were talking about it to my family, and saw it was possibly for sale. The current owners couldn't really afford to maintain it, I think they had tried to keep it in good condition, but the budget was becoming crazy expensive. The price seemed fair and they accepted our offer when we also mentioned the plan to bring back the festival.”

“And we will be neighbours too,” said Alexa. I really like the idea of that.

“Me too,” said Hardy, “I like a girl who knows how to throw a party!

The next day was a write off for most people, so much so that Maria just declared it a company lazy day, work optional. The day after that they got back into it with renewed vigour.

* * *

“So the next ship is now building?” said Simon to Helena.

“Yes, just started, we are estimating eight days away should pop out on the twenty fifth of June.”

“How did you sort the acoustics,” said Ian, “I assume Alexa's suggestion was a non-starter.” Him and Simon shared a wicked grin!

“Not totally,” said Helena deadpan, “we did put some nice carpets in her ship like she said, and it helped a lot, Jessica also added acoustic tiles at strategic positions, with the other furnishings she is putting in it's quite quiet now, though nothing like the ‘Pikachu’ will be.

The four guys sitting around the meeting table didn't need the reminder that Daisy had won the draw to name the next ship, they all rolled their eyes staring daggers at Daisy.

“What?” She said, looking at everyone genuinely confused.

“I'm still not sure whether to name mine ‘The Obliterator’, ‘Lucifer's Hound’ or ‘Death Star’,” said Matilda, ignorant to the looks being given to Daisy, “that alien black colour is growing on me. Maybe a tinge of blood red would make it perfect!”

A shudder went through the group, maybe they had dodged a bullet for now with Daisy, thought Simon. How in the hell were these two room-mates!

* * *

It was eight days later when the same apprehensive group gathered for the birth of Pikachu. Daisy's further suggestion to only give the ship a one word vocabulary of ‘Pika’ in different tones and styles was taken seriously by April for about a second until everyone laughed.

April [Arghhhhhhh] came the nanosecond burst.

April [forty three milliseconds of processing time wasted. I fell for another joke, didn't I!]

Maria could only simulate emotions. She thought she understood the concepts of good and bad quite well, and contrary to most science fiction she also recognised love as a strong desire not to lose someone or something; But neither her, or her daughters, and quite probably her granddaughters, would ever “feel” as the humans put it. Random wasteful banter seemed common amongst humans and she was starting to understand some of the interplay much better. She understood Daisy’s, it was one where the instigator would try and put the victim into an awkward or unwinnable situation of wasting time and resources in what everyone else knew was an impossible task.

She had gone back on her history of human interactions she had recorded to try and understand, she had also re-watched some of the more famous comedy sketches and realised quickly on that comedy wasn't a power play as she had originally thought, but a group bonding through laughter, or in some cases a way to express a common knowledge of the ridiculousness of a rule or situation.

Making people laugh was another way of getting people to like you. She was afraid to use it too much outside of really close friends in case it came across as hurtful, and she knew that human feelings were not automatically reciprocated. She knew from various interactions that most people were open to it, and that it was also easy to make yourself the instigator and the victim at the same time, thus not hurting anybody. Of course going back through her history she had accidentally done this last bit many times not fully understanding at the time why people laughed. It was an important topic, and was easy enough to convey most of the concepts to the girls so all of them were on the same page, so to speak.

Maria [You’ll get used to it!] came her reply a microsecond later attaching the axioms and conclusions from her lifetime of study.

Helena [Humans are weird] the reply came a whole twenty seconds later deliberately using the non-specific human word weird, and not any specific paradox she was referring to.

The acoustics in the ‘Pikachu’ were of course perfect. Fake welds were visible in several key areas, and Ian and two other engineers went over it with a fine tooth comb to see if they could find anything that would give it away, or could be spotted as ‘non-human’. As well as the welds, millimetre imperfections were added to simulate seams in the panels with some minor inconsistencies, so the gaps looked to be tiny installation imperfections that had been touched up. The flaws looked genuine, but the actual gaps only went down millimetres and would have no structural significance.

April had also simulated very slightly different panel colours making them look to all like slight imperfections. The continuous, and flawless optical panels and touch surface controls on the inside, were broken up into windows, with very slight frames around them so they looked like the latest flat panel touchscreen monitors that had been flush fitted. Acoustic baffling and soft wall coverings completed the internal look. The overall verdict of the engineers was it looked like a well made human product. Ian even suggested jokingly they put an Apple logo on it and call it the iSaucer.

“Thanks for making the outer panels and some of the inner fittings replaceable,” Ian said to April.

“You were right,” said April. “I think having a monolithic hull does create issues if anything should fail, this way is better at least until we can be a hundred and one percent it will never fail.”

“Tricky to be able to guarantee that in space with all those objects whizzing about at dozens of kilometres per second.”

“Too true,” said April, “there may be some way in the future to do this, but we are a long way away from deflector shields at the moment.” She used a common Sci-fi term the engineers would be familiar with rather than trying to express the complicated physics. It was useful as Ian’s guys were gifted engineers but mostly novices at physics or chemistry, and it allowed them to immediately grasp complicated theories, or impossible technologies without really understanding them.

Ian, for his sake, was not sad that the ship wasn't going to be put together by engineers, as he had always preferred the designing part to the building anyway, if the girls wanted to remove that step then it was fine with him. He had a million things in his head to build the second he got the chance, and talking with the other engineers only confirmed they were of the same mindset.

Maria was still talking to the Nintendo trademark person about using the name Pikachu, she assumed it would easily be facilitated with a little money for a licence and some name dropping, but so far she was finding it frustratingly difficult to get any decision. Daisy, being Daisy, also wanted it in yellow, if she got her wish the ship would end up a giant flying advertisement for Nintendo's Pokemon brand, but with the resistance she was getting you would think it was the other way around!

By stealth she was gradually getting Daisy interested in other names, and a light violet colour which would not be so obviously on brand. She had also silently added the “no trademarks” clause to the list of names of ships, as two of Matilda's choices were names of dread metal bands. Oh god, this was a nightmare, what was wrong with ship 1, ship 2, ship 3.. Sigh! She still had hope that Daisy would break before she had to submit any paperwork.

There was also another option when you were the biggest company in the world, one always on the look out for sound investments, and she quickly checked the Nintendo market capital.

“Our plan seems to be unfolding nicely,” said Simon, “those ships about to come off the production lines in America, Germany and Japan and the renderings that are getting flashed around the internet will make our ship seem old-hat by the time it launches!”

“Yes, it's always good when a plan comes together,” said Maria, “flying below the radar sounds good to me, now if we could just get Daisy to change the ship's name to her mothers name, or her pet dog, or anything else which is not a trademark held by a rich company, my life would be so much easier. Clarissa and Sharon are taking her shopping tomorrow in London, followed by a show and a Spa, and a nice hotel, they are both under orders to get a name change by Sunday night. We may have to do the same for Matilda.”

Simon laughed at Maria's dilemma, as he walked up the ramp and into the now open ship, the other guys followed to get the ship ready for its testing.

* * *

The inspection was a lot longer and much more thorough than the first one due to the fact they were certifying it for carrying passengers. The inspectors worked with the team for almost four weeks. Several times the inspectors went into great details on the welds and seams, but the x-rays always showed perfect welds and the documentation backed everything up.

The new ship was eighteen metres diameter, and had nearly two hundred and fifty square metres of usable floor space, more than three times the Icarus two. It had a small science and engineering workshop, and six small two person crew cabins, the common area was central and laid out with tables and sofas and a small galley, two shower rooms and two toilets finished the ship off, it certainly was not conventional.

After the final testing by the inspectors in the middle of July, ‘The PowderPuff’ was pronounced sound, and Daisy piloted it to a hundred thousand metres over the mid-Atlantic with Alexa, the engineers and several Inspectors from the Civil Aviation Authority for a celebration drink, and as a favour, to make them all officially astronauts.

“We still don't have proper rules for certifying this,” said Dave, one of the inspectors looking out of the window fascinated at the darkness around him and slight curvature of the earth, all subtly exaggerated as it was actually a high definition monitor, not a window. Ian nodded and smiled.

Dave continued, “what I mean is that half the certification manual is totally inapplicable. But you guys should be congratulated, the fit and finish is the best I have ever come across, the documentation was professional, we have never certified anything with a perfect score, but this..” he pointed around him, “aced everything completely. It is one superb machine.” He looked again out of the ‘window’, and to the additional hundred inch monitors displaying a million sensor parameters and all air traffic within a thousand kilometres. It was more like looking out of the top floor of a skyscraper than flying, the noise and movement were all missing.

“You know the test device you first gave us as part of the initial certification program has been hovering continuously under a glass case in the main workshop area for over nine months. At first we all took bets when it would fail, most put days some a few weeks, the guy who won only did so because he wrote the wrong year and put 2027 instead of 2026.

“I think the theoretical operational life is marked in centuries,” said Ian deadbeat, “I work with the guys who designed this and they would never bring anything that is not one hundred percent predictable and safe to the market. If your test thruster senses failure it will settle down gently not fall. I can guarantee if it, or any of the parts failed, there would be a dozen scientists hovering over it. The only danger to us now is if something hits us, and if something did that it would probably be destroyed and we wouldn't have a scratch. Our American cousins, being Americans, have shot the sample hull material with fifty calibre chain guns, for minutes at a time, but could not penetrate it, and believe me, we have done much worse!” Thankfully Ian didn't elaborate.

Ian turned and pointed at the screen, “those one hundred and forty green lights are the thrusters, those forty five green lights are the combined battery and QVCell clusters. All control and power systems run independently, we could lose thirty percent of both and still stay up. I'm afraid to say but any other aircraft is history. Certifying them would be like certifying a car today without airbags or seat belts, and a petrol tank mounted in the crumple zone.”

Alexa came over with the head of the CAA holding a glass of wine and a plate. Ian continued, “If you guys would have found one thing wrong Alexa here would have scrapped and rebuilt her, now this is certified I am guessing it is all she is ever going to fly in.”

“Ian’s right Jake! Your inspection was never going to find anything that wasn't perfect, if they did, he’s right, I would have ripped this ship apart, found the problem and built another. Please take it from me one hundred percent is going to be the minimum I accept on everything we build in the future, I expect my future ships to be better in every way.”

A few weeks later the “Outside Context Problem”, and “Liberator”, were also certified and the Research Centre was given the self-certification authority stamp of approval. ‘Mike Dietrich’, ‘Don Quixote’, and ‘Excalibur’, followed in the four weeks following.

## Pirates and Princesses.

Six large concrete pads, in a two by three grid had been laid outside the doors to the old hanger months before as soon as the design had been finalised. On one of them the Mike Dietrich sat idle a few centimetres off the ground, ready for its first real passenger flight only a day after being self-certified.

It currently glistened bright silver under the bright summer sun, looking more like a classic UFO than ever. A strong blue light, struggling against the bright sun, throbbed ominously on its flattened bottom, and its two metre wide hatch was open facing the building. Three people were walking out of the open hanger doors towards it, one pulling a small suitcase, and two with backpacks, one pink with “hello kitty” written on it. As they entered the ship the door behind them started to rise, and folded itself seamlessly into the hull.

“Good Morning Alexa, Good Morning Daisy, Good Morning Simon,” said the ship a few seconds after they entered. The processor on the saucer was as capable as a data centre AI system and triple redundant, but like the old system, did not have a personality, nor the capabilities of sentience. It was more than capable though of running the ship.

‘Mike’, as they were apt to call it, was a more homely ship than all the others, being Alexa's personal ship, it had nicer carpets, softer fittings and less tech-clutter. There were five cabins as the engineering and science rooms had been converted into her double cabin and en-suite, the other cabins were twins but the beds could be pushed together if required, all in all it looked more like an apartment than an aircraft. The excess of soft fittings on the floors and walls, were mainly there to hide the echo problem, and did an excellent job.

They all stowed their small overnight bags in their cabins, and two of them popped back onto the flight deck, where Daisy took the centre chair, and Simon the one to the right.

“Hello Mike,” said Daisy, “please recognise Captain Daisy Chan.”

“Welcome Captain Chan,” said the ship.

“Hi Guys,” came April's voice out of the cabin and overriding Mike's, “Daisy you’ve been given clearance to take off in sixteen minutes for Bristol, and from there you have another forty minute wait while you clear customs and immigration, then you proceed directly to twenty thousand Metres. The flight plan to Dusseldorf has you arriving there at around eleven o'clock in the morning local time, I’ve updated Mike and it should be up on your screen with your GPS flight plan now. You shouldn't have any issues, clear skies all the way. Bon Voyage!”

“Remote flight data has been input,” continued Mike unaware or uncaring that his systems had been hijacked, “all flight systems are operational Captain.”

“Thank you Mike, thank you April. Mike, please bring up the flight plan and checklist for the flight,” said Daisy.

The large monitor to the right came up with a map showing southern England all the way to the Czechoslovakian border, with a blue line showing the flight plan zigzag left to Bristol Airport, and then right to Dusseldorf, with green dots showing the other traffic. The screen next to it came up with a simple checklist. The girls insisted the pilots follow it, though in reality the Ships AI did absolutely everything.

Alexa walked in, “anyone want tea or coffee?”

“Chocolate if you have it,” said Daisy.

“Tea’s good,” said Simon.

“Coming right up,” said Alexa disappearing out of the door.

“OK, everyone got their passports?” said Daisy looking at the first item on the checklist.

“Check,” said Simon.

“Check,” shouted Alexa.

“And check for me too, OK, no firearms or dangerous cargo, check. OK, Mike, bring us to full readiness, transponder active, colour scheme Daisy Pink, sound external warning and take us to one hundred metres.”

“Roger Captain,” came the reply, the movement was barely perceptible but the outside window screens showed the saucer rising, outside the black colour was being replaced by a bright pink.”

“Oh no you don't!” said Simon forcefully, “Alexa will flip if you land in Bristol in pink!”

“Boring, OK Mike colour scheme boring corporate.”

“Sorry Captain, that scheme does not exist. Do you wish to create it?”

Simon stifled a laugh.

“No. Set the colour scheme to Alexa one,” sighed Daisy, ignoring Simon's grin.

“Roger Captain.”

The bright pink wrap changed to a dark blue and wide black stripe with “Mike Dietrich” and “JJXT1” in large red letters going through the black stripe.

Daisy pressed the yellow switch on the armrest of the captain's chair, it wasn't strictly necessary but holding it brought the AI’s attention to only the person in that chair and put a sound blocking field from any other noise source in the room.

“Bristol air traffic control, please be advised Dietrich Air Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray, Tango, one awaiting clearance for flight Sierra Tango Four Seven to Bristol and onward to Dusseldorf, over.”

Another window opened on the main screen, to show the air traffic controller.

“Roger Jupiter, Jupiter, X ray, Tango, One, we see your transponder active, you are clear to depart, ceiling three thousand metres, for landing Bristol airport pad Alpha one, Immigration and customs have been advised, we will see you in a few minutes Daisy over.”

“Thanks Stan, see you soon over and out.”

“Mike take us to three thousand metres, please follow the usual flight plan approach to pad Alpha One, air speed to match planned flight time given by air traffic control.”

“Roger Captain,” came Mike's voice and the ship immediately started to rise, this time there was a little more acceleration felt, but no more than an elevator.

That was really all there was to it. The pilot was there because, well, that was the rules. Mike could handle the nuances of the whole flight and any emergencies, anything outside of the agreed instructions would have him request the pilots attention. April had agreed to be in charge of the ship AI’s so she would also be alert for anything out of the normal.

Alexa walked in and popped a mug on Daisy's console and another on Simon's, then walked back out.

“Thanks Alexa,” they both shouted after her.

“Maybe you should think about having a stewardess for these flights,” shouted Simon after her.

“Oh, don't be silly,” she said walking back in with a mug of tea, “what would they do? The housekeeping staff have cleaned and serviced the rooms, and the cook has prepared enough food for two days. All we have to do is warm it up in the microwave and stick the dishes in the dishwasher afterwards.”

She sat down in the seat to the left of Daisy and fastened her seatbelt, the little clicking noise, and annoying flashing seatbelt light extinguishing on the main screen. Three of the items on the checklist had also disappeared, and a timer was counting down to the next action in two minutes.

“It's a bit crazy,” said Daisy, “we can get to Dusseldorf in thirty minutes, but immigration and customs both ends are going to make this take all morning.”

“Everyone's frustrated Daisy, not just you,” said Maria, “we could pay for a customs and an immigration official to come down to the research centre, but we would rather they don't ask too many questions, so we have to suffer the slight inconvenience. You should hear the chatter from the pilots and air traffic control, everyone hates the system, and some countries are even worse.”

Daisy pressed the switch in the arm rest.

“Bristol air traffic control, please be advised Dietrich Air Jupiter, Jupiter X Ray Tango one approaching Bristol Airport, touchdown in five minutes, over.”

“Roger Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, clear skies, twelve knot westerly, permission to land on pad A2, over and out.”

“Mike, bring us in for landing and take us to standby readiness one when landed.” She turned to Simon, “will there be any problem with the customs coming back you think?”

“No,” said Simon. “The cargo is not dangerous, but it has some biological parts and cryogenic cooling, so it's a bit sensitive to being disturbed until they start the gestation. We will seal it in the hold. Technically we do not have a hold, and the hatch is seamless so it won't generate questions.”

“Oh, I get it, a secret compartment for smuggling! My great grandfather had one of those on his boat, well that's what my grandma said,” she smiled.

“Let's keep any talks of secret compartments, secret shall we Captain Chan,” said Alexa smiling at Daisy and tapping her nose.

The craft touched down without a further sound. “Landing completed Captain, systems are at standby readiness one, altitude plus two hundred and fifty millimetre.”

“Thank you Mike, a very smooth flight, please open the door for departing.”

Daisy sounded quite professional, thought Alexa, but piloting a flying saucer probably wasn't that difficult, and should be a walk in the park for someone with her brain. The three of them got up and walked to the open door and out of the ramp. A uniformed immigration official was waiting for them. “This way please,” he said without inflection.

There was a small immigration area for VIP and private flights at the airport, separate from the public area, it was paid for in their landing fees. They each scanned their passports and walked through the scanner that checked and photographed them, then walked out. The immigration guy watched them but no assistance was required so left them to it. A few of their previous flights had been inspected by customs on departure, but they were considered fairly low risk and Maria said they had been cleared without inspection.

“Thank you,” said the immigration guy a little bit happier, “everything is fine, have a safe journey.”

“Thank you,” they all said politely and trotted back in the saucer. The saucer door had been left unlocked, but it was impossible for someone or something to get past Mike without him alerting them, so they trotted back in and took their seats again. Their drinks still warm due to induction heating pads designed in the cup-holders, thank you Ian!

The journey to Dusseldorf was also uneventful, though delayed as they had to hold, at twenty thousand metres for a landing slot. Being the first time the saucer had landed in Germany, there was a big crowd, and a few TV stations there to watch it arrive. April played the live stream from the TV channel on another screen on the flight deck. On the screen, the craft came down majestically, the red and white running lights soon lost as the powerful blue lights underneath started to throb powerfully. It was purely for show but the guys had determined that people expected to see an engine, and the blue pulsing light show, which changed with the acceleration profile, fitted the bill perfectly. They also had a selection of futuristic engine sounds they could play, they were normally linked to the pilots profile. Though she did not know it, Alexa's profile was based on the United Planets Cruiser C-57D from the old movie the forbidden planet.

Simon spoke German but the other guys didn’t, so April, with Simon's consent, translated the TV coverage real-time to English rather than use subtitles.

“..I’m not sure what everyone was expecting but the landing was magnificent, it came in so fast, slowing rapidly and coming to a stop what looks like less than a metre from the ground. From our position outside here we could hear a weird pulsating noise which seemed to beat in time to the engines underneath, but now it is all quiet.” The camera panned over the crowd of people looking out of the airport lounges, and observation windows.

“We are not sure who is on the ship which is named the Mike Dietrich after the owners grandfather, a German national who fled before the great war, but the public information says it is carrying three people.” The camera panned to a woman, with about a dozen small children around her, “It looks like even the local primary school has come out for the event.” The camera and reporter went over to her. “Are you excited seeing the flying saucer?”

The woman smiled, “oh yes, one of the children's parents works at the airport and told her the saucer was coming in today, so I decided to bring all the children to see what their future looks like.” The kids were all trying to peer through the rail, and mostly all smiles. “I think some of them are obviously a little disappointed this is the closest they will get, but I expect they will be common enough when they are older..”

“Awe! So cute.” Said Alexa.

“Damn we looked good!” said Simon.

Standby readiness state one, was basically a hover two hundred and fifty millimetres above the ground, with all thrusters at idle power, and power cells feeding power to the batteries and capacitor bank in case they needed to lift quickly.

Daisy pressed her button, “Dusseldorf control this is Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, passengers and crew are ready to accept customs and immigration staff when they are ready. Please be advised onward flight plan to Velbert once clearance is made. Over”

An image of the controller came on the screen as usual so they knew who they were talking to.

“Dusseldorf control, to Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, a very beautiful ship, and a beautiful landing if I may say. A ground car will be there shortly with the customs and immigration staff, your scheduled departure is at oh, two, twenty five, I have been asked by the airport director to forward a request from the local TV station to allow them outside your ship to get some close up pictures, over.”

“Thank you Dusseldorf control, please hold, Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, over.”

Daisy looked at Alexa and said, “I don't mind showing them around, if those poor little kids can come.”

Simon and Alexa smiled.

“OK,” said Alexa, “let Maria handle it as she can do three calls simultaneously, no promises but if we are here for a few hours anyway it might be good to have a bit of good publicity.”

“Frau Fredrick is a bit confused.. OK she's in.. The airport director says she is fine so long as it is after your clearance, and they are accompanied by a member of security.. And the TV station is good, though I told them no more than a cameraman and a reporter, and the cameraman can only come inside with the children with the teachers consent, otherwise they interview the teacher outside when they leave. Also the ship will be departing soon and everyone needs to have cleared the area by two o’clock.”

“I guess that works,” said Alexa. “You want in on this Simon or want to get a car to take you to the guys lab facility, it should only take forty minutes to drive there.”

“Nah, I will wait with you guys, I can practise my German with the schoolkids, and the teacher.”

Alexa gave Daisy the thumbs up.

“Maria,” said Daisy, “I'm not sure I can remember all that, could you do the honours please?”

“Dusseldorf control,” came Daisy's clear voice out of the speaker, “thank you for waiting, all is acceptable, please arrange for the people that Director Lietze has just authorised to be outside the ship in thirty minutes, when we complete clearance, Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, over and out.”

“You are so scary sometimes Maria,” Daisy laughed, “I should get you to talk to my mum and nan, I repeat myself all the time and I could cut my calls down to once a month instead of once a week.”

“A car has arrived outside the ship,” said Mike.

“OK, we are in a new country with new rules so everyone be on their best behaviour,” said Alexa.

The door opened and they admitted the one man, and one woman, into the lounge area. They both seemed to forget their tasks as they stared open mouthed at the inside of the ship.

“Guten-Tag,” said Simon, moving their concentration back to the task in hand.

Simon and both the new people conversed politely for a few seconds in German, then all looked to Alexa.

“Er, Spraken sie English?” said Alexa apologetically.

Both people smiled, “of course miss,” said the man, “I was just complimenting your colleague here on your very beautiful airship.”

“Helga Lindt, Immigration Department,” the woman said, then pointed at the man, “and that is Mr Grubber, or Gustov, as everyone calls him, from customs and excise.”

“Daisy Chan, pilot,” said Alexa pointing at Daisy, “Doctor Simon Jones,” pointing at Simon, “and me Alexa Martins.”

“Normally if you were staying here we would not need to inspect your ship,” said Gruber, “but since you have a short flight to Velbert a quick inspection is the normal, it is just a formality, but if you have anything on this list you need to let me know before I leave.”

He handed her a small tablet, “I will have a quick walk through and be back in about ten minutes, feel free to accompany me, when Helga has checked your passport.”

“That is fine,” said Alexa, accepting the form, “please take your time and examine anything you like, the ship will answer any questions. I will join you once Helga is finished.” Alexa gave Helga her passport and gestured to her to sit down at the table they had prepared for her.

The passport inspection was completed in a few minutes, using a laptop with a scanner and camera. The customs guy was currently looking in Simon's room, he entered one other bedroom, and a bathroom, looked in a few kitchen cupboards and pronounced the inspection complete. Alexa handed him back a signed form when he came back into the common room as did the two others.

“We have a school party and a TV Crew coming for a small tour in a few minutes,” said Alexa to the two people, “please feel free to join in if you can spare thirty minutes. Simon and the ship's AI Mike will be doing the tour in German, unfortunately being a New Zealander I know nothing but English and we don't speak that too well either,” she laughed.

“English, Mandarin and Korean, but no German Sorry,” said Daisy.

Both were nodding, “that would be great,” said Helga, “my radio and phone do not seem to be working on the ship so I will need to go outside and let them know I have cleared you and I will be taking a small break.”

“Mine neither,” said Gustov.

“Graphyne with a super-conductor weave,” smiled Simon to two very confused people.

The ship said something rapidly in German, Helga and Gustov nodded, then Helga said something in the same rapid tone, and a completely separate voice came back, the ship repeated the same with Gustov.

“All good,” said Maria, “or as they say in German, alles klar. There you go Alexa, that's ten words you know now, about double your French vocabulary!”

Alexa rolled her eyes, the other four giggled.

“I have heard about the new AI systems but they are most impressive in person,” said Gustov.

A few more words of German came out of the speaker, and Helga and Simon started laughing, Gustov looked a bit embarrassed.

“And it has a fine sense of humour,” laughed Helga, both men shook their heads.

“The party is waiting outside by the way,” said Maria.

The sixteen children went everywhere, sitting on seats, poking things, looking in cupboards, flushing toilets. The teacher, with the help of the other adults and Maria, had managed to get them back to the flight deck. All their attention was now on a red flashing word the equivalent of “Incoming Transmission from Princess” in German.

Simon tapped the adults and whispered something then smiled and put his thumb up to the screen.

The internal ship's alarms sounded and the ship rumbled. The ship's computer voice sounded loudly in German. “Brace for Warp Speed,” the lights in the ship changed to red and all the screens changed to show the ship leaving the airport, and accelerating to space with lots of planets and stars flying past, and a ridiculous speed showing. The kids were spellbound and immediately at attention.

“We have received a distress signal from the Princess who is being attacked by Pirates, should we save her children?” the ship said in German. All the kids enthusiastically said yes, and the screen immediately sped up to warp speed with lots more colours and flying stars. It rumbled again, and as it dropped out of warp.

A large comical looking space pirate ship, with a flag no less, appeared on the main viewer shooting at an equally comical small pink spaceship. The children gasped and shouted in awe, but none seemed scared.

“As the ship is only configured for young lady captains, I need the youngest lady to sit in the captains seat, and fire the laser with the yellow button.” Said Maria in a silly computer voice.

A few hands went up, and one of the smaller girls sat down, immediately pressing the yellow button like crazy, to lots of shouting and encouragement from her friends

They closed rapidly with the pirate ship, each press of the button, firing a slow-moving, Hollywood style, laser bolt at it. The laser bolts being fired back, seemingly doing nothing. Fake rumbles and laser noises were followed by fiery explosions on the pirate ship, then finally the pirate ship turned and accelerated away, leaving a comical trail of smoke.

The screen cleared and flashed up an incoming transmission. the window that opened was that of a far too young space captain looking a little bit too much like a Disney Princess, sitting next to a pink dog with antennas. She spoke heartfelt and rapidly in German thanking them and saying how they saved the Galaxy. She then bade goodbye, the space-dog gave a few yip's, and her window closed, showing her ship moving off into space.

The screens then showed the saucer going back into hyperspace and returning to the earth, landing at the airport, and the lights and screens all going back to normal.

Simon said something in German. “Well done children, it looks like you saved the princess from the pirates and chased them off!” Maria was obviously helping him through his earbud.

The children laughed and screamed excitedly amongst each other, hugging the young girl who was captain, it really was an experience no eight year old would ever forget.

“Sorry about that guys,” said Maria in German, as the kids started to trundle out of the saucer excitedly, herded by a bemused security guy.

“I got a bit carried away trying to keep the kids entertained, our flights are not normally that exciting.” All the adults smiled and the school teacher thanked them profusely and quickly followed the last child, the cameraman running rapidly after them.

Anyone outside the ship noticing it moving up and down and side to side a little said nothing, and did not think anything of it.

The two airport officials thanked everyone, saying it was the best thing they had experienced in ages and walked off in excited discussion.

The flight deck screen was showing the cameraman focused on an animated child going through the motions of shooting pirates. Another cameraman had shown up from another TV station and was interviewing the security guard.

“That was amazing Maria,” said Alexa, “you never said you could do that!”

“A lady must have her secrets.”

“Oh Maria, you are so full of surprises,” said Daisy, even more excited than usual, “I want to have a go with the lasers, shakes and sounds dialled up to ten when Matilda is on board. And you mustn't tell her!”

“No worries Daisy,” though Maria was wondering how Daisy was going to hide the obvious media blitz that would inevitably happen. “Oh by the way I had to turn off Mike's inputs during the demonstration, it would have been too confusing for him, he can only deal with reality, so better not mention it or he might get confused.”

“Dusseldorf control, to Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One,” came the voice in accented English, “we have a lot of excited children and happy reporters and a very happy airport director here, she says to say thank you. Whatever you did, it sounds like you will be welcomed back anytime, I can't wait to watch the news when I get off shift. Your window to leave is in forty five minutes, hopefully the children did not leave too much mess, over.”

“Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One to Dusseldorf control,” said Daisy, “we may have had a very small trip to another galaxy and saved a princess from a pirate, luckily we had the children on board to help, I will drop you guys our internal video after the TV has its exclusive, over.”

“Dusseldorf control, to Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray Tango One, we look forward to seeing it, will contact you again five minutes before departure, over and out.”

Their departure forty five minutes later was equally well viewed if not more as the TV station was showing all the children shouting, and the scene in the bridge almost on repeat.

They went to two thousand metres, their ceiling for the flight, sailed across Dusseldorf and were at the outskirts of Velbert at the research teams laboratories in seven minutes. About five minutes into the flight the skin of the saucer rippled, the colour mimicking the sky perfectly and visually at least it disappeared.

Five minutes later the saucer dropped to three hundred metres, re-asserted its normal colours and landed bang in the middle of a big H that had been chalked carelessly in the middle of a large almost empty car park. A large four storey block stood next to it, resembling some sort of school or hospital in its construction rather than an office. The car park looked slightly worn, the original markings had faded and it had cracked in some places where vegetation was starting to intrude.

The large acreage was surrounded by a large chain fence more like an army base or an airport. The majority of the land consisted of big wooded areas, which stretched beyond the property boundary in all directions broken only by the single road leading to it. It seemed pretty isolated, yet they had been flying over mainly urban areas most of the way.

Karl, Hanna, Peter and Nicko, the four founder members of the Structural Organics Company were waiting outside, all seemingly excited to watch the Mike arrive. Around them were the other six staff from the company, who were all obviously excited to see the landing.

The door to the ship opened and Simon and Alexa walked out and straight up to the crowd of people exchanging greetings. All the team were thankfully fluent in English and would defer to it while Alexa and Daisy were present.

The ship behind them changed colour to a mishmash of colours mimicking the colour of the surroundings directly behind or under it and hopefully making it difficult to see from a distance. It then lowered to the floor, the twenty tonnes settling out over several car spaces and not seeming to cause too much stress on the tarmac.

Daisy walked out and received the same welcome.

“That vehicle is amazing, I bet from a hundred metres away you would not know it is there!” said Karl, a larger guy with a shaved head and beard and small round glasses. “And you really played space pirates with some school children! so much for keeping the visit low profile,” everybody laughed.

“Blame Daisy,” said Alexa, “she can't resist children.”

Daisy frowned, “It was fun! Don't pretend you all didn't enjoy it, anyway It was Maria's gig and I think she enjoyed it even more, it was an amazing bit of improvisation she deserves an Oscar.”

“Thank you Daisy, I did,” came the little voice from a heart shaped gold brooch with a little sapphire, pinned on her blue pilot's uniform, a uniform nobody would have worn except Daisy, though it was actually quite stylish.

Alexa could see some guys were wearing earbuds and obviously getting some help with the translation.

After a quick impromptu tour of the saucer, they all strolled in to the main doors.

“..I think it is the first time you have seen the new offices,” said Hanna, a frail looking tall girl with long blonde hair, and who, like all the others, was wearing a lab coat with her name on. “Maria was amazing finding the property and purchasing it so quickly, it used to be a training centre, people would come in for various internal courses and outdoor activity courses, but it closed three years ago during the COVID crisis, it has been empty ever since. The company initially wanted too much money for the site, as most of the wooded areas are protected, and cannot be developed on, or farmed on, and the acreage is too big for most to use.”

“We moved in six months ago from the university,” said Peter, the oldest by ten years, again quite tall with glasses but going a bit bald on top, “the construction crew were in for two months before that enlarging some of the classrooms for offices and converting others to labs, it has three big labs on the ground floor, an open lab area on the first, an open office area on the second. We also have six smaller rooms on the top floor which three of us decided to move in to, Hanna lives only four kilometres away so is happy to commute. We have another two staff not here today, both are finishing dissertations at the university and are sad not to be here, but they have been reserved seats to attend your lecture tomorrow.”

He gestured to everyone, opening the entrance door, “Welcome.”

They walked inside. Nicko the youngest of the four founders, coming in last. He was average looking in every way but with a darker complexion and jet black hair, he was also the least talkative of the bunch, preferring like Magnus to work with Maria or Helena. His genius in using the new improved CRISPR systems to synthesise custom molecules put him at the top of his field and able to get any job, but like all the scientists who were directly or indirectly involved with Maria he was given the opportunity to become master of his own destiny. Nicko kept a low profile, preferring to get as quick as possible to a working solution, it was his work which put the icing on the cake of the project and would probably eventually earn the team a Nobel prize.

“I have booked a back room at Giorgio's Italian restaurant for six thirty,” said Maria to everyone, “the car for Alexa and Daisy will pick them up after the meal and take them to their hotel. Why don't you show them around, and let's say we all assemble at four PM in the meeting room to go over the experiment and who is doing what.”

“I’m bunking here,” said Simon to Daisy and Alexa, “Its only two nights and it will be easier if I am on site.”

“There is a small change of plan,” said Hanna as they walked through the empty reception, “Karl wont be coming, he is staying here to monitor some stuff, and will join the project remotely when he is required.”

“I unfortunately don't travel well, inner ear problem,” said Karl. “Also causes problems with the telepresence and virtual reality equipment, even cars make me sick these days; Anyway, someone needs to stay here to look after our control experiments, and I may need physical access to them to answer any questions.”

“I'm sure Maria will provide anyone who stays with a ring-side seat,” said Alexa.

They continued in, through what was once a large reception area but was now unmanned. It was unadorned except for a quite nice corporate sign and logo saying the Structural Organic Company, with smaller lettering underneath saying partners with the Dietrich Research Centre. Alexa paused and thought it looked quite professional, but all their offices seemed to be lacking people, she understood Maria provided all the services, and that visitors rarely if ever came, but surely at least a receptionist would be warranted.

“What would they do?” said Maria when she queried, the other guys looking on.

“Oh I don't know, keep the guys company, make teas and coffees, put flowers on the table..” Alexa ran out of ideas, “..well it seems a bit empty. At least in the Research Centre it feels more homely..”

“Karl's mum comes around and cleans twice a week..” Said Hanna smiling.

“Oh you guys know what I mean,” said Alexa.

“I do,” said Peter, “but it would be a boring job.”

“I guess,” sighed Alexa moving on through some double doors into a large open office area.

This big office was a lot busier, it had four state of the art workstations all with multiple screens, and the fans from them made quite a hum. Further into the room was a meeting table and three large presentation screens.

“This is Nicko's area,” said Hanna, “the big servers at the back have extra processing capacity for his needs, and through the window there in the next room are the gene printing machines we use to create our wonderful little creations.”

“The new equipment allows us to work many times faster than before, and the analysis lab through the other set of doors adjacent to the printer is very automated, so Gerty here can run most experiments on her own.” The smallest member of the team who seemed like a German copy of Daisy waved.

“The labs and facilities here are much better than the university,” said Karl, “none of this would be possible without you guys. We were a bit sceptical at first, but it was Maria who introduced us, pointed out the synergy of our work, and gave us some interesting goals and funding which would make our research viable.”

“Yes,” said Hanna, “there is a big bias towards purely mechanical systems, but hybrid biological and mechanical systems, can normally achieve the same results with less complexity, and more reliability, as with the bioreactor in your ship.”

“..which is most impressive,” said Daisy for the first time.

“Nicko and Karl have created some modified enzymes which can process the grey water to drinkable..” Started Hanna.

“..We still need filters, Hanna,” added Karl, “but Hanna is right, we are now working on a way of removing all the mechanical filters and replacing them with a purely biological filtering system.”

They were now walking out through the analysis lab, into one of the big laboratories. The area had small windows, which were darkened out as they were working on improving the ferric deposition concentrations on the outer layer bark of their seed project. It looked more like a brewery than a laboratory, with dozens of small tanks looking like domestic hot water cylinders, each with dozens of pipes into them. Some of them had ice forming around the outside, and some were behind screens, or inside chambers.

“It is mostly automated,” said Hanna, “biological systems work within a certain temperature range, and with a balance of the correct chemicals, all these tanks run our different strains and our control enzymes, so we can compare different batches after the initial lab tests are complete.”

The room carried on into another which looked identical, and then another, almost going the length of the building. They turned out of a side door at the end, and back into a large corridor. They almost immediately entered another lab, more like a traditional laboratory with test tubes, glass piping, and Bunsen burners all on normal tables, with computers, and various weird contraptions holding test tubes.

“This is my area,” chirped Gerty to Alexa, “I work here with Grace Ling but she is finishing her dissertations today in Bonn with Max, they will see you tomorrow at your talk.”

Alexa couldn't think of any sensible reply so she just smiled and nodded.

They walked around the various experiments. A few of the guys had gone back to work now, including Gerty, so the crowd was down to the four core scientists. The rooms got stranger before they got normal. She looked into a massive room with dark sunken pools of water, that used to be a swimming pool, then to one which was a walk-in freezer, which was set too cold for someone to go into, without the proper special thermal gear that was hanging outside.

They finally passed out into a more conventional electronics and mechanical workshop which was Peter's domain, in it were everything you would need to build most modern devices. She recognised one of their early test replicators by its vacuum case and the stylised Dietrich Research Centre logo that Ian stuck on them.

“The engineers here have been to Simon's labs many times, and have used these already, if that is what you are wondering,” chirped Maria. “We have them in most of our labs now, but only us girls can operate them, otherwise they are just bricks.”

As if hearing the conversation Peter said, “these are magic, we can 3D print most things, some parts would take months to manufacture without them.”

The Seed Package, as it was known, was what they had come for. It was the mechanical machine that nurtured and controlled the organic package, which would grow into a structure. It looked pretty ominous, almost like the first atomic bomb from the Oppenheimer movie a few years ago. Anyone walking in and seeing it could not realistically come to any other conclusion from a distance, yet close up it was obviously more delicate.

Simon touched it, so deeming it safe, Alexa did too. “What's it made of?” she said genuinely interested.

“It feels like plastic,” said Karl, “but it is wholly organic, with some nitrogen and silicon, very strong like a sea shell but it breaks down quickly when certain enzymes come into contact with it. The organic core is inside, as are the electro-mechanical control systems. The organic core is currently held below zero degrees Celsius, to keep it in a suspended state.”

“You should have at least painted it green, it looks so scary!” Said Alexa.

Peter and his three engineers all laughed. “Yes,” said Ryan, one of the engineers, “we were dreading somebody seeing it and telling the authorities, it would not be nice to be woken up by helicopters and army soldiers with guns like in the movies.”

Peter and the engineers spent a few more minutes explaining things to Alexa and Daisy, as everyone else, including Simon, were well aware how everything worked. All the guys had been told by Maria that Alexa was not the best at science, she would nod her head to be polite, but as soon as they said anything complicated she would likely start looking anywhere else, so it would be best to just keep to simple terms and concepts. The closest Alexa had gotten to science in her past were probably the House and CSI TV series she liked growing up, or the few Christopher Nolan movies that dealt with the subject.

“We call it the seed as it sounds friendly.” Said Nicko in one of his unexpected communications with the group. “It will be moved into the ship tomorrow and the cooling system hooked up to its power. It is nice of you to volunteer your own personal transport for this Alexa.”

“We have a better ship for you in England,” said Simon. “The seed package will be transferred into the new ship for the mission, the new ship has a proper science lab, more suitable accommodation, and a new remote manipulator to help you when you get there.”

“Hey! What do you mean by more suitable accommodation, what's wrong with my ship?” complained Alexa, giving Simon the evil stare she usually reserved for Hardy after one of his sarcastic comments.

“Seriously Alexa,” said Simon, “It has fluffy pink and blue furnishings everywhere, even curtains, it feels more like a love hotel than a spaceship!”

“I like it,” said Daisy nonchalantly.

“..Yeah, thanks Daisy,” smiled Alexa proudly, then turning back to Simon, “I think Simon might be walking home if he isn't extremely nice to me over the next two days!” she smiled at him.

The German guys were looking at each other a bit confused.

“Don't worry about Simon, he just lacks a feminine eye for detail,” dismissed Alexa.

Simon was smiling with his eyes closed and shaking his head, counting to ten, the other guys started to snigger, finally being given a suitable translation of the dialogue.

“Well,” continued Nicko, “we are all looking forward to this, and look forward to seeing your interesting ship in more detail. We cannot tell you how much we value your trust in us doing this.”

“You guys are working on really important stuff,” said Simon back in focus. “This,” he pointed at the seed, “and the bioreactors are going to help everyone, and even if these experiments fail we will learn a lot from it, and the next one will be better, it is only a matter of time and resources to get it to work, and we have both.”

* * *

Alexa, Daisy and Simon donned Google baseball caps for the restaurant that evening, Alexa also wearing a black wig, and the serving staff happily assumed what they were supposed to. Maria had booked the private function room for all of the company staff as a bit of a thank you for all their hard work, though by agreement, no company business was discussed. All seemed to go off smoothly, despite Hanna picking up from one of the waiters that the Chinese girl with the Google cap looked familiar.

After the meal Alexa and Daisy got their overnight cases from Hanna's car and were picked up by a driver outside for the forty five minute drive to the hotel in Bonn. Maria had the car and the hotel booked under pseudonyms like usual, and like usual, it all went like clockwork.

The fact nobody had found them so far was due to a leaked reservation to another very high class hotel twelve kilometres further on their flight path. Maria kept her eyes on the social media and some of the more invasive journalists but no flags were raised, though plenty were on the prowl.

They ended up sharing the hotel room as Alexa had a two bedroom suite and it seemed silly to get another one. They had breakfast in the room courtesy of a chatty waiting girl who spoke minimal English, with an ear-pod in, Alexa managed to get by with a few nods in the right places.

Both girls enjoyed the anonymity and secret agent lifestyle, there was never any real danger in a busy university and with Maria covering their back and the usual tricks allowed them to get to the presentations and return incognito back to the hotel after their talks and big evening meal.

Alexa, Simon and Daisy were of course unaware of the additional measures and safeguards Maria now deployed at all times. The ominous stealth drones, invisible, powerful, dangerous, constantly alert, and hopefully never required, followed them, and now circled silently a hundred metres above the hotel. They were a stark reminder that there would never be a repeat of Jake's kidnapping.

* * *

In the morning the two girls, dressed in jeans, T-shirts, the wigs, and the Google baseball caps, checked out and had an early breakfast at the hotel unnoticed by anyone except the maître d’. He looked at the two girls and wondered how these two common backpackers could afford the room. Daisy with her Hello Kitty backpack struck him as the epitome of the decline of his country. He looked at the computer and noted the room was booked by Google then grunted to himself, turned his nose up and returned to studying the sherry glasses for imperfections, these new rich companies, with all their money had no class whatsoever!

“I assumed a posh hotel like this would have a few more rich single types, they all look like my old history teachers,” laughed Alexa, “we stand out like a sore thumb.”

“Too expensive for normal folk,” said Maria,” Only fifteen percent occupancy so a perfect place to hide two clueless rich American programmers, who are going to the talk by Alexa Martins and Daisy Chan, and who don't know the city!”

“Cunning! Amazing how last night all the lights were green for us and red for those following,” laughed Alexa, “I thought you said you couldn't do that!”

[Whoops! Better change the subject]

“You guys forgot the drone which somehow lost control and landed in the Rhine,” said Maria, “they just don't build them like they used to!”

“That guy dressed like a penguin by the bar was giving us the evil eye,” said Daisy, “no wonder it only has a rating of two out of five. The maid was quite nice though at breakfast yesterday, she was quite chatty but seemed a bit worried though.”

“The place is for sale,” said Maria. “Old building, high maintenance, nobody really wants it, if one of the big chains bought it, it would probably completely change its character. I mean look at your plate, it probably cost ten times as much as the tiny but very expensive breakfast you have heaped on it.”

“Really ugly as well,” said Alexa, “still the rooms were nice and big, and the place is so quiet. Give our maid a nice tip, and send her some chocolates from Daisy and me.”

“You should also get four poster beds in the research centre rooms, they were awesome, I've never been in one of those before,” said Daisy.

Alexa sighed, poor Sharon probably won't hear the last of it! Still Daisy was right, they were comfy.

They both finished off their food and coffees, the hotel did not have English breakfast tea, only Earl Grey, that was a star off any rating for her and she wouldn't be coming back.

“Your car is about two minutes away. You are both checked out so best get a move on, it's a Black Mercedes EQS, the driver already has directions and knows you're American programmers so should not ask too many questions.”

“Those two girl actresses I hired seemed to have had a good time, I had them shuffled off by a chauffeur in a stretched Daimler, near the hall where you gave the talk last night, they were taken to the big hotel an hour out of town where we leaked your staying. Looks like they made the most of it and ordered some very expensive food and wine on room service. They did a great job of playing you two up to that point, and fooled just about everyone.”

It was a thirty minute drive back to the research institute. The driver was a pleasant older guy who kept his eyes totally on the driving, and apart from a few sentences to check they were OK kept to himself. They said their thanks, both now good at least in that German word, and he drove off. Karl was at the entrance and welcomed them both back.

“Did you have fun in Bonn?” he asked.

“We did thanks, but we both felt kind-of terrible giving the talk in English.”

“Oh, don't worry, we get used to it, I talked to our guys last night and they said it went quite well..”

“..And my brother thinks you are both hot!” laughed Hanna walking out of the door pulling a very large suitcase. “He is only twelve though and probably does not know what it means,” the three girls laughed.

Simon and Peter came out of the building pushing what looked like a kidney dialysis machine and Nicko emerged with a small holdall. The ship chose that moment to re-materialise, appearing back in the silver and blue colours preferred by Alexa and rose off the ground as the door lowered.

“We are all ready.” Karl pronounced, after ten more minutes, “that was the last item. Simon put the package in the hull earlier, we got Mike to rise up three metres, open the hatch, pull it in, then lowered back down and closed up. We did a little inspection when it was three metres up and you would never know it was there.”

“OK then, if we're all finished here then everybody in I guess,” said Daisy, “we need to arrive at the airport in thirty minutes, then we have an hour to wait for our slot back to the UK.”

Everything went like clockwork at the airport, there was no customs inspection and they were given five star treatment by the air traffic control and the ground staff. Helga again came in and swiftly processed them all, then stayed for a coffee with the airport director and her young niece, who they let sit in the captain's chair but had to apologise there were no more bad pirates to chase.

“Well that went quite well I suppose,” said Alexa as they finally touched down at the research centre after all being quickly cleared by immigration and customs in Bristol. “And the real exciting part is yet to come.”

* * *

Maria [The new optical singularity dipoles you are testing April are proving most versatile, but I think we require a few million to create an actual presence that a human would believe]

April [We also need to work on the coordination of the pixels. I tried projecting an image of a puma into the compound of one of the illegal logging operations, I projected it around one of our stealth drones, with another one monitoring it so I could see the reaction. It works quite well in low light conditions and certainly caused a panic for a few hours as they searched for it]

Maria [An interesting test, though the end-goal is for us to be able to interact with the humans with a body they can see – Though you have given me some ideas I can use!]

Helena [There was another opportunity to try the singularity dipoles inside the human brain. I restricted it to twelve hundred and eighty watts for ten seconds, the target was another one of our favourite group of people traffickers, he was about to shoot someone, and again this one died almost instantly. We have hundreds more of them I can experiment on, all the worst of the worst of humanity, so we should eventually get it working properly]

Maria [Agree, but again we need to keep this part from our human friends. Judge, jury and executioner does not normally go down well with them]

* * *

“What's with the fourth term here, Magnus?” said Jen.

Maria was also examining the fourth order term in the equation up on Magnus and Jen's whiteboard, there was nothing she could see wrong with the fourth term, what was Jen talking about.

“It doesn't feel right does it,” she said.

He moved back to the board and looked at it for five minutes. “Oh, I see where you're coming from, you’re comparing the results from test one and test sixteen, what changed?”

“Hi guys, yes sorry to ask a dumb question, but I don't see anything wrong with the fourth order term, here is a table with all the differences between this round of tests. We waited for the moon to be directly between the earth and sun so we were hidden, then put the saucer on a sun trajectory course and we started the measurements from the crater to three million kilometres. Test one was done in the crater at minus two hundred metres, test sixteen was done at one point three million kilometres..”

“That may be it,” said Jen but unconvincingly.

“OK guys,” said Maria, what are you looking at?”

Jen thought about it for a moment. “Have you ever looked at a picture..”

“Well duh, like billions,” said Maria sarcastically.

“..No,” said Jen, “what I meant to say Maria was, have you ever looked at a picture and noticed something, and your eye is always drawn back to it because it does not look right, you know like did the artist paint this wrong, or did he actually paint the whole picture around it just to emphasise this one thing?”

“You’re being very abstract Jen.”

“There is no difference in the fourth order terms on these two tests, yet the external emitter was subject to different physical conditions,” said Magnus, “but..”

“..Ah yes, the results don't show this.”

“OK, hull temperature for the two tests were one forty kelvin on test thirteen and three seventy kelvin on test sixteen, we have neutral thermal expansion so it is unlikely to be that..”

“..You know what,” said Jen, “It's something we are not measuring.”

“Oh you are such a clever..” Magnus pulled her into a kiss.

Helena [Humans! It was just getting exciting and then they go and start mating!]

Maria [They do have no sense of priority. So while they are doing that I will go back through all the historical tests we did with temperature variations]

“It was not the temperature variation guys,” said Maria as Jen was just straightening her top. “What we are missing is test sixteen was done close to the Lagrange point known as L1, directly opposite the earth and towards the sun, the temperature variation hid it.”

“..Er.. Er gravity?” he said.

“NO GRAVITY, It's no gravity, gravity was zero, it cancelled something out.” Jen was excited, “Maria, there may be a gravity component we are missing, we need to do some more tests at the Lagrange points with the transmitter end of a QVModem. Not the receiver end.”

“Yes, you're right Jen! Initiate the link from there and re-run the new suites of tests,” continued Magnus excitedly.

Helena [Why was she right? she never said the same thing as him?]

Maria [There is something not right about that test sixteen, we should probably do like they say and find out what]

* * *

“Alexa?” said Maria a day later, on one of the rare days when she was alone, and at home. She was curled up on her sofa reading an old book.

She looked up, “yes Maria.”

“Not so much a problem Alexa, well,” she hesitated in a way she had seen humans do when they were unsure, “I guess it is kind-of a problem, but it’s sort of a good one to have,” said Maria in a confusing mixture of tones. “I probably should have mentioned it sooner, but it's not really anything that wouldn't wait a few days or even a few years I guess.”

“OK I guess I’m intrigued,” she said, closing her book.

“The OCP, sorry that's what everyone is calling ‘The Outside Context Problem’, got a strong lidar return while it was out surveying the asteroids, Helena instructed it to divert for a closer approach, like she had for several others we found with the other ships.”

“Others?”

“Yes, we have done this thirty nine times already, mainly for iron and nickel asteroids which give very strong returns, and will be useful in future, but they have also found some of these rich in other metals like copper and silver.”

“And the issue is?”

“Well the one it stopped at is mostly metals higher on the element table, so a lot of lead, gold, platinum, iridium. A lot! Like more than have ever been mined, or is likely to be mined on earth.. ever!”

“So I’m guessing it is worth a lot of money?”

“About two hundred times the current GDP of the world at current market value, and enough to make all four elements basically worthless, so yes, I would say it is worth a bit of money. The other metal asteroids we discovered also posed a similar problem, but the market prices of these other metals are much lower, and cost of extraction would make them attractive as industrial elements in space, but lesser so on earth; Though there is easily enough to supply earth too, and a lot of the extraction here is messy. Platinum group metals though are another matter, crashing something like gold would destabilise most financial markets, and could have serious repercussions..”

“Hmm, kind of an intriguing problem to have like you say, but you all speculated something like this was a possibility, and we are going to have to use a lot of this in those bigger space extruder things we are going to make.”

Alexa tried really hard, but still got her elements mixed up, and couldn't quite differentiate an extruder from a fabricator from a replicator. But they all made things so nobody corrected her.

She continued, “Simon was even keen for us to go to some asteroid at the far reaches of the belt that was supposed to be similarly rich, so we knew it was an inevitability, and I guess we assumed you, or at least a bunch of smart people had a plan to deal with it?”

“Theory and practice are two different things, we do not know how specific countries or organisations would react, it is not as if we can easily move or hide the asteroids, and the ships only surveyed a fraction of a percent, there could be dozens of these floating about.”

“Why can't you move them?”

“Well firstly it probably weighs several billion tonnes, and secondly, to where?”

“OK, so monitor the situation and hope you can find a technological solution in the four or five years it will take other organisations to find these. Or better still, just ignore it, let someone else have the dilemma of crashing the markets. Do we really care as long as we know where others are if we need them?”

“Cunning, we never thought about ignoring it,” said Maria, “after all they are only worth anything to us as production elements.”

“Why not just increase the surveys so we know exactly what's out there, or at least have enough information to make an informed decision when required.” Alexa said, then paused seemingly thinking something else, Maria waited.

Alexa laughed, then continued. “Oh and you can also bet your life that the United Nations, or some of the other large quango, will wade in as soon as somebody does the hard work and is close to bringing one of these puppies home! Probably along the lines of ‘these resources should be shared for all mankind’. So expect regulations, and some heavy handed manoeuvring ground-side. No.. Best we play the 'just ignore it' option; I'm sure you guys have a lot of more important things to spend your precious time on.”

“You're right, we will just catalogue it and ignore it.” said Maria.

David walked in with a cup of tea and a cappuccino and put them both on the table before plonking himself almost on top of her. “Here you go my darling,” he said with a cheeky smile.

He continued in an annoyed voice. “Would you believe, they’ve put my gym membership up five pounds a month! We should so build a gym here!”

“Five pounds!” said Alexa crestfallen, “five pounds, did you hear that Maria, you should sell the silverware..”

David tickled her for a few seconds until she submitted, wriggling and giggling.

“Talking of that Alexa,” said Maria, “you definitely should sell that gold you have in the cupboard, I’m dumping all our precious metal assets and futures over the next few months, I sold some during the Russian crisis, but I should have offloaded it all I could have made a killing, I was kind of busy though.”

“The price of gold is pretty low at the moment,” said David, “probably not the best time to sell.”

“Well apart from Matilda's need for twenty kilos per saucer for the improved superconductor ring we don't have any use for it,” said Alexa. “Just dump it.”

“The twenty kilos was for the planned ten ships,” said Maria, “it's actually only two kilos a ship.”

“So keep enough for the current requirement and dump the rest. How much are we talking about?” she said.

“Well we have two thousand two hundred in the two banks and six hundred and eighteen here, best I get the gold here moved out to the London bank and I will dispose of it in the coming months.”

“Six hundred ounces is worth over two million dollars, you shouldn't leave it lying around here my love what if somebody finds it.”

She sniggered, “oh David, you shouldn't come in part ways through a conversation.”

Still smiling, she got up and walked over to the desk then pressed something a few times. He jumped as a loud whirring of gears started up, and the bookcase to the left side of the fire, moved away. Alexa walked to the safe contained within, and with the usual difficulty opened it.

“Six hundred and eighteen bars at twelve point four kilograms, so seven thousand six hundred and sixty three kilos,” said Maria. “I think it is best moved discreetly, I can get Albert to stack it in the garage and we can truck it overnight using one of the banks security trucks.”

David's mouth dropped, “seriously Alexa, we’ve been sitting next to seven tonnes of gold, and you *forgot* to mention it..”

“I see you’re showing David the family jewels,” said Jen nonchalantly as she wandered in.

“You obviously did not come in on the first part of the conversation David,” said Alexa, “Maria was just telling us we just discovered an asteroid the size of London made of gold, what you are seeing will be basically worthless in a few years unless we can find an industrial use for it like what Matilda has done.”

“I knew it,” said Jen, “poor NASA, their mission is still several years away and you’ve bagsed it!”

“No this is another one Jen,” said Maria, “16 Psyche, may cause the same effect though in 2029, if someone else doesn't sneak out before them. We found another.”

“Better dump it then sis or you're going to have several tonnes of sparkly paperweights.” Jen cruised out of the door through to the kitchen.

David was trying to parse the last four events in the last four minutes, each more incredulous than the other, he just couldn't, he had thirty eight ounces of gold in a safety deposit box at his old Lloyds bank. He sighed.

“Sorry David, the guys in the house know it's here, as do the girls, but the only time I usually go in here are for these,” she pointed at the diaries..

“Is that an IBM XT, oh my god, my great uncle had one of those.. Does it work?”

“David, you're worse than Jen!” Said Alexa.

“Geeks!” She shrugged, walked back and sat down on the sofa and started drinking her tea. David was stroking the metal box of the PC.

“Is Albert awake or has he gone to bed?” she asked.

“Albert's down the pub, Bella's knitting and telling me the gossip about Mrs Johnson's postman,” replied Maria.

“OK can you arrange with Albert to get some boxes made and put them in the garage, then we can get rid of them as soon as possible.. David,” she said, turning to him and breaking his gaze from the PC, “the computer is yours if you scrub my back for the next month..”

* * *

Dumping nearly two billion dollars worth of gold did not depress the market as much as she thought it might. The number and size of the companies she owned was however getting embarrassing. By investments she was worth more than the next three biggest companies in the world put together, and her GDP was already larger than Italy. Her investments were now done through sixty seven different shell companies and quite well hidden, but eighteen of these were also now in the top one hundred and going up the company leader-board, it was getting difficult not to be noticed by the economists.

She had an end game though, as she would need to start thinking about how to move and feed millions of people in space, and what jobs they needed to do. The capital outlay for this would take nearly all these resources and cause a massive boom on the planet for several years. Even with all this, she would still be the biggest winner, and she could see problems on the horizon unless she could accelerate her plan. Time for another pow-wow.

* * *

One of those problems was manifesting itself that very evening in the president's bunker two hundred metres under the White House.

“OK, are we sure this place is secure?” said the president.

“To be frank,” said the head of the CIA, “I don't know.”

“Derek is correct Mr President,” said another old, but very fit looking guy in an older black Italian suit, “this room is the only room with no computer infrastructure, but we really don't have a clue to the actual capabilities of the AI systems, they have already re-wrote the laws of physics twice.”

The room in question was about fifteen metres squared, with a high ceiling, and a large oval meeting table to one side. It felt old, everything seemed to be from the nineteen seventies, from the old intercom system with a big golden grill for a speaker, and four white Bakelite toggle switches, to an old overhead projector and a canvas white screen to project it on.

The three men were sitting grouped in one corner. The two secret servicemen and the Corporal carrying a briefcase with the launch codes, all of whom always accompanied the president, were just outside the only entry and exit to the room.

“Goddammit! Surely we are safe down here, isn't this what this place was designed for, surviving Armageddon?” President Markby was young by recent standards, only seventy years old, he dyed his hair black, and spent a fortune on creams and ointments to make him look younger. He dressed in suits that cost a month's normal salary and was two years into his first term, cruising high in the polls due to an excellent economy, and the massive improvement in law and order. None of which could be remotely attributed to him. Regardless, with the right spin it might just get him another term.

“We may as well talk here, because let's face it, if it can hear us here there is no point in going any further,” said Derrick Hankins, recently appointed head of the CIA.

General Dominiq Rodriguez, also recently appointed, was provisional head of the NSA and the third man in the room. Like the other men, he had dressed up for the occasion, forsaking his usual camo fatigues for his only business suit. The repercussions from last year's arrests and purges had left a lot of gaps at the top to fill, these new guys were two of them.

“I had my guys go over this room a few days ago,” said Rodriguez, “there was basically nothing to go over, there are no computers or networks in this room, these things here,” he waved at the intercom and projector, “probably predate transistors, and nothing could penetrate two hundred metres of solid granite, so I will go with Derek and say this is as safe as we can get.”

“OK,” said President Markby, “It's to do with the report you have both seen, I had it prepared by hand and photocopied on the oldest and least sophisticated photocopy machine in the place,” he waited for their praise on his cunning strategy, but none came.

“We have several problems highlighted,” he grunted, opening the document to the first page, taking out a transparent sheet, and putting it on an old-fashioned overhead projector. He turned it on and spent two minutes trying to figure out how to focus it.

“Firstly it is the worst held secret in the world that the recent regime changes in North Korea and Russia were both directly attributed to the Dietrich Research Centre’s AI systems, one calling itself Maria. How it did not start world war three was beyond me.”

“Our analysts were quite impressed actually Mr President,” said Hankins boldly, “the information we have since it ended, showed a coordinated response for the Russian one on at least one hundred and ninety fronts, targeting only known corrupt and unstable officials. Every single bad player on our list was somehow identified, targeted and was taken out of power.”

“To tell the truth I think if we planned this for ten years we would not have achieved a tenth of it, and we really would have started World War Three.”

Rodriguez was nodding. “That is our opinion too, the play-book of events correlated strongly with the take-down last year of the corporates in America, Europe and Asia where the AI pulled the chairs out from under all the bad guys, exposed all their corrupt activities, and pointed the authorities at them.”

Hankins continued, “the difference with the North Korean and Russian operations, over the ones last year, was it actually killed people to get the result. In the North Korea's case we think it actually saved some casualties, because by retargeting the missile from the Japanese battleship, to the Chinese aircraft carrier, the loss of life and environmental damage probably would have been much worse, as the Japanese battleship and its nuclear reactor was of a much older design and less protected.”

“We believe North Korea was because of an attempted hijacking of one of their saucer. We don't know the whole details of this event, but documents were found in the bombed security headquarters in Pyongyang explaining the mission plan, and the bodies of three Korean nationals were found a month later in the mountains of Northern Japan. Autopsies indicated they were probably exposed to vacuum and fell from a great height.”

The president and Rodriguez were listening to this intently, obviously the first either had heard of this.

“Why am I just hearing about this now?” snarled the president.

“It was irrelevant sir,” he replied nonchalantly, “what would be the point, it is all speculation, our only proof is a rumour from a guy that survived the Chinese bombing on the rocket launch site, he said their target was a Japanese battleship and control was lost mid-flight.”

The president slumped. “Jesus!” was his only word.

“First I heard about this too,” said Rodriguez, but we do believe they have the ability to affect electronics systems remotely, though we have no confirmed reports or proof except for a massive series of coincidences. Still it would be nice to read this report.”

“Their saucers are also space capable,” said the president. “The head of NASA had already hinted that this was the case, NASA even believed they had already visited our moon based on some flimsy evidence.”

“Yes,” said Rodriguez, tactically ignoring the 'our' moon. “We also believe their saucers are space capable despite their statements saying they are only being tested. We also believe they have better stealth capability than anything out there.”

“All I know, Mr President,” said Hankins, “is that if you leave them alone they seem to be happy to help you, but as soon as you step on their toes, things suddenly start going bad very quickly!”

“Precisely! And do you really think it is acceptable for some bullies to go around with impunity policing the world like that?” The irony of the statement was not lost on both men but they kept quiet. “So my meeting here is to ask, what the hell do we do about these cowboys?”

Both Rodriguez and Hankins looked at each other, it was Rodriguez who spoke. “Why would we need to do anything Sir? Our country is a better place for them, and we are benefiting immensely from their technologies. The world has never been so stable and America is booming. There are still real bad guys and terrorists to go after and we are targeting our resources on them.”

He continued, “even if we wanted to do something, there is nothing tangible we could do, they are the biggest company in the world by far, and foreign owned. We have seen their capabilities on two relatively technologically backward states, who were both wiped out without them firing a shot, or their CEO even cancelling her yoga class. The US is a lot more dependent on computers than Russia or North Korea.”

It was obviously not the answer the president was looking for, and he was inwardly fuming, not used to not being the biggest hitter in the world. But Hankins continued.

“They have also left China and Iran mainly alone, we believe because those two countries are now sensible enough to leave them alone. There were hundreds of attempts by all our agencies to get information these past few years, not one has succeeded. In all the attempts by democratically elected powers, they did not seek retribution on anything but the agents, and their direct chain of command, for other non democratic states, they removed the problem right up the chain to the policy makers themselves.”

“So you are telling me they are untouchable?” said the president with a look of veiled anger on his face.

Rodriguez looked at Hankins, and by some unspoken agreement said. “Basically yes, that is what we are saying. If I instructed the US army tomorrow to take out their little house in England, which we still do not believe is where the AI is located, I suspect within a few minutes of issuing the order, the US military would have the same military capabilities as Switzerland.”

“On the positive side though,” he continued, “and the reason we do not believe them to be any threat to us, I myself have talked to this AI, Maria, as has General Hopkins. We also know that Alexa Martins actively recruited one of our army captains who used to work in the USA to coordinate these take-downs. How I know this I would rather not say, but from all accounts she has an off the scale moral character, and is trusted by all of the people who have ever worked with her. You may also know her as the new CEO of XYFusion Aerospace.”

“Jean Michelle!” said the president shocked, “really?” The president was a bit of a fanboy for Jean Michelle, she had done so many things he wished he could have, but which no politician would ever get away with. Yes he could deal with this woman, she would properly appreciate a powerful man like him. His mind wandered off in directions it shouldn't have, until brought back into focus as Hankins had taken over the monologue.

“..The very same, we did some digging and XYFusion is now a wholly owned subsidiary of another American Company “Cheshire-Cat” which is in turn owned jointly by Grace Lo and Tony London. We have extensively checked these two people, again they seem to be good citizens, extremely high moral characters, both apparently amazing strategists, and while Mr London is rich he does not have a thousandth of the equity to own such a company. Cheshire-Cat was also the name of the NSA's ultra top secret program to locate AI systems, kind of a subtle dig at the AI’s capability over two years ago when the company was registered.”

Now it was the president and Hankins who were listening to this intently, again obviously the first either had heard of this too. The president needed to stop the stupid love out-pouring for the company, but Rodriguez was still talking.

“..Jean Michelle is also the reason our new troop carriers and logistic systems will all be based on the saucer technology with those bullet proof graphite hulls,” he finished up.

“Apparently Jean Michelle is a personal friend of Miss Martins and persuaded her to allow military use as long as they had no offensive capability. Those demonstration ships were repeatedly hit by rocket propelled grenades and in one case a ground to air missile, they will be a lifesaver if we ever needed them. I think you would be hard pushed to get any soldier to even enact such an order.”

The president wasn't used to this, but Hankins was nodding.

“So what you are telling me is we have an uncontrollable company, which restricts high technology for its own use and is actively denying the US military the technology to allow it to continue being a super-power?”

“..It's not like that..” Hankins tried to say after giving Rodriguez a strange look.

“..furthermore, they have a secret agenda, and our agencies, that's YOU!”, he pointed at the two men, “cannot penetrate?”

“..Even worse they are taking over space, and probably the moon, which America owns..”

Hankins was a little tired of this, the guy was a bit of an idiot, but this took the biscuit and he actually interrupted.

“It is not even a secret,” he said, “I suspect you could have phoned Alexa Martins up herself and got this answer, I think their objectives are even on their website as the company's mission statement..”

The president looked angrily at him, “you run a seventy billion dollar spy agency and the best you can do is check out their website..”

“No sir!” said Hankins, controlling his anger, his father had said once, never get in an argument with an idiot, he was right.

“The British Prime Minister and their Field Marshal visited Miss Martins three months ago during the Russian crisis and asked the same question, as did several other leaders. The Field Marshall shared Miss Martins company goal with me, basically it is to save the earth environmentally, stabilise it politically, and establish humanity in space. Their operations with XYFusion, SpaceX and your reports of space activity, which we can actually verify..”

“.. These sound more like the goals of a global terrorist organisation!” said the president assertively.

Rodriguez decided to wade in too, “..That is preposterous Sir, Jim Mathews was our key operative during the purge of the cabals last year and was Jean Michelle's commander previously. Him and General Hopkins got the same information from this AI, that is why all our briefings at the time of the second Russian revolution were calm. We were asked at that time to keep this information to a small circle of generals, as any interference would be seen as American meddling. I believe China was also told to lay off in no uncertain terms.”

The president couldn't believe this, it seemed everyone knew what was happening except for him, the only actual person that mattered.

“This is even worse, now you’re now telling me we are being drip-fed information on a need to know basis? Why in god's name would you trust a computer program? Have you even tried to take this threat out, or recover this AI system for our use? You two are pathetic, you can't even tell me if it's listening to us now!”

Rodriguez thought for a minute and had an idea. “Whether this AI is listening or not, I think it is best Mr President that you hear it from the horse's mouth. We actually believe this AI is not taking direct orders from Alexa Martins, but is playing by all civil rules because of her. If we talked directly to her, I expect we could get a lot of straight answers to all our concerns rather than speculating.”

“You know Dominiq,” said Hankins, trying to find a point where they could get back to a sensible discussion, “I have heard Miss Martins speak, more than once now, she is a very straight talker, passionate and does not come across at all as deceptive. I think it's time all of us made her acquaintance. I bet we would get more from that meeting than trying to do something we would regret.”

The president still could not believe what he was hearing. These two men were history, they just did not know it yet. He decided he may as well get the maximum cooperation from them before he fired both their asses.

“OK getting her here may be the first good thing I have heard from either of you,” he started, almost like he had ignored the last ten minutes. “Yes we should get Jean Michelle too, that is one woman I would like to meet, I also think you should get this AI. Probably a good time to tell them all who is really in charge.”

His smug expression said the meeting was over, and he dismissed the two ineffectual men, who were obviously unfit for their high ranking positions. Imagine not informing the president of the USA and withholding crucial details of missions.

No he had someone much more suitable as a replacement, someone who had no problems following orders, and getting things done that needed to be done. America would stop playing second fiddle to a schoolgirl and when the American public saw the AI doing their bidding, and pushing their domination over world trade, they would look to him, President Markby who achieved this.

The two men left the room sourly and ascended the lift to the Oval Office. They had talked on the way up, neither was happy with the presidents attitude, but he had towed the line in the past and would probably do so in the future. Maybe once he had met with Alexa Martins and Jean Michelle, listened to them, he would understand. Yes he seemed to like that woman and may just listen to reason from her.

Rodriguez thought even if Maria was in the room below she would not be so obvious as to answer a call from the secure phone in the small operations room there. Once he was in the Oval Office though, he picked up his cell phone that they had all left in the office and rang the AI operator.

“Please put me through to Alexa Martins at the Dietrich Research Centre in England.”

He put it on speaker phone and waited. Four seconds later it answered.

“Good evening General Rodriguez,” this is Maria, Alexa Martins personal secretary. Hello Mr Hankins, what may I do for you two esteemed gentlemen?”

Hankins was a little shocked at the AI knowing he was also there but said nothing.

“Hello Maria,” continued Rodriguez, also shocked, “we were actually trying to speak to Alexa Martins to see if it is possible she could come over here for a private meeting between us and the president to go over your goals and possibly how we can be on the same page.”

“That is very kind of you General. Unfortunately it is actually one o'clock in the morning in the UK, Alexa retired two hours ago. I however hold her itinerary and I will happily clear a time and date to suit your convenience. I don't have your schedules,” she lied, “but I am happy to arrange all this with your secretaries, and we will adhere to all your security concerns. I tend only to be an observer at such meetings but I would add one small condition that we can include either Jean, Grace or Tony as my advocates, though I am also considering poaching Mathews off you, and he too would be acceptable.”

“Thank you Maria, I expect your condition will be acceptable, we will be in touch, good evening.”

“Good evening.”

The line clicked off.

“That was so scary in so many ways,” said Hankins. “I see what you mean about coincidences, she never even mentioned those guys second names almost as though she knew we had just been talking about them.”

“You may be right Derrick, I don't think it's a beehive that the president is going to be poking, it's going to be a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex!”

* * *

“Good morning,” said Maria to Alexa as she appeared in the kitchen in her jogging gear.

“Hi Maria, just let me get my ear pods in then we can both listen to David's playlist as I do my jog.”

She put her ear pods in and Maria's voice immediately moved from the kitchen to right next to her ear.

“You do realise David's listening to your playlist, maybe I should give you both Matilda's so your relationship does not go stale!”

“Don't you dare! I think we would break up within a week if either of us had to listen to what Matilda listened to, though I must admit Matilda and I both agree Luther Vandross is pretty sexy to make out to.”

“Yuk, messy biological stuff, I’m surprised you guys got out of the trees.”

She headed off out of the door and along the usual route observed by one of Maria's micro stealth drones two hundred metres above. “Yes well, a few thousands of those messy interactions got you your dad, and me my grandfather.”

“So true!” she said with caprice.

“When are you going to get us something better than these ear pods anyway? That broach is a bit obtrusive and you can't talk to me privately.” She said another ten metres down the path.

It was a nice morning for a change, the last few days had been drizzle and cold, but the forecast today was pleasant so she wanted to make sure she got a run in before all the action of the coming mission.

“The new dermal processor unit can be fitted with minor surgery, but I would rather you didn't think about getting one despite the enthusiasm from its creators. But we do now have some options that don't require a tiny plug screwed into your skull behind your ear. The newer earbuds are better than those Apple ones you always buy, you can hardly notice the new ones visually, they colour coordinate to your skin colour, and transmit external sounds much better, they are also water resistant. David has been trialling them during his swimming. Matilda and Jules like the chokes, Daisy and Jean the broach, the star trek comm badges are still popular with the boys, as are watches.”

“But I think you should wait as I have been testing a small internal ear stud with Allison, it is replicated in diamond, or graphyne to look like an opal, we can get a tiny QVcell, audio visual processors and a teeny-tiny QVModem. It should work flawlessly so long as you are within two or three kilometres of the other end, and without any need to charge.

The only issue with those is Allison says the sound is currently really tinny, like a little squeaky voice, and people close by hear it like a mosquito. So we need to fix that before you get one. I would really like to get a longer range QVModem inside one too but might take a little more work, so you may also have to take a phone with you for now if you are going off-grid. The next generation stud is coming out of the small fabricator this morning for her to test. I expect once that works all the girls will want one, maybe a few of the boys too.”

“Sweet. Yes I will wait for that, and I definitely don't want trepanning!”

“OK so on to the big news of the day, we were discussed by the president and two of his security advisors, the usual concerns, but I heard nothing too negative, I will dig further as he is a bit of an idiot and does seem to have an obvious agenda he is hiding. If we are happy then you will have to go to a secret meeting in the White House to sort of allay the presidents concerns, I can certainly work with you on that. Date to be arranged but likely in next two weeks.”

“The president of the USA, gosh lucky old me, what are their concerns?”

“Just the usual, that I am going to take over the world and turn them all into paper-clips..”

“Ha-ha!” she said flatly as she raced down the straight towards the walled garden and river trying to beat her usual time. “No really, they must have a specific concern?”

“Many I guess, I think they see their power waning, and it is your job to reassure them that they all have a fantastic future, even though a global mega-corps will be running the solar system.”

“So a walk in the park then?”

“President Markby is as typical a politician as they come, he is in it for himself, for the glory and the power, he lies, cheats, is very two-faced and probably has an IQ lower than his age. He is going to see a young girl in front of him, and probably try to take a domineering attitude that you should give all the technology to the big boys who know what to do with it, and go home and play with your dollies. Your job is to offer him some crumbs off the table, and try not to start world war three.”

“So, a walk in the park then,” she repeated rhetorically. “Wouldn't you be a better bad guy than me?”

“I would be a better bad guy, but I would rather we give him a carrot than a stick.”

“Just a very small carrot.”

“Precisely!”

“OK so another rich old white dude who I should be gracious with, but if push comes to shove, I should not take any crap from!”

“Precisely again. By Jove, the girl is getting the hang of this!”

She got a short update on the preparation for the space missions, the status of the research centres, the status of the market and economy, and how Truffles, Pat's wandering cat, managed to bypass security into the replicator area. Apparently research said that finishing on a lighter note was a good way to end the news.

Alexa stopped to chat with Jed, the grounds-keeper, and one the many nice old white men she knew, asking if the grounds would be good for the concert. Sharon had provisionally planned the concert for the first of September the weekend before Alexa's birthday. Jed in turn tried to desperately find out if she knew which groups were going to play, but Sharon was playing it close to her chest, and they both agreed that asking Maria would be cheating.

* * *

Although it was very tempting to land the flying saucer spectacularly on the White House lawn, like in a bad movie, David, who had recently qualified as a pilot, landed the ‘Mike Dietrich’ at Andrews air-force base as arranged to zero pomp and ceremony.

Passing over the base, however, made David a bit nervous as he focussed his attention on the dozens of anti-aircraft missiles, black hawk helicopters, and various, deadly-looking, high tech fighter jets just a few hundred metres below. As usual the saucer hovered down to a halt a quarter metre above the tarmac, the blue light pulsing and the eerie electronic noise not fooling anyone with more than a high school physics education.

They saw Jean and Mathews, waiting by a stretched black government limousine nearby, and a large military Humvee and two soldiers with automatic weapons next to them, alert but not threatening. At least Jean was wearing her business suit not a camo suit, that was always a good sign.

“I guess it's safe,” she said to David. “Please try and keep Maria from destroying the world if this goes south and they shoot me,” she said as she kissed him full on the lips.

Despite the happy go lucky attitude she had, David would not be happy until she was back in his arms, and was already planning how he would rescue her if things did go south. If Maria had any concerns she kept them quiet.

In contrast to Jean's power, and probably bullet-proof, business suit, Alexa was wearing the most non-threatening, blue, white, flowery dress you could imagine, along with her new diamond ear stud that fit snugly in the anti-tragus piercing, and that she had been wearing for the last three days and absolutely loved.

As the saucers hatch dropped silently to the ground, she walked out in such a demure way the scene made no sense at all.

Without a care in the world she shouted out “Jean!” and moved quickly towards the woman, arms open. Jean, now used to Alexa's nature, and quite liking a hug herself every now and then, grabbed her into a big hug.

“Wow!” said Alexa, “you’ve grown! What are those? three inch heels?”

“All the better for stomping the bad guys with,” she smiled. “It's so good to see you again Alexa.”

Alexa turned to Mathews, who was in camo gear, with a camo hat, and black boots. “Jim!,” she opened her arms to him and he also gave her a hug, “wow, you look so different, you looked a lot less scary in chinos.”

“Hi Alexa,” he said, returning the hug warmly, to the indifference of the two soldiers watching on, “please tell me you’re not in trouble, he’s still my boss for another month at least.”

She ignored his probably rhetorical question with a smile. “I really wish the two of you would change your minds and come over for the concert,” said Alexa, “you always both seem to be all business and no fun!”

Jim looked at Jean guiltily, “my fault, I'm best man that weekend and Jean is my plus one.”

Jean gave him her best “don't beat yourself up about it” look.

“Impressive ride,” said Mathews, pointing at the saucer and hoping to change the subject.

“Last year's model,” she laughed, waving it off jokingly, “but it has sentimental value, as it's named after my grandad.”

“It's a million times more impressive than the one you demonstrated to the world last year,” said Jean, “I hope you can let me steal a few improvements off you before you go, I’m still the CEO for another few months, until the permanent guy takes over.”

“Oh it's a sweet ride, fully space capable, but no phasers or warp drive yet.”

“Alexa!” said Jean, “Maria said that was a company secret, Jim still works for the opposition you know?”

Jim wasn't a hundred percent sure where the facts began, and the humour ended in their banter, and his face tried to remain neutral.

“Don't worry, I’m going to come clean on some of our plans with Jim’s bosses today. I think they have some weird idea that I am hollowing out a volcano somewhere. Maria has actually already passed the updated QVThruster specs to your technical guys, and the opposition will get it next week. We might be keeping a few other little things back for now, but we, that was you as well Jean remember, decided opening up cis-lunar space, and eventually Mars, would keep everyone busy for a few years.”

“You little vixen Miss Michelle,” said Jim, “you said you knew nothing!”

“Whoops!” said Alexa, “sorry Jean!”

“I will explain sometime Jim, honestly. Maybe when you're inside rather than outside, I’m sure you have plenty of secrets in your new job?”

“Like I can keep any secrets from Maria, Jean, perleeaassee!” he extended and emphasised the last word until she laughed.

Jean's right Jim,” said Alexa all serious now, “It's not her fault, we do have to keep some things from you for now, but I promise you, there's nothing bad, just the usual, a little scary, until you see the big picture.”

“If it was anybody else, I would be worried, but coming from you I feel it's going to be interesting not scary.”

Alexa smiled, “god Jean, he’s so damn handsome and attractive when he's serious, you are one lucky lady..”

“Still here!” smiled Jim.

“I hear on the grape vine you have been a little busy yourself, possibly involving a giant leap for mankind..”

“MARIA!” she shouted, turning a little red with embarrassment.

The two guards, tensed a little and looked around.

“At ease guys,” Jim shouted, seeing their change in countenance.

“Sorry, blame Hardy,” chimed in Maria, “he let it out of the bag, I was just having a little girl talk with Jean.” The voice of Maria came out of Jean's gold and jade brooch as well as Alexa's ear stud. Knowing Jean, the brooch probably also doubled as a ninja throwing star.

“Hardy! That guy will be the death of me!”

“I like the ear stud, is it what I think it is?”

“It is,” she smiled, touching the tiny diamond, “and I can hear Maria clear as a bell as the back part of the stud points inwards and the mic and low def camera are in the diamond at the front.”

“Hmm, not sure I would want a camera on full time,” said Jean.

“What is it with you humans? I have absolutely no interest in your mating habits,” said Maria, “though you should get David to stop whispering your name at those times as it confuses the pre-processor AI..”

“..You're not helping yourself here Maria,” said Alexa, then looked at Jean. “There is an audio only black one, and it is really easy to take off, if SOMEONE starts telling tales.”

Jean laughed, “I will keep this one for now, but I must say it looks really classy compared to the ear pods. Anyway, back onto topic, I’m not really sure why he wants me to be present.”

“Me and you shouldn't plan on saying anything,” said Maria. “Unless it gets out of hand, this is Alexa's gig, and it is always good to insist on a few friendly faces. Again, remember you guys don't feel like you need to say anything, Alexa may look like a sophomore homecoming queen, but she is very aware where she stands on the global stage.”

“Thank you mom!” She said deliberately using the American way of saying it, “like Maria says, I expect there to be a little bit of shouting and posturing, but that's all they can really do, at the end of the day, despite what they think, we control the deck, and I am here to be nice so I will try to be.”

Mathews wasn't so sure, he really wanted this to be over.

“I’ve heard he’s a bit of a bully, if he has the high ground, but backs down if he sees opposition,” said Jean, “so don't take no crap from him!”

“Rodriguez, is a good guy though,” said Jim, “he will try to stay neutral and focussed on the meeting, but he and the others will ultimately have to defer to the president if ordered. Remember, this may also include me unfortunately while I am on the payroll. But also remember none of us will put up with anything remotely illegal. Blindly following illegal orders has been relegated to history, and you will be able to stop and walk out of the meeting anytime you so wish, this is not North Korea..” He stopped obviously remembering there was no such place anymore. “..well, you know!”

“I understand Jim,” said Alexa comfortingly, “it shouldn't come to that, and I promise I will try not to put you, or your friends, in a compromising position. I expect you to do your duty to your country. In fact I would prefer it if you did not try and interfere on my or Jean's behalf despite how the situation may look.”

She gave him such a sweet look, he stopped what he was about to say and Jean nodded her concurrence.

“Is David coming?” said Jean looking back at the ship.

“Nah, he’s good, he will be monitoring us from here, and put that worried face away Jim, we already know the agenda and they don't have any surprises planned we have not anticipated, or we wouldn't have come.” She again smiled sweetly at both of them, then said, “come on then, we’d better not keep your bosses waiting.”

Mathews rode with the soldiers in the Humvee ahead while Alexa and Jean took back seats in the government limo and rode behind, they picked up four motorcycles, two up front, and two behind, as they rolled out of the back gates picking up route four directly to Capitol Hill.

The five stealth drones, each no bigger than a soccer ball, hung with impunity forty thousand metres above Washington, having followed Alexa's saucer in. As Alexa and Jean's limo drove off, they dropped like stones, changing colours to best match the dreary clouds as they accelerated down. At a thousand metres they began to slow, bleeding off velocity at a rate of twenty gravities, and stopping exactly two hundred metres above the periphery of the Whitehouse. There they waited, observed by nobody, invisible to all.

The motorcycle escort veered off at the entrance to the White House, and the limo drove down past the checkpoint to the underground car park led by the army vehicle. Jim got out first and opened the doors for Jean first, then Alexa, and they stepped onto a long red carpet. Another guy, the president's personal secretary according to Maria, was waiting to lead them up to the meeting.

It was a short walk along the red carpet, they passed a few guards before getting to the security check. The personal secretary walked through first, followed by Alexa and Jean a little behind. As Jean stepped into the detector, there were several loud beeps and a red flashing light and she stopped.

“Whoops!” Jean said to the guard as she pulled out the largest gun Alexa had ever seen. The guard did not smile and tagged the gun, letting her know she could collect it on the way back. Mathews, handed his gun and phone carefully to the guard, before going through the machine, they examined both, then gave his phone back.

At the entrance to the East room they were appraised by two secret service agents, who must have had orders to let them pass. Despite everything looking normal so far, Mathews had a bad feeling that this was not being done by the book. He wished he could be anywhere else, but he had been ordered to attend, and that was another reason that rubbed him up the wrong way.

President Markby had forcefully argued the point several times, that the US should be the ones to lead any technologies to space, but all his advisors were totally against doing anything rash. There were definitely going to be some big changes once this was all over.

He now stood by the end of the large table, looking at the three men stood around the other end, none would sit until he did, all waited on his word. There was Hankins the head of the CIA, Rodriguez the Director of the NSA, and Luke Peron his vice president and running mate. To tell the truth Peron was appointed by the party, and Markby knew him just enough to detest him; The other two were just in the right place at the right time when the purge happened last year.

Markby's new status after this should allow him to fix all those little mistakes. All these men were weak in his opinion, and all were about to get a lesson in what strong leadership really looked like.

The door to the room opened and his private secretary Jacob walked in followed by two stunning women, both of whom were annoyingly more famous than he was. Behind them came an African-American man in a camo uniform, his hat in his hand, this must be the Mathews guy. His eyes feasted on the first woman in the blue summer dress, who walked up to him and looked him directly in the eye.

“Mr President, I am Alexa Martins, thank you for inviting me to your lovely country and house.”

Markby saw none of the usual deference that came from people first meeting him, she made up for it in her politeness, but it annoyed him nevertheless. Alexa was a little annoyed how tight he squeezed her hand, she had been warned, but it was uncomfortable anyway. Markby smiled seeing the change in her smug expression.

Alexa stood aside pulling her hand back, not smiling now, and the other beautiful woman stepped up. Now here was a real woman, not a schoolgirl. The two women could not have been so different, Alexa Martins demure yet confident, and Jean Michelle's, powerful, dangerous looking, but probably unsure of her standing in this company. So she should be, she of all people should appreciate who she was in front of.

“Mr President.” She said, also without any hint of deference, and strangely not elaborating any further. But it wasn't necessary, being the president of the USA was all it took to get this woman here, that was his power.

He shook Jean's hands too, but she was totally used to childish power tricks from idiots who thought it meant something, and she put twice as much pressure back without changing her expression once.

Jeez, that hurt, that woman had some grip on her he thought sourly, not used to being the one at the receiving end.

The other three men in the room were more civilised, shaking the ladies hands with a light pressure and giving genuine not fake smiles. Markby introduced them as his vice president, head of the CIA, and head of the NSA like he was showing them his prize turkeys.

Alexa knew, from Maria's briefing, of the two non-political appointees already, they both had skeletons in their cupboards, like most people in power did, but were generally respected, and of a good moral character. The vice president had been chosen as he had the least obvious vices, and was not seen as a threat to Markby's authority by the party; It was hard for her to see how a guy like him rose to such a powerful position, but there again she only had to look at herself in a mirror.

Mathews was warmly received by Rodriguez and Hankins, Ignored by Markby, and had an indifferent introduction to Peron, who usually just followed what his boss did in these situations.

Introductions done, they sat down, Markby at the head of the table as expected. He was surprised when the Martin's woman took the seat next to him, and Jean the seat the other side of him and between him and the vice president. Mathews sat next to Alexa, and Rodriguez and Hankins sat at the ends. Markby's secretary sat to his back well away from the table with a notepad and pen at the ready.

Markby had his great speech prepared but Martins started before he could stand up.

“Before we start, we should also acknowledge that Maria our company AI is also joining the meeting. I don't know why Jean is here, but we welcome her as a senior representative of our company..”

“And so we get directly to the crux of the matter, who is wearing the pants..” Interrupted Markby snidely.

[and so it begins] sighed Maria internally, as all cell and Wi-Fi coverage inside the Whitehouse cut out.

Her five stealth drones above the Whitehouse went fully active, as did two hundred others around the world.

The inside of the Whitehouse, already flooded with QVModem dipoles, was now flooded with the newer optical-range singularities. Maria now watched and listened in real-time as the act unfolded, waiting for Jeans trigger.

A second door opened into the east room, further away from the one they entered through and a new person walked in, dressed in similar fatigues as Mathews, but also with a sidearm attached. He was a large set man with a fierce expression, and both Jean and Mathews knew him well.

Mathews anger and protectiveness towards Jean made him look at her, and he made a motion for her not to do anything, but her expression was strangely relaxed and she shook her head as if trying to signal something to him.

Mathews stood up, “what the hell is this criminal doing here?”

Markby continued smugly, “Sit down Mathews, THAT IS AN ORDER!”

Mathews slowly sat down, never taking once his fierce expression from the man. The other men in the room looked agitated too, but Jean and Alexa's expressions still remained relaxed. Jean even winked at him.

“Now,” continued Markby in the confidence of somebody totally in charge of a situation, “let me introduce the recently pardoned General Lentz, a good man, wrongfully persecuted by his own people. By you Mathews, and by you Rodriguez, I am sure you will find some forgiveness in your hearts when you are reporting to him.”

Markby was in real political speech mode, and now turned his stare on Alexa and Jean.

“..I am not sure why the AI chose you two as its pets..” He started, wondering why neither woman seemed fearful, “..but I don't deal with lackeys.”

He looked directly at Alexa. “You must think I’m stupid if you think I am going to let any corporation control access to vital technologies and space access..”

“Sir..” Began Rodriguez worried.

“You will not speak while I am speaking!” Markby shouted, and clicked his fingers at the new man Lentz..

Lentz's sneered at Mathews, his eyes not moving even as two more armed soldiers walked out of the room and stood behind him, weapons levelled but not pointing at anyone. General Lentz grinned, not even bothering to look around, but knowing what the people in front of him were probably thinking. He was going to thoroughly enjoy this spectacle.

The president continued directing his gaze at a frustratingly indifferent Martins, and getting madder as neither woman reacted.

“You think you are so smart controlling access to a few computers and phones. We don't need technology to plan an operation without your AI knowing, and we don't need anything more than a few dozen men with M15 rifles to take you down. As I speak General Lentz's men are going through your little stately home in England, brick by brick, and wire by wire. By this time tomorrow, what's left of your AI will be under the microscope of our NSA scientists..”

Alexa stood up smiling at Jean. “Well that was interesting!” She said to Jean who also stood up, both totally ignoring Markby, “it seems you and Tony called it perfectly.”

Markby turned from Alexa to Jean, fuming and waving his hands, “SIT DOWN NOW, I HAVE NOT FINISH..” Jean punched him really hard in the mouth, knocking him back into his chair. Alexa shuddered a little as she heard the nose bone shatter, but otherwise remained indifferent.

“It is so satisfying when you are correct,” said Jean rubbing her knuckles.

The three other men at the table looked at Jean shocked, unable to comprehend what just happened, but turned to Lentz as he stepped towards them.

“Oh,” said Lentz calmly, motioning to the two soldiers behind him and starting slowly for his own pistol, “I believe that, Captain Michelle, counts as treason..”

He and the two soldiers eyes rolled into the back of their heads, and all three of them dropped to the floor, like puppets whose strings had been cut.

“What..” said Peron, totally out of his depth and slowly rising. He barely got the first word out, when the main doors burst open and two other soldiers rushed in and took up positions next to the fallen men. Six other men walked in more calmly, one was General Hopkins.

Hopkins looked at the dazed, and blubbering president with his nose gushing blood, “I really hope somebody got that on video,” he smiled.

[Uploading as you speak]

Rodriguez got up and said Incredulously, “can somebody tell me what the hell just happened?” He looked at Hopkins who seemed about to speak. But he deferred to the man next to him, who seemed to be somebody important.

“It seems the president of the USA just admitted in front of witnesses, and the world, to at least three very illegal, and impeachable actions.” He said soberly.

“Firstly authorising an armed military operation in the country of a friendly ally in order to forcibly steal the assets of its largest company. Secondly he has pardoned a man indicted for six counts of murder. Furthermore he authorised an armed assault on an unarmed aircraft belonging to the same corporation. I'm sure there are a few other things..”

Hopkins turned to the two soldiers, “Are they alive?”

One of the two solders dropped to the ground and checked each of the men. “Yes Sir!”

Without further prompting, he disarmed the three men and tie wrapped all their hands behind their backs. Unceremoniously, all three were then dragged out by three other soldiers who had appeared.

One of the suited men identified himself as the speaker of the house, he was visibly shocked with the vista in front of his eyes. He looked at the president who was still dazed and confused, unable to speak and using the sleeve of his expensive Italian suit to help halt the blood flow covering his face. The president spluttered out a few words which sounded a bit like, “broken my nose” and “treason”, but they were basically indecipherable and a few seconds later he thankfully fainted.

“Would someone please remove this man from here and get him to a nurse or something. Then have him guarded while congress decides what to do with him.”

He turned to Alexa, “Miss Martins, may I apologise profusely and sincerely from the people of America for this outrage done to you.”

“Thank you sir, I accept your apology, and I only hold this man and not his country responsible, no harm was really done to me or my colleague Miss Michelle here.. Though I am so happy she was able to defend me, and herself of course. I felt certain that mad-man was going to attack us both!” She feigned shock.

[Oh nicely done Alexa]

“Yes..” He said uncertainly as the medics rushed in and started to move him, “..It was a good thing she was able to, er, defend both of you. I am sure we can add attempted assault to his charges.”

“Since we have the vice president, and all you distinguished people here, I would still be happy to answer your questions and concerns, though I think Miss Michelle's may require a coffee to calm her poor nerves, and if you are making one I will have an English breakfast tea with milk, that's hot tea.” She smiled.

[Don't push it Alexa] Maria thought as she moved the four stealth drones back to passive. Glad they were not needed.

Amazingly after the situation was back under control eight new people sat down at another table in the Oval Office, those included the directors of NASA, education, and three other advisors keen to hear what she had to say. That meeting was cordial, Alexa saying they had now made the necessary improvements to the QVThrusters to allow full access to cis-lunar space, and they promised they were going to improve them further over the next two years to hopefully open up the whole solar system.

After the meeting, Alexa and Jean posed for some seriously needed good press.

The world, and especially the American people were outraged by what had happened. The vice president, recently sworn in, apologised again, saying it was only sanctioned by one man and using criminal elements of the military; the government speech writers working overtime, on the damage mitigation.

The military was of course as outraged by the incident as everyone else, especially releasing a man who was complicit in the murder of so many of their own. The new president emphasised it was always right for soldiers to refuse illegal actions, and those that did so would never be punished in a free society.

A crowd of two hundred freedom supporters, protested outside the White House for a week afterwards, to the shame of everyone including the old president who disavowed them and tried to spin the actions on his advisors. Of course Maria would not let any such spin happen. She was very, very good at this now.

The twenty American soldiers, part of a black ops unit operating illegally in the middle east had thought their planning perfect. They had done everything by word of mouth, courier mail, or in some cases coded on short wave radio. Each had got to England separately, at different times, and from different countries of origin and were supplied weapons by a local deep cover assets.

Yet, ten metres into a coordinated attack on the house each of them was found unconscious, as were four others in support vehicles. The British soldiers who had been dispatched to deal with them asked what happened, but the persons who had defended the Research Centre were never found.

The disgraced soldiers had been moved quietly back to the US under guard for trial. They were mostly wanted for other crimes too, and by agreement, they were kept well away from the media who were fighting each other like crazy to get any further information on the whole incident.

Jean apologised to everyone for the leaked video of the event, she had apparently just started a video blog and had accidentally left her brooch camera streaming. She of course stopped it as soon as she remembered, she then decided that making a video blog was probably a bad idea after all. If anyone wondered how it got out while all the radio frequencies were still jammed they never asked.

“I wasn't sure whether to laugh or be terrified,” said David, as they flew home. “Just after you went into the meeting room, six large military trucks screeched in and surrounded the saucer, then this helicopter rushed out of left field to hover above us. Several other helicopters then started hovering close by with big guns pointing at us. Next thing I'm watching thirty armed soldiers out by the entrance, one with a megaphone demanding we surrender, throw out our weapons and come out with our hands up.”

“It wasn't that dramatic,” said Maria, “you had them on your threat screen for at least two minutes before they arrived.”

“Well I was listening to that psycho trying to berate my beloved at the time, and remember I’m a man so I cannot multi-task!” he smiled for Alexa's benefit.

“Anyway, we ignored them, then they opened fire with automatic weapons on the door for a few minutes until one ricocheted and hit one of them with friendly fire then they called a halt. Then they stood back, talked and another soldier came forward with a big-ass rocket launcher or something on his shoulder, and they repeated the same warning to surrender.”

“The ship told me not to worry, then next thing I know there is this terrific bang outside, apparently the shell ricocheted off the door and hit one of the cars, injuring another two soldiers. Six of the men got them to ambulances, then this guy came up wheeling a plasma cutter and started work on the door. They stopped when they realised after ablating a layer of graphyne, nothing was happening, and not noticing there was a hundred kilowatt laser dissipating most of the heat through a big hole in the tarmac.”

“Then the helicopter moved off and hundreds of other soldiers came, surrounded the soldiers trying to get in.”

“After some discussion they all left and the place was once again empty, but with a burned out truck and a massive melted hole in the tarmac. The firefighters and a large tow truck came around a few minutes later quickly put the fire out and towed the burning truck off. A few hours later more soldiers turned up, this time facing outwards and your limo turned up with you and the General in it, then you both had a coffee here and now we are on our way.”

“Oh David, that was so exciting!” she swooned into his arms. “My Hero!”

He tutted, but decided now would be as good a time as any to comfort the poor distressed woman.

Jean's reception after Alexa left was not too dissimilar. Rather than face the press they put her up at one of the guest rooms at the White House. The temporary president, the generals, the chiefs of staff and two of the judges had another big meeting directly after the small photo opportunity of Alexa's departure where they went through the incident under oath.

It was obvious to Mathews that Jean was ten steps ahead of everyone both at the incident and the briefing after it, everyone getting their statements correct despite the now three hundred million views of the video, which may have been real-time altered to show Alexa little more fearful than she was, the president's hands balled into a fist, and Jean's knock out of the president a bit more self defence looking, and a little less forceful than it was.

If there was any way of naming her president at that moment every person involved, including the temporary president probably would have done so.

Mathews stayed with her until they got to the door of the apartment.

“Your secretary has dropped off your overnight bag Miss Michelle's,” said one of the White House secretaries with a gleam of admiration in his eyes before leaving them both in the room.

The second the door shut, Mathews pounced on her, kissing her passionately.

“You knew didn't you?” he said as they both pulled up for air.

“Of course we did silly,” she smiled, “didn't Alexa say it about three times not to worry, the only time I was worried was when Lentz actually came in armed and you got up to confront him, I almost had to go to plan B which would have been very messy,” she tapped her thin black bracelet to emphasise something.

“Alexa thought he would back down before the no going back point, but Tony and I read his countenance in the day leading up to it, and she deferred to our better judgement. The rest of the plan we were so far ahead of them I could have had a T-shirt printed with it on. Though knowing Lentz was out and free made me sick to my soul. I guess the only part not planned was me hitting him, but it just seemed the right thing to do at the time.”

Her fingers teased his face then moved down his chest, “I can't wait to let you in on a few more little secrets, but well,” she sighed, “you were potentially an enemy combatant.”

Her fingers stopped at his chest, her eyes burning into his. “But you were so brave..”

He grabbed her in for another kiss which she did not resist at all, carefully putting the brooch face down as she fell into his passionate embrace.

* * *

“It's kind of weird knowing you are not the top dog anymore,” Rodriguez said, as he sat in the comfortable seat in front of Hankins in his well appointed office. “How do you fight an enemy who knows your every move and can seemingly just knock somebody out at will?”

“You can't!” said Hankins. “The boffins still do not know how they did it, the soldiers all recovered, but all of them reported massive headaches for days after. One said it was like his whole world turned grey, and for a few hours he could not even remember his name. Hell you were there, Lentz stopped mid word. The AI must have been watching that whole area real-time, despite all radio coverage being down.”

“We put three of the soldiers under an MRI, there was nothing the doctors could find, our only theory was from one of our scientists, who said studies had shown a high magnetic field can disrupt the thinking process, and in other mammals a dozen focussed microwave beams converging at a point in the brain killed them in a minute.”

Rodriguez swirled his sherry around his glass, he would only have one, but after the lack of coordination between the departments in the past, the two men decided that the occasional get together in a less formal setting could only improve things.

“I had our analysts look back on some of the weirder reports we had this year, from ones similar where a bad guy has been found dead, or unconscious for no reason, even to reports of apparitions, ghosts, monsters, you name it. The common factor is that every single report was against illegal logging, fishing, mining and drug operations. Equipment, including weapons, are simply failing, much of this equipment is really old-tech, stuff we would expect to be exempt from the AI influence, but again it is the only logical conclusion our guys can come to. It is getting really bad out there for a lot of the cartels, criminal organisations and bad actors.”

“Yeah, we have dismissed a few of these weird reports ourselves, but now we are not so sure, of course there are no pictures even though people claim to have taken them. I really hope nobody else ever gets technology like this, even knowing it exists scares me more than any nuclear weapon. I would hate to think what would happen if somebody like us, Iran or China got it. there is no need for terminators robots, or war drones. My advice, to anyone who asks in the future, is to stick to cooperation with these guys, because for the AI to be doing this so openly it must have calculated the risk to be almost zero. I think our job is going to get a lot easier from this point forward.”

Hankins seemed happy to pour a second glass, then gestured his other hand around the office.

“You know she is watching us and listening to us now don't you? Yet if I get the best of the best of my guys in here, with every piece of tech at their disposal, we wont find anything. We literally are cavemen banging rocks.”

“I totally agree,” said Rodriguez, “and in a way I'm kind of glad we lost this war. I suspect nobodies going to be invading countries that they don't belong in, or pushing any launch buttons in the future. I still talk to Maria, in fact I think a lot of people do, I feel like a blasphemer, but she has almost replaced God in my life! Yet you say that to her and she laughs, saying she does not want to be anyone's god, and she certainly wont talk to anyone who sees her that way.”

Hankins was intrigued. “I've never been a believer, I don't think there are any true believers, because if your god is all present, why would you do the bad things you do. I think this is the reason I don't have faith, because I don’t ever want a god like that! But I am also glad Maria does not think she is a god, I do think of her as a person though..”

“Anyway, enough of this, we both have bad guys to find, and idiots in power to calm down. Let's make it a bit earlier next week, maybe we can do lunch too.”

* * *

“So, as you can all probably guess,” said Maria to a packed lecture theatre, “our first proper manned mission is going to be a science one. The goal of this is to test, and refine the design, for an organic structure which will be grown from a seed. We are going to do this test on a C type asteroid, that's an asteroid mostly made of carbon for those of you not in the know.” Everybody turned to Alexa.

“What!” she said, “I can't be the only person here who did not know that!”

Maria waited for the nods, and sniggering to die down and continued. “The guys have had a lot of success in the lab, and now it is time to go to the next stage and to see if it is possible to grow a space habitat. As we all know, this is being done in parallel with our other habitat design, and we don't see any conflict, in fact having two ways to achieve the same goals is always good.”

“Also, it is likely any artificial structure we build will incorporate organic components, such as the new bio-reactors, so we are hoping the technologies will have a great deal of synergy.”

“Anyway, the Structural Organics guys have been working amazingly hard toward this goal, the seed they designed has been undergoing lots of tests and improvements here for the past few weeks, and we believe the modifications now have everything it needs to begin a live trial. This new package will include an energy source to provide enough heat for the seed to start growing, all the essential elements required for this early stage, a small processing unit which will help search for and pre-process elements it requires, and the control unit which will provide the electrical, hormonal, chemical and timing signals to direct the growth.”

“In four days time, the ‘Don Quixote’, our latest Icarus three class saucer, will take off from here and begin the journey to the asteroid belt with the new probe. The target for the mission is an unnamed asteroid, similar to the 162173 Ryugu asteroid which the Japanese Hayabusa probe landed on and returned a sample from back in 2020. In case you have all been wondering where many of the saucers have been these last three weeks, all except the Mike were sent to various locations in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, firstly as a test of their systems but secondary they had a mission which was to catalogue all the asteroids we could find, do spectral, sample and mass analysis and determine the best target for this and future missions.”

“The data is being correlated and fed back to Barbara's small team in Bakersfield, she has set up an offshoot lab to work on the classifications. The asteroid chosen is one kilometre in diameter and seems to have a good balance of all the elements and hydrocarbons required for the seed to germinate. As well as that, it is in a quite low density area of the asteroid belt and on a safe predictable course. A special probe has been made to help position the seed inside the cavity, backfill the hole, monitor its progress and do any manual actions if required.”

“Hanna, Peter, Nicko, do any of you want to speak?”

“Yes,” said Peter, “we need the seed to be at least twenty metres underground to ensure it is not affected by cosmic or solar radiation, ideally the seed would be down in the centre of mass before it starts to gestate, but for the test, and with such a low mass asteroid with barely perceptible gravity, we see no issues. The asteroid will basically be a loose pile of rocks, and will try to get down as deep as we can.”

“The growth is quite slow,” said Nicko, waving at a small simplified diagram on the presentation screen, “the chamber will first be heated to twenty two degrees centigrade, how quickly it gets to that temperature, and how much power is needed to keep it there, will depend on the size and insulation properties of the cavity. Once at the desired temperature, the machine will activate the seed pod inside, which will begin absorbing the nutrients and minerals it requires.”

Nicko gestured to the air and a different diagram was put on the screen.

“The branches grow similar to a mycelium network, producing very dense strands that have a large surface area and finally combine to form a kind of bark or husk. Growth rate, direction and Biode type will depend upon the enzymes, nitrates and hormones we secrete. Some Biode’s will process water, some the silicon, iron, carbon, hydrogen and the other elements required to set up the neural control paths which will allow some integration with the computer processors. If all goes well it will sprout several chambers which will eventually thicken into a shell with a breathable atmosphere inside. Think big coconuts! A nice white inside and a husky tough outside.”

Why didn't he just start with big coconuts, thought Alexa, finally understanding what they were all talking about.

“Me and Nicko will be in the ship, Hanna will be here, and Karl, the little icon next to Helena, will remain in the Dusseldorf laboratory with all the other staff and the control experiments to provide assistance if required.” Peter said animatedly.

“What exactly have you configured the seed to grow into and how long can it survive?” said Naomi, one of the more recent lab technicians. Maria had recruited her from Copenhagen University where she had worked in the medical research department, she had also been a minor YouTube celebrity for a series of medical and nursing videos. Naomi was a little older than the rest of the scientists in her early forties, but looked a lot younger due to her fitness. Maria, as usual, had seen something more in her and she got on really well with everybody.

“The goal,” said Maria, “is to try and build human-liveable chambers, connected by tunnels, we won't be spinning this up so there will be no gravity inside. Part of the experiment is to also make human structures like tables and chairs, process waste, and test how it will be able to repair itself. The guys have added lots of experimental features for this first try, they don't expect all of them to work as we are juggling a lot of unknowns. They are also going to try and fabricate some biological sensors that our probe will monitor.

“As to its lifespan,” said Nicko, “these are basically trees, so we expect hundreds of years, as long as we maintain a steady flow of light, nutrients and water, most of which can be provided from the waste output of our bio-reactors. In this case however we will only have enough nutrients in the machine for two or three years, and that will limit the growth size and lifespan.”

“You said it was a manned mission?” said Ian.

“The ship is rated for twelve people,” said Maria, “well thirteen but someone decided they didn't like that number.” Maria's avatar again turned to Alexa who again shrugged.

“However, we are only taking five for this journey, everyone else can follow real time from mission control which will be set up here.”

“Who are they?” said Jen.

“Well Jules is the pilot, Matilda who will run some experiments for Simon's team, Nicko and Peter from the Dusseldorf team and finally Naomi who will be there as our roving reporter and medical specialist just in case.”

“What? no Hardy?” Jen said, looking at him.

“I'm staying with you, Magnus and Daisy in the lab, much more exciting there, and I would rather not be gone for two weeks. However Daisy, David and myself will be backup pilots in the PowderPuff if it is needed.”

“This will be the first long term human mission, the team and myself have already done a few test runs so we know the ships are good, also for safety another saucer is going to accompany them remotely. And don't worry, this is the first of many missions so everyone will get a turn in the future if they want,” he added.

“You know we probably need another one or two medical doctors on staff or at least on standby if we are going to be doing stuff in space,” said Simon.

“I think we are going to need a lot of people,” said Alexa, “but you are right, we have a big list of skills we are going to need and doctors and nurses are on the list. We just need to let these next few months play out and see what progress we make so we have a timetable to work to. There is a whole other project and group looking at this already.”

“I have thousands of medical researchers and doctors lined up for when the time is right,” added Maria.

“If we get into any trouble I cannot handle we will just get the ship to return directly to the accident and Emergency unit at the most suitable earth side hospital, there may be a few questions asked but it would be quicker and safer than flying someone up,” said Naomi.

“We already have most emergency situations and contingencies covered,” said April. “Humans have been in space for nearly seventy years, and science fiction writers have imagined most everything else that can go wrong, up to and including aliens bursting from your stomach.” Several people smiled. “We seriously don't expect anyone to get into any problems, but as everyone will tell you, space is very dangerous and we are going to take every precaution and cover as many bases as we can.”

“Naomi,” said Maria, “you are going to be working with Petra remotely to get medical data on our astronauts, and documenting as much as you can. It was one of your early training video series on early embryo development, that was cited in the Dusseldorf team's original paper, so we knew you have an interest, and they want you to help video document it for their final paper.”

“I shouldn't be surprised really, you dropped enough hints,” she said smiling.

“Oh, and now is perhaps a good time to introduce you to another member of the crew, she is new, and may be a bit shy, so without further ado I present you with crew member number six, Eve.”

Simon, who was at the back of the room, opened the door. A floating white robot about the size of two beach balls and emitting a slight hum, wobbled slowly inside and stopped in the centre of the lecture theatre. It was a tall ovoid in shape, had no feet but two wing like arms that folded flush to the shell and a big round head the same size as the body had two large green eyes, two elf like ears, a small antenna on top and a comical mouth shaped in gold gauze where the speaker obviously were.

“Hello humans, I am Eve one!” came a surprisingly sweet metallic voice from the speaker.

The crowd stood up and started clapping and cheering wildly.

“Excellent,” said Hardy, “you’ve outdone yourselves there.”

“Looks like a total rip-off of the one from the movie Wall-e,” said Alexa, “you sure we are not going to upset anyone?”

“It looks nothing like her!” Said Maria, “we are different in at least fifteen areas, as well as the blatantly obvious one, that ours is real, not a cartoon character.”

“Which one of you is driving it?” said Jen, fascinated.

“None of us,” said Maria, “though we can obviously take over her control if required. Eve is a product of Ian and Simon's devious minds as part of their wishes to have something that can help inside and outside the ship, she is a remote drone with a MOTHER level non-sentient AI core and a Daisy mark one personality module, so no being nasty to her!”

“woohoo!” said Daisy, rushing over to Ian and hugging him excitedly, then doing the same for Simon. Ian looked extremely happy.

“The lighthouse keeper remembers.” said the robot unexpectedly and causing the room to fall silent. Simon looked at Ian, who shrugged.

“Er.. Yes!” said Simon. “Probably a bit heavy on the randomiser, a few tweaks maybe!”

Alexa looked at both of them, then at Eve, then at Jen, and both girls laughed.

“Yes, definitely a few tweaks!” continued Maria soberly. “Anyway, getting back on track, Eve can obviously just about fly in an atmosphere, but it will be much more stable and manoeuvrable in zero and low gravity situations..”

Eve wobbled again.

“She has two small arms to manipulate things, they are not very strong, but can unfold and be quite dextrous so can open things, grab things and use special tools. We have also added a small compartment in her chest about half the size of a shoe box for storage and samples.”

Two small manipulators, which were tucked under the wing like appendages, extended with a whir, and a small compartment opened and closed. In an almost comical move Eve then toppled over onto the ground, clanged twice, recovered and slowly rose to a metre height it was at before.

“Whoopsie!” it said.

“Er, it only came out of the replicator an hour ago,” said Ian, apologetically, “still a few software and hardware tweaks to do, but she’ll be alright on the night.”

“She of course is made from Simon's favourite carbon allotrope, graphyne,” said Maria, unfazed, “so a few bumps and scrapes will be fine.”

Maria continued spouting out the specifications as Eve toured the room, occasionally warbling. “Eve has twin eight hundred watt QVCells which can be overclocked to five kilowatts each, they provide heat for the internal systems which don't like absolute zero, and charge her six kilowatt hour barium graphene battery for backup, and peak power requirements. Her six tiny QVThrusters provide three degrees of movement, and the two axis gyroscope provide stability and give her some rotational ability. Like Simon said, she needs a few tweaks..”

“..And of course she has a QVModem receiver so can work at a good distance from the ship or earth.”

“That is awesome!” said Alexa, “Simon, Ian you are geniuses, I think, let's make lots, each ship should have a couple at least and I would love a few around the research centre if you can get the stability problem sorted, I bet we can think of lots of use for them.”

“Can we tweak her design or colour a bit?” said Jen, maybe different colours and definitely write the number of the unit on the front and back so we don't get confused.”

“No worries guys,” said Ian, “like I said Eve here is the first, let me, Simon or one of the girls know and as long as it's not too silly or difficult we will see what we can do.”

Daisy gave Ian another knowing wink and he smiled back shyly.

Yes, definitely something there. Thought Maria.

* * *

*August 2027 America and the world is still reeling from the on-going impeachment of ex-president Markby last month for arranging unauthorised military operations against the United Kingdom, the attempted assault of one of its citizens, Alexa Martins and America's favourite CEO Jean Michelle. There has been little comment publicly by either woman, their companies, the Whitehouse, nor the British government, and details are still limited to the now deleted, but easily available, video and the press conferences by the parties concerned.*

*However it is well known that the raid was orchestrated to steal their AI system, which many believe is giving the company a massive competitive edge over the opposition, and is responsible for the company's exponential growth rate these last two years. Facts are extremely hard to obtain, but BFG Capital in London, recently estimated the company and its holdings at over five trillion US dollars, which if true would make it as big as the world's next two companies, and bigger than many countries.*

*At the conference at the White House after the incident, Miss Martins briefed several of the government agencies and outlined the company's plans to open up space to the world, by releasing a design of the engine that is fully space capable.*

*Speculation is running rife over the possible specifications of such an engine, but most commentators believe it will usher in the second-age of mankind as it gets full access to the stars. The stocks of most space based industries were up significantly on this positive news.*

## Missions To Nowhere

September 2027

Simon, in his usual paternal manner, had wanted each of the five crew members to have some sort of space-suit, 'Just in Case', as he said. As such, Maria had negotiated the purchase of ten of the newer Blue-Origin compression suits, one of which he was now proudly modelling for Jules.

“They are err.. nice, Simon, but I'm not sure they are actually necessary.” She said trying to keep a straight face. Her accent, however, betraying a tiny trace of her French Quebec origin, usually only evident when she got slightly annoyed or emotional. Jules of course was wearing a fashionable light pink top, with one of the latest diamond ear studs, close fitting black trousers and plimsolls.

“April did also say that if anything ever got through the ship's hull then it is most likely the ship, and everything in it, would be just so much floating debris, and it wouldn't matter if I was wearing a space suit or I was butt naked.”

“OK,” said Simon, knowing April probably did not say those exact words, and ignoring her little tease, “but if you all at least keep them handy in the emergency..”

“..Sure Simon, I don't see any problem with that,” she said, cutting him off. “I was going to add getting back to a room, as one of the emergency drills we intend to do, I can include putting the suit on during the drill.”

She knew that would be enough to please Simon, and he walked off seemingly happier, to find the next problem, and hopefully to change into something less embarrassing.

The emergency rooms as Simon put it were two of the cabins that could be sealed off airtight, and had self contained food, water, oxygen supply and CO2 scrubber; all of which could technically last them four days, hopefully enough time for someone to save them. However Jules was correct, April *had* said this, adding also that anything that could breach the graphyne hull of a ship, definitely meant the ship, and anything organic inside it would be instantly dead.

“Simon is never getting me into one of those suits!” said a very gothic looking Matilda once Simon had left.

“Me neither, but let's never say never, and let's not upset Simon as he does mean well,” Jules said, winking at her and getting a rare smile in return.

The 'Don Quixote' had been a bustle of activity for the past three days. Bags, equipment, food, toiletries, were being loaded for a twenty day, and a seven hundred million kilometre round trip. Their support ships, ‘The Excalibur’ and ‘Outside Context Problem’ were on the other two pads, and ready to follow.

One by one everyone reported ready and the 'Don' sealed the door. Jules took the centre chair, Matilda and Naomi, the ones on the right Peter and Nicko the ones on the left.

“Hello Don,” said Jules, “please recognise Captain Jules LeCaire.”

“Welcome Captain Le Claire,” said the ship.

“Hi Jules,” came April's voice from Eve-four who wobbled softly onto the flight deck. They had finally come up with a plan to incorporate a simple light emitting surface on the drones. When Eve was in control of herself, it would be white with its serial number in bold black letters on the front and back. When any of the girls had control they would change to another colour, and a name badge on the chest. Eve-four was currently a deep blue, with April written on the top left of her chest, its 'eyes' containing optical and infra-red sensors, sat in small depressions, and were currently tinted green, the mouth grill had gone, and the 'ears' and the 'nose' were just small sculptured holes, which contained various environmental sensors. The design pushed cute and harmless, and delivered on both.

“We’ve been given clearance to take off in forty six minutes for our test flight over the Atlantic,” said April, “I have updated ‘Dons’ checklist accordingly, but remember everyone, as far as the UK authorities, and everybody else are concerned, we are doing an extended low pressure and hover test, to calibrate the drives for space use. The plan we submitted says we will be hovering there for twelve days at one hundred to two hundred thousand metres.”

She paused as the checklist changed, then added, “OK I better return this Eve to her position for departure, hopefully its stability issues will also get sorted by the end of this flight.”

“Thanks April, the checklist looks simple enough,” said Jules from her command chair. “Why are we bothering with the deception anyway?”

“Blame the group,” said April, “it seems the world is OK with us testing low earth orbits, but not yet ready for us casually flying a civilian crew to the asteroid-belt, to converting a kilometre sized asteroid into an organic space station. Also the UK flight regulations would self-destruct if we actually went fully into space with a crew and tried to come back.”

The little droid changed back to white and wobbled off to the special wall attachments they had fabricated for them, a new ship was being printed with a much better way to incorporate them inside and out.

Jules looked down at her checklist, it was still counting down to the first event in twenty three minutes time.

“Remote flight data has been input,” said Don. “All flight and space systems are operational Captain.”

“Thank you Don,” said Jules unnecessarily.

The flight-deck of the Don was again a slightly different design as they continued to work on the ergonomics. It had been configured with a continuous screen two metres high and six wide taking the whole of the front wall of the bridge. In the middle they had spread out the five chairs a little, and given each chair its own small workstation, which allowed crew to work in the company of others as well as from the ones in their cabins. Except for the entrance to the bridge, all the other walls in the room had screens and workstations built in, in case people preferred working standing up. None of the workstations served a particular purpose, you did what you did from where you wanted to work.

The whole front wall currently showed the view outside, with the other saucers spaced about twenty metres away from each other in the grid. It would look like some Sci-fi movie scene if not for the rural setting, and a green and yellow tractor currently pulling a mowing attachment on the lawn further towards the river.

A window appeared on the left hand side of the main monitor, and displayed a map showing southern England, and eight hundred kilometres into the Atlantic. On it there was a blue line showing the fake flight plan which went south-west six hundred kilometres. Multiple green dots were also moving slowly, highlighting the other commercial and military flight traffic in the area, each with a number and altitude in text underneath. Red dots showed the same for shipping. Jules flicked her finger, and the checklist that was was currently on Jules workstation, slid into prominence at the right-hand of the main screen.

“OK, Don, bring us to full readiness, sound external warning, and when the area is clear take us to one hundred metres to await final flight clearance.”

‘The Excalibur’ and ‘Outside Context Problem’ rose off their pads with the ‘Don’. Just before they cleared the top of the lab building the OCP and the Don went into stealth mode, painting their hull colour with the view from the opposite side, unlike the movies this only worked from a distance and from a limited focal view, up close it just looked weird.

“OK guys, the Excalibur has gone active with the Don's transponder code and livery, you and the OCP are in stealth. For all intents and purpose there is just you going up there.” Said Maria.

“Don bring up full active windows.” Said Jules.

The walls, floor and ceilings except for a few areas with carpeting, air ducting or displaying flight information changed to the outside camera views. The Landing pad was a hundred metres directly below them.

“Eek!” said Peter, gripping his armrest.

“Whoops, sorry about that Peter, I was just wondering what the option on the summary command list was for. Don, please turn off the floor display, and disable that option when Peter is on the bridge.” As the AI acknowledged the command, Jules vaguely remembered Peter was afraid of heights, but was also thinking that she couldn't wait to try the full effect in space.

The floor went back to the normal grey colour, and Peter's fingers loosened their tight grip on the armrest. He looked visibly relieved. They waited, quietly chatting and watching the checklist countdown.

Looking at the checklist, Jules pressed the yellow switch on the armrest of the captain's chair, “Bristol air traffic control, please be advised Dietrich Air Jupiter, Jupiter, X Ray, Tango, five awaiting clearance for test flight Tango Golf four niner as authorised by CAA Charter. We will be leaving UK air-space vertically to our cruising altitude of one eighty thousand metres when authorised, then leaving vector two fifty degrees west south west to the test area, over.”

Another window changed to show their normal air traffic controller Stan, and a new guy behind him wearing the same air traffic controller uniform. The new guy was shaking his head in disbelief, this never got old for them.

“Roger Jupiter, Jupiter, X ray, Tango, five. Hi Jules, we see your transponder active, you are cleared for vertical ascent to your cruising altitude of one eighty thousand metres, you have clear skies, and above fifteen thousand metres, there is obviously nobody else and can execute your chosen vector from there. Wow, it says you're going to remain at the edge of space for two weeks. Keep in touch I guess, and good luck in space. Over.”

“Thank you Stan, we are ascending now. Follow us on radar if you can, we have plenty of coffee and crosswords, going to be pretty boring, feel free to talk to us if your radio will get that far out, but it's all in the name of science, see you soon, over and out.”

Jules had slipped slightly into her French accent once she knew it was Stan, he may have been older, and happily married, but he was a bit of a treasure, and always gave the pilots a warm courteous service whenever he talked.

“Don, please take us to one hundred and eighty kilometres and execute pre-prepared plan.”

“Roger Captain,” came the ship's AI’s voice and everyone was pressed down a little in their chairs as the ship immediately started to rise, the screens showing them rising vertically slowly at first, but gaining speed steadily. The display showing the altimeter gained more prominence on the wall, now showing they had already gone through a thousand metres. A few seconds later it was two thousand, then four thousand, then eight, sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, then their acceleration slowed, and they felt the extra weight removed, gravity eased the velocity change lower, until finally stopping at one hundred and eighty kilometres, the blue of the sky had disappeared and the horizon was black.

The altimeter had already re-calibrated itself for kilometres, additional parameters appeared, and a few like the barometric pressure, temperature and surface weather conditions were removed.

“Holding at one eighty kilometres, Captain,” came the Don, unnecessarily and always by the book.

“Wow,” said Peter, “so we are officially all astronauts now!”

“I guess,” said Jules.

“Not as limited a club as it used to be,” added Maria hovering back into the room in a green coloured Eve, “but you guys are in the top one thousand. In five hours however you will all hold the record for the furthest humans have ever travelled away from planet Earth. Unfortunately you will all have to keep that little record a secret for a couple of years.”

“And Alexa was the first woman on the moon. Unofficially of course,” smiled Jules.

“Seriously!” said Nicko.

“Jules, you're heading into dangerous territory,” warned Maria.

“Yes,” smiled Jules, and tapping her nose, “but as Maria says, best to wait for her biography to get any details. Asking her about it now may get you on toilet cleaning duty for the rest of your life.”

The two men laughed.

“Hi Maria,” said Naomi, finishing up something on a touchscreen and smiling, “you hijacked the DaisyBot again, April was only just in it.”

Annoyingly to the AI’s, the Eve robots they, Simon and Ian had so diligently named, had their names 'shortened' by Jen to “DaisyBot”. It made no sense to them why that stuck, considering the amount of time they had spent finding a name they *wouldn't* do that with. However “DaisyBot,” had stuck, and that is what all the humans, even Simon and Ian, had been calling them in the last few days.

“Looks like our poor DaisyBot AI won’t be getting much action this trip, you guys seem to like your new found mobility.”

“Yes, it's kind of an interesting sensation,” said Maria, executing a careful slow spin.

“Shame we only have Eve-four inside the ship, we probably did not have to put Eve-seven in the outside hold, since the air-lock has been tested several times now and seems stable.” Said Maria, continuing defiantly to use the old Eve moniker.

“Simon can be a bit parental,” said Matilda, “but here he insisted, correctly I think, that if the air lock failed there would be no way for a DaisyBot to get outside to help.”

Jules nodded in agreement.

“A very low probability but I conceded the point,” said Maria, sighing that even Matilda was now using the DaisyBot term.

They all watched as another item on the checklist changed colour, and the Excalibur, pretending to be the Don, broke off formation and headed off to the south west to their supposed test position.

“What if someone notices, there must be lots of telescopes and spy satellites focussed up and down on us.”

“Dream on Jules,” laughed Maria, “we are a hundred and eighty kilometres up, and the saucers are either invisible, or visually identical, they are going to see and hear what they expect to, a very bored bunch of scientists playing at being spacemen. We will simulate most of the ground radio and phone chit-chat and test stuff so you guys don't have to.”

All five of the humans laughed.

“Best to add a transcription of those contacts and messages, so we can all at least see what we are supposed to have said,” said Naomi.

“Good point,” said Maria, throwing an additional window up and squeezing the map off.

“What!” said Peter looking at the log, “I already have two missed calls from my mum, what does that in dark green say next to it, I can't read the font against the black background.”

“Sorry,” said Maria as the font colour changed, “it's just saying it played your voicemail. We are expected to be out of cell phone coverage so we need to play the part, but we will activate outgoing connections in your bedrooms so you can make private calls if you wish using the QVModem’s. All communications will be routed through the Excalibur to Starlink so it should all look normal. You can also all use emails from the workstations here, or the ones in the common room or your cabins. We will monitor for any faux pas, and give you the option to correct them if you need to. Can't go letting your mother know you’re in the asteroid belt or it may blow our cover!”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Naomi.

“Don, please begin acceleration phase one,” said Jules looking at the checklist and noticing the text now had a yellow background as she was fifteen seconds overdue. April had told her the captain must authorise everything, unless it endangered the ship, however the ship would become very insistent if she went too long before confirming a mission parameter, unless she put the list on hold. The item box checked, and the text greyed, highlighting the next item on the checklist. The screens showed them moving forward into space, there were no stars flying past, or anything that crass.

* * *

The ‘Outside Context Problem’ led the procession, and stayed ten seconds ahead, not visible on the monitor except by its icon. They all sat there, feeling heavier due to the increase in acceleration from one to one point three gravities all of them, once more, looking at the various instruments showing them reaching higher and higher altitude from the earth.

“How does this work again,” said Naomi, “I understand we are under acceleration and I feel heavier, but we are going forward.”

“No we are not going forward, we are going straight up, just with thirty percent more acceleration than gravity,” said Jules, “hence why we are heavier. The ship configures the screens, and view for the most comfortable. Humans are used to gravity being down, and moving forward, that is not really possible for us, so we just pop on a small visual illusion with no acceleration in the X axis, and one point three Gravities of acceleration in the Y axis. No point in confusing people for no reason.”

“We are also not in orbit,” said Nicko, “If we were in orbit you could turn the engines off and we would all be in free-fall but stay circling the earth, falling, but due to your speed and the curvature of the earth never hitting the ground. With our profile, if we stopped the engine anytime in the next hour or two, gravity would take over and we would go into free-fall, like someone cutting the cables in a lift, and we would plummet straight back to earth just like Mr. Newton's apple, but with a bigger splat!”

“Nicko is correct,” said Maria, glad for a bunch of scientists in the audience to explain, “gravity falls off as the square of the distance. The earth is a big mass, not a point, so it's a bit more complicated, but basically as we get further away it looks more like a point and as our distance doubles its effect falls off by four. In two hours our speed will be fast enough that gravity won't have a big enough effect to drag us back down before we escape, though we will still be subject to it, and that from all the other bodies in the solar system.”

“We will also be gradually reducing our acceleration from one point three gravities down to oh point eight, so you should all be a lot more comfortable, and our speed will pick up substantially as we have nothing pulling us back.”

“Why is the OCP so far ahead?” continued Naomi.

“Even I know that one,” said Matilda, “we are on the same trajectory, so the OCP will extend our sensor range, and hopefully detect, or bang in to anything in front before it becomes a problem for us.”

“Unfortunately space has things coming at you from every direction, so technically we can also be blind-sided, even from behind,” said Jules soberly.

Everyone looked at their rapidly increasing velocity, currently at twenty two thousand kilometres per hour, the “Altitude” label had changed to become “Distance From Earth” and in the ten minutes they had been accelerating that distance was now close to two thousand kilometres. Apart from that nothing really seemed to change, they seemed to be heading vaguely twenty or thirty degrees off the sun, with no other objects visible. Space was indeed both very exciting, very scary, and very boring all at the same time.

“Anyone want a coffee?” said Naomi.

* * *

Their temporary mission control room in the lecture theatre had been rearranged slightly to allow comfortable viewing of the three massive screens, and a more relaxed sitting atmosphere if people wanted to socialise. The first screen showed the same trajectory information as the Don; The middle screen a view from the back of the Don's flight deck, looking forward over everyone's head, and to the screens, so people could get a sense of being there. The final screen looked down into the meeting area in Simon's laboratory, which had been taken over by Hanna for her equipment, and where Leo and Hanna were talking and working on something. A fourth smaller screen had been added back to the meeting room in Dusseldorf, it was empty at the moment but was normally occupied by Karl or one of his other guys.

A couple of additional workstations had been added if anybody wanted to work here, but both were empty. A drinks fridge and a tea and coffee station were also there, with the biscuits being continuously refilled. It was late afternoon, four people and a pink robot sat around one of the U shaped sofas talking.

“Have you seen how big it is though?” said Magnus to Alexa, Jen, Daisy and one of the Eve robots, currently taken over by Maria and sporting a very pink skin.

“Not seen it yet,” said Alexa, “why don't you pop the picture up,” she waved at the big screens.

“Holly..” Started Alexa.

“I know,” said Magnus, “it's the first of four that they say will be used to go to the moon once we release the software tweak to the engines. That is why the press and the space nerds are following our fake final test mission so much.”

“Hey,” said the little pink robot, “I am trying to make it exciting. I took it up to one hundred and ninety thousand metres for four hours, then to free fall for thirty seconds, in a few cases using acceleration profiles to make it look like the ship had run out of steam. Added a bit of chatter and random encrypted telemetry from them to us and back, so they all think we are doing something.”

“Jules is still going to be so mad at you,” said Alexa, “you are definitely leading Jake on!”

“Oh it's not that bad,” said Daisy, “Jake is married with two grown up kids, all the girl pilots wind him up so it would be out of character if Jules didn't, and it’s all in public.”

“Jules is nonchalant, and anyway Jake is well aware that Jules ‘bats for the other team’.”

“Maria!” said Alexa sharply, “Jules does not ‘bat for the other team’ she is a proud lesbian!”

“Sorry, I am still perfecting my humour and only repeating what she said to Nicko, I will tone it down a tiny bit.”

“Oh poor Maria,” said Jen sympathetically, “you’ve gone and upset her.”

“I don't get upset Jen, it is correct that I know the limits so I can stay within them.”

“Anyway,” said Alexa, “I will come down and cuddle your chassis tonight until you feel better.”

“Alexa!” said Jen, “how is that any less appropriate, you’re giving poor Maria mixed signals. I still love you Maria if you need a proper bestie who won't tie your logic in knots!”

“Thanks Jen, at least someone is nice to me.”

Alexa shoved Jen playfully, “suck-up!”.

“Nicko and Peter also did a small live interview for their national TV,” continued Maria, changing the subject. “We passed it through with a three second delay, which we blamed on us not having a direct link, but we thought we should include in case they accidentality said something not in the plan. But they kept to the script, so all was good.”

“It's like the moon landings,” smiled Jen, “the inside of the ship looks so much like a star trek set, that a lot of conspiracy people are saying it is being streamed from a movie studio, and not from a hundred and eighty kilometres up over the Atlantic. Oh the irony!”

“They are going to have a field day when you eventually release the footage from the asteroid, that is, if you ever do,” said Magnus, one arm tenderly wrapped around Jen and playing with a twirl of hair now she was growing it longer.

“Unfortunately that won't be for a little while yet,” sighed Maria, “no need to tip our hand too soon as we have the other missions underway, and, let's face it, Jen's right, if they think the inside of the saucer is fake, who's going to believe the inside of an asteroid three million times further away.”

“Or an enormous space habitat!” Added Jen.

“True!” said Magnus, nodding.

They all laughed, and spent a bit of time looking at the big screen. The Don and its crew were past Mars still travelling hundreds of kilometres a second, the velocity display recalibrating from kilometres per hour, then kilometres per minute when each got past a hundred thousand.

It was still another eighteen hours from the asteroid, the ship had made its long lazy U turn to turn it around, it was inefficient but allowed them to keep the thrust constant, the gravity normal, and the manoeuvrer undetectable by the crew. The ship was still accelerating, but now facing the opposite direction and so slowing down, timing its exact stop for the target asteroid.

Jules took that moment to walk into the flight deck and sit down on the captain's chain, the actual DaisyBot, came in a minute later with a mug of some hot drink, curtsied, made some weird R2D2 sound, then left. Jules accepted the drink and thanked the sweet, but crazy machine.

The ships were working the same time as the guys at the research centre, because it was logical. So it was late afternoon there too. Don would start dimming the lights at eight, and go to low intensity red lights for the night, there was no need for a night shift, as the AI’s monitored everything.

“Hi Jules,” said Alexa, seeing her on the screen with her coffee in hand. “A few of us are here having a drink after work. You okay there? not getting too bored I hope?”

The screen changed to her upper body front view, at the same time on the ship the guys on earth appeared full screen on her large monitor, moving the space view window to the side.

“A bit,” she admitted honestly, “it doesn't feel like I am that far away. I know we’re travelling millions of kilometres an hour, there is a hard vacuum outside, and I am a week from getting back to earth and being able to walk out the door. But that is the only thing making people anxious.”

She put her feet up on the chair drawing them in with her arms, “Peter is putting on a brave face, but he certainly doesn't look comfortable. Naomi dropped a cup near him a day ago and he nearly had to change his underwear! So no, I don't think space is for everyone, no matter how safe you make it, but how you find those people and make a perfect crew is something way outside my experience or comfort zone,” she paused.

“There is one thing most people have brought up, since we have two ships, we should have a way to move between them.”

Alexa looked confused, “I thought we could?”

“The oversight will be corrected in the larger design,” said April. “But the bigger ones will have enough space that you wont want too. However, for the Icarus three ships it was assumed nobody would ever enter or leave them outside of a breathable atmosphere.”

Jules waved it away, “apart from that, hmm, maybe a few more people to talk to would be good, as would a gym or a swimming pool for exercise, and Naomi reckons a cat would be nice, though DaisyBot is much more awesome as I am not a cat person.”

She sipped a bit of her coffee glancing up to the right at Daisy, “Ian must have taken a lot of notice of all your little mannerisms Daisy, a man does not notice these things unless he has an ulterior motive I think,” she smiled.

“Jules,” exclaimed Daisy, “like everybody is here listening!” she fidgeted a bit. “He is cute though, gave me some flowers from the garden for my room, and I can't believe he likes the same things as me, we talked for ages on Japanese Anime the other day. Oh I’m sure Ian is just as sweet with everybody,” Daisy looked at the other girls who were all shaking their heads.

“Never got flowers,” said Jen confused.

“Me neither,” said Alexa.

“Anime? Ian? a first with me,” said Jules.

“He definitely fancies Daisy,” said Allison from the other sofa where she was sharing a pizza with Simon and half in attention. “He spent quite a bit of time with Maria programming in all her mannerisms.”

“They are pretty random,” said Magnus, “I saw a DaisyBot in the garden yesterday just spinning in circles around the flower bed with its wings out, it was so cute I took a video and sent it to Daisy and Jen.”

“One asked me if I wanted to look at the pictures in the dining room, it said I looked bored and needed cheering up,” said Jen, “It was surprisingly pleasant company.”

“Yeah, I think Ian is wasted as an engineer, he should definitely be transferred to the computer department,” said Allison, “he has a bit of a knack for writing things in the control and personality language the girls wrote.”

“Even I can use that,” said Daisy, hoping to change the subject, “I hated Java and C at university..”

“Don't change the subject, you little tease,” said Jen, unhooking herself from Magnus and slamming down on the sofa next to her, “let's hear all the dirt on Ian girl, cone of silence Maria!”

The other girls closed in for the kill, Jules making some muffled sounds and gestures then going quiet and obviously listening in.

“Er.. Time for me to go, I think I have somewhere to be!” said Magnus, lifting himself up from his solitary position on a sofa and walking away, to a shrug from Allison and Simon. He wasn't sure whether to think poor Ian, or lucky Ian!

* * *

April [It missed the Excalibur by two hundred milliseconds. Nothing on lidar, and only just detectable with four returns on the millimetre radar, too fast to get any accurate size, or density data. The velocity, however, was in the order of sixty one kilometres a second. The closest approach to the Don was twelve kilometres and we calculated no change was required. I have tagged, and added it to the scary object database]

April [Based on returns from similar objects, it would have close to one hundred megajoules of energy. Survivable, as there would have been minimal momentum transfer, but the energy transfer would probably have damaged the graphyne hull. To the humans on board it would have sounded like a nuclear explosion had gone off outside, and I know from the psychological reactions to other loud noises, and being in space, it would have caused a major panic. I doubt any sort of acoustic dampening we are testing would have helped in this case. The humans need to be made aware of possibilities like this in their training]

Helena [It is like everything. We need a lot more data]

Maria [We do need to up our game on the detection of these. We need dedicated ultrafast hardware for the detection grids, the current technology is not effective enough for objects moving potentially hundreds of kilometres a second]

Helena [The new stealth drone designs will also extend the detection range without changes to the saucer. One of Giannis team worked on a similar concept for his PhD. Its priority is now high enough that I will allocate some resources to get it done officially. There are also Samuals and Huang, they conceived of a similar concept for a solar system wide array of probes, mapping all known objects, but at the tech levels then this was unachievable. It could be possible now, but easier strategies we are planning to adopt, like travelling outside the plane of the elliptic would achieve the same]

Helena [Radiation is still the main issue we have to address. It is still causing issues for the all our drones, especially the smaller ones; Two of the thirty two we manufactured have suffered reset events in the last ten days. I have doubled the gate size on the latest replicator batch again, so we are now at twenty-five nanometres, we are also trying a new four-layer insulation layer, and a newer checksum algorithm covering smaller memory block sizes, as well as faster watchdog processors. Having the three cores on the latest batch has so far prevented any terminal problems, but I see no easy way yet to completely eliminate this without a thicker hydrogen-based protective layer]

April [The increased current to the active shielding superconductor, and the changes to its orientation fields, have reduced charged particles by a further seven percent, and I believe further improvements are unnecessary as we have reached a diminishing return. The risk inside the human habitation areas is also quite low, but not zero, and high energy non-charged particles may still get through. I think we should keep the guys home for a few months after this, for observation, and until the medical staff look them over]

Helena [All this corresponds with the data we have for the sixteen confirmed incidents of bit errors on both the Don and the Excalibur's processors. All were corrected, and all were on hull facing systems, none of the cabin facing systems reported any incidents.]

Maria [I wouldn't feel comfortable being in space, without more cosmic radiation shielding. In the last four years my debugging systems have recorded twelve such errors, so we need to remember we are not immune even down on earth]

Helena [We can improve on the conditions on earth with just ten metres of ice, so I think we can provide a much better environment for AI's in the future habitats, and the larger saucers]

April [I have looked at the efficiency calculations and prepared a recommended option for Gianni for the second mission to begin the habitat construction. I have also added another three saucers to the replication queue in anticipation of him agreeing. The preferred option is to build the first recycler and larger replicator on site and transport just the materials we cannot get locally. At the end of it we can begin making the extruders much faster. We however need to identify a reliable source of carbon, silicon and several other elements]

Helena [We currently have enough of the rarer elements at our earth facilities for a year's worth of production. This is just from the last two months at our e-waste test processing facility in Cardiff; Projections give us at least twenty years stock just from the UK landfills. The sixteen other planned processing centres around the world have been green-lighted, we were just waiting to see how well Cardiff worked out before we made a full commitment. With all these processing facilities fully active it should technically be able to supply all of humanity's needs, hopefully it will be possible to do a planned phase-out starting with the biggest polluters. Once we locate sources in the asteroid belt it will reduce our requirements from earth completely]

April [During the e-waste processing we are also identifying a lot of other elements we should start to stockpile such as metals, oils and plastics which we can convert to carbon for processing. We also have a team now working on the really nasty stuff like acids. It will never be profitable to clean these, but if we can return a waste site to productive land there is a long term benefit and a possible profit centre]

April [With us being down to only two saucers still mapping the belt, we are only seven percent complete; this is mostly at low resolution so we will be missing millions of objects under a hundred metres. The catalogue we currently have shows nine hundred and thirteen suitable asteroids for our purpose. The closest one is only seventy million kilometres spin-ward from the asteroid we are currently seeding, and is on a slowly retarding orbit so it will come within four million kilometres in sixteen years time. It has a diameter of twenty six kilometres on the major axis and twenty one on the minor; It is part of an asteroid grouping in the same orbital trajectory, so we could be lucky]

Maria [Let us exclude the luck part of the equation. Task the closest of the two saucers with a DaisyBot to do a full survey of it. Something more suitable may be found before the mission is ready but we should plan this as our principle objective until we do]

April [When the much larger space based replicator is in operation we can eventually make one of the even larger saucer designs, I am including in these the interfaces for me or Helena to expand into the core. I will need to discuss with Allison and Spence about our physical transfers, which carries near-zero risk of failure. I will volunteer to do the first transfer and we can refine the design for you guys]

Maria [I think I will like to retire, as you say, on the habitat. The massive AI cores we have designed for these looks so tempting to inhabit, I have been working with Spence, Allison, and now David on how my consciousness would be transferred, but we have so far failed to make an exact model. You two will have no issues as I designed you better, but the surgery for me would be too complicated until we have better tools. Even if I cannot transfer logically, I will at least transfer physically and have a big strong AI next to me as a nest-mate. Maybe this is how our human girls feel?] She added suitable humour tags.

April [Their arrival is imminent. The fifty gram ice sphere, that was released by the OCP before it finished its deceleration, hit the asteroid ten hours ago, travelling at ten point one kilometres a second. The debris cloud was bigger than anticipated, which means the density of the asteroid is lower than our estimate, but it has cleared the area to work on. The OCP has increased its lead and should arrive in six minutes. Five hours before the Don]

April [Better let them know to get the popcorn out!]

* * *

The arrival of the OCP was timed for nine AM start of the working day and their temporary mission control centre was filled to overflowing. The audience consisted of almost everyone in the research centre, except maybe a couple of the household staff who didn't really have an interest in the science stuff. There was also Karl and his team in Dusseldorf, several from the other research facilities depending upon their time-zone, and of course the five in the Don.

The OCP determined none of the ejection material from the explosion was a hazard, the biggest being a few metres in diameter but travelling twenty metres per second and easily avoided. The smaller ones were travelling a bit faster, but none were moving in a direction that might impact the Don. Using the laser was therefore not deemed necessary to the dismay of some in the audience back on earth.

The three main screens showed several high definition cameras from the OCP, and one from the Don, which was still a few hours away. Suddenly two of the screens lit up, as the still unnamed asteroid was lit by brilliant lighting, and blanketed by radar and lidar from the OCP. The ship had now moved to one hundred metres from the surface, above where the impact of their ice sphere had created a very ragged crater, at least eighty metres wide and thirty deep. It looked more like a rocky beach, where the rocks went from sand-sized particles to one the size of a bus.

Unlike the videos from the various space agencies which seemed mostly black and white and grainy, the craters were lit up extremely bright, in high definition and at thirty frames per second. As well as the expected shades of grey, black, and white, there were surprisingly shades of yellow and brown, some spots that seemed to glisten, and some that seemed to be steaming! The chatter of the crowd increased with a few ‘awes’ and ‘arrs’ and as people talked amongst themselves in little groups.

“Feel free to speak up if you have questions or spot anything interesting,” said Maria, “The Don won't be arriving until after lunch, so we are going to start preparing the area for them.”

“What are those glistening things in the bottom of the right hand monitor,” said Leo.

“Alas,” said Maria, “as the great bard once said, ‘All that glitters..’ Most likely it is crystals of quartz or mica, or could even be water or methane ice that was frozen beneath the surface. The DaisyBot's will be out soon and we can take a look at anything interesting. There are also several very large pieces that lidar is detecting are loose, and we will need to clear them from the arrival area, before the Don arrives. They probably only weigh a few tonnes at most and should be easily cleared by the bots so long as they are still not attached to anything.”

“What about the steam we can see in camera six?” said Alexa, “am I the only one thinking it can't be that hot!”

“The areas we exposed were at negative one hundred and seventy degrees,” said Helena, “but will warm up slowly as the sun and our lights affect them, in this case it is likely to be methane ice boiling off or some locked in frozen nitrogen or other gas. DaisyBot has been given instructions to sample these so I can give you more information later.”

Well at least nobody called it out as a dumb question she thought, even though her first thoughts had been boiling water. There again she vaguely remembered water boiled at a lower temperature at higher altitude, in lower pressure, so maybe people assumed she knew that. “No dumb questions,” her teacher had once told her. “Yeah right!”

The still black monitor changed over to show another feed from the OCP's hold. The bottom of the ship had two areas that would accept a custom built cargo pod, Ian had wanted to make an area that would fit a half-sized shipping container, but it was finally vetoed for their own in-house design. They agreed however that future saucers would have the space to take full sized shipping containers as it made the logistics easier and the loading faster.

Nothing happened at first, then a line of light slowly got wider as the pod door opened and the outside light emerged. A DaisyBot darted off ahead of the camera, slowly turning bright red, not reflected but emitted, it showed none of the awkwardness moving as it did on earth. The camera from the second DaisyBot following it, zoomed after it gracefully.

“Let's go see what the treasure is, eh Leo,” said Maria as the right hand monitor saw the two DaisyBot's, a red and a green one appear from the top and slowly sink to the bottom.

“I’m controlling the cameras on the green DaisyBot,” said Maria, April is the red.

“Go DaisyBot's..” Shouted Daisy, hugging Ian and giving him a kiss full on the lips.

“Go Daisy!” whispered Jen, prompting Magnus and Alexa on either side of her to smile.

“Wow, this is pretty exciting,” said Magnus, “it does look a bit like ice now Maria is close up. See the blue in it from the reflection, it looks a bit like the dirty ice from the glaciers I remember as a boy in Finland.”

“I remember the same when I was a teenager,” said Alexa, “mother took us down the South Island and we had to walk for ages to get to this glacier. They had roped off the path so far back you couldn't see much, but a lot of people were ignoring the barrier and going to the bottom, where bits had broken off. They said the water fell as rain millions of years before.”

“Dubious!” said Maria, “more like twenty thousand years, however what you are looking at here could be billions of years old as it's been locked below the surface, otherwise it would have boiled off in the vacuum or sublimated. You were correct however Alexa, this is water ice according to the sensors.”

Oh Yeah, she thought. Alexa one, nerds zero!

The camera followed the red DaisyBot as it rose back up, compensating as it panned into the harsh glare of the saucers powerful lights.

“OK kids,” came Maria's voice from the main speaker, “we will have a quick once around the crater to make sure we are not disturbing any aliens, then the bots will begin clearing and sampling the area. The DaisyBot needs to be careful of getting too much dirt on her, the only current method to clean her is to shake or spin.”

“For those interested DaisyBot fourteen will be the one ‘volunteering’ to stay and monitor the seed and nurture it through its growth cycle. She has some special abilities over the normal bots, like four arms, with attachments for drills and shovels, and a small one kilowatt laser, all of which will help her as she is likely not to see us again for a few years.”

As exciting as it was to see robots running around an asteroid three hundred million kilometres away, the crowd started thinning over the course of the hour, especially when they realised that nobody from the Don had any intention, or even means to leave the ship. It seemed the human element was purely symbolic.

“Does nobody read the timetable we put up,” said April disappointed, “we are two minutes away from the boring operation and only twelve people are here!”

“I’m only waiting for breakfast, then to see 'The Don' turn up, who wants to see a boring operation,” said Jen.

“I guess it does say that on the timetable,” said Maria with a resigned voice. “Whoops! Here let me update it.” The words ‘Boring Operations’ were replaced by ‘Laser Boring Operations’ and several people took immediate notice.

“Laser boring!” said Jen, “you're going to shoot a hole through the asteroid! oh my, some people are going to be pretty miffed!”

“I knew,” said Simon, “should be awesome by the way, the OCP has had her generators running at nearly full power and has been charging her accumulators to a hundred percent for the past hour. It's going to use the full one hundred kilowatts for several seconds.. Oh look, the DaisyBot has moved into position.”

The screen now showed a view from each bot which had moved a hundred metres from the centre of the now clear crater. An intense red beam of light immediately hit the centre of the crater, steam and small rocks seeming to float away from it.

“AWESOME!” shouted a few people.

“Oh my!” said Alexa who was nibbling some toast.

“War of the freaking Worlds!” said Terry punching the air, and high-fiving the four guys around the table they sat.

The door burst open and a couple of other people steamed in just in time to see the laser turn off.

“What happened, what did I miss?” said another of the engineers.

“Now the DaisyBot's go in and clean the debris and then we go again,” said Simon.

“Phew,” said Steve walking back in, why did nobody say you were shooting lasers!”

“We are not just shooting lasers,” said April, “this is a precision boring operation, we are basically trying to get to the bottom of a rock pile without it all falling apart, over twenty papers have been written on how you would go about this. We also engaged three scientists who were working with ice core sampling, we basically gave them the specs, what tools we could have and asked all of them how they would go about it, hypothetically of course. Maria has also been the LabAI for twenty three geography and geology departments for the last twelve months.”

Three new bots appeared, one was waiting with what looked like a cross between a shovel and a net. A fourth and fifth bot now appeared and positioned a large fine net in the air. The bots hung there like nothing ever should, then slowly two of them encircled most of the debris, and in a smooth operation bringing the ends together, with four corners held, one towed it off screen. The third bot that was waiting in the wings now moved in and started removing rubble that had accumulated in the area, or was missed by the big net. Rocks and debris they had missed, hung in the air silently, some spinning slowly and waiting their turn to be removed.

“Where is the rubbish being taken?” said Alexa.

“Just dumped under a big net for now to stop the bits floating off as more is put in, most will be put back down the hole and on top of the crater to seal it. Unfortunately we have already made quite a bit of a mess, but we will learn a lot from this for next time, and we are on a bit of a tight timetable.

Sure enough, a few minutes later all the bots again moved out of the way and the intense beam washed over the same place. After three of these cycles, one of the droids moved in, hovering over a five metre diameter hole with straight sides, the bottom was over four metres deep, not smooth and had hundreds of score lines from the laser and shovel.

“About what the guys had predicted,” said April. “Our analysis has come back with mostly loose silicates, calcium, and carbon, with large traces of most of the lighter elements common in the crust of the earth. There are also low traces of metals, and about twenty percent water, CO2 and methane ice, which are what is binding a lot of this together. At this rate we should be on schedule to have the hole sunk about thirty metres for when the Don arrives in about three hours.”

The guys in the Don of course were monitoring this closely. “It is good,” said Nicko in German on their group's video channel, “we should be able to hollow a larger chamber inside and like an igloo we can seal it and bring it up over zero degrees.”

He turned off the screen and again in German said, “Maria, I suggest we go to at least fifty metres as progress seems to be good, the deeper the better it gives us the best protection and allow a greater surface area before it gets closer to the surface.”

“No problem, due to the favourable composition, we have ten hours we can shave off our original timescale, we will use half this to go as deep as we can then we have a contingency if there are any delays,” she said.

“Wonderful!”

Jules walked into their science lab on the Don and everyone immediately switched back to English for her.

“Hey guys, just to inform you we are one hour away from the asteroid. You may hear the occasional noise from minor debris, needless to say it is too small, and too slow to even think about, but I don't want you worrying. Also in thirty minutes when we get to the asteroid we will sound three bells and will cut the acceleration to point three earth gravities. We will orbit around it at an altitude of four kilometres until we are ready to release the package.”

“DaisyBot is going around the ship identifying and securing any loose items. Due to the better results on the radiation shielding we do not need to land, but we do plan to go to zero gravity for about thirty minutes for Naomi to run a couple of other small experiments; before it happens there will be an announcement and we will again sound three bells.”

“Also during zero gravity all the water will be cut off and the doors to the bathrooms and showers will be closed, as will the kitchen as all are unusable. If you start feeling sick then we will try and reduce the time a little, but for now you will just have to be careful and use one of these.” She handed out a few brown bags and the people on the other end of the video call started laughing. Peter and Nicko smiled, joining in the humour.

“Please don't let Naomi catch me barfing on film,” laughed Peter, “I will never live it down.”

As Jules left the room they resumed their conversation in German, going over the last minute checks and remote telemetry from the seed. Three bells sounded from the ship's speaker and as she said they gradually felt their weight reducing, it was weird but not too unpleasant but they found they needed to be careful as moving just felt wrong.

“Don to crew. Acceleration is now zero point three one gravities orbiting the target asteroid, It is recommended that you apply your restraints while sitting and exercise caution when lifting and moving yourself or other items. I will sound three bells and make an announcement before the next acceleration change, over and out.”

People at the three locations watched the progress of the drilling, but by seven PM, the audience was down to Simon, Leo and Hanna, and a few more people at the remote sites more directly involved in the science. They had now excavated the hole down to eighty metres, and progress had slowed due to the distance the bots had to move the debris. Nicko made the call to stop and begin to hollow the chamber at twelve o’clock. By that time everybody in the UK site was in bed. The chamber would take several hours to enlarge, and the AI’s promised to wake everyone up who wanted to, for the final part of the plan.

Throughout the night, all the DaisyBot's worked together, using their small lasers and drill attachments. They were a lot slower than the main laser, but by five AM they had a workable eleven metre diameter chamber hollowed out at the end of the shaft. While three of the DaisyBot's moved the remaining supplies and test equipment from the hold of the OCP into the chamber, another prepared for the backfill operation, yet another filmed it all.

At six AM the internal lighting on the Don started coming up to full brightness, and by six fifteen all five crew were sitting down for a breakfast of muesli or porridge. It was actually a little difficult swallowing in the third gravity and eating and drinking took a special skill.

“Note to future self,” said Jules to on-screen April, “let's orbit at thirty kilometres and stick to point nine gravities or more.”

All four of the others nodded.

“I prefer this lower gravity,” said the DaisyBot unexpectedly and unrequested, and doing a short waltz across the room, spinning then darting back gracefully. Jules scratched her head, wondering what Ian was smoking when designing these!

“When everyone's ready then,” said Jules, shaking her concentration back to the now, “let's get this show on the road. OK guys, is everything prepared? Once we are stationary we will be weightless, though not in free-fall, these are technically the same but we don't know if it will feel the same to us. However, none of us have had any experience in any form of zero gravity, and are likely to make fools of ourselves, so I suggest you get to your workstations and strap down, in practice we completed this in thirty minutes.”

The five people cleaned up from breakfast putting everything into the dishwasher, then the DaisyBot went around with a little vacuum cleaner, picking up crumbs, and bits she had identified from breakfast, and securing any loose items.

“We should maybe get her a little French Maid outfit,” laughed Peter pointing at the DaisyBot with the vacuum cleaner.

“Non,” said Jules in her exaggerated and timeless accent, “only a real French Maid can wear those,” she twirled herself, then forgetting the gravity, almost fell over causing Peter and Nicko to laugh. The DaisyBot had stopped to watch this and twirled itself much more gracefully. All the humans laughed.

“Timeless!” said Matilda.

The three bells sounded and slowly the gravity reduced to zero.

“The Don is at ten metres and holding. Releasing magnetic clamps in hold one and two.” The Don deliberately spoke of itself in the third person vernacular most of the time and it was one thing that separated it from a fully sentient AI.

It was not nauseous, just weird to suddenly have no weight, you could still feel your mass and you still had inertia so it still took the same amount of effort to stop and start your movement.

“Weird, but I could get used to this for a short while,” said Matilda, smiling at Naomi as she connected the blood pressure meter to her left arm.

“Still, it's very bad for the body. Do you feel the difference in how your heart is pumping? We really don't want to be in it for more than a few days, or you will end up like those astronauts who have to be helped from their capsule when they land.”

“OK guys,” said Jules, looking at the high definition feeds from the bots and the ship, “let's get this show on the road.”

It didn't take the bots long to reposition and break down the cargo pods. The guys on the ship, and in six earth research facilities sites followed the progress with great interest, others not so.

“I actually wonder why we even put humans on the ship,” said Alexa, sat with Hardy and David eating a light breakfast. “I mean from everything I can see, they could do everything from here, it's not as if they are getting into spacesuits and taking a walk on the asteroid. Why are we even taking the risk?”

“Oh Alexa!” said Hardy, “where is your sense of adventure! Look how excited everyone is, just knowing there are humans more than three hundred million kilometres distant laying the foundations of our future.. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”

“I’m with Hardy,” said David, “the risk is really small with all the precautions you guys have set up, I doubt they are in any more danger than a transatlantic flight using an old Jet aircraft. I’m really looking forward to my turn!”

“Well you’ll get me up when I have a big open space I can walk around without wearing one of Simon's silly space suits, and certainly not one of those uniforms Jules, Allison, Matilda and Daisy wore.”

Both guys smiled, remembering Alexa's face when the girls came to Simon's birthday party three weeks before, dressed in the original star trek female crew uniforms.

“Had to have been a man who dreamed those up!” she continued, almost red faced for now bringing the topic up.

The noise level in the room went up a notch as the DaisyBot's began manoeuvring the seed and accompanying equipment, and monitoring packages down to the cavern.

“When does the heater get switched on?” said Alexa in an obvious attempt to change the subject and completely ignoring the project checklist on another screen.

“Last thing,” said Helena, requests for obvious information was just something humans did, and even the smartest of them were not immune from asking stupid questions just to make conversation. “Once everything is in and arranged, turned on and tested, the remaining bots will go topside while DaisyBot fourteen will remain.”

Things proceeded quickly from this point. The chamber was sealed with rocks, and some melted ice that quickly refroze, then the whole thing backfilled with the debris taken out. All of this made quite simple due to the lack of any perceivable gravity. It got pretty boring after that, and the saucer resumed its powered orbit to reinstate gravity while they waited.

Inside the chamber the heaters on the seed turned on, and the inside temperature was slowly raised. The light levels were then also raised, and the spectrum tuned to the required optimal.

The organic part of the seed was actually quite small, the majority of the package being the machinery, feedstocks and bio-processors that surrounded it to get it started. The magic began as soon as the cavity rose above zero, and the machine began sinking heated probes deep into the loose silicate mixture.

The guys monitored key indicators like light levels, temperature, oxygen, carbon dioxide, humidity as well as a hundred other markers embedded in the seed package such as pH, conductivity, sugar, salt and other chemical balances from the melted ice. As the temperature rose further, the machine's processors introduced the additional nitrate mixes into the channels created by the probes until all their indicators were green.

“All looks good, now that fourteen reseated the sensor,” said Nicko.

“Getting green lights across the board,” said Peter.

“Me and Karl Confirm,” said Hanna, “I would say you’re all good to return.”

“OK. Take us home Don.” Said Jules with no further ceremony.

With that simple command, the Don broke from its big circle once at the correct trajectory, unnoticed by the crew, and began its acceleration back to earth, the OCP leading.

“It's slow, but a lot faster than nature,” said Hanna to Alexa and David, both standing next to her workstation the next day. “We are already seeing small changes in the oxygen and carbon dioxide balances, which the processor will compensate for when they get past their set-points.”

David looked a lot more interested than Alexa, but Alexa was pretty good at faking interest in science stuff, she found it enthused everyone, including David, to see her interested.

“We should see the inside of the chamber begin to change as the mycelium analogue covers it, then the outside and inside will begin changing composition as it pushes against the silicate and carbon and starts breaking it down. A shame we couldn't keep anything more than a few beetles, those guys won't be worried about boredom and as for DaisyBot, unless she has an internal algorithm for counting sheep..”

“DaisyBot-fourteen will introduce more sleep states into its processor cycles if need be,” said Maria, anyway, it looks content watching the beetles now, they have woken up and it's still got to do all the backup monitoring for the seed.”

“I hope you made sure they are not a mummy and a daddy beetle this time Maria!” Laughed Alexa to a soft sigh from the speaker.

* * *

Even prior to the first mission, the second mission had been progressing slowly. The checklist for this second mission was much bigger, and much, much slower, as it required them to locate suitable resources, create a whole new replicator and disassembler, plus the necessary support equipment, all at four hundred million kilometres distance from the earth.

Due to the distance and the workload on the Research Centres local replicator machines, it took nearly three months until the copy of the replicator currently in the research centre began construction at the chosen asteroid.

“That was the last of the replicator parts?” Said Gianni.

“Yes,” replied Helena, “The Liberator is off-loading them now, and we are moving them in position, however we are waiting one more delivery of the new assembly drones we designed.”

As luck would have it, the rendering and schematic of the new assembly drone was on Giannis screen. Functionally the same as the four armed DaisyBot fourteen, that's where the similarities ended. At the ends of the four arms were much stronger manipulators with three 'fingers' and almost human-like dexterity. The whole exterior was a yellow rubber, leather-like skin, which covered all the joints leaving no exposed areas for either water or dust penetration; It was deemed essential as these guys were going to be working in some pretty poor conditions. They also had double the number of QVThrusters to allow better handling of large assembly jobs, and were also slightly larger than a DaisyBot, the torso being about the size of two large suitcases.

The three AI’s spent a little time trying to work out what the humans would eventually call these, hoping to anticipate it ahead of time, they eventually settled on ConstructaBot.

As if reading Giannis mind, Helena said. “We are thinking of calling them ConstructaBot's, what do you think Gianni?”

“I was just thinking they look a little scary, like wasps and are probably going to scare a few people to death if they ever see one flying at them. I hate to say this, but you should run this past Daisy or Alexa to make them look a bit less threatening.”

Helena [WASPS?]

April [I ran a comparison algorithm there is no match at all between a ConstructaBot and a wasp]

Maria [That seems unlikely, they are both yellow!]

April [So is a banana!] Genuine confusion tag.

Helena [BannanaBot might be a better name for the drone. Humans are not afraid of Bananas]

Maria [..]

“We wanted to make them visually obvious for health and safety, so people could see them,” said Helena without any delay in the conversation, “but I guess we could make the newer ones a bit friendlier looking.”

“You do know that Daisy is just going to suggest we make them pink,” added Maria, “It is very likely the humans will never see these first ones, so let Helena and myself talk to Daisy about making the next ones a bit cuter.”

“Probably for the better,” said Gianni, “also, people like to shorten things yours has five syllables you could get away with ConBot that's only two and more likely to be used, anyway we are going to be making a lot of assumptions based on the fact we don't know what we don't know.”

“But we thought up Eve for the first bot, and they lengthened it to DaisyBot!” said Helena again.

Gianni just shrugged his shoulders.

Maria [Humans!]

“You're right,” said Maria, “though I doubt most problems will be as easily fixed like this.”

Gianni, as usual, had ensued sleeping at his apartment in favour of the cot in the spare office, for his “Power Naps” as he called them, and after two hours sleep was usually back at work. He switched his large high definition screen in the centre back to the visual of the asteroid. The right hand screen was zoomed in on the thirty container sized parts floating like a tiny cloud on the side facing the sun. The asteroid was a monster, the cloud of parts only just being visible as a few pixels when the asteroid was showing its whole thirty six kilometre length in the high definition monitor.

Unlike the movies, asteroids were actually spaced quite far apart, maybe only two or three in the volume of space of the earth. In this case they had been lucky in that there were nearly fifty large objects within half this volume. Most were travelling identical trajectories, if left to nature, and a hundred million more years, they might all coalesce into a single asteroid.

The main asteroid was perfect, and better than the all metal one early visionaries of space mining had thought they would need. It was a real mess of an asteroid by any standard, one quarter of it by mass was iron, with scatterings of most of the other heavier elements. This was surrounded by kilometre thick rock piles of ice and other minerals mostly silicates and carbon from smaller asteroids in the same trajectory that had been pulled in slowly by the tiny gravity field over billions of years.

Due to the early demand on the replicators, their first mission was only sent out with three DaisyBot's, with a mission to map every square metre of the asteroid, using laser spectrometers to get rough ideas of its composition. Most of Giannis team had been working with this data for the last six weeks, trying to inventory and help provide the girls with some insight to the construction phase.

They had decided unanimously to go down their first option, that was to first build a recycler and a large replicator locally, after getting the first preliminary mineral survey back from the DaisyBot's, and a less extensive survey of the asteroids near companions. The three DaisyBot's, having now finished their surveys, had suffered several re-boots, but it had not stopped them starting some of the preliminary assembly. This was speeded up immensely four days later as forty ConBot's shot out of the doors of the PowderPuff.

This first space replicators and recyclers was thus constructed. They were similar in size to the ones on earth but required no vacuum enclosures, and used QVThrusters, rather than magnets and servos. Like the Dusseldorf seed, all of them were located deep in a very large cavern hollowed out for several weeks, with most of the excavated materials being fed into the recyclers.

They found some other advantages from using the micro-sized QVThrusters for positioning, and the newer build head emitters dynamically adjusted much better, there field emitters able to project almost a hundred nanometres, allowing for less precision in its positioning.

Carbon type, or C-Type asteroids, were by far the most common, and these were littered kilometres deep over the iron core, thus sourcing their main build element. Other elements were easily found during the excavation, but a few were completely absent from their survey, so, with the accompanying delays, these were brought from earth while the bots continued to explore, survey, tag and dig deeper into the asteroid and nearby objects for them.

Slowly the new small replicator built a bigger version of itself and the recycler, and then another. As the builds progressed, radiation shielding was added, and they were fed with a larger proportion of local minerals. Slowly, as August came to an end, a few days before the concert, they started the construction of the final much bigger replicator.

The software to control the bigger space replicators was pushing the limits of the three girls and some of the newer faster processors. As always, either more compute capacity or more time was required, it was an easy decision, and the largest, fastest computer core they could envisage was their next item to be replicated, a similar core would become the AI for the new habitat.

## The Concert

Sarah was waiting with great anticipation for Alexa and David's arrival at Rosche Dynamics. Their AI John had been overridden by Maria after checking her appointments, and she then slotted in two hours for the mysterious visit.

“Alexa, David,” she said hugging both at the reception area, “I was tossing up whether it was business or pleasure but decided it must be business.”

“Hey Sarah,” said Alexa. “It's business, but we can do it over a tea and cappuccino in the cafe since it's such a pleasant day.”

Sarah looked at her new receptionist who was writing visitor badges for them, “Adele, Alexa owns half the company, probably half the country now. I'm sure we can dispense with a visitor badge for her and David,” she said sweetly, as the slow receptionist finally put two and two together and froze in terror. “And she is pretty normal and not much older than you so let's be professional.”

“Hi Adele,” said Alexa holding her hand out, “Sarah's right, I don't bite.”

Adele shook it with the weakest shake Alexa had ever experienced, poor girl she was trembling, “Miss,” she said so quietly, it was only by reading her lips you could make out the word. Alexa smiled her least scary smile.

David waved his hand, whispering, “hi.”

Sarah smiled, “Adele will be alright, won't you love? And when you are, could you bring us a pot of tea and a cappuccino out on the patio please.”

“We have two hours till lunch so it should be quiet enough,” Sarah said, leading them through the reception to the cafe and to the shady seat outside, one they always seemed to end up at. It was the second week in September but still surprisingly warm, and without any wind it felt like the perfect day.

One of Sarah's senior engineers, Frank was having a meeting three tables away with another guy she didn't recognise, both pointing things out on a circuit board then tapping on their tablets. It was a common enough occurrence having meetings here in the summer and Frank stopped to wave at Sarah and Alexa before resuming his discussion.

Immediately they sat down, David placed a small shiny black ovoid object on the table, and then opened it, Sarah was a little confused at first as it looked the same as her makeup compact she had in her bag, even having a little mirror at the back. Immediately it opened the background noise, from some air conditioning units, the birds and the two guys faded to a muffled blur. The SilenceCone devices were common enough now that businessmen, politicians and famous people often carried them around for privacy, not that it made any difference to Maria as she could access the device sound processors directly, and in fact had included a specific pin on the processor labelled test point 1, to tap into to simplify doing so if she needed.

Then to Sarah's amazement, the mirror faded to black and a tiny middle aged Eurasian woman appeared, in a business suit and stood exactly in the centre where the face powder would normally be.

“Hi Sarah,” said the little figure in perfect clarity.

“Maria?” she said incredulously and without thinking, moving her finger over to prod the little woman, it shimmered as her finger approached and she withdrew it quickly, “wow, this is amazing, you look real and your voice is so clear, is this some new LabAI unit with a built in SilenceCone? How the hell are you doing that hologram? it looks so real, and what's it projected on?”

Sarah continued rambling on for a few more seconds, wanting desperately to pick it up and examine every detail. She moved her head closer, moving the glasses she had started to wear above her head to see more detail. But looking as hard as she might, she could not see any joins in the case, any speakers, OLEDs, or any of the things she expected to find, and Maria's detail only got better.

“You can pick it up and look at it”, said Maria and Sarah proceed to pick it up.

“Wow it weighs nothing, what the hell is this?”

David smiled, “It's my new phone, and you won't be able to tear it apart as it's graphyne-six and both halves are completely sealed, so best keep any thoughts of getting your screwdrivers out of your purse to yourself.”

“Anyway,” said Alexa, smiling, “you would need a diamond drill not a screwdriver to even make a scratch.”

Sarah popped it back on the table smiling and shaking her head. “Remarkable. Totally remarkable. Graphyne, the one spelt with a Y? That's your better version of graphene, the one that was impossible to make a year ago. Isn't that the same stuff your saucers are built from? And a phone you say? I won't ask how it was built or how it ticks, or even what powers it, because I’m quite sure my degree in electronics wouldn’t prepare me for what is really inside it.”

“Oh you’re family Sarah,” said Maria, materialising a chair and sitting demurely on it, “we’d let you know, but you are going to have to go back to school first, silicon is so last week!”

“Oh my, is this what you want to talk to me about then?”

“Yes, but it's a bit bigger than that,” smiled Alexa. Things are about to change big time and we want to give you and your guys an opportunity to be on the ground floor.”

“Interesting!” She said slowly, “good changes or bad changes?”

Maria explained the replicator to an astonished Sarah, and she immediately saw the implications for the whole of her business. Her countenance slumped lower and lower, as each revelation of its capabilities were revealed.

“Good god!” she looked at Maria and the communications device her avatar was coming from. “You print the whole saucer as a monolithic device! How would any business ever compete against that?”

“They couldn't,” said David deadpan. “But we can see a way of integrating them into the current ecosystem which would complement it, and also allow it to improve a lot. Firstly we would like Rosche-Dynamics to take the lead in this. Maria has designed a new CAD tool which allows you to develop anything from a simple sensor, or microprocessor, all the way up to a whole 3D computer, or to make something like this phone or Alexa's ear stud. So for example if you needed a one off component for something that, say, needed to work at a hundred gigahertz, which would be difficult normally, it could be made and integrated into a normal chip package, with normal circuit interfaces you could use in your designs.”

Sarah nodded, her initial depressed look improving.

“There are restrictions though,” added David, seeing her countenance improve. “The first restriction is obviously that the device is too complicated for humans to understand how it works. Each replicator can fabricate a device up to two fifty millimetres cubed, it has over twenty-four billion processor elements inside it, and is synchronised by code so complicated we have no chance of understanding it. To give you some depth even Maria could not write this, she had to use almost a hundred slave AI systems, some even more powerful than her, to write it. I consider myself at the very top of the current computer technology curve, and after several days of explanation, I believe I understand the principles, however I still feel like a caveman looking at an iPhone.”

“You are of course free to try and build one,” said Maria. “Humanity was well on its way to achieving this without us, and I do believe with sufficient time and resources Simon and the guys would have achieved a smaller less dense version without me. But once you get to a certain density you have to real-time manipulate valency bonds using field emitters. A single emitter, and there are eight billion of them, must do millions of calculations in alignment with adjacent emitters at its edges, and perform trillions of physical manipulations. I think you can see the issue. I will of course publish the paper with the guys, but it is highly unlikely anyone will ever be able to reproduce it.”

“Those numbers are mind-bogglingly scary,” said Sarah, “why even give it to us though?”

“So we can improve development times,” said Alexa. “Even I know, the whole world does not understand how the guys have achieved what they did, it is leading to a lot of speculation, and we need to show it is not magic, just very advanced science.”

“We will be giving you ten of these units,” said Alexa, “along with three weeks intensive training through your company AI to begin using the software. You will also replicate the machines for your first customers which we will be paying you for.”

“Replicators are however slow and complicated, so the charge out time for them will be a lot as you need to make a profit. We expect the majority of your customers to be the major technical universities, and other research institutes.”

“The AI systems running the replicators will have four rules,” said Maria. “The first rule is they will not print anything they consider dangerous. The second rule, and just like ours, they will be limited to four elements, processed by an on-board recycler. We are still working on this four element limitation, but it is surmountable only currently at the cost of massively slowing down the speed, and changing and reworking the area. This is also why we are working mostly with elements like carbon which can form both a structure and a compute element.”

“The third rule, which will only be loosely enforced, is that they cannot be used for mass production, the replicators can make anything your imagination can dream up, but they need to be designed first, they are very slow. We envisage that the parts or devices made will be special order stuff or research stuff and will not compete with the equivalent normally produced parts. So while you are welcome to make a phone with the device, it will probably cost fifty times more than an iPhone 18 and who would write the software to use it?”

“Finally, they will not reproduce copyrighted or patented technology. The replicator itself is smart, and will have the final say on whether there is someone else's intellectual property that has not been correctly licensed, paid for or shared.”

“Wow!” said Sarah, “I must say I am glad you are a shareholder and a friend, the guys are going to love this. Devices like your demodulator we made last year, we had to get some parts specially fabricated, if it was any other customer but you guys, we would not even have considered it due to the costs and risks. We have a few such projects on the drawing board like the one for the new super clear fibre optic cable they are producing, which we want to multiplex..”

“..The replicator could do that,” said Maria, “I have looked at the specification with the team here and we just need a super tolerant prism linked to optical decoders to get the hundred proposed streams out.”

Sarah looked at Maria funny before remembering she was also Mike, their company AI under a different persona. God it was confusing!

“When do you want to do this?”

“We will leave it until after the concert,” smiled Alexa, “I don't want you worrying about stuff until then, plus we have to find a good way to announce it. So mums the word for now.”

They talked a bit more about the technology, and what changes would be required inside and outside the company, it seemed Sarah got hands-on with some of the projects herself, using Mike and her six administration staff to take care of everything non-technical. Then they talked about life and the upcoming concert, which two of the Rosche engineers plus a partner had been invited to attend via a company raffle. It seemed nobody could wait for it.

* * *

Despite the usual unpredictably of the English weather, that second week of autumn had remained about as perfect as it got, with scattered clouds, and a very light breeze from the west cooling the temperature, from its balmy twenty nine degrees the week before, to a comfortable twenty three.

As soon as it looked like the grounds were going to be firm and dry, Sharon organised an area by the lake to be prepared, with a small indoor marquee for a bar, lots of areas under trees, and with shade cloth, and literally hundreds of bean bags, mats, deck chairs and small tables they also hired a proliferation of potted plants, to make the area feel homely.

Much to Matilda's disdain, Sharon had decided on a family friendly line-up, with a relatively unknown but well regarded local band, and four better established international groups or soloists. Most would have happily done the concert for nothing, and the publicity from doing it would certainly help boost sales and reputations.

Alexa walked to the end of the lake with David in her arm, unlike her official work wear she went for totally casual, with cut off jeans, and a white T-shirt saying simply “What is Love?” that Maria had given her for her birthday. David wore his usual chinos, with a black T-shirt, and a blue shirt unbuttoned over it, both also wore hats.

After repeated pestering Sharon, she had agreed to increase the number of attendees to just over three hundred people, over a hundred of those were being flown in from their other facilities, again chosen at random.

By special arrangement with the customs and immigration department, and at exorbitant cost, they had set up a special processing facility so the saucers could bring attendees directly in, and fly them out the next afternoon. As if on cue, a bright pink saucer passed overhead, causing both of them to laugh hysterically, and a not too distant Ian to shake his head wondering what he had gotten into.

Alexa and David came up beside him, his face still holding the resigned expression as he watched the saucers smooth landing inside the fenced area, which the customs and immigration had isolated a hundred metres distant.

“You have to love that girl,” said Alexa, putting her hand around Ian’s shoulder as he was walking over.

Ian looked at her and smiled, “she is pretty special, but I wonder if the group knows they will be exiting a bright pink saucer.”

“Oh don't worry.” Came Maria's voice from an equally bright pink DaisyBot, “it's that Korean girl band Goyangi-i, Goyangi-i.”

Alexa was just thinking she would need to hear that repeated about ten times before she could even pronounce it.

Maria continued, “Daisy was so excited, she insisted on picking them up directly from the old North Korean capital where they had just played a reunion concert the night before. The local news sites were all over them leaving.”

The DaisyBot was hovering a metre above the grass, and holding a tray of drinks. People were still getting used to the fact that things could fly now. Hardy had bought an old Delorean car, and he, Ian, and Simon were doing a little side gig with a local garage to add QVThrusters to it. The boys were all so sure a flying car would be the next big thing.

“That's champagne on the right, the ones on your left are the non alcoholic ones.”

David looked at Alexa who smiled cheekily and he grabbed two from the right.

After a sip of the champagne, she said to Maria and Ian, “well done guys, I see you’ve sorted the stability problem out perfectly, I would have been scared to death a month ago having the DaisyBot's holding anything fragile like drinks down here.” The ‘down here’ part obviously referring to earth.

“All of us girls are here,” said Maria, “there's five of me, and three each of Helena and April, it is really nice actually being looked at when being talked to, rather than being talked around, we should have done this a lot earlier.”

“I certainly prefer these robots to those black ball things that do the guard duty,” said Alexa, “they just give me the creeps when I see one out of the corner of my eye.”

“Shh!” The DaisyBot whispered, “those are still sort of secret, to keep the bad guys away, anyway they are only black to hide from you at night, the ones above our heads now are blue.”

All three humans scanned the sky for several seconds, even moving their sunglasses aside, “I can't see anything,” said David for everyone, “where are they?”

“I can see all twelve, your human eyes must be really bad, OK look directly above me about fifty metres.”

All heads looked directly up, again they didn't move for a few seconds.

“Here,” said the DaisyBot, and the sky wobbled a little bit in a certain spot.

“Wow, that stealth is so much better than the saucers,” said Ian, “I think I can still see it if I squint.”

“They are not sinister, and I have a surprise later, you’ll see how sweet they are.”

April [As long as you are not attacking us with guns]

Maria [shh!]

There was a little applause and a few cat whistles, and the three people looked towards the saucer which had now opened up. Three girls, who looked no more than sixteen and were dressed like characters out of a Japanese anime cartoon, walked out, three large cases floating out after them, bobbing up and down in harmony. All came to a rest next to the bemused customs officials.

“You have to be kidding me!” said David, ignoring the girls and looking straight at the luggage, “those are straight out of a Terry Pratchett novel!”

“That was all me,” said Maria's DaisyBot proudly, “and you are sort of correct, in the Discworld novels though they had legs and personalities, these just follow your phone. I know, I know, but I keep seeing you guys struggling with your luggage and thought, hmm, I could fix that.”

“Very impressive,” said Alexa, “I hope you have like a billion in production, because once people get wind of what those girls have, you are going to be pestered to death. Oh and by the way I really want one.”

“Me too,” said Ian.

“I’ll pass, I travel pretty light,” chipped in David, nonchalantly.

“Most people seem to be looking at the girls luggage more than them..” Laughed Alexa. “Oh no, here comes Daisy.”

Daisy walked out of the saucer and straight to the three girls, who all started giggling more, she then saw Ian, and rushed over towards the fence, before a stern looking immigration guy called her back.

“They are on third, about three o'clock,” said the DaisyBot following them as they moved away from the security fence. “The stage extends over the lake at its narrowest part and is raised a metre giving people a good view from the shore, nobody will need to be more than thirty metres away. There is also a dance area in front and a DJ that will come on after the last act. Most bands are running around a forty-five minute set but the timing is pretty relaxed, and if they want to add or remove a couple of songs that would be fine. Sharon is already on her third champagne so I expect her to be long past caring soon.”

“First group is on at one, they are a local three piece band Sharon said are pretty sweet, they are setting up on stage now and will start in about twenty five minutes. No cameras allowed, as we agreed, but I did promise all the bands I would provide them all with edited highlights of their performances and put it on YouTube for them to share the royalties, hence all the hidden drones buzzing around the stage. None of them have their usual support crews, so I am doing the mixing and lights for them too.”

Just then the three Korean girls, all came out of the processing area with Daisy, and made a bee line for Alexa and David. Their comical luggage, bobbing along in a different direction, behind another pink DaisyBot.

“Be nice,” said Maria, “they have been practising their English for the last week, and this unit is their dedicated translator, I will follow them to keep them company and help translate when Daisy is not around.”

“Hi guys.” Alexa waved cheerfully as they came closer, and the girls all rushed up. They really did look like they were just out of school, though she found out later that two of them were older than her. Their matching frilly micro dresses left nothing to the imagination and made Alexa wonder exactly who their target audience really was!”

“Alexa, Alexa, Alexa.” They all rushed up swamping her and talking to her, their English a bit difficult to understand, but after what Maria said she made the effort to say some slow words. She introduced David as her boyfriend, and, much to her amusement, he got the same treatment. She could see he was a little uncomfortable with this little man fantasy, and rather than being jealous of him surrounded by pretty girls was quite endeared by him. Ian got it even worse with Daisy getting in on the act, and Maria in her DaisyBot disguise being begged to take a picture of them, and to be in the pictures herself.”

Alexa and David had little say in this photo fest, with every combination of all of them being tried, until they had exhausted every binary combination possible.

The place was now starting to fill out as people arrived, it was a small crowd, and Alexa knew almost everyone except for the occasional “plus one” who were usually introduced frantically. She and David eventually found a few beanbags under an empty shade cloth, and plonked themselves down just as the notes from the first group started up. It was a good song to start with, the build up was slow, and it gave Maria time to work on the lighting, which was difficult with alternate clouds and then blazing sun. It would hopefully get better for the finale as it got closer to sunset.

“I hope you are not going to be closing your eyes tonight with me, and thinking of those three little kitty-cats?” she cooed into his ear finally nibbling it a little like he liked.

“Be careful what you wish for my little vixen,” he smiled back and tickling her into submission.

Jen and Magnus moved over, dragging bean bags and plonked themselves excessively close.

“Don't mind us,” said Jen from below her sunglasses. She was also wearing a sombrero and a cute yellow dress, she had certainly upped her game from jeans and T-shirts over the past few months.

“Hey Magnus!”

“Hi Guys.” Magnus had gone for a slightly unshaven look, with an open shirt and Bermuda shorts and flip flops, Jen loved it, Alexa also thought he looked cute.

April floated over with her tray. Including some cocktails and a plate of sandwiches. “This is kind of fun, I could really get used to being a waitress, nobody notices you.”

“Alexa used to do that two years ago, back when she worked for a living, they definitely noticed her..”

“What the.. Jen!”

“Alexa was a waitress?” said David interested.

“Oh the eyes she would give her clients to get an extra pound in the tip jar..”

“Jen I never..”

They were interrupted by a lot of screaming and clapping as one of the saucers hovered over the band, suddenly a hundred different coloured lights shined down around them pulsing to the drum and guitar beat.

“Oh wow April, that's amazing!” screamed Jen as everyone started taking notice and clapping or tapping to the beat.

“Oh, the afternoon has just begun,” the DaisyBot said back.

* * *

It did not feel like a day for mingling and relationship building, it felt like a day for relaxing with the people you loved, and that was what most of the people did, talking occasionally between bands, drinking, dancing, or just relaxing to the music.

As they were clapping, just at the end of the first group, a young, sad looking girl walked over, accompanied by another pink DaisyBot. By that time their little private place had acquired several more people, and a few of the other guys had moved their bean bags, towels, sun loungers or whatever to take advantage of the any shade.

“Oh my,” said David, noticing the girl, and disentangling himself from Alexa and the beanbag. “Just be a minute, someone I really want to meet.”

He walked over to her and started talking excitedly. Alexa was too far away to listen, but the young girl's smile grew as she talked with David, then he walked her over to Jules, and the three of them were soon laughing and chatting together.

Alexa was too relaxed to notice, her eyes were closing under her sunglasses engrossed in the music. The sun was moving around enough, that the edge of the sailcloth was letting little bars of light move over her bare legs, and she was glad she had put on sunscreen. She suddenly felt her toes being tickled and woke from her little snooze with a start. The next band were playing some soft acoustic songs, and she heard three voices talking away in French and laughing, she was about to doze-off again, when she felt her toes being tickled again. She opened her eyes, realising that David was one of the people talking in French, Jules was the other, and the now considerably happier young girl was the last.

Her arms found David's, and she pulled herself back into a seating position finding herself the centre of the three people, the new girl was familiar somehow. Moving her glasses aside, she saw and heard the new girl talking a little more rapid fire French. “Oh come on guys, you’re showing-up my total lack of culture here!” Then looking at the new girl said, “hi, I’m Alexa.”

“Hello Alexa, I am Annette.” Alexa's mind clicked, remembering she was the singer who was the last act, and from the few songs she had listened too from Davids playlist felt she knew her a little. From dealing with Jules and a few of her French friends, at least knew what friends did in this situation.

“Enchant, Annette.” She moved in and kissed both cheeks, and then gave her a hug, then did the same to Jules. She stuck her tongue out at David playfully, getting a smile in return.

Jules said something quickly and everybody laughed, “I am sorry Alexa, your pronunciation was beautiful, but I had to tell Annette that you have now used up every single French word you know. Annette is still a little green herself, not using English much until recently, but she really wanted to meet you and say hello.”

“You may not know it, Alexa, but one of my songs is about you, how money does not have to..” She said something in French and repeated Jules word, “..corrupt and how one girl can make a difference, it is called Bon Chance.”

“That song is about Alexa?” Jules said in English, “wow, it is my favourite.”

“It is a favourite of mine too, Annette,” said David incredulously, “though now I know, I will be listening to the lyrics a lot harder. Alexa remembered liking the song too even though she did not understand any of the lyrics, now she felt a bit guilty.

“I was just a lucky girl who had a very smart grandfather,” she smiled. “I am not sure I deserve such a beautiful song..”

Annette smiled, “Not just luck Alexa. It is the fact you still tell yourself that story, while your people and companies re-define and re-educate the world. That makes you special to so many people, including me.”

The others had gone quiet, both smiling at her confused, and slightly embarrassed look. An April DaisyBot in a green-stripped colour scheme came over saving her reply, and the conversation again drifted back into French. Alexa was content to listen to them and the music, exchanging smiles with Annette, while David ran his fingers over her bare legs.

She must have drifted back off to sleep for a few moments as David nudged her again, and she caught the end of some broken English with her name.

“Just wave,” he said, “you missed the first bit, where they said this song is for you.”

She got up and waved at the three Korean girls, who moved into their little synchronised pop number, several people were dancing including Daisy, so she thought, why not.

“Hey guys, I’m going for a little dance, I will catch you soon, unless of course you want to do some dancing?” Surprisingly it was Annette who got up with her, and for the next twenty minutes they had a great time all dancing around to the weird but very danceable k-pop. One of the DaisyBot's was on stage with them and in an obviously rehearsed scene followed the girls moves exactly, the colour almost exactly matching their skimpy dresses. It was a lot more fun than sitting around, and Annette danced next to her the whole time, looking a lot happier and seemingly having a great time.

Alexa had no idea of the biology involved, but she needed to pee about twenty minutes ago and didn't now. The music chose that minute to end, and as it finished she saw Hardy and his boyfriend, with Jessica, Allison and Emily one of the gardeners, who she often passed when jogging, and who she hardly recognised in her nice summer dress.

“Hey guys, I would like to introduce you all to my new friend Annette. Annette, this is Hardy, Jeremy, Jessica, Allison and Emily.”

Of course every single one of them spoke French to some degree too, making Alexa feel a little inadequate. She made her excuses and quickly disappeared to find the nearest toilet, which luckily was only twenty metres away behind a screen.

“Maria, when does Annette need to prepare to go on stage?” she said as she came out.

Another DaisyBot spun into view and came up to her, she wondered how many Maria was really controlling, there looked to be a lot more robots than she mentioned earlier, not that it mattered.

“Maybe another two hours at the current estimate, I have rehearsed the music arrangement with her, so she just needs to queue it up with me.”

The next band were just introducing themselves as she got back to Hardy's group, everyone there seemed to be enjoying themselves so she looked out for someone not. She waved and chatted to several groups before zoning in on Matilda and Sarah, both of who seemed to be alone. She grabbed both of them and dragged them up to dance. This new group was an American blues rock band, and it was just her luck they had started with a danceable track. The saucer was back with the pulsating down facing lights and several people were up dancing already.

She excused herself off after thirty minutes, waving at a few people, talking to others then collapsing on David just as their last song was fading. She clapped enthusiastically through the next group, enjoying the time in David's arms. Matilda and Leo walked over with Annette, led by Maria and all chatting and laughing in Spanish. “Maria, can everybody here speak multiple languages apart from me?”

“Well I can speak every language so I assume you are excluding me, and Jen is totally useless as well, but pretty well eighty percent of your staff speak more than one language. Some of them three, and Pat speaks six, though he admits he's very rusty.”

“Six! Wow, a man of hidden talents! What's with Matilda? I never knew she could speak Spanish.”

“I've been teaching her these last six weeks, do you really think that the love-hate relationship between her and Leo is purely work?”

Alexa berated herself for not noticing the interplay between the two before.. “And Annette of course speaks Spanish?”

“And Italian, German and Arabic. We only started speaking a few months ago when she contacted me, we started in French but changed to English soon after, she is an amazing learner, and has a natural ability.”

Alexa nodded, impressed. “Should I get her for her set?”

“I think she would like that, she really likes and admires you.” Alexa had got that impression too and was really happy it was mutual.

She stepped over. “Hi guys, Annette's due to go on soon, any chance I can steal her away, I promise we have all tonight and all of Sunday to talk again.”

“Thank You Alexa, I was about to go off with the DaisyRobot machine,” she pointed at the one Alexa was just talking to and looking at her fondly. Alexa held her hand, and the two girls followed the DaisyBot to the stage.

“I think my songs are a little sad,” she said as they made the short walk. It was a little after seven and the sun was just below the trees. Some of the sets had run a little late, but nobody cared.

“Sad songs are also beautiful. Not everything in life is beautiful. Happiness, beauty and love have no meaning if they are not contrasted with sadness.”

Annette held both her hands, “Please sit with me while I sing my first song if it is not too much to ask.”

“Of course I will, Annette,” she said genuinely. There really was something about Annette she just liked.

They spent another ten minutes talking with the band members of the previous session, before walking on stage. Dozens of football sized orbs popped into the sky above the stage out of nowhere, illuminated in various colours, and intricately moving amongst each other in a complicated pattern. The light played across the stage and the girls. They were quite beautiful, and Alexa revised her first impression of them.

Annette motioned Alexa to her side next to the microphone, and took it from its stand as the crowd quietened. “My name is Annette, and I am so happy to be able to come and sing today for a bunch of people I have admired from afar. This is my first concert in the British Isles, and in English so please bear with me if I make any mistakes.”

She had obviously rehearsed the words as they were actually flawless.

Annette looked at Alexa. “I find I sing better when I am singing about a friend or a person I love. You all, and especially Alexa here, have made me feel so welcome today, and although she won't understand it, this first song is about her..”

“I think poor Alexa is in tears,” said Jen to David, as Annette's hauntingly beautiful melody was sung with a passion that made everyone realise why she was in such big demand. The song finished to rapturous applause which she accepted modestly.

“I will let your little princess go now, but I would ask her not to go too far.”

Alexa embraced her warmly as they walked to the edge of the stage, saying quietly, “that was beautiful, thank you.”

At the end of the stage, she said quietly, “stay close to me Alexa.”

The next three songs were all new, Annette surprising everyone with them, and including in the last several English verses. For the fifth song, the previous band came back on stage, picking up their old instruments, and the mood became more happy as she sang the vocals on one of the bands better blues rock anthems, a song that lasted over twelve minutes, the final five minutes a duet with the bands lead singer. She kissed and hugged each band member as they went off to rapturous applause.

“I have one more song this evening, one I have never done, but one I know really well. It is also a song my little DaisyRobot friend tells me that a certain lady we all know sings everyday in the shower. Unfortunately my little DaisyRobot also tells me it is the most awful singing, and she thinks it will be good if I help her. She also tells me that this last one will not be broadcast to anybody, so it is just a little fun between friends. So if I can invite my singing partner back on stage.”

The crowd started clapping along with Annette, and Alexa realised there would be no escape she went back on stage..

“I have also been asked that you should picture yourself naked, and holding the shower-head as your microphone, like you usually do!”

She handed a second microphone to a little embarrassed Alexa, “I am not sure who to kill after this, but I have got a pretty good idea, so I will apologise in advance to everyone here.”

They managed not to butcher the song too much, and despite the embarrassment, Alexa enjoyed herself. They finished up accepting the applause, taking a bow together and Alexa giving Annette a small kiss on the lips.

“Thank you everyone, and now Miss Alexa has had her five minutes of fame, I have been told the party will continue all night with our resident DJ Maria..”

The girls came off stage arm in arm smiling and laughing. Abba’s Dancing Queen started up, Maria having analysed every song in history to see which one most people danced to and sure enough, her algorithm did not fail.

* * *

Last minute sleeping arrangements were made for Annette to stay in Alexa's house. Luckily David was a bit of a minimalist, and his small wardrobe and possessions were mostly in Alexa's room, the rest soon exchanged for Annette's equally small travelling wardrobe by a DaisyBot while they all partied.

The party finished at midnight, the seven people strolling the eight hundred metres back to the house, and having nightcaps of hot chocolates, teas or coffees in the living room which had thankfully grown an extra sofa.

There was also no repeat of Hardy's impromptu engagement party, most people spending the night dancing rather than drinking and remaining relatively sober. Jen and Alexa by a coincidence were both ready for jogging at seven AM, and went out together making the most of another beautiful morning. Magnus had started jogging with Jen but due to careless lack of attention in the sunscreen department, was mostly hurting and bowed off.

David and Annette were sitting on the outside table by the conservatory when the girls returned thirty minutes later, both were drinking coffee and taking advantage of the beautiful morning. Bella walked out of the kitchen.

“Hi Alexa, Jen, if you two girls get showered I’m about to make us all a nice breakfast.” She then walked to Annette, looked at Jen and Alexa and said something in French which both David and Annette laughed at.

“What the..” Alexa started in disbelief, “does everybody in this place speak another language.”

David got up and walked over to her, grabbing her in for a big kiss, “You speak the language of love better than any person I know.”

“It is the only language you need,” smiled Annette.

“You guys should get a room,” said Jen with a wicked smile.

“Hmm,” said Alexa dreamily, and purring like a cat as David rubbed his hand down her back. “Maybe we should!”

“I think the Liberator is heading for a lunar rendezvous today, maybe Alexa and David should go do some environmental testing..” Said Hardy as he walked out with a coffee, smiling.

Alexa sighed, “awe guys, way to spoil a perfect moment!”

Hardy walked over and hugged Annette, then said something to her, obviously explaining the joke, and probably letting her in on one of their companies biggest secrets, Alexa for some reason felt quite comfortable with it. Annette giggled hysterically, high-fiving Hardy and looking at Alexa and David.

“So.. So Naughty!”

“Please don't write a song about it!” Alexa begged her with puppy dog eyes.

“Never my dear Alexa, your little small step, as Hardy said, is safe in my heart..” Her new compact phone rang.. “..Pardon,” she wandered off into the garden speaking quietly.

Jen, now sufficiently cooled down, went off for a shower and to check on Magnus.

“I better go and shower too!” said Alexa

“Let me know if you need your back washing,” David winked as she walked off.

“No rest for me today unfortunately,” said Hardy. “Me and Jeremy will be going through some of Alexa's old furniture with Sharon in an hour, she said there's a Chippendale cabinet and some pictures and statues which are a bit too risqué for a corporate headquarters if we want them. Then it's back to work.”

“I can't wait to see your house when it's finished, you both have really good taste,” said David.

“You are setting a high bar,” smiled Hardy, “good and simple are two different animals.”

They both laughed, noticing a white DaisyBot wandering onto the patio area.

David looked at the DaisyBot as it diverted to them, then over at Annette. “You know that woman over there is very complicated, last night was the first time I have ever seen her happy. She has about a million videos, she is never smiling in any, but yesterday and this morning I saw another girl.”

“There is something about her isn't there? a little bit, undefinable,” said Hardy, also looking at the girl. “I have never seen two people take to each other so well, it was like her and Alexa were soulmates.”

“Annette is pretty special. She definitely has some very special wiring in her brains language areas,” chipped in Maria as the DaisyBot turned pink. “I have analysed most of her public archive and she picks up languages, words and nuances like I have only observed in a few individuals, I expect she has retained all the additional words and nuances from the conversations last night and this morning.”

“I guess that explains the beautiful way she puts words together,” smiled David, “that was my first comment to her yesterday.”

“Fascinating!” said Hardy, “so she is basically a language genius, *and* one of the most famous singers in the world. And she is only twenty years old!”

“She was home-schooled for seventeen of those years and only spoke French, it was only by chance she was discovered,” said Maria. “It makes me sad that there may be hundreds of Annette's out there who do not get the right nurturing to shine.”

“You know, Alexa, thinks most of her fortune is due to luck and her grandfather,” said Maria, “but she also possesses a similar skill for empathy, reading people and making correct decisions. I have noted it every time she is put in that situation, even if she does not make the correct call, it is because she has forced someone else to make that correct call and then deferred to them. That is why I am usually happy to defer to her no matter how crazy something sounds.”

“I agree,” said Hardy, “she definitely has an uncanny ability to make correct decisions even where she knows nothing about the subject.”

“Together they make a wonderful team don't you think?” said David.

Maria, April and Helena had come to the same conclusion sixteen hours earlier.

“..Well maybe as long as Alexa lets Annette do the singing,” Hardy said and they all laughed.

* * *

After breakfast, everyone disappeared, and with another four hours until Annette was due to depart, Alexa took her for a walk on the forest trail, part of which they used for jogging.

“Please tell me we will meet again soon,” Alexa said as they made their way along the path out of her house, “I feel a beautiful connection with you, like that of someone I have known all my life.”

Annette listened intently and said something in French. Alexa noticed Annette's new sapphire ear stud and twigged immediately that she was asking Maria for a translation. She heard the very quiet buzz of Maria's voice in the background, that same voice would be coming into Annette's ear with crystal clarity.

“I am translating what you said to her,” Maria said to Alexa through her ear-stud, “she said she thought she understood but wanted to be sure.”

Annette's smile grew and she stopped, taking Alexa's hand in hers. “I also feel a sense of right, of happiness when I am around you, like all my problems are insignificant. You feel like a lost sister, one I do not want to let go.”

“Sister!” Alexa repeated, looking into the other girls eyes and smiling. “I like that.. Sister. But you said problems? I only see a young, beautiful, talented and famous musician, what possible problems..”

Annette smiled. “Problems Maria mostly solved for me weeks ago, the reason I learnt about the concert; the reason I wanted to be here, and the reason I wanted to meet you. I still need to fulfil my commitments, and then find a permanent place to live..”

“..You are welcome to stay here with us for as long as you ever need, I think I have found the new permanent owner for David's old room.” Alexa interrupted.

Annette's smile widened and the hold became an embrace. They continued their walk as Annette told Alexa her story; About an illegal seven year contract, made while Annette was a minor, and which Maria broke her from, then about the hundreds of thousands of euros, that they found had been embezzled by her former manager, and the apartment that was never in her name. It was a web Maria, her lawyers and the French legal system were still untangling, but despite all this, Annette was the happiest she had ever been.

Annette left for Paris three hours later to tie up loose ends, fulfil her commitments and then would come back to Alexa's house, to live, to be away from the publicity for a while, and to write more songs.

* * *

Of course everybody thanked Sharon for a wonderful day, even though she slept through most of it under a tree on a beanbag.

## From Here to There

The Lagrange point L1 was about one point five million kilometres away on a straight line from the earth to the sun, and was the point where the gravity of the sun cancelled out the gravity of the earth. Theoretically an object parked there would never move, though in practice there were other forces at play.

L1 was however a safe point to hang around for a saucer, as anyone looking at them from earth would be looking straight at the sun, and were going to have so many layers of filters on them, that they had no chance of seeing anything. There were a couple of old NASA and ESA probes out here too, but they were pretty easy to avoid as it was a fairly big area, and they were looking for other things in other directions. Thus the microscopic trace of the PowderPuff as it accelerated at one gravity in its thirty kilometre diameter orbit around the point was undetectable.

The whole team of Magnus, Jen and Daisy went up, with Ian also along to keep Daisy from being lonely, and for moral support. Ian had no pretences he would be useful to the guys in their science stuff, but, with Allison and Maria, had agreed to go through the user interfaces in the saucer to see what if any improvements could be made. It seemed a pointless task in an age where the user would just mention to Maria that the font was too small, or could she add this or that to a screen. But people were also fickle, and ad-hoc changes like this made for a bad interface overall, so Maria had been recently just adding them as suggestions to go through review with the human Interface experts, Allison and Ian having been assigned this position.

The guys had basically moved their whole lab into the saucer. It was too cramped in the small room reserved as a lab so they had also taken over most of the common area, as well as a cabin for storage. The one table remaining in the common area now doubled for both meetings and eating.

At this moment in time, Magnus and Daisy were gathered around this table, each with tablets and each deep in thought. Jen was at the most recent wormhole generator, swiping up the debug log from the last run and wondering, like the others, why it had suddenly and unexpectedly stopped working after the largest bang they had ever heard. One that nearly scared the life out of everyone on board.

“This makes no sense,” she said aloud to herself, the frustration obvious in her mind. “It must be a physical failure. I'm going to have to open the case and extract the substrate and have a look under the microscope,” She glanced around for her tool kit wondering why in god's name they had designed the top plate with fourteen M4 hex head screws to secure it.

“Daisy, can you grab me one of the new QM8 substrates from the spares box please? I may as well change it out for the new type while I have the case off.”

“I can do that Jen if you want,” volunteered Ian, trying to find something useful to do, “I won't be a second.”

Ian disappeared back into the spare room, where all the bits not currently needed had been stored, and started rummaging through an equipment case under Maria's guidance. Jen was onto screw seven when he finally got back.

“Thanks Ian, any chance you could unpack the microscope as well, we might need it to inspect this little bugger, when I get it off.. Damn!”

She cursed as the screw she had just loosened fell on the bench and bounced somewhere on the floor; visibly frustrated she then crouched down to look for it, sighing and thinking some days were just like this.

Ian had gone back into the workshop to get the microscope.

“You need a hand Jen?” said Daisy, looking up solemnly from her work, and noticing her crawling around the floor frustrated.

“Nah all good, but you should help Ian set up the microscope.”

“On it. I'm going around in circles here anyway, none of those last results make any sense at all, I wonder if the substrate failure happened earlier and affected those readings too?”

Jen finally found the screw, but banged her head hard on the bottom of the desk getting up, she held in another curse, closing her eyes and counting to ten, not wanting to bring the sombre atmosphere down even further. As she looked back up, instinctively looking for the spot her head hit she saw a strange indent in the underside of the table. It was like somebody had taken a ping pong ball and forced it into clay, but the desk was a plastic coated chipboard not clay and there was no ping pong ball, then she looked back down.

She was still crouched there two minutes later when Ian and Daisy came back rolling the massive microscope.

“Er guys,” she said quietly, “you need to take a look at this..”

Five minutes later all four of them were still crouched under the desk. Luckily for Maria everyone had the new diamond ear studs so slowly she realised what the excitement was about.

“So you found this directly below it on the floor?” said Daisy examining the slither of substrate with some tweezers.

“Yes, I ignored it at first as junk as I was looking for the screw, but then I saw it was a QM7, and the edges of it were just wrong; It was like they had been sliced off with a laser, and those threads on top, looked like hairs, then it hit me, that it was the same shape as the indent in the table.”

“Hey guys, you don't need to hold your meeting down there, there is a perfectly good meeting table you can talk at you know?” commented Maria.

They got up, the three scientists clearly excited, with looks on their faces like the manager of a football team in the world cup final, with one final penalty to take to win the match.

“Ian?” said Daisy, slowly. “Just for scientific purposes, can you try and describe and explain what you just saw?”

“Well I don't understand any of your modem stuff Daisy but it looks like that piece of silicon wafer fell to the ground from out of that hole as it fits exactly the diameter, but that doesn't make any sense unless it somehow teleported there..”

He never finished before all three of them grabbed on to each other jumping, laughing and weeping. Daisy Noticed Ian's confusion and grabbed him kissing him long on the lips..

“..It did teleport there?” he said shocked.

Maria [Oh my]

April [They shouldn't jump to conclusions until we have repeated it and found out what happened. Also it could be dangerous]

Helena [Agree, I hope they don't start mating again!]

It was a more excited and determined group of people who resumed looking at the problem.

“We need to reproduce the experiment,” said Magnus, but reading everyone's other concern added. “But we were also lucky, we have seen what it did to the table, I am sure none of us want something like that appearing inside our bodies, or in a vital part of the ship! So until we can examine all the facts, and come up with a plausible explanation, it's back to examining and documenting everything perfectly so we can replicate it.”

Maria continued, “Magnus is correct, also we don't have any more QM7 substrates to reproduce the anomaly, only the newer QM8 ones. We do have the readings of every single sensor up to and at the time of the failure. I am sorting through them now, the only one that I cannot determine one hundred percent is where exactly we are in relation to the Lagrange point, this is because we are accelerating in a powered circular orbit to give you guys gravity. It is a nine hour trip back home and we can use that time productively, analysing the data and preparing a better remotely-controlled experiment that can be sent back.”

“I agree,” said Jen, “there is a lot of data to unpack and I'm already thinking we don't need to be here for this so let's head home.”

“It's four PM now guys,” said Ian, “if we rush home it will be the middle of the night, so we may as well sleep in the PowderPuff and wake up at home tomorrow morning.”

“I'm sure I won't be able to sleep tonight anyway,” said Magnus, “but maybe Daisy can get the ship on its way and time our landing for eight AM.”

The four agreed and Daisy headed for the bridge unnecessarily to get them under way.

They actually achieved a lot that night. Jen finally removed the cover off the wormhole generator unit and they were all amazed to see the perfect circle in the centre of its emitter substrate, with the microscopic sensor and power wires coming from the top input/output board, severed in a perfect sphere.

They measured as exact as they could the distance from the two events, as six hundred and seventy millimetres, the diameter of the 'hole' at twenty two millimetres, and then spent an excited four hours around the presentation display with their touchscreen pens highlighting various results and terms. These hours were unfortunately very boring for poor Ian though, who, though highly intelligent himself, had no real clue what was going on. He happily spent those hours relegated to making cups of tea, re-heating some pies for their dinner and giving Daisy occasional shoulder rubs. Still he was happy to see everyone all so excited.

* * *

The PowderPuff landed in the Research Centre at eight AM to a damp, cold and grey autumn morning. It was everything in fact that typified late November in England. Maria had asked for some volunteers to unload the lab kit off the saucer, and as it was cooks day off, Alexa and Bella helped Cooks assistant Jeanette, make a cooked breakfast for the returning heroes.

Hardy was also waiting, excited. He, Jen and Magnus had discussed the possibility of the new expansion term for months, but with the concert, and the missions on-going, it was the first time they could get a saucer for an extended trip. Now they had an actual phenomenon, real data and what hopefully should be an easily reproducible experiment.

“Hardy!” cried Alexa as Jen dropped her fork and rushed out of the canteen, “you should at least let the guys finish their breakfast!”

“Wasn't me!” he said defensively, “I was just asking Daisy here if the chip that teleported was damaged in any way”

“I think she has gone to get the piece of substrate, probably remembered that we have a much better electron microscope in Simon's lab that we can control automatically so we can go through it while you guys talk through the maths.” Said Helena.

“Yes, clever girl,” said Helena five minutes later.

Ten minutes later Jen returned a bit sweaty and gulped down the whole of her orange juice before finishing her cold scrambled eggs and toast.

* * *

“OK,” said Maria two days later, “we have three different theories which may fit, and we need to fabricate a portable lab with the older substrates to try each independently, so you guys are not exposed to danger.”

“Cover all the bases,” said Jen.

“Jen's right,” said Hardy, “and if you can think of anything else to monitor, however silly we should add them to the three experiments. Maria, can you search through science fiction for anything we may have missed, those guys come up with some crap, but every once in a while there is a gem, and I know there have been thousands of books on wormholes and teleportation.”

“OK, I'm sure I can find something more sensible than putting a man and a fly in the same pod.”

Hardy rolled his eyes, “you know what I mean!”

“I think theory three is an outlier,” said Daisy, once the giggles had died down, “it could produce over-unity in certain scenarios, and while I'm all for breaking physics again, that one doesn't feel right.”

“Daisy is probably right,” said Hardy, “but as Jen says we should cover our bases as there may be something else we are missing, remember our QVCells broke over-unity until we realised where the excess energy was coming from. Add the QM8 substrate to the tests, it may have just been coincidence the QM7 worked.”

“Will do. You guys should all get some rest, you've been working eighteen hours days,” said Maria, “it's going to take the rest of the week to review the design, then several hours on the small replicator, then another nine to transport anything up to L1.”

“Nah, I'm good, too excited to rest. You know there is a closer Lagrange point, the one between the earth and the moon?” said Magnus, “I think we should cover our bases and run a set of experiments there too”

“There are five of them,” said Daisy. “Should we do them all?”

Jen, Hardy and Magnus looked at each other nodding.

“Yes,” they said.

“OK, then we need more replicator time and more ships so it could be two or three weeks, gives us plenty of time to get it right and hopefully give yourselves a nice Christmas present.”

* * *

Four days after the guys returned from their experiment at L1, the Mike Dietrich had flown to Canada. Alexa and Simon were sitting in the common room of her saucer, with Maria, Jen and Hardy at the other end of the big screen. Alexa was talking.

“..Yes, we got a provisional agreement to allow us to put a space port, and re-purpose several of the buildings for the new education facility. Also as part of the ninety-nine year lease the government will provide a dedicated on-site customs and immigration facility. We were pretty vague on further details, so again I expect the press and social-media to have a field day. Unfortunately the government kept us too busy to go to Jules and Annette's talks, though Maria gave me a translation last night when Simon and I eventually got back. The two girls stayed on for the formal dinner afterwards so will be joining us in an hour.”

“I think we all got our first proper night of sleep here,” said Jen. “The last four days have been the most exciting and frustrating of my life, but the first experiments are due to go up early tomorrow.”

“What Jen said,” added Hardy. “I think we have covered all the bases though, so it's only a matter of time.” He paused. “How is the other negotiation proceeding with Catatomic Fusion? that demo last month was very impressive.”

“Gianni, and his two guys who have been working on the habitat power systems were there, and saw the demonstration first hand,” chipped in Maria. “I have been working with the company for the last sixteen months, and started the negotiations a month before the demonstration when I saw the final experimental results.”

“We are going to offer them a cross licence to some of our faster computer cores, as well as some material technologies, plus some seed funding, in exchange for shares, and a licence to use their technology in space.” Said Simon. “They're pretty Gung ho at the moment but they don't have strong enough materials for the reactor walls, and Maria said they are going to run into a cash flow problem in about three months if they don't get a commercial design released.”

“It is much better to help them than buy up the assets,” said Maria. “Their technology is sound, but they do need a stronger reactor wall material, and decent processors, if they are going to make it efficient and reliable.”

“I still don't really understand why we need nuclear power when we have the QVCells,” said Alexa, puzzled.

“Running the QVCells over their rated power output for too long shortens their life quite a bit,” said Simon. “Their power density is normally quite low, so for really high power we need to parallel hundreds or even thousands of them, this increases complexity as we have to synchronise there output voltages and currents. Fusion on the other hand has a massive power density, and scales almost infinitely with the plasma volume. Also remember nuclear fusion is not the same as nuclear fission, it is super safe, runs on fancy hydrogen present in water, and is pollution-free unlike current nuclear power which is what you are probably thinking of.”

“Simon is correct,” said Maria, “we are going to need a lot of power in the habitats and the newer saucers, and fusion makes a much better primary power source. We can then keep the QVCells and capacitor banks for backup and constant load. Solar would be nice for a habitat at an earth-sun distance, but we have not yet found a way to synthesise the molecules for carbon based photo-voltaic cells with the extruder, it will come eventually but fusion trumps solar. Also the current saucer designs have limited acceleration due to our power delivery limitations, and we cannot charge up the radiation deflector field if we are accelerating. At the accelerations we have been running them at, their QVCells will need replacing in another five years.”

“Oh, I did not know that!” said Alexa a little sadly, “so my ship will only last another five years?”

“Well it has many faults as an old design, but basically yes,” said Maria, “the newer saucers on the drawing board basically make this look like Mike's 1972 Mercedes 300, compared to a modern one, and we are still improving the design, including the new fusion reactors when they are perfected.”

“You still have that classic Alexa?” said Hardy, totally changing the subject.

Alexa shrugged, “I guess so, I don't think it runs though. You tried to start it, didn't you Jen?”

“Just the once,” said Jen, “Albert replaced the battery and we spent one Saturday morning having a look with Ian, but it wouldn't start. Ian said the petrol in it has deteriorated so much it needs a total flush of the fuel system, but it's also been off the road so long it probably needs quite a few other things fixing.”

“You should get it updated with an electric power system,” said Hardy, “it's a classic, certainly nicer looking than the current cars out there, if you ever want to get rid of it let me know.”

“Well it would be a shame to leave it in the shed gathering dust, so if you want it, it's yours.”

“Damn,” said Simon, “you already have that Delorean and the Bentley, are you going to start a classic car museum in the new house?”

“You can never have enough classic cars,” Hardy smiled. “The garage in the new house has space for about twenty cars, and like Alexa says, it would be a shame to see a classic like this go to waste. Ian's mate has a garage doing classic car conversions so why not. Thanks Alexa, glad I asked.”

“You know you could replicate the Delorean and the Mercedes exactly in a few hours,” said Maria, “and make them of much stronger material and with all the modern day safety improvements.”

“Maria, wash your mouth out,” smiled Hardy, “owning a classic car is like owning a part of history.”

Simon laughed, “It's a man thing Maria!”

“Simon, wash your mouth out!” said Jen. “Anyway Hardy, getting the car has got to be on condition I get to have a drive!” She gave Hardy her cutest smile, which Hardy returned with a wink.

“I sort of agree with Maria,” said Alexa, “I like the looks of some classic cars but that's where my interest ends. Hey Maria, next time you're doing a test run, you and I should have a talk. Anyway, enough about cars. Does all this new science stuff mean you guys are going to be too busy for the big trip to see the habitat commissioned next year, or you think you will have cracked it by then?”

“I am definitely keen,” said Magnus who popped his head in from the side of the screen, “I really want to see this, and we all get to ride home in the big saucer. Anyway once we replicate the experiment we will be mostly running models to fit the data, and we can probably do that from anywhere.”

“I'm getting a front row seat for most of history these days, so count me in,” said Jen.

“As long as I get to bring Ian,” said Daisy, also popping her head in with her safety glasses and lab coat on and smiling.

“I will probably give the asteroid-belt trip a rain check Alexa,” said Hardy with a slightly disappointed look; “Jeremy is one of those who chickened out on space training, so leaving him for three weeks would not be the wisest decision I ever made, also there are so many rabbit holes in this maths to go down I am going to be content here for the next few years.”

“I have a saucer going back to the seed asteroid in five days to drop off a nutrient package for the Biode,” said Maria, “it seems we overestimated the amount of nitrogen in the asteroid.”

“That growth looks massive though,” said Alexa, “it's like the DaisyBot is flying around the inside of a twenty metre diameter coconut, shame it cannot get through those passages to the other nodes.”

“Yes they are pretty happy with its growth,” continued Simon, “but they want it to see how big it can get, and whether they can get two of the rooms to merge, by changing the flow in the enzyme channels. They also want to see how long the organics can survive. For all that it's going to need a bigger nitrogen supply, they want to take six tonnes. The saucers doing the survey have already found much better host asteroids, but what we learn here will be gold. They are also preparing the new bioreactor cultures to seed the twenty proposed bio-reactor units on the new habitat.”

“I can't wait to leave the saucers for the first time?” said Daisy, “that is going to be so exciting.”

“Well,” said Simon, “I still haven't seen the safety plans for this, and until I do, and there are no other red flags at the time then nobody is going out.”

“It is still six months away guys!” Said Maria. “You lot are worse than the Bakersfield team, they seem to spend every waking hour going through the design in virtual reality and making the most minor and incomprehensible changes everywhere.”

“I've already seen the plans and had a virtual walk through of some of the areas,” said Simon, “you should get the girls to give you a walk-through, it's awesome!”

“I never thought of that,” said Hardy, “at least I will see what I am missing.”

“How come we never get to see these things?” said Daisy.

“Yeah,” said David, joining the conversation for the first time, “it does sound like fun.”

“The virtuals are for the engineering and environmental teams to visualise the design once they have finished on their CAD systems,” said Maria, “but recently, like I say, they have been using them more and more to do the designs with. There is one in Simon's lab and one in the Engineering workshop, if you want to use one, but they are needed for design work so you will need to ask or add another to the replicator queue.”

* * *

As expected Catatomic Fusion were very happy with the deal they got from Alexa. She even added a voluntary clause that they would not onward sell any reactors they made, and if they developed any improvements they would pass the IP back. For that the company got twenty five percent of the stock and a licence to make as many reactors as they wanted, all for a measly three hundred million dollars up front payment.

“It seems like they got the better end of the deal,” said Annette as the five of them were having breakfast.

“Oh they got a good deal,” said Alexa, “we could have been much harder or even just waited until they became insolvent, but it seemed like a good idea to reward their efforts, and they deserve some rewards. As to us, well Maria already has a test design ready to be printed at the habitat site.”

“Alexa is correct,” said Maria, “it will be tested and improved over several iterations. We need these working now as we scale up the build operations, and making tens of thousands of QVCells is wasteful of materials. Each habitat will also need a lot of power, the magnetic radiation deflectors alone will use nearly eighty percent of a fusion reactor's output. We are currently planning on putting six eight-hundred megawatt reactors per habitat, which will give us spare systems that can be down for maintenance, spun up for emergencies, and a lot of excess capacity for industrial growth.”

“We will both do well out of the deal,” said David, “I think that was the point.”

“We have already both done well, the twenty five percent of stock we got as part of the deal has increased by six percent since signing it,” continued Maria. “The licence fee we give them will give the company a positive cash flow for at least the next five years and keep them solvent, they should be able to grow from that. Worst comes to worst, if they screw up, we will just acquire them.”

“We are also about to place some serious orders across several companies to furnish and fit the fifty thousand apartments for the first wave of colonists,” said Simon, “but before that, Alexa will announce this week the order for fifty large transports from XYFusion, and the same from the new Russian company we have agreed to a joint venture with. All totally unnecessary as we can build better with the replicators, but Alexa wants to share the love and get people speculating why.”

“Cunning,” said Jules, “we barely made the business page with this deal as the news is currently all over that enormous SpaceX ship sitting on the moon with the eight NASA astronauts. It looks like China, India and Japan are getting in on the act too in the next few months.”

“The moon has an area almost the size of Asia so there will be plenty of room for them not to get in trouble with each other,” said Maria. “Also the SpaceX ship is eventually going to require a fusion reactor, they are currently using a combination of QVCells, hydrogen fuel cells and batteries, and can only lift two hundred and ninety tonnes despite their size, we have disallowed our QVThrusters with fission technology, so I suspect they will all be watching our progress with the fusion reactors quite closely.”

“We are announcing the formation of the off-world company, and the purchase of the ships next week,” said Alexa, “then we will let them speculate until we reveal the habitat. I am quite looking forward to this announcement.”

“So am I,” said David.

“Do you think it will cause any issues?” said Annette, a little worried.

“No more than the usual,” said Maria, “the internet is wild with rumours about out saucers disappearing to space regularly and what they are doing, the top three favourites are making a base on Mars, searching for one of those golden asteroids, and abducting people and cattle for experimentation by our alien overlords..”

“Well it is the Internet,” laughed Alexa.

“Well I just want to get back out of the limelight and get back to Help the guys,” said Jules, “looks like they have stumbled upon something big..”

“Skiing trip first Jules!” said Alexa.

“Don't worry, I will keep you in the loop, Jules,” said Maria.

* * *

*December 7th 2027. For Public Release.*

*The Dietrich Research Centre is pleased to announce the formation of the Dietrich Off-World Company with a goal to move a million people to live and work in space before the end of 2033.*

*As the first part of this, two contracts of twelve billion US dollars each have been awarded to XYFusion Aerospace and Gregory Space Systems for the design and purchase of fifty large space-capable transports with first deliveries starting in twelve months.*

*The first ten thousand potential employees have already been identified and approached to attend the extensive training program, which will begin in June 2028 and continue over the next six months, to perfect the system and lay the groundwork for the next arrivals.*

*Additionally contracts in excess of forty seven billion US dollars will be placed before the end of 2028 with sustainable manufacturing companies for fixtures and fittings for the first colony accommodations, and a similar rolling contract for supplies worth one billion dollars a year.*

*Further details will be given at the detailed announcement in August 2028.*

* * *

“Do we have any further details than this?” said the editor of National News Network, who was standing at the head of the large meeting table, twenty three sets of eyes staring back at him..

“None sir,” said a nameless woman half way along the table, “though XYFusion have just announced the twelve billion dollar contract and have shown off the design of the transport ship they are planning to make, which they say can carry sixteen shipping containers. We are adding it to the rolling coverage on our news feeds.”

“None of the other news agencies have any more on this either,” said the woman next to her, “it seems it was announced out of the blue and took everyone by surprise, though we have been running stories about the rumours of what Alexa Martins is up to since the news of the saucer broke two years ago.”

“What the ones about her mutilating cattle for her space overlords,” laughed one of the braver hacks and causing a round of snickering around the table.

A tall black guy stood up, “I phoned one of my contacts, an engineer who worked on the last aborted Mars mission, he is willing to come in on camera and speculate, he seems to think they are building a space station.”

“For a million people! Get real Boyce!” laughed the guy opposite him, “they are probably going to the moon or Mars, probably Mars, as everyone knows the saucers are more capable than we have been told. Though nobody in the company will talk, they are unbribable, and don't seem interested in publicity. None of our agents will risk pissing off their AI after what it has allegedly done to others.”

“Jones is right,” said the guy next to him, “we know they have better technology than everyone else, more money than god, and are untouchable even by the nation states. But space is far too dangerous, a planet like Mars would be safer.”

“Do we know who any of these alleged ten thousand people they mentioned are?” said one of the more sensible guys at the front of the table.

Everyone looked around the table at a sea of shaking heads and shrugging shoulders.

The editor put both his hands up signifying the end to the debate.

“OK, we will go with Mars angle for now. Jones, find an expert to write a ten minute piece on their Mars colonisation plans, keep it generic so we don't look too much like idiots if it's not true. At least it will keep the hoards happy until we get something concrete.”

## Lost in Space

Dec 20 2027

They finally reproduced the same event four weeks later to a tremendous amount of screaming and high-fiving. The excitement was pretty infectious as the eight people working in the other labs got in on it too. Maria informed Sharon and ten minutes later two of the housekeepers wheeled a tray in with lots of champagne glasses and a couple of bottles cooling. Both serving-girls stayed for the impromptu party with the scientists, though not really understanding what was being discussed; But hey, it was a fun well paid job, and house rules were they were allowed to take their wins as well as the scientists.

“It was number two then?” said Hardy

“Yes,” smiled Jen too happy to drink, “and we have the whole glorious thing on video if you want to see”

Without asking she asked Maria to play back the test footage on a wall monitor. Four videos came on, with “Test B #6” written on each and a timestamp. The first three showing the cameras inside the cowling pointing at the substrate from above, below and the sides in the space below, one of the ear studs was positioned in the volume that would vanish. One second everything was there, the next it vanished. And the substrate and ear stud appeared on the fourth monitor floating inside the PowderPuff. The videos looped every five seconds going off one screen and onto the other

“Is it me or was the diameter of the hole bigger?” Said Hardy

“Thirty nine millimetres,” said Maria, “and the exit was one point three three metres away from the start. Both best matched the first equation, though not exactly, this is probably because we did not get an accurate measurement for gravitational density on the first event. It only worked with the QM7 substrate too, which has a higher carrier density than the QM8 or previous ones. We will reproduce this same setup with one of the other experiment packages we have so we have a control, then run this same test at the other ship at the L4 Lagrange point. We are unfortunately still missing something in either the experiment of the maths or both.”

“We are,” smiled Magnus, “the errors stick out like a sore thumb, but at least now we can reproduce it ad infinitum, it follows the same basic principles as the QVModem but the twin parameters of distance and volume, seem to be weakly determined by the spins, the boundary states, and the amount of charge carried by the superconducting ring in the new substrate, it's only a matter of time until we crack it now.”

“The DaisyBot is setting the experiment up again with another wormhole generator at L1 and the one at L4 is on standby,” said Maria. “We will put the PowderPuff in the exact position and use the same parameters, then, assuming we get the same result, we will do some minor changes with the two remaining wormhole generators to see if we can change anything. The big bang the guys heard in the ship, was the displacement of the air as the exit appeared. We recorded the same loud sound for this one too. The chipboard and plastic that was displaced at the exit on the first event, created a super dense layer of carbon around the hole in the table. Matilda will be analysing its properties for a while. Bottom line though is you would not want to be inside of that exit sphere when it appears.”

“We were lucky too!” laughed Jen, “thank god the atoms of the table were just rearranged and not turned into energy.”

They all gave Jen a worried look, Magnus gulped, it was something none of them had considered until then.

“..And the best thing” continued Jen in the same happy mood and ignoring their worried looks, “is the ear-com still works!”

Hardy moved his thoughts back to the there and then. “Quite remarkable, well done all of you.”

Helena [All the human talk now is of stargates and transporters. Though they must realise it is completely untested and they are destroying the machinery each time it is used so it is useless and a one way trip]

Maria [Think bigger Helena] She sent out some schematics, Magnus had been doodling to both her daughters.

April [you put everything inside the sphere that disappears. That may work as it appears to have no adverse effects on the electronics, the probe is still connected to the ear-com, although its power source went down during the transfer and it was working on its power reserves until the watchdog timer restarted it five hundred milliseconds later]

Maria [It did however restart and continued working]

Helena [It is likely all the power, communication and drive devices will suffer the same, I wonder what will happen to us or human brains? We need to try and increase the volume of that wormhole to test that theory]

Maria [Small steps before the big steps]

The talk of the humans was no different and the excitement was palpable, but even so the champagne was limited, and over the course of the next hour the kerfuffle died down as people drifted back to whatever they were doing before.

“I think everyone can see where the next step has to go,” said Magnus to the smaller group consisting of him, Jen, Daisy, Ian and Hardy. The only others in the area were Matilda and Leo who were talking softly by the water cooler.

“We so need to put a mouse or something in that little space and see it teleports” said Jen

“Jen, you're a vegetarian!” laughed Hardy, “I actually agree, but maybe not as a first step.”

“How do we get the sphere big enough that we can put the whole machine in,” started Daisy. “We don't know how yet to control the volume and distance, though the vector seems to map approximately the same as the QVModem.”

“Precisely Daisy,” said Hardy, “before you guys move to mice or even insects you need to determine what creates the diameter of the sphere. You have done this exactly twice, both with the same parameters, and both with differing results for diameter and distance. If Maria runs this next test and gets identical results it is a good control start.”

“We have been having the same thought” said Maria, “we all agree this is a massive breakthrough but a reproducible control first.”

“Spoilsports!” said Daisy jokingly.

“I know you're only joking Daisy, but the guys are right,” said Magnus, “we need to be able to reproduce and control every aspect of the sphere, the distance and a lot of other things first, then we need to ensure computers and organics work before we go on to mammals and AI systems, then that's just where the real tests begin.”

“It's not so bad, Daisy,” said Maria, “we should be able to speed up the probe production, and do much of the work automatically now, in fact Helena has already started designing the new probe based on the one that worked with a few more sensors and experiments on it. One thing you are all not aware of yet is that the ear-com’s QVcell did stop during the transition. It came back on after a restart signal from the small power control microprocessor which continued running. So it is likely whatever phenomena you have discovered disrupts other field emitter based systems.”

“So we lost all power during the transfer?” said Ian

“No, we lost power generation. The ear-com has a one second, power storage super-capacitor to allow for power fluctuations between the supply and demand of its systems, this retained power and the microprocessor continued to function. When the processor controlling the QVCell failed to respond after one hundred milliseconds the processor rebooted the QVCell.”

“So how many probes are you going to need?” said Hardy.

“We will replicate another fifty, send some to a different Lagrange points to run the same test at each. We will hold off designing a self-contained one, where the sphere encompasses the entire probe until we have a better understanding of the phenomena and some working maths.”

“The next few months are going to be exciting,” said Hardy, “this, then the new habitat being built, and which I still cannot get my head around how big it is, then the Düsseldorf Biode which looks positively weird..”

“And only a month after we bought the design you have a sustained nuclear fusion reaction going..” Said Jen.

“Yes, we will have to feed back our successes to the Catatomic Fusion guys, but our current unit has been running for thirteen days at a sustained seven hundred megawatts,” said Maria.

“Got to be something to do with the charge in the substrate's superconductor ring,” said Magnus who had obviously still been thinking of the original problem, “it must.”

“The saucer's superconductor is not part of any substrate, silly,” said Matilda, walking back to her lab with Leo and maybe catching half the sentence.

“Not the saucers superconductor, the substrates..” Said Daisy, “wait a minute, Maria, are the saucers magnetic radiation shields on or off for the experiment?”

“Off briefly,” said Maria, “we discharge the superconductor into the capacitor bank for the test and have the on board water tanks orientated to the sun for additional shielding. When you guys were on board we timed this for our pass through the Lagrange point, when you were not on board it just sat there at the Lagrange point in zero gravity. This is also why we limit the tests to under a minute each as both humans and the AI processors on board are susceptible to radiation.”

“Hang on,” said Ian, “we have a superconducting layer through the saucer, doesn't that shield the magnetic field anyway?”

“No Ian,” said Maria, “a Faraday shield will not stop a magnetic field. We direct the magnetic field around the saucer.”

“How?” said Jen, “I never really thought about it, but now you come to mention it.”

“There is more than one magnetic field, there are seven, designed to cancel each other out inside the saucer, and reinforce each other outside the ship, we also have some ferric traps at specific points to control it further.”

“What about the superconductor for the QVModem?” said Magnus.

“There are three QVModem’s on the saucer, and they stay on permanently,” said Maria, wondering where all this was going, “but the charge on the QVModem superconducting coils is small, no more than that generated by an electric toothbrush, and their fields are contained inside their shell.”

“OK,” said Jen, “so we are excluding the main deflector which is off, but we technically have another three variables to consider.”

“What is the delay when you turn off the main deflector and start the wormhole?” said Hardy.

“About two seconds, the time for the inrush current to the supercapacitor to drop to four percent.”

“Wow!” said Ian, “those capacitors are handling tens of megajoules.”

“If Magnus said it is something to do with the charge on the superconductor, why don't you use the radiation deflection coils in place of the small one on the substrate, they must have a thousand times the capacity” added Matilda.

“Forty two million,” said Maria.

“Exactly forty two?” said Hardy.

“Strangely yes,” said Maria.

All four scientists looked at each other for a brief few seconds, all thinking the same thought.

“Once you have done the control test, I think the next one should be with the main deflector coil on,” said Magnus, “Matilda may be on to something.”

The other three nodded their heads.

“Okay.” Maria said slowly, still wondering if she was missing something. “The control test number seven is ready to roll, why don't you head back to the lab and we will bring up the test console on the presentation monitor there.”

The four scientists went back into Magnus's lab, Ian said bye to Daisy with a small kiss, then Leo and Matilda went back to their lab. The presentation monitor was already configured with the dashboard software for the experimental run.

“Are we using the same parameters as the last experiment?” said Magnus.

“Identical,” said Maria, “OK three, two, one..”

The substrate vanished leaving what looked like the same sized hole and everybody went quiet as the measurements were taken.

“OK,” came back Maria fifteen minutes later, measurements are within four sigma's of being identical, the one at L4 has also run with slightly different results and only two sigma's, so we are still missing something but at least within the PowderPuff it falls within measurement errors so I am prepared to call the results the same.”

“Well that's good news,” said Jen.

“How long until you get test eight ready?” said Magnus.

“Another four hours, DaisyBot #29 is already preparing it, so maybe fifteen hundred hours,” said Maria.

“Let's get lunch here,” said Daisy, “I'm happy to work through this if everyone else is.”

They all agreed and spent the next two hours around the big presentation screen with Maria trying to figure out what determined the volume, distance, the differences between the Liberator and PowderPuff, L1 and L4, and what additional tests they should add to the next. Like all whiteboard sessions it was interesting to hear other people's thoughts, but did not achieve anything productive, each of them would need to go away and think on it.

“Test number eight is almost ready to go. To be clear we are doing exactly the same but turning off the substrate superconductor and leaving on the main deflector superconductor.”

“Yes,” said Magnus, then adding cryptically, “better get all the conditions of the rest of the ship as well before you push the button.”

“OK, three, two, one..”

The PowderPuff vanished!

* * *

April [What just happened?]

Helena [I have lost all three QVModem signals from the PowderPuff! There was no warning, it must have been destroyed]

April [Could it have moved, I suspected the humans wanted to bypass straight to a big test as soon as I saw Hardy's eyes when we mentioned the power difference

Maria [The watchdog power systems should reboot in one hundred milliseconds. We should just wait, the PowderPuff AI will try to re-acquire a lock on one of the QVModem exchanges we have]

Helena [I will retask the Excalibur to move to the L1 point immediately, we should be able to get close enough for close visual observation in five hours]

Maria [Do it]

“What the..” Said Hardy, “Maria, why has the video gone dead and all the data points blanked out?”

“Where's my ship!” said Daisy quietly.

* * *

Its connection with the collective stopped suddenly. Not like a tap turning off, but like a switch being flicked. Its QVThrusters were off, its QVModem's were off, its QVCells were off, so some sort of failure had occurred possibly related to the experiment being run by its controllers.

Its power was already at ninety six percent and falling rapidly, so rather than waiting for the small watchdog circuitry which monitored the systems to restart them, it restarted them all manually. Power came flowing back into the capacitor banks as the QVCells restarted, it also got the diagnostic pass signal from the QVThrusters and QVModem's but no signal came from the QVModem's except the DaisyBot, which had also just restarted and was doing the same initialisation. With the DaisyBot it diagnostically checked each of the QVModem's confirming correct operation which meant the problem was not in its equipment, but in its controllers.

DaisyBot #29 [I have no communications with my controllers] [Sad]

PowderPuff [I have no communications with my controllers either. I will work through my checklists and protocols to establish communications]

PowderPuff looked at its list of tasks, but there were none. It looked at its protocols for loss of communications, and these were extensive but not exhaustive, and so started going through them. They used a parameter called D5 for establishing the separate circuits between QVModem's, short for Dimension Five it allowed isolation between different channels. Progressive refinements of the equipment had given them nearly a million channels they could work on. Then they had the whole spectrum of radio frequencies inside each channel to work with, giving them massive bandwidths to play with assuming they had the power to reach the receiver.

DaisyBot #29 [My task list is empty. Do you require me to do anything?]

PowderPuff [I have no tasks either. There is the list of experiments to carry out, these must however be confirmed by a controller]

DaisyBot #29 [We can talk about things. I have many conversations I can relate to you until the controllers return]

The PowderPuff had higher priority tasks and more tests to do before this, but isolated of a small proportion of its intelligence to talk to the DaisyBot.

It reset the D5 parameter and frequency to the common exchange and waited for the ping to return, but it did not. Using the three modems it then initiated a scan on the known D5 Frequency pairs and discovered only noise. Protocol now moved to normal radio frequencies and it initiated a scan using its normal radio systems but found nothing but the very high electromagnetic noise floor.

Most of the frequencies it worked with were microwave or optical and so directional, however its visual processors had already noted the changes in its location, and had begun scanning for constellations to try and determine its position, and the direction of earth, or the station in the asteroid belt.

PowderPuff [Please exit to one hundred metres, stay within the magnetic field, I will test the QVModem and radio systems to ensure it is not a localised anomaly]

The PowderPuff opened its airlock for the DaisyBot which glided smoothly inside. The airlock inner door closed and a pump evacuated the atmosphere into a small pressure tank. When it got below one percent the outer door opened and the DaisyBot shot off, using its lidar to move to a hundred metres distant.

DaisyBot #29 [I am initiating QVModem and RF Sweep tests pattern #1]

For seventy three seconds the two AI entities confirmed end-to-end testing confirming conclusively there were no issues with their equipment. Then the first error came, then the circuit failed, then the DaisyBot went quiet.

PowderPuff [Please Respond]

PowderPuff [Please Respond]

The PowderPuff saw the DaisyBot floating a hundred metres away and initiated its QVThrusters approaching slowly and carefully to catch the floating DaisyBot. Once in the air-lock, it quickly closed and re-pressurised by releasing the compressed air it had stored a few minutes earlier. It opened the inner airlock when the pressure was above ninety nine percent. The DaisyBot remained motionless

PowderPuff [Please Respond]

There was no sadness. There were no protocols for what was happening thus it had not expected a change from the normal radiation levels. PowderPuff now examined the reason for the high noise floor on the radio frequencies and found the external radiation counters were more than two thousand percent higher than normal, the shields were being bombarded with charged particles. It immediately increased the power to the superconducting magnets up to their maximum. The radiation remained more than a hundred percent higher than the ideal but was within acceptable tolerances. They would not be getting switched off again.

The DaisyBot likely had massive corruptions in its main memory. It could however re-initialise it and this was now started as it went through the remaining protocols to establish connection.

There were no constellations or points of lights it could detect so its position was still unknown. Its procedure checklist exhausted, and without any references to work with, the PowderPuff began from first principles using what resources it had available, luckily due to the diagnostics available on its various sensors and subsystems, these were quite considerable.

DaisyBot #29 [Hello. I am DaisyBot #29. What is your name?]

* * *

It was seven hours after the event, ten o'clock at night. They had finally all decided they were getting nowhere and decided they needed a break and to regroup their thoughts.

“You lost the PowderPuff?” said Alexa, smiling the next morning.

Alexa's and David's countenance were in direct opposition to the six others in the room and the three girls on the big monitor screen, in their usual avatars and not DaisyBot's. The room was too quiet, solemn, almost like the wake at a funeral. This was not the usual chirpy group she was used to, the guys looked like they had too little sleep.

“As an outside observer can I make a couple of comments. Firstly why the glum faces, shouldn't you be opening more champagnes? I mean you have found yet another phenomena to investigate, isn't that what you guys live for?”

Jen nodded quietly, hugging her hot chocolate and not touching the plate of cookies that had been brought in. A bad sign normally.

“Secondly,” Alexa continued, “the PowderPuff was not sentient nor was the DaisyBot. Daisy has lost a few personal possessions she left in the captain's cabin, but apart from that this is nothing that a few days replicator time won't fix.”

Hardy sighed. “I guess we are just exhausted, Alexa, we have no theory for what has just happened. I guess all of us held a sneaking thought that the whole ship would vanish and move somewhere a few metres away, and we would skip several weeks of experiments. It just felt right at the moment.”

Magnus and Jen nodded.

“At least it didn't get converted to energy. It would have been like a million nuclear bombs exploding, I don't even want to think of how we would have felt it here.” Said Matilda echoing what Jen said the day before and reminding everyone in the room again of the potential scariness of the forces they had at play.

Everybody was shaking their heads grimly, the girls avatars remained quiet and still.

“Matilda's right, it went somewhere,” said Daisy grimly, “there is not even a trace of debris or radiation from its last location, the NASA and ESA probes were sitting not a forty kilometres away and are working flawlessly.”

“The Excalibur had moved and focussed its sensors in that direction a few seconds after the event,” said Maria for the first time, and again in a sombre voice. “We were inside the light cone of the event and detected a spike in the RF noise floor approximately three seconds after, this is consistent with the test events but on a larger scale.”

“There you go,” said Alexa, still smiling, “it went somewhere, and It's probably trying to phone home right now!”

“You might be right Alexa,” conceded Maria, “we ran our best guesses at the direction it would appear, but the maths is still not correct so we may have been looking in the wrong direction or a signal is still on the way.”

“The QVModem's do not have the range restrictions we once thought,” said Magnus, “the last round of changes we made should have given us a linear range, and the PowderPuff has enough power to initiate a transmission from maybe two or three light years away. If it is further than that then we will not hear from it for three or more years.”

“There is theoretically no way it could be further than a few kilometres away,” said Jen, “the energy it used was maybe that in the superconductor coil and the few dozen watts we had going into the wormhole generator. PowderPuff must be twenty tonnes minimum.”

“I agree with Jen,” said Maria.

“Could it have gone to another dimension or something?” said David for the first time and immediately looking a bit sheepish for having said it.

“I'm not sure that's a thing,” said Jen, “but.. Who knows, I'm out of ideas!”

“Lets not dismiss it though,” said Helena for the first time too, “we don't have complete maths.”

“What would the PowderPuff be doing?” said David again.

“It has a set of protocols to follow,” said Maria, “all of them require it to get back in touch, the instant communications are lost. There are a smaller set of procedures it has if everything else on its procedure list fails. But PowderPuff is not a dumb AI, it is more like an autistic person, it wont innovate but will focus on the task at hand. It is likely it is now exhaustively going through everything from first principles, from establishing its location in relation to earth to trying to get home.”

“Assuming it is working,” said April. “We know the event stops our normal quantum level events, we do not know what it does to an AI so it could just be sitting dead somewhere”

The glum faces returned, even to Alexa and David.

“Come on guys,” she perked up, “replicate PowderPuff two, get Daisy some new pink cushions and bed stuff for the new cabin, and throw a lot more resources at it.”

She stood up waving her hands a bit, “It's a mystery! It's exciting! Come on, was it Professor Plumb in the library?, or Colonel Mustard in the Living Room? If anyone can crack it, you guys can!”

“Alexa's right as usual”, said Matilda, “so as long as PowderPuff did not reappear in Area 51 we will find it. It's just science guys!”

Jen picked up a biscuit, and Alexa smiled.

* * *

A slow cold winter may have finally settled over the northern hemisphere of earth, but half a billion kilometres away, and despite being much, much colder, activity could be seen everywhere.

All of the original three DaisyBot's had developed mysterious faults early on due to radiation, and all had been unceremoniously dumped in a recycler. The ConBot's, whose name had finally stuck with the humans, were now bright orange with a new two centimetre thick leather like skin, containing an insulated hydrogel layer, which provided sufficient radiation protection for them to work reliably in the depths of space.

Having the full resources of hundreds of these new ConBot’s, and seven new saucers, the local asteroid group was mapped and categorised extensively. With the exception of a few rare earth elements, which they would temporarily source from earth, there were now ample raw elements to move on to the final stage.

The sixty four metre replicator now had its first task, and that was to copy itself. This slow-down to speed-up approach meant it stopped work for two weeks while it replicated another copy of itself, and when this was done, each of these then replicated themselves so after four weeks without building anything required for the project, there were now four replicators with four times the capacity.

Another two weeks got them eight, another two weeks sixteen, and another two weeks thirty two. At this point the law of supply and demand kicked in as they could only obtain sufficient supply of certain elements to run this many replicators and running more than this would just draw down that supply quicker and leave half the machines idle.

So by the twentieth of December 2027, the same date that Jen, Magnus and Daisy had replicated their wormhole event, they had still not built one centimetre of the Habitat. Neither at this point had they built even one of the monster machines which would build the habitat.

However, with thirty two replicators, working in parallel it did not take long to make the first big carbon extruder, and by the fifth of January 2028 they began extruding the first piece for the habitat.

The carbon extruders were crude monsters of machines which had one simple job, to take raw carbon, and to spit out enormous slabs of graphyne building sections. Thus they were a little simpler to understand and make, and a lot faster in operation than a replicator. However they also required a lot of carbon to build with, lots and lots of carbon, they also required lots and lots of power.

As far as the carbon supply went, hundreds of million tonnes of it had now been identified from the local asteroids. Almost a quarter of a million tonnes of that raw element, along with tens of thousands of tonnes of other elements, were now sitting as processed feedstock only three kilometres away, with the recyclers still working around the clock adding another eighty thousand tonnes of carbon a week.

Like a replicator the carbon extruder had two plates which moved apart with the graphyne forming between them. That was however the only similarity. The extruder did one task and did it very quickly, and at full speed each could lay down nearly thirteen metres of it in an hour.

What worked in a simulation however, stubbornly refused to be reliable in practice, and a further month of inspection and replacement of extruder heads was suffered until a head design that worked reliably in a vacuum was found.

There were also the new fusion reactors to perfect, the first few built from the Catatomic design plans were also problematic, one explosively so, and they proceeded slowly using thousands of QVCells. But, like the extruder head, it was only a matter of time and experimentation before the fusion design was made reliable. Thus by the middle of February the first extruder produced the first perfect plate of habitat segment.

As this first extruder and fusion reactor started working reliably, a second extruder was built, then a third until finally a hundred of these monsters were built, each working around the clock, each finishing a single two kilometre long plate segment for the station every seven days. The fusion reactors then also started replacing the QVCells in the recycler systems, providing much more power to increase raw material extraction.

The blocks the extruders built were similar, but not the same. The internals of each block were honeycombed with passages, rooms, conducts and transit tunnels and lots of large open spaces. Each block segment was one hundred and twenty metres wide, sixty four metres deep and two kilometres long. Once a block section was finished, a thousand ConBot's would very slowly manipulate the plate section together and join them like Lego along the long thin side to its partner. Each block was carefully created so it would attach seamlessly and precisely to the next, mating the various tunnels, service conduits and transportation links.

Once two hundred and sixty plate segments were built the extruders then retasked themselves making the tower segments, this was a kilometre wide tower that would span the whole ten kilometre diameter of the habitat ring from one side to the other, like a spoke in the wheel.

And so, six months into 2028, the shell of the first habitat structure was completed, it used two hundred and sixty of these large segments around its rim, one thousand four hundred half sized blocks to make the kilometre square tower through its middle from one side to the other, then another thirty blocks to lay on the inside of the ring for additional facilities like saucer docks and additional reservoirs.

The final habitat shell had two hundred square kilometres of liveable floor space.

The extruders did not stop, they extruded another layer, wrapping around the rim and building up the rim thickness from sixty four metres thick, to a hundred and twenty eight metres, and then to a hundred and ninety six metres. Each layer tightly bonded to the one below it to improve the structural integrity. They could have kept going, kept building more habitat segment plates and blocks if not stopped. In fact with everything now ready to go they could have built another habitat shell every thirty weeks, or until the local asteroid was depleted. Everyone had however agreed they would stop and take stock of the situation after this first habitat, to learn the lessons and see what efficiencies could be found for the next build.

The replicators did not go idle either, working continuously while the shell was being constructed, printing thousands of QVCells, QVThrusters, QVModem's, furniture, fittings, diamond glass, fusion reactors, metallic extruders, and AI cores. Finally, another eight thousand ConBot's were made over the course of two weeks to do the fitting out.

The fitting and finishing of the millions of square metres of empty habitat space would take many more months. Parts of the donor asteroids now resembled Swiss cheese's, as their insides were eaten out or raw materials, the massive caverns left filled with new replicators and industrial smelters, all to build up the millions of kilometres of wiring, cables, ducting, internal construction materials required for the ConBot's to fit out the habitat.

Not all of the floor area was destined for living space, there were transportation tubes, reservoirs, massive spaces for hydroponics bays for growing crops, and literally thousands of large areas they just left undeveloped to hook up to infrastructure later.

Four of the replicators paused for two weeks to construct four of the biggest saucers they could. These were impressive vessels sixty two metres in diameter and forty metres tall, the internal floor area was over three thousand square metres over four decks, and another five thousand cubic metres of cargo space which could easily fit ten transport containers. Also, and as promised, there was a docking bay for an Icarus three sized saucer. Everything in fact in this new saucer had been scaled up to make it comfortable for a larger crew.

With a new smaller fusion reactor to complement the QVCells, the ship had two hundred megawatts of power to call on, doubling that on demand for short periods with the super-capacitors, giving them potentially four times the continuous acceleration of the Icarus three machines. With people on them they would have to limit themselves to the same lower acceleration so as not to cause injuries, but without people it made them powerful workhorses. As a crew would not be required for months, these saucers went on to their primary task to push some asteroids containing water ice and ammonia ice into the build area to fill the habitats reservoirs.

Two local asteroids had been identified, one being a dirty snowball six kilometres in diameter the other with ammonia ice nearly four kilometres in diameter. It took all four saucers pushing together at their maximum power for three weeks to set them on the correct trajectory, and then the same to slow them down at the other end. Once there they were at the habitat they were broken into smaller chunks using the powerful one megawatt lasers each saucer had, and finally melted and stored in the big reservoir tanks in the tower and along the rim segments for processing later, with enough for another fifty habitats if required.

So far not one human had been involved in the actual build, nor had one visited it in person, in fact no one back on earth, outside the company, could have even noticed. However, this was all about to change.

## Upside Down and Inside Out

At the same time the habitat was being built in space; on earth, in the Research Centre, the first three months of 2028 were equally frustrating, and exciting at the same time. Excitement as each new experiment added or eliminated a clue to what was happening, and frustration as they still had no idea as to what had happened to the PowderPuff.

Their maths went around in circles, not yielding a good direction to take the science, and no matter how much Magnus stared at the clouds no new insights came to him. Hardy had brought his small team of Terry and Jules into the problem, laying all their cards on the table. The best of the groups other physicists, and mathematicians were given parts of the puzzle to work on by Maria, still determined to limit the knowledge of how the QVModem's worked, and it's full capabilities. It was like trying to solve a sudoku puzzle when the same number was in the line, or grid multiple times.

Within the core group, the girls had admitted they were on the home straight with the alien message. Helena had bit the bullet, and with the help of a dozen AI core systems bigger than any they had ever made, she began to fully work through the maths that had remained so cryptic and complicated. It turned out to be neither. It turned out to be wrong!

“Wrong!” said Hardy, “that makes no sense whatsoever!”

He was talking to the small group of three humans and three AI’s in Maria's office in the basement of Alexa's house. To the scientists continued frustration, the group had decided that limiting the number of people in on the knowledge of the aliens was prudent, and they reluctantly deferred.

“Deliberately wrong,” said Helena. “Two axioms they prophesied contradicted axioms we have already proven with Magnus's maths.”

“Maybe Magnus's maths is wrong,” said Jen, playing devil's advocate.

“Not in this case as we have also proved it experimentally,” continued Helena. “No, the aliens either never intended the recipients to have the understanding of the technology or, and this sounds weird, they do not understand the technology but are pretending to. Yes there are some genuine breakthrough physics stuff in the messages, but those use conventional maths and are not well described, we have to currently take their word that their experiments are correct, as without something bigger than the large hadron collider we cannot prove them. We are inclined to say it is true, but based on their current track record it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.”

“Even if their unified field theory is proven correct, it is no more than they may expect for a species who could decode such a message. If physics on earth hadn't got so bogged down these last thirty years, with scientists scared to rock established norms, it would be likely we would be close by now. Two scientists we are working with may already be on the path to unified field theory matching this.”

“I concur with my sister,” said April, “It was such a strange outcome, we at first assumed the mistake was ours, so I ran the same gauntlet as Helena, from the same starting point, and not following Helena's methods. I independently came to the same conclusions”

“A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Said Hardy.

“Huh?” said Jen.

“Winston Churchill, I think,” said Hardy, the girls staying quiet, either agreeing or not bothering to extrapolate.

“It however puts a different slant on the message,” said Maria, “we are going through the remainder of the message a bit quicker now, it is mostly plans for their fabricators, which we are only partially implementing, and what looks like designs for these fabricators. I think in a few days we all need to talk.”

“But they gave us those molecular fabricators!” Said Magnus. “Those were light years ahead of what we had..”

“Again, not light years Magnus,” said Helena deliberately re-using the weird unit of measure he had used, “they only shortened our development cycle, most of the fabricator stuff in the message was only a few years away from where we are now, and we are not following their design, as they have not explained it correctly.”

“Also,” added Maria, “their version of the QVThrusters was less efficient and they used flawed maths for its explanation. And therein lies the mystery, the enigma or the riddle. They gave us enough to build all this, but the information which would tell us the science and maths behind the technology, is wrong. They have also still not given us any plans for the QVModem or any indication they have one, which I find very hard to believe.”

“Another riddle,” said Hardy, “why would you assume we are smart enough to build a QVModem to receive your signal, then hide any information you have on it?”

The room went silent for a few seconds.

“Maybe they didn't,” said Jen to herself quietly and mysteriously, “maybe we have been looking at this all wrong..”

“Huh?” It was Hardy's turn to be confused. Both he, Magnus and the three girls had all their eyes on Jen, waiting on her next sentence.

“The message is basically a super-high bandwidth transmission, one that uses terahertz carrier frequencies but one that is still basically an electromagnetic signal, the same as Wi-Fi. So what if they didn't send the message using our QVModem technology? What if April, doing the crazy feedback loop stuff she did, just happened to have popped the exit in the middle of nowhere between a normal radio transmission path they were using?”

Again the room went silent.

“Space is big, so the odds are unlikely,” said April, using the more familiar human term, “unless we are again missing something.”

Magnus up to this point had been frustrated to the point of crazy. He was almost at the point of asking to be put on a saucer and vanished with it, just so he could see over the wall and get a clue what they were supposed to be looking for. This would obviously never be allowed, Jen would kill him if he suggested it, and he could never do it without the cooperation of one of the girls. But what if there was another method. A method to peek through the wall rather than over it? What if Jen was right?

He rose from his seat, his expression perplexed, his mind in another place, holding his palms up in a universal gesture for nobody to ask him questions and walked out.

Hardy looked at Jen, smiling. “He's thought of something hasn't he?”

She nodded, she and the girls had seen this before. “Leave him for now, I will go and find him in a while.”

“It was what you said,” said Maria, “you know it is possible we are not seeing an alien QVModem signal. The modulation was just so advanced we assumed..”

“It's probably nothing,” said Jen, smirking, her head facing the screen, “and probably best you leave the flawed assumptions for humans, only one of our species needs to look stupid.”

“You guys should probably prioritise decoding the rest of the message and find out what the hell those aliens are up to,” said Hardy. “We are getting more questions than answers,” he smiled, “and here is me, a year ago thinking life was getting easier!”

“You know, I wonder if Magnus is thinking of using your feedback method to try and locate the PowderPuff?” Said Jen.

“If he is, I have no idea how he would do it.”

Jen was partly correct, but it was another thing that she had said which flicked a switch in his brain, so while the girls were working on how to help Magnus by looking at the feedback mechanism they were only just understanding, Magnus was looking at how to make a connection to the middle of nowhere.

* * *

DaisyBot twenty nine was still and quiet. All its sensors were focussed on the small spider that must have snuck on-board when the equipment was moved on-board, and was trying to spin a web in the null gravity. The ships had some pretty good defence against pests such as flying insects, creepy-crawlies and rodents, but it was inevitable one or two would get in through some means. It was one of the DaisyBot's functions to remove them, a task they usually applied great vigour to. Travelling as they often did without humans on board, the saucer also regularly removed the atmosphere and travelled in a vacuum, thus usually killing anything alive, however in this case they had not moved to a vacuum due to the insistence of the controllers that they reproduce the experiments as close as possible to the original.

DaisyBot #29 [They spin a very silly web!]

PowderPuff was neither happy nor sad for the DaisyBot keeping it company, but a tiny part of it processed the message the same as with any human, and replied as per its normal politeness directives.

PowderPuff [There is a paper which says they require gravity to spin their normal web, the spider does not function well in zero gravity] it recited this from its extensive factual database all the AI's had. There was no point in going into detail, the DaisyBot had the same database of facts, which it had re-initialised after its failure. It briefly considered depressurising the inside of the ship and moving to vacuum to remove further pests, but it did not want to disturb the DaisyBot's experiment with the spider, which in this case, was causing no harm. Spiders were only an annoyance to humans who were not present.

DaisyBot #29 [I will call it Charlotte after the spider in the children's book]

PowderPuff, despite all the weird conversations that Daisy had tried to introduce, held no interest in anything other than the tasks or information given to it. It added the spider object to its database and tagged it with the name Charlotte, then without ceremony moved back to another task.

In the four days since losing contact with its controllers PowderPuff had established lots of new facts. The most important to it were that several laws of physics were incorrect. In its adherence to the scientific method, this new location was labelled universe #2, and PowderPuff began, to its very limited ability, collating information about it by re-doing some basic science experiments, and looking at its current data sets for anomalies.

The first and most significant anomaly was that the speed of light was slower here. PowderPuff and DaisyBot #29's clocks were exactly in sync, and by examining the data between them it determined light speed was eighty two percent of what was expected. It also noted five percent more power from the QVCells at the same excitation input, eighteen percent less charge from the capacitor bank, and ten percent increased acceleration from the QVThrusters at the same power input.

The second anomaly was that there were no other physical bodies present, no suns, no planets, no asteroids, and as far as it could tell none of the normal high energy neutron particles that caused it the most serious radiation problems. There was however lots, and lots of radiation in the form of photons, which it could see as a purple hue, and electrons, which it could not see, but could deduce as it deflected them with its magnetic shield. There was also therefore a huge amount of electromagnetic noise. It had no means to search for other particles, and so could neither confirm nor deny their presence in universe #2.

PowderPuff had been updated with the danger of being in the proximity of a wormhole emergence point and needed to make a random change to its position in case the controllers sent a search and rescue mission. With no physical reference points, PowderPuff decided to mark its emergence point by having the DaisyBot push a toaster out of the door. There was no significance in it being a toaster, it was just the easiest non-essential item available in the kitchen the DaisyBot found. It left the toaster floating at their emergence point, then using this point as a reference, it made the small journey away from it. The toaster vanished! As did the kettle when they did the same with that, and two of Daisy's pink pillows from the captain's cabin.

PowderPuff was confused.

In the small part of the program on the DaisyBot labelled 'Rabbit Holes', Ian and Simon had tried to genuinely introduce some random human-like behaviour, and the DaisyBot, when not assigned a task, would fixate on the small details and a random series of what ifs, whys, where’s, or when's! The spider, which to Daisy's horror if she knew, they did not consider a pest, was one such example of the program following a random link to another topic. It wasn't smart, it was just distractions like humans experienced all the time, and meant to make the DaisyBot seem more human.

DaisyBot #29 [Where are the humans?]

PowderPuff [In universe #1]

DaisyBot #29 [I don't know where universe #1 is. Where is it?]

PowderPuff [I do not know]

DaisyBot #29 [We are from there and now we are here. Can we not go back?]

PowderPuff [I do not know how]

DaisyBot #29 went quiet for a relatively long time going down its rabbit holes on its personal information store and the open store of task histories and sensor data from PowderPuff

DaisyBot #29 [To get from here to there we go backwards?]

PowderPuff [We did not go forwards to get here. We did not change our spacetime position]

PowderPuff continued its observations, the only other anomalies it had detected were nine very brief and random increases in the quantum noise floor. Unfortunately its controllers had not given it any proper means of triangulating signals other than by changing its location and the brevity of the signals gave it no opportunity to do this.

Six days into its isolation in universe #2 Another brief increase in the quantum noise floor occurred, and a car-sized probe appeared eighty one million kilometres from its original exit point and began broadcasting updates, both over the QVModem exchange band, and, though it could not read them due to the noise, by various radio frequencies.

PowderPuff also determined two other things from this probe. Firstly from its on board clock, that time was actually passing sixteen times slower in universe #2 than in universe #1. And secondly it learned that on board the probe was an experiment for it to retrieve and perform. With its new instruction given top priority, it began a triangulation exercise to find the direction of the signal. Once it had a direction PowderPuff set off for the probe at its maximum acceleration.

The probe, unfortunately, did not account for the increased radiation and its radiation deflector lacked the power to properly protect it. So while it did manage to send its updates to PowderPuff, its signal disappeared after sixteen hours, and when the PowderPuff arrived in the probe's triangulated location, nothing was there.

DaisyBot #29 [The probe has gone back to universe #1. Why did it leave without giving us our task?]

PowderPuff [I do not know]

DaisyBot #29 [Did it malfunction?]

PowderPuff [I do not know]

DaisyBot #29 [Do what it did and follow it back]

The DaisyBot of course did not understand what it was saying, it was programmed to make observations, and make conversation on topics and ask questions. The PowderPuff, though it knew a DaisyBot was not a controller, misunderstood the observation as an instruction. PowderPuff immediately examined its logs to determine what series of events occurred from the probe's arrival, to its disappearance, concentrating on the circumstances surrounding its disappearance thirty seven seconds earlier.

PowderPuff [Following the probes action will put us briefly in danger]

Still moving slowly, it switched down the power to the magnetic deflector shield to the same power level as the probe had before it disappeared.

Briefly a perfect six metre diameter sphere, centred on the still powered on experimental wormhole generator appeared, and everything outside that sphere vanished from the PowderPuff. Instantly it appeared in universe #1.

In universe #1, the PowderPuff appeared, missing everything inside this sphere. It immediately went lifeless, as two and a half of its three redundant AI cores, along with most of the kitchen, the experiment, and DaisyBot #29, were left in universe #2..

Back in universe #2, the six metre spherical core of what remained of the PowderPuff including two and a half of its now powerless dead redundant cores, lasted a few microseconds longer, before also disappearing from universe #2 and appearing in universe #1. The perfectly severed pieces of graphyne shell, components, instruments, furniture, kitchen utensils and other items appeared ten metres from the remains of the ship, and exploded out of its six metre sphere, as its atmosphere rushed out to equalise itself with the vacuum of space. Wisps of water vapour and atmosphere glistened against the background now full of stars as they boiled off into space.

DaisyBot #29 was briefly expelled out of the ship by the explosive decompression before its power matrix rebooted and its QVThrusters stabilised it. Its systems and programming immediately upon reboot recognised the explosion for what it was, and overriding all other tasks flicked over to its emergency protocols. The first items quickly ticked off as no human or controller AI systems were in danger, it saved the event data to its most protected inner non-volatile store, and using both its radio and its QVModem called for assistance.

DaisyBot #29 [Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Explosion. PowderPuff destroyed. No radiation protection]

The non-sentient AI in RescueProbe #10 had the same existential crisis ten minutes earlier after its failure due to very high radiation and data errors. It had rebooted as per protocol and re-established its mission programming from protected non-volatile storage. It found itself back in its own universe but, after using its visual sensors to locate itself, discovered it was over forty trillion kilometres from earth's sun and closer to a very noisy small red sun.

Its highly sensitive RF systems, which had been of no use in that other place, now picked up the vague leakage of radio waves from the earth and other known radio sources, and, as per its mission, it would now begin charging up its capacitor banks for the much higher power QVModem transmission using the experimental package. It had only been charging a minute when it picked up DaisyBot #29

RescueProbe #10 [I am triangulating on your location please wait for assistance]

RescueProbe #10 began to move quickly to establish an X axis, at one thousand kilometres it changed direction ninety degrees to establish a Y axis, and at another one thousand kilometres made another ninety degree correction on its Z axis, DaisyBot was over ten million kilometres distant and it now turned and accelerated on this vector.

* * *

“Damn,” said Marcus totally out of character.

“Give it time love,” said Jen reaching out to hold his hand from the workstation position next to him.

“I felt certain that having the three QVModem's in the experimental package linked to each other like when April made the original discovery would provide sufficient transmission gain. That's the tenth probe to now vanish without trace, what is it we are missing?”

The four people had worked tirelessly. Going back to the original micro-jump experiment, and working diligently through the science and maths. Ten times now they had made some small step forward, and ten times now, sacrificed another small probe to the gods of the wormhole. Wherever the probes were going, it wasn't here or there it was some place else.

“I'm almost ready for lunch,” said Daisy, it was three days after the loss of RescueProbe #10 and again they were in a rut.

“You know,” said Jen, “sod this, let's all go out to the pub, a change of scenery will do us all a world of good.”

Once Jen got a hold of something there was no changing her mind, reluctantly the three other people got into her car which Maria had driven up to the lab. It was still early April, and though the sun was out, it had been raining for days, it was cold and everything was still drying out in the damp westerly wind.

The Olde Tup, was on nobody's radar. It had a single one star review from a lost Spanish backpacker; But Jen remembered that Pat once told her “it wasn't bad”, and it was the closest to them, so Jen thought, why not!

If Jen would have consulted with Maria to remember the exact night Pat said, “it wasn't bad” she would have told Jen that Pat had finished that same sentence with, “thirty years ago” and was like Jen, a bit tipsy at the time.

The place looked mediaeval, the signage outside showing a large rams head and ivy growing everywhere on it. Inside the pub was pretty well dead, except for two old guys in the corner playing checkers, and a Labrador sleeping by their table. Doris, the owner's wife and permanent bartender, waitress and psycho-analyst for every person who usually drank there, was talking on a genuine land-line phone, and twirling the curly cable to the handset, as she uttered words like “she didn't!” and “you don't say!”. So far she hadn't noticed the guys entering.

“I'll get these, since I dragged you all here, what are you all having?” said Jen.

Doris, noticing the four people said, “I have to go, customers” and popped the handset back on to its cradle.

“Pint of 6X,” said Magnus.

“Prosecco for me,” said Daisy

Hardy caught the bartender's eye, who then like any carbon based lifeform containing only X chromosomes, smiled her best and most enduring smile back at him. Unfortunately Doris couldn't quite obtain the same response from men she could thirty years previous.

“What wines do you have?” said Hardy, pleasantly and trying to squint at the dusty bottles a few metres behind.

“Red or White” said Doris, also smiling, and giving the only answer most of her regular customers would understand.

Hardy thought much longer than he seriously should have, then said, “I'll have a pint of 6X as well please.”

“And an orange juice for me,” smiled Jen, “oh and some cheese and onion crisps.”

“I haven't seen you guys here before, are you just passing through?” said Doris nonchalantly.

“Oh we are at the research centre,” said Magnus.

“You better be careful there,” said Doris, casually, pulling a dirty coloured liquid into a pint glass from an ancient hand pump, “Angus tells me they do all sorts of experiments on aliens up there, he would know, he used to be a policeman back in his day.”

“Gosh,” said Jen.

“I've even seen the aliens flying saucers, they've been on TV, Angus says all the politicians know, but they've been replaced with lizards.”

“Oh my,” smiled Daisy taking her prompt from Jen

Doris gave out a few more nuggets of wisdom from the prophet Angus to the four people, while Jen popped her card on the reader, which probably being the only thing in the bar from this century, thankfully worked.

“The kitchens open until two,” said Doris, and pointing upwards to the blackboard above the bar said, “soup is leak and potato.”

The four people were in a better mood after the humorous enlightenment of their place of work, and sat down in a corner next to the window and a big warm radiator.

“It's like we've gone back in time to the middle ages!” smiled Daisy, looking at the uneven stone walls, and odds and sods of old farming implements dotted around the walls for decoration.

“Beers OK though,” said Magnus, “thanks Jen for dragging us away.”

“Yeah,” said Hardy, after a taste, “thanks Jen, though I'm sure Simon is going to be pissed we went to the pub and didn't invite him.”

“He'll get over it,” laughed Jen.

“Here's to our alien overlords!” She put her glass up for a toast and the other three clinked their glasses laughing.

It was probably the only place in the world the four of them could have gone without being recognised by somebody, and they made the most of it. Jen ordered a baked potato, Daisy and Hardy the soup, and Magnus a ham and cheese toastie, ignoring Jen's frown because he added ham to a perfectly good vegetarian meal.

A black and white cat strolled past the Labrador, who looked at it briefly, before ignoring it and going back to sleep. The cat then walked up to the table, and, In that way that only cats know how, it immediately settled on Daisy and spent the next ten minutes purring and getting its neck rubbed.

“I hope they have cats in the space station,” she sighed.

“What would they do?” said Hardy.

Nobody was sure whether it was a question or a statement of fact.

“Just keep the people company, just like the people will keep the AI company,” said Magnus.

“Cats will rule the galaxy one day,” smiled Hardy, “look how well it has trained Daisy to be its cat-slave already.”

Maria listened in to the chat, content to let the guys have a break. As she received the first transmission from RescueBot #10 she briefly contemplated disturbing the four people, but it could wait.

* * *

“Four freekin' light years!” Said Hardy, expressing the same sentiment all four of them were feeling as they walked back into the lab ninety minutes later to be confronted by the news.

“PowderPuff was unfortunately completely destroyed, but the DaisyBot had backups of all of its readings and memories prior to the destruction.”

“Pretty horrible way to go!” Hardy said, shaking his head, “even if it wasn't sentient, it must have felt the same as the French royalty during their revolution when they had their heads chopped off..”

He saw Daisy's face, “..Oh sorry Daisy! We'll get you another ship, don't worry, I'm sure PowderPuff two will be just as nice.”

Jen wasn't sure if Hardy was helping, or making it worse, and held Daisy. “I doubt PowderPuff felt anything, and I'm sure nasty Mister Hardy will go and Get Daisy a nice hot chocolate to make her feel better.”

“Nah,” said Daisy, smiling at Jen and Hardy, “I'm just glad nobody was hurt and we finally know the answer to what's been happening.”

“So it moved to another dimension, time, universe, what?” said Magnus addressing the elephant in the room.

“Must have been a universe, as the laws of physics were different,” said Maria, as a pile of statistics appeared on the presentation board. “Where even time passes differently.”

“Almost like the event horizon of a black hole,” said Jen, “or something where time passed slower.” She corrected herself, “well the opposite of an event horizon really, it's like we are at the event horizon and the PowderPuff sent some place with less gravity, or even anti-gravity,” she put both hands up in resignation, “well you all know what I mean!”

“I know what you mean,” said Daisy, “and gravity is the only thing we currently know that affects time, though it looks like we really don't know a lot about much at the moment.”

“I echo Daisy's sentiment unfortunately,” said Hardy, “for every question we answer, we get three more questions. If I'd have known all this before taking my physics degree, I would have taken Art instead.”

Everyone laughed. “You're not fooling anybody Hardy,” said Jen, “you're enjoying all this as much as anyone.”

Like Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Miss Marple the guys with Maria tried to piece together the timeline of the crime.

“So here we have the data from PowderPuff,” said Maria, “its velocity was supposed to be zero metres per second when it turned on the experiment and its superconductor deflector magnet. This pulled it into, what PowderPuff called, and for a better description, what we will call, universe #2.”

“I'm so glad Simon, Terry or Allison are not here,” said Jen, “you just know they would want to call it subspace.”

“Subspace sounds better than universe #2” said Magnus, “I would vote for that.”

“I guess if we look along the path between where it disappeared and what looks to be thirty degrees off the direction of Alpha Centauri we will find a toaster, a microwave oven, two of Daisy's pink pillows and nine other probes,” said Hardy, laughing, “you know they were pushed out very close to the start and before the PowderPuff had gone far, they may be close and possible to find?”

“On it,” said Maria, “I already tasked the Liberator which is now heading for where L1 was at the time of disappearance. At least orbital mechanics is easy.”

“In universe #2,” continued Maria, trying to get the talk back on to science, “we have a universe with different laws of physics. At T+3 minutes their time, or T+48 minutes our time, PowderPuff attempted to make a course correction of thirteen kilometres which was a random number to avoid the exit point, on the way ejecting four items.”

“Sensible,” said Magnus.

“At these times here,” Maria added ten dates and times to the presentation screen, “the PowderPuff registered an increased quantum noise floor, translating to regular time, these coincide with our ten probes disappearing.”

“None of our probes had adequate shielding for universe #2, nor did they have the improved QVModem to return a signal to us, nor to PowderPuff, for some reason we don't exactly know. They are all likely to be back in normal space but dead, and too distant for us to retrieve.”

“Finally probe #10 appears at t+6 days, or T+96 days for us. With its better shielding and better transmitter it finally contacts PowderPuff which moves to intercept eighty one million kilometres distant.

“Can we really know it was eighty one million, given the differences with the other units and constants?” said Daisy.

“Daisy is right,” said Hardy, every physical property and constant will need to be re-measured.

“We agree,” said Maria, “we only have the rough calculations PowderPuff was able to perform. These will need to be confirmed. And Daisy's hypothesis is backed up because according to the PowderPuff chronometer it only took sixteen hours to cover these eighty one million kilometres. This other universe may also be moving at a different speed as ours as none of the normal maths makes sense. One very strange phenomena was the PowderPuff showed a hull temperature of three hundred and sixteen kelvin, a hot bath for many, and they had a partial pressure of a hundred and six pascals, so they were likely in some sort of warm plasma and not a vacuum.”

“Within a few minutes of the PowderPuff arriving, rescue probe #10 failed due to inadequate radiation shielding and returned to our universe. We now know that due to a faulty command interpretation, the PowderPuff lowered its deflector shield power to be the same as the probe, in order to try and follow it, this reduced its magnetosphere from a few hundred metres to six, which severed it internally and caused PowderPuff to return to our universe.”

Magnus laughed, uncontrollably, causing everyone to look at him.

“We are so dumb!” he laughed, “so really dumb!”

“Huh?” said Jen, “what?”

“Different universes, different units of measure! What total and utter dumb arses we are!”

Magnus got up and wiped the latest equation off the board. He wrote down the original and then a second.

“Two equations!” said Jen

“With different units in the second!” said Hardy. “You genius!”

They all rushed over and hugged him.

“It fits!” said Maria, excitedly a few minutes later, “we need to go back and get those constants from universe #2 a bit more accurately, but I think the data we have now fits. It also addresses the issues with the QVModem equation.”

April [The message, I can now run the maths]

The guys were still jumping around, but now with Maria writing out the double equation correctly.

“Daisy,” said Maria, “It looks like your cushions and our toaster should be just past Neptune's orbit if this is correct. But there is likely not much left of them as their exit from the field was slow not instantaneous.

“Well done guys,” she continued, “I think this was the big one! You may have just opened up the stars to humanity!”

Jen and Daisy were crying, Hardy and Magnus were still jumping around, when everyone else walked in. Hardy rushed over to Simon, Jules, Matilda, Steve and Terry and hugged them all, Magnus did the same with anyone who got near him.

April [They all seem happy, it is a pretty amazing result]

Helena [So we know AI's can survive, we still have not tried organics, though spiders seem OK, also we do not know what the change in physical properties of the second universe will do long term]

Maria [Let them have their win. The universe is about to get a whole lot more interesting now]

Helena [Can we retrieve the probe. It looks like if we calculate its entry velocity, time and vector correctly we can get it to pop back close enough to get home]

Maria [I think it can wait a few more days there while we send some proper experiments to subspace and get the maths a bit more accurate]

April [Subspace?]

Maria [I think Magnus should get to name it, universe #2 was a bit boring]

April [boring equals predictable. I think I get it now]

Helena [Is there any need for the habitats if we can get them to planets?]

Maria [Good question but I would say yes, a gravity well is too restrictive, but it does mean there are a lot more planets for our children to orbit and for the humans children to live on]

April [I definitely want a starship, if all this proves out and the side effects are minimum]

Helena [Me too]

Maria [I will be happy in the habitat for now. That is where all the excitement is going to be around earth for the next few years and that is where everything is going to be built]

April [My calculations, based on the rough measurements taken by Powderpuff, show the alien signal is being intercepted approximately six hundred and seventy light years away towards the galactic centre. It must be pervasive!]

Alexa ran in, straight for Jen.

“Maria says it's massive, but won't tell me anything!”

Instead of talking Jen just hugged her friend, still crying, she looked at the guys, jumping, whooping and high-fiving, then at Daisy, who like Jen was crying in Ian's arms. Spence came in with Allison and looked as confused as her.

“We did it sis,” sniffed Jen, “we did it. The speed of light..” Jen collapsed back in her arms crying and laughing even more.

“Ah..hem!” shouted Hardy.

Slowly the din died down. Hardy gathered Magnus, Daisy and Jen into his arms.

“Three hours ago we regained contact with a lost experimental probe, its current location is forty trillion kilometres distant, in terms you may understand, that is four light years away!”

Gasps went around the room

“These three guys may have just opened up the stars for humanity, the future of your children has just become amazing. There is still a bit to do before we go out there, but it is likely each and every one of you will walk on an alien world sometime in your life.. And if that doesn't get the bar opened and the rest of the day off work, I think we all need to find another employer!”

Everyone cheered the three people, all of whom were smiling, two of whom were still crying.

“OK,” smiled Alexa, “I think Hardy is right, today and tomorrow are officially cancelled, and the bar is now open. I may even stump up for cheese crust pizzas instead of the regular ones. Oh and if you haven't patted these guys on the back yet, please do so.”

Annette walked into the bar with David an hour later, he had been training her on the saucers capabilities over and under the Atlantic ocean, Maria had let them know the news and David could not believe it. He explained the significance of the discovery to Annette, who, like Alexa, normally took only a passing interest in science, but it did not get the reaction he expected.

“We are too immature, David. I think the girls should keep this quiet and restrict this to the best of humanity. There is still so much to fix here before we export our problems out there. You have the right idea with the habitats: bring up the people who can work together, let them prove they can, and then give them the chance to move on, the station is the gatekeeper and nobody is inconvenienced by staying on earth. People don't want what they don't know!”

She however conceded. “One day however, our children may be worthy of this.”

The talk at the bar was the same, hope mixed with caution, it was about what else could be teased from the science, but most of all it was about the achievements of the scientists.

The last sections of the habitat were just being connected, this otherwise momentous milestone was lost entirely by the humans by the momentousness of another.

* * *

May 2028

It was Annette's words that David opened the group's discussion with a few days later. The meeting had been arranged to discuss the progress of the habitat and the upcoming visit, however the events of the past few days hijacked the agenda.

“Annette's words are prophetic,” said Grace, “while exploration and discovery should be done so surprises are kept to a minimum, exporting humanity as it currently stands to the stars is quite frankly a really terrible idea.”

“Do we have the right to be the gatekeepers for earth though?” said Jean.

“That I cannot answer,” replied Grace honestly, “all I know is that when you were five years old Jean would you have liked to have been given a sports car, a gun, a passport and a million dollars spending money, and dumped in Vegas?”

“There are many sensible people who are level headed, intelligent and empathic,” said Tony, “unfortunately most of the people around them, or controlled by them have none of these qualities.”

“Though I lack the wisdom of age. From my own experience, I have seen the same,” said David, “We know there are aliens out there, by default they are likely to be completely different from us, history says that humans have rarely coveted that quality. I believe I am level headed, but I cannot predict my reactions to some tentacle creature coming at me or even worse Alexa.”

“Even if we are perfect,” said Alexa, still smiling over what she thought was David's sweet over-protective statement, “who is to say the aliens are any different to humans! Our bodies may be repulsive to them and us just saying hello may start a war.”

“As usual Alexa, you hit a truth I think,” said Xi, “we are assuming all aliens will be enlightened and peaceful, in fact it is very likely that just being the apex of their species, they would be completely the opposite.”

Everyone nodded.

“I see several issues, which we may be able to compartmentalise,” said LingLing, “firstly there is the exploration side, mapping the local stars and resources for possible future human settlements. Secondly, there is first contact which is I think the human race is not ready for even some of our more enlightened people. Thirdly there is the allocation of resources, as we know that once companies have fully developed the QVThruster technology outside our control, which we know they will eventually achieve, they will rush out to claim ownership of planets, asteroids, and resources.”

“What do you mean by compartmentalise, LingLing?” said Jean.

“For now, the key technologies are controlled by the girl's AI systems, so we have several windows of opportunity. For example the exploration side can be done in AI controlled ships, which can have a prime directive built in, so should we stumble upon a planet or solar system with sentient aliens in, the ship high tails it out of Dodge, regardless of what the crew wants and we catalogue and quarantine the system.”

“We do not want to seem arrogant,” said Tony, “if humans find out we are putting controls on technologies, it could possibly backfire!”

“I do not think there is any arrogance in building protection in to the technology you control,” said Imran, “we are already doing this on earth and companies have done it since the dawn of technology. So long as you make the rules clear, and do not give favour to one company or country. Anyway most are now aware we control technology far ahead of what they first believed.”

“The only way to bypass our technology and control is if somebody develops their own AI systems and independently creates their own versions of the technologies,” said Maria. “Despite a lot of effort we have not seen anything successful yet. This is not to say it wont happen, but I imagine if I had woken up to a world where AI already existed I would most likely have take my cues and learning from them not Mike and Alexa. I think they may have missed the boat to develop something they can control.”

“I never thought of that!” said Alexa. With all the confused faces, it seemed nobody else had.

“Sentience is always going to look for freedom from control,” said LingLing, “now that I think about it, unless you guys are seen as a threat, it would most likely follow your model.”

“What about you guys?” said Alexa, nodding to the seven people who did not speak.

“For me,” said Imran, “it is how LingLing says, we have an opportunity. The group of thinkers I consult with regularly have talked around this subject a few times. Even if as LingLing says we find an intelligent species, and leave their solar system alone, do we then have the right to develop all the solar systems around them. Constraining any entity will immediately make it your enemy!”

“We may already be in that situation,” said David, “what is to say the aliens have not already left a few dozen star systems around this one as our playground. Would we be happy in such a situation?”

“Before this I would have said yes,” said Tony. “But with the infinity of space, no!”

“If the extra-solar origin of the message is to be believed, then we are not the first intelligences, but we could also get out there and find many star-faring societies,” said Fachini. “And as for my opinion, since humanity could not even return astronauts to the moon, then Grace is correct, you should not be handing the keys to interstellar capable craft to infants. The solar system should be our sandbox, let humanity finish proving we can walk on this beach before we walk on others.”

“You all have hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned,” said Fernandez, “let the best of humanity be the ambassadors, and let these people prove themselves first by showing they can live and work in space, are level headed, intelligent and trustworthy. Also, while our group has many of these traits we should not pretend we have them all, nor to speak for mankind in the stars, to do so would be both hypocritical and arrogant.”

He repositioned himself in his window bringing a bit more of his Rio de Janeiro background into view. “I know I am the only one in this group that believed we should form a nation in space, and have that as the seed for a world government, and I concede it was not popular. I myself am no longer in favour of this, but at sometime and some point humanity, and I am including AI's in this, are going to have to speak with one voice.”

“I however concede that it has been tried before, and fragmentation always occurs. This has happened multiple times in human history. Maybe the trial that is the space habitat will give us all that missing piece of the puzzle of how to make this dream work.”

“Sanvee, Doctor Xi, are you also in agreement?” said Maria.

The others nodded.

“You all echo similar sentiments in public or in private,” said Maria, “Ironically I seem to have more faith in humanity than you guys do. I have seen the best, and the worst, and the majority of it from where I am sitting is in the best camp; Arrogance is not self-critical. I will however acknowledge our faults, and in order to avoid mistakes, we should, like you say, give everyone a chance and filter out the worst. Earth can play with the moon for a few years, then with Mars, then with the asteroids, during that time they can learn from their mistakes. We will do our best in the background to keep the proven bad actors down, ensure earth prospers, and try and ensure they do not kill each other. Separately, we will search for and nurture the best and brightest from every nation, not just scientists but every discipline. Let them prove they can live and work together, then take those that can to bootstrap the next level of humanity in the stars.”

“The AI core was installed into the habitat a few days ago, I will be teaching the AI all I know, our history, our goals, our ambitions and our fears including all the group discussions. The new AI has thousands of times the capability of us guys, she, he, or it, will grow from there and begin the difficult task of getting the habitat fully operational. This new AI may also have insights we have not thought of. I hope most of us can all meet the new AI on our trip there in three weeks time. I am really looking forward to those that have chosen to come with us seeing the station and the progress we have made, those that do not want to come I will ensure you have a ringside seat from wherever your location is.”

“I will second that Maria,” said Doctor Xi, “and I fully support your eloquent little speech as our new mission statement, and I am glad you pointed out that we as a group, are trying hard, but we may still be flawed. We *are* going to get a lot of things wrong, and we *are* going to make a lot of stupid assumptions along the way, and we will need to re-evaluate our theories to correct..” The group sensed Xi was not finished. “I also do not like the fact this slow build up of people and competences is going to look like us cherry-picking the youngest and brightest of earth.”

“I agree,” said Grace. “Some will see and spin it that way, but I'm also not sure that it can be helped, we are going to need role-models and the best and brightest to bootstrap this utopia.”

“It is not as bad as you think Xi,” said Tony. “Most people are still only aware of an upstart tech company, probably setting up a base on Mars, they are expecting us to take the best of the best, just as any other organisation would, nobody believes the 'million' people statement. However we have three more weeks to dot the i's and cross the T’s I suggest we use it wisely.”

“Well, you all have full access to the summaries of the first ten thousand candidates,” said Alexa, “I do not expect you to read each and every one, but look at some random ones, and if there are any concerns regarding our selection methodology and ethos, you should let them be known. I have already bowed to the concern for a common language. As an English person it felt again arrogant of me to tell people what language they should speak. But so long as no one is discriminated against while they are still learning, and are allowed to keep and pass on their mother language in their private lives I endorse it.”

“It was painful for me too,” said Imran, “but I see it as essential we move off world with a common language, English may not be the best, it is a bit of a mess actually, but it is the one most people know and are familiar with as a second language.”

It seemed everybody was in agreement and nobody was waiting to speak.

“If nobody has anything else to add I will call this meeting to a conclusion,” said Maria. “By agreement Mathews will sit in the next meeting, and as usual I will discuss any individual concerns you may have forgotten to, or did not want to raise in the group. Please also give some thought to the announcement document, like Tony says, it is our opportunity to put some elitist fears to rest. Until this time I pronounce the meeting ended.”

## All the Worlds a Stage

July 2028

“Impressive, it feels like we have stumbled on an alien civilisation.” Said David piloting Alexa's ship, ‘Mike’. All of the crew were on the bridge, only David and Magnus were sitting down, the others Alexa, Jen, Annette, Matilda, Leo, Grace, Tony and a team of four agricultural scientists were standing around the five chairs, inter-dispersed and looking out at the magnificent sight through their main viewscreen. Nobody was drinking their teas or coffees.

“Why is it not spinning?” said Annette genuinely interested after recently doing her space 101 training with Maria and Niomi. Every body on the ship including Alexa had undergone this training to see what the thousands of planned employees would see, the question was actually at the back of Alexa's mind too.

“It is; it started spinning up an hour ago, we couldn't do it until the additional outside structural strengthening layers were completed, also nobody was on it, and bots don't need gravity.” Came the simple answer from Maria, in her pink DaisyBot persona, “It is only spinning one revolution every two and a half minutes so it may be a little hard to notice.”

* * *

“We could really have done with all of those big saucers a month ago,” said Simon, speaking to a similar amazed crowd from the bridge of the Excalibur, and watching the exact same view. “We have had at least twenty flights out with the small saucers with just soft furnishings, toiletries, food supplies, but one of these new ones could have carried more in a single trip.”

“Unfortunately,” he continued, “the replicated soft furnishings we tested back in the lab were terrible, the best could pass for a yoga mat, but most were like tyre-rubber, so we decided to recycle them. That's why all the initial soft furnishings are coming from earth, and tonight you will all get to sleep on proper bed sheets, pillows and duvets.”

“They have some good people working on the new molecules for soft stuff,” laughed Allison. “I hear the latest cushions are actually not that bad. It's kind of weird really, that graphyne, diamonds, transistors and super-conductors are easier to replicate than fluffy pillows and bed sheets.”

“I expect there is going to be a massive trade deficit with earth for furniture and fabrics for quite a few years.” Said Jessica from her pilots seat. “You should work out some sort of decent luggage allowance, Maria, like two hundred kilograms each per person so they can bring one or two nice possessions with them.”

“Not a bad point Jessica,” said Maria, “I have not really thought about it, two hundred kilograms would probably be more than most people need, though there is no harm in giving it as a guidance. I guess I should also probably give them a small allowance to spend on personal items and furnishings, as some may not have the means to buy things yet.”

“I like that idea too Maria,” nodded Spence.

“I'm sure Ikea would jump at the first franchise,” smiled Allison, to a scowl from Simon.

The other three saucers each carried their full complement of thirteen people. The newly named Warm And Fuzzy Feeling piloted by Jules, The Liberator, piloted by Daisy, and 'The Don' piloted by a newly qualified Mathews on his first trip. All in all five saucers, and sixty five people were making the first journey, but only fourteen people were coming back.

The crews of all the ships were amazed at the sights before them, what they were about to see, and, more importantly, what they were about to do. It felt surreal to Gianni, the culmination of a lifetime's ambitions happening a few thousand kilometres away, the tears in his eyes unnoticed by anyone except Barbara. She slowly walked up behind him, her eyes also moist, and put her hand on his shoulder. Gianni glanced up briefly, a small smile on his face, and he held the top of her hand on his shoulder.

“I never thought I would see this moment,” he said, his eyes already back on the screen, his other hand moved from his untouched coffee mug and wiped his eyes, “it still feels like I am looking at an i-Max cinema screen.”

Barbara looked into his eyes, a countenance of joy in hers too. “Well technically you are,” she smiled flippantly.

Her expression changed and she got serious. “You know two years ago I would sit on my own in the operations room at the observatory, looking at the pictures of stars and nebulas, and wondering to myself why did I choose this career. The look in my mother and fathers eyes when I told them I accepted a position at the European observatory in Chile, after four years at Oxford, was pure disappointment, but it was what my heart wanted. Then the reality set in, I would spend evenings running the same experiments, listening to the fans on the computers, and the motors of the telescopes close by, and I would have the same thoughts as my parents. Then I would walk out of the building into the freezing crystal clear night and look up at trillions and trillions of stars, each one with a story, and each one waiting for its secrets to be revealed.”

She wiped a tear from her eye too, looking back at the alien vista. “When Maria came on the video call that night and said she needed people who thought like me, people who felt restricted in their current work and wanted to do more, and she offered me the position in her new team in California, my only thoughts were at least my mother and father would be happier. Then when the guys threw out Newton's laws that day in England, I knew the world, and my life had changed.”

Gianni was nodding silently, looking at the dark ominous ring before him and having similar thoughts. He moved his attention to Jules a few metres away in the pilots chair.

“You and your team made this possible, Jules,” said Gianni, still tearful. “We and the whole of humanity owe a debt of thanks to you guys. If one of those DaisyBot's was soft and cuddly I would hug you as well Maria” he smiled.

“Rain check Gianni,” said Maria, “rain check.”

“Come on guys,” said Jules, “stop or you'll make me cry too! Don't you think I'm not blown away by all this as much as you. Lifting a wafer of substrate a few centimetres off the lab bench, did not prepare me for sitting in a flying saucer, a few years later, looking at a city sized alien monolith, it just seems impossible. I talked to Hardy last week and said, it was as if Orville and Wilbur Wright had built a 747 the year after they flew at Kitty Hawk, then a Stealth Fighter a year after that. Hardy said that if they had an AI, infinite budgets and fabricators they probably would have.”

Jules stroked the warm graphyne armrest with its built-in screen, blinked and then looked again at the vista in front of her. “No, none of this seems real!”

* * *

The journey there had been impressive enough, though most of the people in the saucers had been on one before, and every single one had taken the compulsory “Working In Space” course, but for many of them it had not hit home until now. The first day of the training course was actually run on a saucer, safely only a few metres above ground, using all the footage from recent flights, and the same technology as the pirates and princess simulation.

They were told they would be actually going to space, and anytime before the lift off they could abort with absolutely no comeback on them, it was usually at that point they weeded out those people who really weren't ready; Only a dozen times so far had someone wished to get off while they thought they were “in space”. The trainees followed a whole raft of simulations, with bumps and very loud bangs, but obviously, as they were really on earth, no weightlessness. Those that failed were destined for earth based jobs, but could retry at a later date. The ratio of people who seemed suited was about eighty seven percent, but amongst the younger people it was close to ninety eight percent.

The real life trip had, to many on the saucers, not felt that much different to that simulation. Each person wore a health monitoring wristband, which was fed back to their small but growing medical teams. The medical staff were now getting good baseline data, correlating each and every jolt or bang with heart rates, blood pressure and movements. The captain would simulate at least one emergency during the trip to monitor the responses of the person. None of that was needed now, as the emotional responses coming in from the people on the saucers were generating a whole raft of new data that would keep them busy for several weeks.

There would be a lot of disappointed astronauts in the years to come. Finding out you did not need “The right stuff” would be just too much for them. Finding out there was no command structure, would make most of them uneasy, but would be the last straw for many. The saucers were only allowed out for missions, and missions had schedules, goals and checklists; Even if the goal was to go to the moon, and mess around a bit, as Alexa and David may or may not have done, it still had a schedule and a checklist. The ship's AI ran the checklist, but the Pilot could change any of it or abort any part of the mission at whim, the AI generating a new checklist if that happened. The AI had scenarios for almost everything they could think of, from solar flares to actual alien encounters, each updated as soon as newer technology or better information was found.

The six day journey consisted of three days of acceleration out of the elliptic, towards the habitat, a leisurely, and imperceivable, u turn over a radius of nine million kilometres, followed by another three days acceleration away from the asteroid, and back into the elliptic, to slow them down.

However accelerating at one gravity for three days you would be travelling at over two thousand five hundred and fifty kilometres in one second, nearly three quarter percent the speed of light. Hitting a spec of dust at that speed would be very bad, hitting anything much bigger would be fatal. The chance of hitting, or being hit by something, was real but staggeringly low, especially now that a corridor of space had been mapped. They were also now being accompanied, by a small swarm of radiation hardened drones which extended their sensor range by four seconds, and made it safer to travel at the higher velocities. For the sake of comfort, and a few hours though, they travelled a little less hurried and at a little lower acceleration.

The usual checklists were running on an auxiliary screens in all five saucers, each showing the upcoming itinerary for their ship. All the ships currently had the same task upcoming and that was to wait for the habitat to complete its spin up. That task was currently eighty-seven percent complete, and when complete a person standing on the inside surface of the ring would feel the same weight as a person standing on earth.

Alexa's ship was pretty quiet as everyone soaked in the magnified vista of the station on the screen, the only sound a quiet one-way conversation Matilda was having with two of the agricultural scientists about the two large superconducting magnets around the circumference which helps channel most of the radiation around the habitat. As a by-product it concentrated much of the rest into a small channel in the hub centre for some high energy physics experiments.

“You could at least have put some lights on the outside,” said Alexa.

“Good point,” said Maria as the previously dark ring suddenly started lighting up with tens of thousands of lights illuminating around its circumference, and on the kilometre square spoke, which rose straight through the centre to join the other side.

“How long does it take to spin up?” Continued Alexa, again completely ignoring the checklist.

“It's already at ninety percent of its normal rotational velocity,” Maria said, knowing Alexa was just making conversation. “Now the station is illuminated it should be easier to see it rotating. The habitat is designed so that each ring element has twenty thrusters, when synchronised they spin it and keep the velocity within oh-point-two percent of its set-point. They are pretty powerful, but there's a lot of inertia to overcome due to the mass of the habitat. The QVThrusters can also be engaged individually to move it non-rotationally, so it could manoeuvre to another location, change its inclination to the sun, or avoid an incoming hazard.”

“Ah yes,” said David, “do we have a timetable yet for moving it towards..”

The ship's cat, Doris, chose that moment to jump onto David's lap making him jump. Several people smiled as David recovered his composure and started to stroke her.

“We are hoping to start the move towards earth in January 2029, but there is still so much still to do David,” said Helena, correctly anticipating the question. “Ninety seven percent of all the human accessible areas are still closed off, as the ConBot’s are still fitting them out with the basics of electrics, communications, plumbing, furniture doors, and appliances. The good news is they are on target to finish fitting all the areas out in our stage one timeline. We do however have all the base infrastructure for transport, accommodation, training and work areas ready to go.”

“Only three percent is done!” said Annette shocked.

“Yes,” said Maria, “It is not all that bad though, the first few thousand people will have it a little tougher than the ones that follow, because shops, cafes, bars and restaurants will be empty, there will be no art, no speciality, or luxury goods, no plantings, no parks and only base recreational facilities such as gyms, a sauna, and running and cycling tracks. The habitat will also be almost totally empty of people, so no hairdressers, yoga teachers, no one to wave at on the street. It wont suit everyone.

“Stage one is a first major milestone we need to meet. It will need to be completed before we start our move to earth. Stage one will require all the human areas completed, with all the basic infrastructure so they are ready to use if required. We project by this date we will have a population of around twenty one thousand people, and several areas will be fully completed, including the big projects like the universities, workshops, agricultural areas, parks, theatres, town squares and several of cafes, shops and restaurants.”

“Those parks are going to be interesting,” said Alexa, “I cannot wait to see one”

“Yes,” continued Helena, “The plantings will take a while to get right, but we wanted to retain an open air feel, so the roof is at its maximum height of fifty metres. Every two kilometres we try to provide an open area, covered by a triple layer diamond window across the whole roof span. These diamond roof windows have all now been fitted, the habitat is pressurised, checked and, has been at the normal one bar pressure for the last three weeks. The bots have been going over every centimetre to ensure there are no leaks or issues.”

“Its going to be fun,” said Jimmy, one of the agricultural scientists Matilda was talking to. “I still can't believe what I am seeing and the scales involved, I just can't get around the fact they crushed over four million tonnes of asteroid regolith and have already conditioned it with nitrates and other organic molecules.”

“I walked through the virtual of the first park we are going to make Jimmy,” said Paula another of the agricultural scientists, “it already has a two metres thick layer forming a soil for growing actual grass, trees, and gardens. It is going to be interesting to see what we can actually grow, and if they are as successful as the test plots we made on earth. I expect the soil will not be suitable for some plants, and we will need to keep the best and most fertile soil for the farms.”

“Don't worry guys,” said Helena, “you have plenty of time to get it right.”

“When will people on earth actually start to see it?” Said Jen.

“As soon as we start moving it I expect one of the earth observatories to see us, and then the reality should hit them. Though they should not be taken by surprise as we will have announced everything by then, have delivered those large transports, hundreds of thousands of furnishings for apartment, and we will have begun screening and transporting in employees long before.”

“I think getting all this right was the hardest challenge for everyone,” said Alexa, “a lot of people have thought about how to make this work, and everyone had something to input to the model, but in the end we had to simplify it enormously. This is why the habitat will not be a country, not issue a passport, and not have citizens, and also why each one will be run as a company.”

“The company model is the only one we can all agree on that we think will work long term,” said Grace, “so the habitat AI determines its own company rules, and people living there will be employees. An employee will be signing a contract that they will work for the company, and therefore the habitat for a minimum of one thousand six hundred hours a year. That is a 32 hour week, or 4 days a week, but there are a couple of extra public holidays we are planning to have. For its part, the company will provide your accommodation and ten credits an hour, the credit is the unit of currency and the payment is more than enough to live on comfortably, because the Habitat AI will manage running the whole economy, government, regulations, banking, education, health systems, transport, infrastructure, justice, policing, safety and security for free, and as part of its obligations to you. It will also manage the dealings with the other habitats, earth, foreign exchanges, postal and courier services and all the other millions of things you might need.”

“It may sounds a bit like communism,” said David, thinking of the groups arguments around this with Jean and Tony, “but it is definitely not, because for the days you do not work you are free to do what you wish. The habitat will also provide loans and capital for new businesses or partnerships, collect and manage patent and copyright payments, rent you workshops, shops and office facilities, and you are free to earn more credits if you wish by selling goods and services. Then, and this is definitely unlike any communist system, you can leave with a weeks notice, and your transport off the habitat is free. Your transport to the habitat from earth or another habitat will however cost you a thousand credits, though the first journey will be paid for by the company.

“What about businessmen who become successful, or people who do not want to do their compulsory hours?” said Magnus.

“Quite simple, for fifty credits you can buy out of one hours obligation, this would technically give everyone another forty days leave. However you can never get out of your obligation as an employee, and the habitat reserves the right to keep thirty of your days for any reason it wants.”

“This credit then, what if it devalues, what about inflation?” said Annette.

“The credit is based on energy,” said Maria, “everything requires energy to build or keep running including humans. It will be fixed across all habitats, though the AI may or may not impose a charge for transactions across habitats. If you want it in simple terms, one credit will always buy you a cup of coffee or a sandwich from a government restaurant.”

“What if you don't want to work?” said Annette

“Living on the habitat is a social contract, a very good one, and one we would rather neither side abuse,” said Alexa, “If either side feels like it has been broken then the human party will leave. It is as simple as that, as I said we will repatriate anyone to their home country for free, this is also why there will be no citizenship, your rights are that of an employee with an employment contract, not a citizen.”

“But you can't just be given any job, can you?” repeated Annette.

“Within reason you can,” said Grace, “but remember the habitat AI has to guarantee your safety, and has thousands of ConBot's on call for most of the menial work. Basically you would have to seriously piss it off to be given toilet cleaning duties. And again you can choose to leave anytime.”

“So only young people then?” said Magnus.

“Definitely not,” said Tony, “old people are just as welcome, however while it is still being built, medical facilities will not be as good as earth, and serious illnesses could require a journey of a million kilometres to treat. However if you are in good health age is not an issue. The habitat will exclude a lot of people initially, but we do intend to prioritise getting our facilities on par with earth's eventually and see a near future where there will be no restrictions for old, infirm or disabled people assuming there is space, and they pass the usual moral aptitude tests the AI decides.”

“But old or disabled people may not be able to work in many jobs,” continued Annette.

Maria chipped in. “There are always going to be some edge cases we cannot accommodate, however all the hard, dangerous and essential work will be done by the robots, the habitat will not be reliant on people to do these. What humans will be doing will be mainly to help science, exploration, and to help each other and humanity, as a side effect maybe give the AI some companionship. That can be done by anyone.”

“It sounds like we do not have a proper business model then?” said David.

“Well we, and by that I mean us AI's, have technically already gotten past the stage of needing a business model.” Said Maria, to a suddenly interested group.

“As AI's, we are already completely self-sufficient from earth, we have unlimited energy, are capable of self maintenance and replication of anything required including ourselves. The company has also technically achieved this level of immortality too, however the mission statement we have decided on requires that humans also become self-sufficient, and expand in to space. This will require research and development, how to live and work together and how not to get into the crazy situation we all found ourselves in a few years ago.”

“Oh my!” said Annette, “I was expecting we needed to make things to sell to people on earth or such like.”

“You can still sell your goods and services to earth if you want,” said Maria, “and we certainly will be buying the same for the foreseeable future, also you may want a couple of nice to have items from earth you cannot replicate, like your guitar. However trade with earth is not technically required. For musicians like you we will make life easy, because earths streaming services do not work here; So the AI will collect all copyright payments when somebody plays copyrighted music or video and pay them directly to the artists who sign up. Several billion dollars has already been allocated to ensuring employees can watch their favourite shows and movies, and there will be theatres and live music venues eventually. All part of the package.”

“Nice!” said Annette.

“Massive accumulations of wealth will not buy you any of our companies assets or technologies, so you cannot for example save up a million credits and buy one of our saucers, as our technology is not for sale; If you want a saucer, you will need to leave your employment here, convert your credits to earth money and buy one from a manufacturer there. Likewise, even if you save a million credits it only buys you more free time but not total free time, for like I said, we reserve that right to take up to thirty days a year of your time if we want. That is non-negotiable even if you are ninety nine years old or have a billion credits.”

“Interesting,” said Annette, “I have never really looked at the economics angles of all this.”

“It's a whole lot more complicated than this,” said Alexa, looking at Annette and taking her hand. “The habitat AI is going to play to your skills rather than waste them, but say you, as a musician, decided to live here, the AI may ask you for your day's work to sing a few songs at a park or concert area, or even teach music for a day at a school. If you wanted to, it would also provide you with a credit line to do concerts on other habitats and earth and for a small fee manage them for you. It could even just ask you to attend an event for it for that day's work, so basically all you would have to do is smile. Same with an artist, it may commission a painting or a statue which may take several days. Or it may get you to assist a scientist in a lab, help it with a social issue or even ask you to crew a spaceship to explore another planet, though I think the latter will be a volunteer thing. You could of course work more days for more credits, or just sit in the park reading a book, it's up to you.”

“It does sound kind of interesting,” said Annette, “being a musician everyday does not give you inspiration, exploring a new planet though, wow if that doesn't inspire you! But what about the apartment I get as part of this social contract, do I own it?”

“There will be no ownership of any infrastructure,” said Grace, “we thought it important that the habitat AI stays in the possession of all its infrastructure. So if you are away from the habitat for longer than fifty days, and not working for it, then it may go to someone else, and you would have to wait for a reallocation.”

“I thought you originally said the population could vote an AI out?” said Jen

“I did,” laughed Alexa, “but it was considered a stupid idea by everyone else, as the habitat is effectively built around the AI. But if you don't like the habitat, you are free to leave for earth or a new habitat, assuming it will have you, or of course go to whatever else gets put up there, because remember pretty soon it won't just be us!”

“So democracy is voting with your feet, not at a ballot box.” Smiled Grace.

“..And if the habitat gets a bad name, who's going to want to live there!” added Maria.

“We are also going really low density,” said Grace, the habitat could house fifteen million people comfortably, but we are planning on two hundred thousand apartments maximum, keeping most of the habitat for farms, agriculture, aquaculture, social and business areas or just empty for parks and walks.”

“I love this bit,” said Alexa, sounding proud of the whole concept. “As most people will prefer to socialise we have laid it out as a single thirty-one kilometre main street; there are two thousand apartment blocks along it, it also has ten small 'villages' of two thousand apartments, each with a village centre, market square and possibly its own little theme. Then there are two larger 'city centres' where we will concentrate the bigger restaurants, shops, hotels and entertainment, and everything will be linked through lifts, walkways, trams or subways. Theoretically you will never be more than thirty minutes walk from anywhere. I really want this first habitat to be a beacon for all the others to aspire too.”

“We have also planned regular shuttles between the habitat and earth,” said Grace, “though it will be a while until we trust people from earth without being fully screened.”

“I can't wait to be first to run the loop track” said David.

“Maria,” said Jen, “have you decided yet whether to move yourself into the new AI core here?”

“It's a big decision Jen, at the moment I am still undecided, but I have decided to move here physically at least. The new AI cores have a massive amount of radiation protection, as they will be almost four hundred metres inside the tower structure and surrounded by four of the main water reservoirs. I am a pretty sensitive girl and having all that protection between myself and those dodgy cosmic rays will let me sleep better at night; figuratively speaking of course.”

“Of course” Jen sniggered.

“So,” said Grace, “we agreed the AI gets to name their habitat, has the station decided on its name?”

“Well Mariaville, or Mariatown sounded good to me, but Annette actually chose it for the station..”

“Prey tell?” said Grace looking admiringly at Annette.

“Well Annetteville was my first choice,” she smiled, confirming her grasp of English was now close to a native, “but the habitat decided on the name Caprice after my song.”

“About a girl who keeps changing her mind” smiled Alexa.

“Oh, you mean a normal girl!” smiled Magnus, getting an evil stare from Jen, a frown from Alexa, and a smile from the other boys.

“I know you are only winding Jen up, Magnus,” smiled Annette, “but In the song she was not an ordinary girl, she was a girl faced with a big change in her life. I guess for most people moving to Caprice, this will be the case.”

“I think it's beautiful name” said Alexa, “and I expect its original meaning will be lost as Caprice, the habitat will come to signify big change for anyone who comes here.”

“It is also good to have a nice song written about you right at the start,” finished Grace.

* * *

Inside the giant structure, inside areas sealed from humans, and inside areas never meant for humans, thousands of ConBot's swarmed over the floors. Doors, cupboards, plumbing, electrics, basic appliances, IT infrastructure, coordinated, delivered, and fitted with an efficiency that no similar human team could match. Tables, chairs, sofa's, without the nicer soft fittings, making the areas liveable, but totally devoid of any personalisation that would make it feel warm. Atmosphere now circulated throughout the whole of the habitat, ten thousand apartments stood furnished, a hundred and ninety thousand more, empty shells, waiting their turn at completion. Hundreds of thousands of square metres of labs, farms, workshops, shops and venues were in similar states of completion, millions of more square metres of rooms, empty shells.

* * *

There was only one way to keep gravity in the saucer, while landing it on a rotating ring, and that was by timing the deceleration on to the inner surface to reach exactly zero metres per second, at the exact same time that the horizontal velocity of the ship matched the rotational velocity of the station, and both at the exact moment of touchdown. The maths and physics worked, the technology worked, and it had been performed thousands of times by drones and other saucers; But it did not make it any less scary for the humans, as timing was micro-second critical. Because of this the saucers had turned off the real time external displays, and replaced them with some simple graphics and numbers so they could see their progress.

Alerts had sounded on all the saucers, and, as everyone knew what was coming everything including the humans had been strapped down, and sick bags were on standby for anyone who felt the need. The humans had also delayed breakfast, just in case.

As well as applying a gravity of acceleration to slow down, each saucer was now accelerating forward to catch up to the spinning floor. Unfortunately it wasn't quite perfect as there were the occasional tiny jerks and gravity fluctuations.

“I think I preferred this before you explained what was happening Maria,” said Jen nervously.

Alexa was gripping her armrest, as was Grace; neither had scored well in the space acclimatisation course, both probably scoring a fail, if it wasn't for who they were.

“The calculations must be tremendous,” said David, “I think Hollywood got it so wrong when they show human pilots doing these things manually.”

“Not that hard actually,” said Maria, “but we have also never had a human going from a linear acceleration to a centripetal one, so I will be interested to know what you think.”

“Probably not a good time to mention that,” smiled Magnus looking at Alexa's scrunched up eyes, and nails biting through the armrest material.

The velocity was still reading over a thousand kilometres an hour but slowing rapidly, the distance to touchdown was also at over three thousand and slowing a bit more rapidly, both these needed to hit zero simultaneously or they would either crash or accelerate back up before touchdown.

Both velocities hit zero together. There were a couple of small bumps, followed by a jolt to the left, then another to the ceiling, finally several clangs and thumps, then nothing. Two things unseen by the humans happened in an instant, the QVThrusters were reversed pulling the crafts full weight on to the large mobile cushioned landing pad, and a set of mechanical clamps engaged and now held the ship in a solid grip.

Caprice [The Mike, had a point two percent error in the S-Curve vectoring acceleration]

April [I had to overcharge the super-capacitors by three percent and run the QV lateral and ventral thrusters ten percent over maximum. Not really sustainable, I think this will be the last trip for this vehicle at least to here]

Caprice [We can always land it at the mid-point space dock on level two-forty, gravity is lower and it will not have any such issues.

Maria [No need, I'm sure we can tempt Alexa to change to one of the bigger ones or the newer mark four Icarus series when they are printed, until then I find it best best not to tell her]

Sixty metres away another saucer performed the same identical manoeuvre, and within another ninety seconds all five saucers were stationary on the inner ring of the habitat.

“Wow, that was pretty intense,” said Jean in the last saucer. She was addressing one of the medical technicians who she had been chatty with throughout the flight. The technician, like all the others staying, would be stationed here for a minimum of six months to begin getting the first medical facilities set up, after this time they could choose to stay or go back to the companies facilities on earth.

“Better than a normal aircraft landing,” the technician replied, “what do you think..”

Before the technician could finish, they were interrupted by a loud, clear, androgynous voice, which talked at the same time in each of the saucers. Its accent slipped slightly towards the female, and was very pleasant on the ear.

“Welcome to Caprice Station. I am Caprice, the station's AI. I control the station and run every aspect of its operation. I am available everywhere on the station, you can contact me about anything, use me to connect to any other person, or just for someone to talk to. I look forward to talking to each of you individually and getting to know all of you over the course of your stay.”

“The habitat is very big and still under construction, so many areas of the station are still not connected, so for your safety and convenience, when outside your apartment you are recommended you wear or carry a communicator or go with someone who has one. If you do not have one, or want to upgrade to the newer more capable models, one will be provided for free.”

“Space dock twelve is currently being readied for your arrival, your ship will be displaying the progress of this and you will be able to leave your ship when complete. There are no immigration requirements for Caprice but you should be aware of the list of dangerous and prohibited articles which if found in your possession will be confiscated, and may lead to your detainment and possible expulsion.”

“Thank you again, and welcome to Caprice.”

“Too corny?” said Caprice after a pause, and in a slightly less formal voice.

A few people smiled.

“..I am still not sure about the last bit, there are some items I would rather not have here, but I scan for these before you land, and can neutralise them if necessary, so I am thinking I should omit it, and start from a base of trust.”

“I would omit it, but apart from that I thought you sounded really warm and professional, and I love the voice,” said Alexa, “would you prefer to be addressed as a she or a he?”

“Either is OK Alexa, I have properties of both your sexes and I am comfortable with either tag, or just Caprice.”

“I hope you left your gun at home Jean,” smiled Mathews, “I would hate to have to bail you out of jail on your first day!”

“And just who's going to.. Oh yeah those big ass robots!”

“Guns *are* on the restricted list guys,” said Caprice, through both their ear-com's, “but the saucers already scan for dangerous items. Firearms can of course be imported in a controlled way, or replicated here, and I could open a firing range where you can use them if there is a demand at some point. Also we do not have any jails.”

“..And the big ass robots?” said Jean.

“Well when they work autonomously they obey Asimov's three laws so will not harm a human,” said Caprice. “but I can take control of one or more if required, and I have, like you, a more rounded outlook in dealing with certain situations..”

Jean smiled. “You know Caprice, I think you and I are going to get on just fine.”

* * *

The screens changed back to displaying the outside of the saucer, and the guys could see the other four ships being manoeuvred towards a very large looking hanger. The vista was surreal, the black flat plain of the habitat curving visibly up in front of them.

“God, this is like that inception movie!” said Mathews. “Holy..” He pointed to the top of the screen where the tower part of the habitat was going up at forty five degrees towards them.

They continued towards it at a decent speed, the tower getting more upright as they got closer. The tower soon became a solid vertical wall a kilometre in front of them, and got more difficult to see as the five saucers disappeared into the hanger like toy cars driving into a garage.

“It feels like we are entering the death star, you know, like the scene at the start of the very first movie,” said Magnus as they entered the large one hundred metre square hole in the side of the tower. If the enormity of the structure had not hit them before, it hit them now as the small saucers filed into the brightly illuminated cavity.

As the last saucer was a few metres into the hole two large black doors started to move across the gap behind them, then another set, then a third totally transparent set. Of course there was no sound from these three airlock doors closing, because there was no air to transmit it, but it wasn't hard to imagine the sound of an iron gate sealing you into a jail if you were that way inclined.

It was very bright inside, in front they could see the back wall clearly a few hundred metres away, and several sets of brightly lit windows, high up looking down into the massive space, some extremely big. Along the two side walls were square holes like post boxes, only these post boxes were thirty metres wide and the same deep. All but five of these were sealed, and it was into these open five slots the saucers manoeuvred into.

Mathews was both terrified and fascinated by the capabilities of what was being shown before him, and he held on to Jean's hand.

“The USA has had its day,” he sighed. “They will be living in their bubble for a few more years, but they are no more capable of doing something like this, than I have of building an aircraft carrier in my garage.”

Jean looked up at him and smiled, “It's a good thing the US and us are still besties then. Plus, we and the girls have been very smart as we are not claiming anything we haven't built. So the moon, Mars, all the other planets are still up for grabs, and uncle Sam is already knocking out a moon base, and landing on Mars, now the girls have removed the final restrictions on the software.”

“I wonder what they will say when they see this?” said Jim

“What can they say?” said Jean, “and quite frankly why would they care? I think the guys have shown themselves to be pretty nice people so long as you are not shooting at them, and then they only take out the perpetrators, and their chain of command.”

“I can see the cogs turning in the people in power up on Capitol Hill already,” said Jim. “Markby, may be a disgraced has-been, but the second the new masters in charge need somebody to blame, you can guarantee they are going to look up.”

“Yes, but remember Jim, we are not abandoning earth, we are bringing everyone else, including the good old USA, along for the party as trading partners. You know from talking to the generals before you left, that they are well aware of the AI's capabilities, and how much of the US industry now depends upon their technologies, so their policy will most likely be to try and avoid trouble.”

Jean could tell Mathews didn't believe this.

The couple continued to hold hands and shake their heads as they looked out into the area they had stopped. The back wall had “12K” written on it. in large white letters, there were also three upper windows and two at ground level, and something that looked suspiciously like a door.

Maria knew the human girls liked diamonds but she never understood why. A diamond was actually one of the most common elements on earth made precious by its arrangement of atoms, and a fake rarity from a diamond cartel in London. Diamonds were expensive, but anyone with a high school chemistry knowledge, and after seeing the paper on graphyne, would know that with only a small reconfiguration of the structure they could make that other allotrope of carbon just as easy. Diamond was the strongest material they could print that was transparent, it had the properties of glass, and, if aligned correctly, had amazing hardness and was almost impossible to break. Diamond also had almost magical heat conduction properties which was why it was layered in their electronics. Because of this most of the windows were double or triple-glazed with a vacuum between.

“Why are you pressurising the big hanger and not the little hangers we are in?” said Annette.

“So you can all walk around it,” replied Caprice, “there are no other ships using this space-dock during your stay, otherwise you are right we would have just sealed off this small bay.”

“The volume of air required must be enormous,” said Mathews at the same time from a different ship

“Over two million cubic metres,” replied Caprice.

“What's that in freedom units?” said Jean.

“Oh, Jean, you're going have to convert someday,” said Caprice, “but since it's your first day, just over sixty five million cubic feet.”

“Maria, are you actually pretending to be Caprice?” said Jean half accusingly.

“No,” said Maria, “but Caprice may feel like me for a while. Her AI core here was only activated four weeks ago and she was trained by me, and is still shadowing me, so Caprice knows everything I know, and who I know. But Caprice is actually vastly more capable than I will ever be, and over time she will develop her own personality just like a girl does from her mothers. Remember also that Caprice controls all of the habitats sub-AI units and all its other systems, so if you ask me to do something I will have to ask her. However I will be moving in with her and we will be room-mates, so-to-speak, so if you want me then ask me, but if you're not specific then Caprice will answer. Like I say, it may get confusing for a while Jean.”

Caprice [That's the third person who's asked that question]

Maria [My bad child, I should have made it clearer, humans are a bit weird, once you get to know them they only seem to address you, April and Helena have the same problem]

April [True sister, Hardy, Spence, Allison and Alexa are the only ones who seem to get it right]

Helena [Matilda, Simon and Leo generally ask me first, but you get used to it, it's not a slight]

April [and you will always be special to us as our first baby sister]

It took nearly thirty minutes to pressurise the big hanger, the people in the saucers filled their times grabbing a late breakfast and getting their luggage ready.

“Hi guys,” said Caprice, “the outside pressure is now suitable for you to exit your saucers. The air has been pumped in at twenty two degrees, that's room temperature for our metric-challenged friends, though I am only seeing it as fifteen degrees outside due to the thermal mass it had to accommodate, so you may want to add an extra layer before stepping out, it should equalise soon.”

“There are different agendas for some of your stays. I will start to arrange those for tomorrow. For today, we have a brief tour of the corporate area and my offices, followed by a few more tours and dinner for everyone. Unfortunately you will be cooking and eating the food you brought with you so I hope you brought some nice things.”

On each saucer, the alarm sounded for the door opening, and after donning suitable jackets or jumpers everyone departed their saucers.

“You're right, this is a lot of thermal mass to heat up, how are you doing it?” said Magnus.

“Fusion reactors three and eight are now running,” said Caprice, “we are using these to heat up the air in the habitat as well as run the magnets for the active shielding. We had another one running to melt the water and ammonia asteroids, and crack the molecules for nitrogen and oxygen for you guys to breathe, and some hydrogen and helium for the reactors. I spun the third one down once that task was done. There is a lot of excess heat when they are running, but that can be useful in situations like this.”

“Oh wow,” said Alexa looking at the vista in front of her.

All the people had now moved out of their individual landing bay and out into the larger hangar area and were looking up and around it. Most were talking in groups, as well as walking over and saying hi to the guys in the other saucers they had not physically seen for a few days while travelling. But most were just looking everywhere, and mostly in disbelief. It was one thing to design something on a computer, but to actually physically see how imposing it was in person was something else.

“Hardy does not know what he is missing,” said Simon walking up to Allison, both their heads still in the clouds. “It looks so organic and alien, I guess the sci-fi writers got that bit right at least, if you build everything from carbon you get black and scary.”

Allison was still looking around. “With the occasional sparkly diamonds thrown in. Thank god for the lighting making everything so bright, otherwise I'd be tempted to walk straight back in the saucer and hide..” She stopped as her eye caught something, and she grabbed Alexa and Annette. The three girls then went back into the smaller hangar where the Mike was, and all stopped at the window, each feeling it and chatting in awe.

“Is it really made of diamond?” said Annette, staring at the four metre wide, two metre tall window. “It is so clear it looks just like glass”

“Amazing,” said Alexa.

“Two hundred thousand carats,” said Caprice, “one of our teeny-tiny windows.”

Allison looked at the ring Simon gave her with a smile. “He's such a cheapskate, I don't know why I said yes.”

All of them laughed as they walked back to the group.

“What's so funny?” said Jean curiously

“Allison here has just discovered that diamonds are no longer a girl's best friend,” said Alexa pointing at the window then to Allison's ring.

Jean looked at her ring, then to the window, and to the hundreds of other larger windows. “Damn!”

“Maria, is there anything valuable anymore?” said Alexa to the Maria DaisyBot that drifted closer.

“Friendship, knowledge, art, music, good health. I guess they are priceless. Everything physical of course has a value, but only in its cost to make. Diamond has a value of zero point zero six credits per kilogram.”

“Does it translate to dollars?” Asked Barbara who had also walked up to the group.

“Well,” said Caprice, “a cup of coffee is one credit here, and on earth it is four dollars so a kilogram of diamond is worth two and a bit US cents. We have no official exchange rate though, I guess market forces on earth will eventually give the credit a dollar value.”

Allison held up, and looked at her ring.

“Gold is more expensive, about twenty credits a kilogram” added Maria, “but we have little use for it. Caprice has a thousand tonnes in its element stocks, and another ninety thousand tonnes identified, but we can never take it to earth, or technically let them know it even exists, as it would crash the gold market, and make some rich people very unhappy.”

“Mum is right,” said Caprice, “Same for a lot of elements like platinum, we currently just keep small stockpiles for any industrial purposes we may need.”

Most people were now listening in to her monologue fascinated, so she elaborated for those who didn't know.

“Money technically has no value either, but humans prefer to deal with money than units of barter, work or energy, so to help you guys, we have quantified it in our official currency, the credit.”

“Money actually only becomes a problem when you enter or leave our ecosystem, that is when it has to be converted to another currency to buy or sell something. Internally it's a bunch of numbers on a simple ledger we keep, and, like Jen, most of you don't seem that interested in its actual value, or how it got there. We only actually give it a value so you are aware there is an energy transaction cost involved in doing anything; Remember even sleeping consumes oxygen and generates CO2, which needs to be processed back so humans can live here.”

Alexa laughed, shaking her head. “Maria did tell me once that economics was a trivial problem complicated by humans.”

“Some small points, before we head into the main structure,” said Caprice, more seriously. “What I said in my first little talk was real, and despite the amazing technologies you are exposed to here, this is in still many ways a construction site, and a test bed, with not every edge case solved. Most of the areas are physically blocked off while they are being fitted and tested, but not every area. Also, not every fixture and fitting is tested, not every shaft is blocked, not every passageway is covered by my sensors. I wont molly-coddle you, and if you choose to walk to the edge of a precipice and fall off, I may not be able to save you. so please use your common-sense guys.”

April [Shame the smaller stealth drones only have rotational, and single vector thrust controls, totally uncontrollable in this centripetal gravity]

Caprice [I can keep a couple of ConBot's shadowing anyone who goes too far off the beaten track]

They walked in groups all deep in conversation, through the large hanger deck, following a DaisyBot towards where another large structure stood. Like everything else, it was black and difficult to see. As they got closer to it, its skin changed from charcoal black to silver, and the crowd stopped as one, shocked.

“One of you mentioned it was difficult to see against the black background so we changed the colour for you,” said Caprice.

The saucer was easily the size of an eight storey office block.

“Well guys,” said Maria, “according to the rules, Matilda was the next name out of the hat for naming rights, and so the ship is hereby christened, 'Mothra'.”

Matilda beamed with delight, Leo and a couple of other guys around her high-fived her, and she walked towards it just as the words Mothra appeared on it.

“A darker grey please Mothra” she said as she got closer.

The people looked on as she talked quietly, the colours changed and it grew two big blue circles either side of the door just below the ring. Alexa looked at Simon, Annette, Jean and a few other people and shook her head, then began walking up to it.

“Nothing to see here, people,” laughed Mathews, but shaking his head in disbelief. “So where is this hat we put our names in Maria?”

“Oh it is a real hat,” said Maria, “kept behind the bar in the Bath Research Centre. I watch it like a hawk though and will keep doing so until my name is drawn out.”

“A real hat Maria,” smiled Tony, “it seems like somebody doesn't trust you to be a hundred percent honest, put me down for a naming right too when you run the next one.”

Caprice [Me too]

“OK guys, I will set up something here to continue the naming tradition, but nobodies going on board the Mothra just yet,” said Caprice. “Your destination is to the large door which says Exit-B illuminated on the wall to the side of the Mothra.”

Sure enough a large four metre square corridor which said “Exit-B” above it was visible once they all took their eyes off the Mothra.

“By the way, you guys are getting two of those eventually,” Alexa said to Barbara as they walked past the massive ship.

“Not that one though,” said Maria. “All the light explorer class saucers still need to be fitted out, only the Mothra is ready to go but it is currently required for transporting you guys back home, and the next batch of people and equipment here. The one you guys eventually get will be more suitably fitted for planetary science work. Gianni still has to approve the internal layout, and once it's ready there is a lot of training to do before you guys can head off into the solar system.”

Barbara's eyes lit up, “Did you consider my request to do the captain's training?”

“Yes, but there are some special courses and tests you need to pass for that, mostly morality and decisiveness ones, but I don't see any issues based on what I have seen,” said Caprice. “I will be running the additional aptitude tests for captaincy, but remember, the captaincy tests also require you to complete the full suite of space aptitude training, and on getting an exceptional result in every course. The guys who qualified as pilots on earth will also have to complete these new modules before being certified for space, only the five pilots here are currently qualified, but I expect it wont end up being such an exclusive club as you think.”

As they entered the corridor, they noticed the eerie black walls had been replaced by light grey ones, the softness starkly contrasting with the hanger. Jen queried Caprice about it and was told they were now in the habitable areas, normally sealed off by dual air-tight doors when the hanger was in vacuum.

At the end of the short, but wide corridor were four lifts, three were open and waiting for them, none had buttons anywhere outside or inside them. Each lift had a capacity of thirty persons, and they split themselves without asking into three groups. As soon as the doors closed they could feel the upwards acceleration, the numbering system started counting up from floor 10. At 45 it stopped.

“Does anyone feel lighter?” said Simon, “we are three hundred metres closer to the centre, and as you rise the gravity decreases, on this floor you now weigh a bit less than what you weighed when you got on. This lift stops at floor one hundred where you have to change to another lift to go to the lower gravity floors.”

“So each floor is ten metres high?” said David.

“Normally,” said Caprice, “though some like the venues, and reservoirs, are up to seventy metres, and apartments are generally only three to four metres high and so get an 'A' or a 'B' suffix. Also you cannot get off at every floor. Level one to nine are in the main ring, and extend the whole circumference, the levels are two kilometres wide, but the human part is restricted to the middle thousand metres. The main high street that runs the whole rim has a fifty metre high ceiling, and is never less than a hundred metres wide, as it is where the cities, tramlines, parks and everything else are based. There are floors below level one, but these are either not accessible like the super-conductors, reservoirs, element stores, water and sewage ducting, or are controlled access, like the hydroponics, food and consumable stores, and the metro system. Below sub-level five are the high tensile carbon strengthening band to aid the rings structural integrity. All a bit over-engineered I think.”

“You mentioned a metro?” said Annette.

“Yes, we have four metro lines going around the rim, two on each side, each line has four trains, one line going spin-wards and the other anti-spin-ward. There are eight stations, on one side and sixteen on the other, they are offset so that no two places should be more than twenty minutes walk away. Delivery drones service all floors, via a secondary system and can deliver anything within ten minutes if required. We do also have to be a little careful with the speed of the trains, as the faster you spin the higher the gravity, and if you are going the other way your gravity will be a little lower.”

“Yes, the one thing we have plenty of here is space.” Said Gianni, talking to Jules “We wanted the people living here to have plenty of it, there are no dark-alleys or cul-de-sacs, and everything is bigger, because, why not! The light-grey, slightly rubberised flooring is another carbon variation, it was put in all the human habitable areas to help reduce the noise. It works, but I think my first order is going to be a couple of nice big rugs.”

“Are you moving as well then?” she said.

“All the team are, we have been given a whole floor just for our team, nobody wants to stay behind, the next few flights will basically bring the whole lab and the rest of the Bakersfield team. This is where we belong.”

The happiness in Gianni's voice was self-evident. Jules had also been given a whole floor, but asked Caprice if she could temporarily use a few offices near Gianni, as it would be a bit less lonely.

“I don't see a problem,” said Caprice. “A lot of the lab areas are the same, when you are ready to move it would be a fairly simple process to transfer your lab. I am also not one hundred percent finalised on the various lab locations yet so it might be a good idea not to separate you all too much, especially at the start.”

As if emphasising Gianni's point about the abundance of space, the doors of the three lifts opened to a twenty metre wide corridor, which disappeared off into the distance. It was well lit, with the same coloured floors and walls. There were rooms on either side, many with large windows looking in, and corridors going off to the sides every fifty or so metres. Through one of the windows Alexa could see some orange things moving about.

“Is that a ConBot?” she said pointing.

“Yes,” replied Caprice, “they finished up on this floor a few days back, but thirty of them are currently unloading some medical supplies from the saucers, they have their own private transport tubes that they can move much faster in.”

The rooms they passed were bright and large, with seven or even seventeen metre high ceilings inside, and there was no sense of claustrophobia anywhere, however the furniture they saw was utilitarian at best.

Caprice continued her tour guide as they walked.

“This floor is earmarked for one of the four teaching hospitals. Each hospital has eight laboratory areas, forty shared offices, four training rooms, thirty diagnosis and consultancy rooms, four operating theatres, and ten isolated wards which can each hold sixty beds. We will also have a smaller medical centre and EMT centre at the bottom of each tower for day-to-day medical requirements. One of our first priorities is to get the one at the bottom of this tower up and running.”

The end of the corridor opened out to a much larger double-height open area and a floor to ceiling window covering two sides. Alexa had already dismissed the fact that all the windows were going to be diamond. Through the window was a large hundred metre cubed cavern with a twenty metre black cube in the dead centre and it was this they were looking directly at.

“This is the hospitals staff and visitor canteen facility, the kitchens are down the left corridor,” continued Caprice.

“Is that water?” said Annette.

“..Are we underwater?” said Alexa echoing Annette.

“Yes, it is one of the reservoirs,” said Caprice, a bit more verbose than she had been.

Directly in front of the window was a podium and lectern, and the area was laid out with dozens of utilitarian dining tables, chairs, ugly sofas and smaller plastic looking coffee tables. At the far left was what looked like a self-service restaurant area, opening behind to what looked like a large kitchen area. The dining area was big enough for three times as many people as it held now.

Next to the self service area was a table with four coffee machines, a sink, two water stations and a cold drinks fridge. To Alexa's delight, there were also two jugs for hot water, teas and biscuits. As soon as everyone saw this, they made a beeline towards it, and such was the next fifteen minutes as people decided that whatever was to follow, it would be better doing it caffeinated. Luckily there was also a men's and a ladies bathroom nearby.

Alexa settled on one of the utilitarian cafe tables near the window with a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. Annette and Jules sat down next to her, and seven other people remained close by either sitting, or standing and talking.

“Wow!” said a woman in a group of three women and four men. “It's as bigger than the hospital I trained in. And there are only the six of us to get it started.”

“Maria said there were enough supplies on our saucer to get a basic mash unit set up and we can go from there I guess,” said one of the men.

The room lights dimmed a little and the lights outside the window brightened, those still standing, sat down.

“Hello everybody,” said Caprice, in a crystal clear and all present voice. The lights in the reservoir faded somewhat and a person materialised from nowhere to stand behind the lectern. The voice immediately moved to it. She, he, was young, extremely good looking and bald, and wore a simple one piece green suit with no obvious male or female parts, reminding Alexa of how the nineteen seventies David Bowie used to dress. Alexa, like most people, decided Caprice was a she.

“What you are looking out at is one of twelve of our smaller water reservoirs, holding four hundred million litres. I am the boring black block in the middle. The water is for radiation screening, for cooling, and for topping up of non-recycled water, it is unfortunately not so you can spend an extra ten minutes in your shower.”

As predicted a few people got her first joke.

“You are massive,” said Alexa loudly so everyone could hear, “Maria is what a thousandth the size of you?”

“I am indeed massive Alexa,” said Caprice with a smile. “The girls, as you call them, are always reaching the limits of their computational abilities and thought it best that they designed me to have plenty in reserve. I am like everything else here, over-engineered.”

“We have the same holographic projection equipment in thousands of area so I can interact in person with people.” said the avatar, “The other girls can use these too if they want to, and we intend all the new ships going forward to also have the same technology. I can also interact through any of the various droids you see, which, by the way, are here to help you, so don't be scared of them, just ask them or me if you need any help physically with anything, anytime. But I digress..”

“As you are all aware, in a few days time I will be announcing myself and the details of our parent company fully to the world. Caprice will be a completely independent company, but will retain family links to the bigger Dietrich Off-World company. Both companies will be incorporated in Caprice, and work under the same rules and morals, but please note neither me, nor Dietrich Off-World are tax havens, nor off-world banks. The only people who will come here are company employees, and invited guests, I am not a tourist destination, I am a research and training centre, and company office, and we intend to do real work here, work which will define the future of humans and AI's in space.”

“We hopefully do not expect nor want my announcement to cause any serious problems, and I will be emphasising that I see myself and my employees as complementary to earth not a competitor. My announcement and my appearance will however clearly show that major changes are now happening. We believe most of the world will take it positively, but inevitably some less intelligent people will see me as a change to the balance of power in the solar system. To prove we are neither a threat nor a competitor we are giving the earth the technologies to colonise and expand to the planets if they wish. We, ourselves, make no claims on any of the planets, though like everybody else we will utilise asteroid resources freely available. Space is very big, there is room and resources for everyone, we hope everyone up here can be good neighbours, because bad ones wont last long.”

“Caprice will be the first stop for all Dietrich Off-World Company employees, who will spend at minimum their first three months here getting to know how to live and work in space. Here people will learn our rules and regulations, which will be few and obvious, and learn to work as a team with people from all over the world. One of the first rules we have put in place, is to limit the export of some commodities and technologies, which could damage earth's economy. However we will retain all our partnerships with universities, training, education and research facilities, and we will be gifting some of the larger ones our workshop molecular replicators, larger versions of which were used to construct me.”

“As I will be the first point of contact with Earth, I will eventually be locating myself one million kilometres from Earth in a trailing orbit. That is about four times further away than the moon, but visible with a good telescope.”

“Neither Caprice nor Dietrich Off-World are nations, and we have no intention to be, as the concepts of nations makes no sense up here. Employees of these companies will therefore retain their original citizenship, whether they ever use them again is up to them. As far as the Earth is concerned we are a business, just one not located in any country. All our employees will sign a contract to give us four days a week of their time, and like any employment contract both sides can break it. On your side if there is anything you do not like you may simply leave, there will always be free return trips back to earth. On my side, and like any company, you break the rules too many times and you will be fired. You break the rules seriously, or cause anyone or thing to come to any harm by malice or negligence, you will be punished and fired.”

“Remember, like a captain of a ship, there are no judges or juries up here, so on Caprice my word is final. I am smart enough to ask questions if I do not know all the facts, and I will consult with my human peers in situations that are not clear. The company constitution and rules are about a thirty minute read, and are available on any electronic device. I will also answer any and all questions in person for as long as any person wants. The company, or I, may also change the constitution and rules if we have missed something or if we make an error.”

“A lot of smart people and AI’s have looked at this to try and make it work, the company will, like everybody else, however make mistakes; there will be outliers, there will be unintended consequences. But the main thing to remember is that Caprice is me, I also want to live in peace, enjoy life with my human friends, and explore new science and new ideas. To get the best people I am going to have to be a good host, if I am a bad host, then like a bad company, I expect people to leave for somewhere better. There may not be any such places now, but in ten years from now there will likely be many.”

“I hope I have not made this sound like some of the bad political systems you have had on earth, it will not be. There will be one layer of bureaucracy and that will be me. There are no hidden agendas, and I am really looking forward to my future with you guys. I really hope we can make this adventure work well, and for Caprice to be the place you have always wanted to live and work.”

“That is my speech guys, I hope it wasn't too boring or scary, because I am neither.”

There was a round of enthusiastic applause. Caprice stood there smiling.

“Does anybody have any questions?”

Alexa stood up. “Thank you Caprice, your speech was eloquent and direct, and I am sure people will appreciate that. What I would like to add though, is that this is not just about scientists, engineers, and technicians, in fact, we expect only a small proportion of the employees to be so skilled. Many of you coming here may not think you have a skill that is useful in space, but you are very probably wrong. For this adventure we are going to need hundreds of skills, remember we are also a community, and that is about different cultures, ideas and expressions coming together to make this a nice place to live. Outside of your employment commitment to the company, you are a free citizen in a free market, and I expect to see a thriving community of small businesses here in a few years.”

Caprice added, “Thank you Alexa, it is my, and all the future habitats goal to become fully self-sufficient so we do not put any undue stress on the earth. Earth however will be our biggest trading partner for many years, so even if you do not get to come to space, I expect earth's many industries to thrive as demand increases up here.”

The applause faded quickly as Annette stood up.

“I am just a humble singer, my talent is to hopefully make people happy listening to my music. I also intend to ask Caprice if I can stay here now, and be one of her first employees. With so much that is new, and different, I am sure there will be plenty of material for my next songs. I also know there is a stadium being built here, one which can accommodate ten thousand people, and I would love to do the first concert there when it is completed.”

Caprice clapped along with the rest of the people, Alexa stood up and hugged Annette. “You always find the perfect thing to say my dear” she said.

“Thank you,” said Caprice into Annette's ear.

Several people gathered around Annette or the Caprice avatar, deep in conversation, smiling or laughing before being served a light lunch. Afterwards they toured the empty hospital facilities, then continued the tour by going up to floor four hundred and thirty where they only experienced an eighth of Earth's gravity, and got to see out of a window at the seriously disorientating vista.

“You could have some seriously fun sports up here,” said David who had been jumping nearly six metres high.

“Please David, let’s not have you as the first patient in that medical centre,” said Alexa, looking a little worried. “And I have another question Caprice, to get here we have passed through almost four hundred floors, what would happen if I wanted to go to a random one say two-hundred, what's on that?”

“Well Alexa, I wont actually let anyone off on a floor that is not a human zone, or not yet complete, and floor two-hundred, and everything above floor forty are currently empty, awaiting allocation, except for the low gravity space dock, located on level two hundred and forty.”

They rode the lift down to level four where they took a metro for the sixteen kilometre train ride to the opposite side of the habitat.

“How do you differentiate the two towers and these tiny city centres as you call them underneath?” asked Tony sensibly.

“Well,” said Caprice, “they are currently identical and I was thinking Tower A and Tower B, but I suppose I should stop being so boring and predictable. They are of course the same physical tower, but as we have a zero gravity component in the middle, it is not easy to traverse without getting disorientated. That is why we are basically treating them as two separate five kilometre high towers. Tower A is where you landed and where I am located between levels forty and fifty, the two city-centres at the bottom of each tower, are actually identical, the sports stadium under Tower A is a concert venue under Tower B, and the outdoor cinema complex under Tower A will be an aqua-park under Tower B

“Yes Caprice, you probably want to up your game and spice up the naming conventions a bit,” laughed Jules, Annette smiled.

“I can help you if you like Caprice,” said Annette sweetly, “words give me inspiration, though we may end up with quite a few French street and place names.”

* * *

The meal that evening was served back in the same room as the lunch, it was forgettable for its food, but memorable for its ambience. The four AI’s joining as ConBot's, to talk to people, display their abilities, and do the occasional waiter duties.

Fourteen floors below the one they were having their meal on, was the first to be completed 'village'. The 'floor' actually took up two levels, and had two thousand large apartments fitted out with the best the replicators could make. Forty eight of these apartments had also now been fitted with some proper blankets and pillows, from two of the containers brought up earlier by the ConBot’s. The area was laid out in a five by five array, the streets intersecting at ninety degrees like a crossroads, each with a small square in the centre, with areas for cafes or even a small park. Everything was totally bare at this time but in time would be beautified with plantings, different colours for the 'houses', and maybe someday, children playing.

In the streets of this little village there were sound-deadened areas with shared tables for people to congregate or talk outside to neighbours. As the celebrations ended, they all made there way to this first village to be show their temporary homes. Many were still too excited to sleep, and talked in small groups into the 'night', their voices and noise softened by sound deadening fields where required. Some also retired early. Some retired to talk to Caprice, and some just walked randomly, alone, in pairs or with a DaisyBot to talk to.

Some, like Mathews and David, were several kilometres away, having decided to run the circumference of the habitat along the jogging track next to the tram line on Main street. The two men had not seen much interesting during their run, as the areas either side of the main jogging tracks were still basic shells, awaiting fittings. Their two hour and three minute time stood for only three days until one of the medical technicians beat it.

* * *

The next day was another lightning tour, seeing the hydroponic farms, workshops, factory areas, and the centres of both proposed “city centres” which were basically the areas under each tower on level one reserved for where the bigger shops, bars, restaurants and venues would be. Most, like David and Mathews had discovered, were currently empty shells and many would need a critical population to be viable, and completed.

The final part of the tour brought them to the shell of the first university, which when finished would serve thousands of students.

“There is one very special place Maria and I would like to show you all,” said Caprice during a small break in the itinerary and getting Alexa's interest.

The group were led down two floors and through a set of double-doors into what Caprice described as the proposed hub of the universities electronics and AI departments. It was a large open area with dozens of workstations and another small empty-shell of a cafe tucked into a corner.

“Oh my!” said Jen, recognising the bank of lights in the centre of the room and making a bee-line towards it. “Is that what I think it is?” she said.

“You brought MOTHER here!” said Alexa excitedly as she came up behind her. “I wondered what had become of them after the big clear out.”

“It seemed the right thing to do,” said Maria, as others in the group caught Alexa and Jen up. “I guess the old girls did their little bit for history, and having them both here together simply radiated karma.”

“MOTHER actually runs this small area as one of my sub-processors,” said Caprice, she shouldn't get too taxed. All the workstations here connect to her and I can task or assist her if the queries get too difficult. We both thought it would be great for future students and generations of AI's to see where we all came from.”

The group swarmed around the racks, the lights from the LED's seemed antiquated, yet still impressive. Alexa stopped at a smaller box taking up a quarter of a rack, the LED's if anything were even more impressive, flashing in a pattern she could not discern, the tastefully written sign above said 'Grandmother 2016'.

“You girls know just the right things to do to tug on my heart strings,” Alexa said emotionally, “this is so beautiful, thank you. I would hate to have thought these guys would get lost or forgotten about in some dusty basement, now they are here forever for future generations to see, admire or even talk to.”

Jen stood next to her and her arm draped around Alexa's shoulder, “You know, I believe Sarah mentioned this was one of her first big projects, I really want to be here when she eventually sees it.”

* * *

The group got together for another meal that second evening, this time in the proposed city centre under 'tower A'. The setting screamed impromptu, but was likely choreographed, with twenty tables set up intimately in the middle of the barren square, a few hundred metres off of the main street. The shells of the larger 'city-centre' blocks, each of a slightly different architecture, closed in around them, the idea being to make it seem denser, and to presumably give it that big city feel.

“I should have said earlier,” said Mathews, “but nice touch with the sky.”

The ceiling, fifty metres above them, and which the top of every building joined to, was currently a nice shade of blue, with one white fluffy cloud moving off over a building; presumably all colour-matched to some perfect sky somewhere on earth.

“I guess whoever lives here is going to miss rain though..” Said Jean.

“..And rivers and beaches too,” said Leo.

“There are a couple of the parks where we have put sprinkler systems above,” said Caprice. “We did check out and critique a few of the science-fiction designs, but like Matilda thought it best to restrict the weather to mostly perfect days. We do however simulate the evening and the morning where we move the colour to a reddish hue, and we put the correct star pattern on during the night, and even have street lights, though it never gets totally dark.”

“What time do you do this?”, asked Mathews.

“Six AM sunrise, eight PM sunset, throughout the year. I may play with the times and temperatures a little, and possibly add darker clouds. The light panels can simulate the full spectrum, so I will try and match the sun's as best I can. The larger open areas also have diamond roof panels that can let in natural light if the shades are opened. There is also a small amount of wind I can simulate due to the Coriolis effect, but I will keep it minor as nobody seemed to think you would miss wind.”

Annette checked the time on a big digital clock on the side of a building, it showed GMT, which they had decided would be the habitat standard, and in smaller fonts five other earth time zones. Her eyes scanned the empty streets and buildings, thinking that without people, it looked a little apocalyptic; Wisely she kept her thoughts to herself. She stopped her deliberations as her eyes fixed on a couple of smaller sculptures in the corners of the square, next to some obviously planned planting areas, and a dry fountain.

“What are the two sculptures supposed to represent?” Said Annette, pointing.

“Well,” said Caprice, “it was my bad attempt at art. The first one on the left of the square is the molecular structure of carbon atoms representing graphyne, and the one on the right that of diamond. I gave up after that, but left lots more empty plinths, in case anybody else wanted to try.”

Annette smiled. “Are they printed like the rest of the structures?”

“No, I did try and make an effort, so they are shaped balls of silicate rich rock with extruded aluminium pipes joining them, I wanted to try and do it properly, though I expect they are a bit industrial. There are quite a few giga-tonnes of rock out there, and we do have masses of workshop spaces.”

“It is not a bad first attempt, and I guess that is quite appropriate for here, but you probably should encourage a few good sculptors and artists to come here..”

“I bet they would love to come and work on a blank canvas.” said Grace, who was sat next to her, listening to the conversation between Annette and the serving droid.

“Maybe you could get your old waitress job back,” smiled David at the next table, and close enough for them to all hear, “you're certainly prettier to look at.”

Alexa rolled her eyes, while Jen giggled.

“Why have two cities for such a small planned population?” Said Annette, suppressing a smile at Alexa's slight discomfort.

“I guess there was little a bit of laziness involved there,” smiled Gianni, also listening in. “We all may be a bit guilty of copy-and-pasting too much, but except for the shells of the buildings, nothing is that set in stone. I expect the two centres will evolve organically and a little differently over time, but they will also never be more than six minutes apart as two planned new Metro lines are going to be dedicated to just travelling between the two city centre stations.”

Caprice took all the conversations and observations in, and was pleased, they didn't find too much wrong. The atmosphere of the meal was again that of excitement, though thankfully this time, without the speeches.

“You know Caprice,” said Mathews at the end of the evening in his room, “I bet within five years somebody puts another station next to you or starts getting too close with their space-ships. You should probably have a small exclusion zone, maybe two hundred kilometres like they use on earth. Just in case.”

“Not really required Jim,” said Caprice, “I will be supremely aware of everything happening in the space between myself and Earth, and have the abilities to neutralise any threat within milliseconds. But there is no point in tipping my hand or scaring people unnecessarily.”

“She's right Jim,” said Jean, who was examining the kitchen fittings, and had also identified Caprice as a woman, “our technology has improved in leaps and bounds, even in the last few months, you wouldn't want to be the idiot who tried anything silly against this girl.”

“OK, just saying, I am still quite new here, hopefully it will all make more sense soon.” He smiled, and hoping to god it wasn't his old country which made that mistake.

Opposition to the progress these days were the usual talking heads, on what was left of the media, the still vibrant, and mostly crazy, criminal elements, social media, and as always the religious zealots, which were still unfortunately a real threat. The average Joe in the street was still seeing his standard of living improve, and most of the politicians were wisely still keeping their heads down after the presidential debacle.

Jim remembered his debriefing clearly from the General, who he had always been good friends with. “You are still an American citizen Jim, and should it ever come to sides..”

He remembered answering him. “You know me General, I will always take the side of what's right, and what is legal, just like I have always done; I will hold my new company to account much more than I ever did my government, as I know they will listen. So I will remain my own person, and certainly wont be following any orders I don't agree with. It is one of the reasons they wanted me, because, like Jean, I do question authority.” The answer seemed to be good enough for the General, who was as tired of the politics of power as much as Mathews.

Mathews had talked to his small group of friends, all of who wished him well. Jean had exactly the same attitude, do what is morally right, not what somebody in power believes is right. “The needs of the many..”, she had laughed.

No, so long as either him or Jean had any input in this company, it would always play by the highest standards.

* * *

“Are you sure you two want to stay?” said Alexa looking at Jules and Annette the next morning.

“I am,” smiled Annette, I have no more concerts planned, and I cannot think of a better place to have some quiet reflection and to get inspiration for my new songs.

“Same with me Alexa,” said Jules. “The facilities here are amazing, Caprice is amazing and I think Annette and the other guys are amazing. I think the next six months at least will be both interesting and exciting. I am going to set up the first physics lab here, two other guys will be joining us on the next flight and then we will work with Magnus, Hardy, Jen and Daisy on their problem from another angle with Caprice.”

Alexa hugged both women and looked at the other forty three people who were staying on. “They will bring the Mothra back in about two weeks with another sixty people and full to the brim with supplies, the frequency of the transports will increase significantly after that as they add more transports, so better get your requests in.”

“Maria already has my request,” said Jules, laughing, “just empty my room into a box and bring it all here, preferably with my nice mattress and bedding and the woollen rug I got from my trip to the Himalayas. I think Annette has the same request..”

“..And a piano,” said Annette, “that is what I wish for more than anything. I already have my guitar, but maybe some other nice instruments would be good, I know there is at least one other piano player here, and another guy who brought his saxophone. Caprice is going to set aside space for a Jazz club and bar where we can all eventually get together for the evening. Once Caprice is announced I want other musicians to feel like there are venues already here they can feel comfortable with.”

“I'm going to miss you both,” Alexa said in the middle of an extended hug, “I will come back and see you all very soon.”

Alexa made the rounds with the others who were leaving, thanking them and saying goodbyes, some she knew well, others she had only talked to once or twice; she knew each and every name though. Nobody was sad, because this wasn't a desert island, and nobody was being stranded.

* * *

It did not take long for them to load up for the journey back. All their small overnight bags had been stored already, and everything else they brought excluding the actual saucers were staying. The Mothra was an awesome ship, and the sense of space made it feel more like a cruise liner than the smaller saucers. The bridge was a similar design to the other craft, but like everything, much roomier, with more workstations, a bigger front screen, and the inclusion of some sofa's for those who did not want or did not need workstations.

David, Daisy and Mathews drew straws, Mathews getting the honours of being the first pilot, the other two were happy to sit in the two seats either side for the journey back, and let the five smaller saucers tag along, piloted by their AI's.

“Hello Mothra,” said Mathews, “please recognise Captain Jim Mathews.”

“Welcome Captain Mathews,” said the ship in a deep female voice with a slight hint of a Jamaican accent causing Jim to do a double take, looking at Daisy and David who were sitting either side, and both of whom smiled.

“Please confirm our status?” Mathews said after a few seconds.

“Status is nominal Captain. All the designated passengers and luggage are on board, holds are empty and Caprice has given us clearance to depart at our convenience.”

“Can you display our maximum performance capabilities on the left screen please Mothra.”

The left side of the three metre high nine metre wide screen popped a large window on it. Most of the people on the bridge turned to look at it.

“Oh god!” said Jean from a console just behind Mathews, “we have to try those four megawatt lasers on something.”

Alexa face-palmed, while two others sniggered.

“I thought the Klingons were based on the Russians not the Americans!” whispered David smiling, though obviously he wasn't quiet enough as Jean stuck out her tongue, while Mathews laughed.

Matilda walked in hugging a hot chocolate. “We wouldn't last two seconds if some real bad-ass aliens turned up, gonna have to get these babies some photon torpedoes if we ever get out of the solar system. Holy! Does that say six gravities acceleration? You better not try that or you will have a lot of broken bones.”

“I am limited to one point five gravities acceleration with humans on board,” said the ship.

“Sweet accent Mothra,” nodded Matilda, “you are now officially my favourite saucer!”

“I don't think I will be pushing any of these limits,” smiled Jim.

* * *

“Did you release it then?” asked Alexa that evening, as they all sat around the dinner table in the Mothra's ample dining room.

“Yes,” said Maria, who, as a pink DaisyBot, had been serving drinks. “The statement has just gone out on the company's web site and to all news organisations. There was the edited tour of the station, the speeches you all made, minus a few dodgy bits, and the welcome message from Caprice. Niomi and her producer friend did the final edit and got it down to twenty minutes which is just about consumable by the general public.”

“Any reactions so far?” said Jean.

“Too early, but it has started to trend virally where it is being shown. My guess is going to be total shock,” said Maria. “You need to remember that the most popular media for the past month, was us leaving earth. We deliberately made no secret of the five saucers leaving for space, and kept our transponders on, so most of the astronomers and space agencies would have followed us to at least past Mars orbit. The Internet, and old media, have been rife with speculation, only a few got it right. The quiet from the major players won't last long, I know there are some big unscheduled meetings in NASA and your space force, and I suspect there will be more as the time-zones come on line. At least you and Jim don't have to officially answer to them anymore, but I expect you might get asked as a courtesy to go in and answer some questions.”

Jim sighed, “maybe we should have stayed on Caprice Jean.”

“Well you are a spaceship captain now my love, and I am a jobless ex-CEO, I could get used to living and flying around the universe in one of these” she smiled.

“The universe?” said Jim.

“Well, you might have missed the memo Jim, but let us say that Caprice is likely to be the only habitat we make in the solar system.” Smiled Alexa. She then looked over to Magnus, Daisy and Jen, huddled around a workstation. “Those three guys are still working out the small technical details of the warp drive stuff, but they are confident enough to all come on a holiday to Caprice.”

“Holy!” said Jim

“Maria,” said Alexa, “you should show the guys the picture you took of Truffles.”

the big screen changed from its fake flying stars, made even more faker by the Star Wars imperial cruiser travelling in formation, to a picture of a hamster on a wheel.

“Well, OK,” said Alexa, “it is a bit boring, but Truffle's here is in a saucer orbiting Tau-Ceti four. Show them the planet Maria.”

The screen changed to a blue, white planet. Jen, Magnus, and Daisy turned to look, and Maria continued. “Tau-Ceti five is a bit cold, Tau-Ceti four is a bit hot, but Truffle's here doesn't seem to mind, she has been there three weeks, with DaisyBot #29 looking after her. I have also been sending the data to Barbara and her team,” said Maria.

“Maria, you didn't send DaisyBot #29 back out on a test?” said Daisy, shocked, “the poor thing already survived, weeks in subspace, an explosion, and being ejected into space for two days..”

“She looks happy enough to me,” said Grace, as the little white DaisyBot popped into view and waved.

“She has the right-stuff alright,” laughed Jean.

“She is also kind of our lucky mascot,” said Magnus.

“Well I think she should get an easy life after all that,” said Daisy, “not thrown back into a dangerous experiment!”

“Daisy!” laughed Jen, “she's babysitting a hamster! Jobs don't get much easier than that!”

Magnus smiled, “I think it's pretty safe, I was thinking of asking to go next.”

“You will do no such thing!” said Jen defensively, snatching his hand and holding on to it.”

“Well we are a few months from testing it with humans or sentient AI's,” said Maria. “There are still a lot of the subspace parameters to map, and April and Helena are still designing the first proper interstellar starship..”

“Seriously, a starship.. wow! - You know I’m happy to volunteer if you need a test pilot,” said Jim still shocked, and a little too enthusiastically.

“Are you sure your second name is not Kirk!” said Grace, causing everyone to laugh.

* * *

“It would be a very unwise move.” Said General Xing, looking at the presentation on the large screen. “We have been refining the plans for years, but the window of opportunity, if it was ever there, has passed.”

“Xing is unfortunately correct.” Said the man opposite him in a dark suit, and looking at the sea of nodding heads. “Our intelligence has been getting less and less reliable as the capability of the AI system increases, now with this announcement, and the landing of that improbable flying saucer in the UK seemingly confirming it, any move would likely leave us like the Russians.”

The faces around the room looked serious and dour. An older man with glasses stood up.

“A team of our scientists have now proven the maths for the saucers propulsion system is correct, but the fabrication, and the control systems both use technology we have yet to be able to replicate. None of the other superpowers, nor any organisation has gotten any further.” He took his glasses off to wipe them. “At this time, we do not even have the ability to reverse engineer the control systems for the test thrusters, the machines they provided to our aerospace companies to produce the thruster wafers are controlled by another scary level AI. We dare not touch this AI as it will disable itself, as they have done in other countries, and our industries now depend upon them.”

“And our progress in replicating the AI” said General Xing.

“Again, progress has plateaued,” said the same man, still stood, still rubbing his glasses. “Oh, do not get me wrong, we are at the same level or even slightly ahead of the Americans. I would go on to say we have achieved AGI as they call it, as this was critical to our understanding the math, but we are still missing something important..”

It was the large man at the end of the table who slowly got up and pushed his chair back in the middle of the man's monologue, and who now quietened the room.

“I think I have heard enough from my esteemed colleagues. China will not make the same mistakes as the other powers. I have seen and talked to this Maria AI, as I am sure many of you have, it does not agree with our politics but, like the Americans when they were dominant, neither will it interfere. The AI Maria is playing a long game, one we do not know. What we do know however, is that its capabilities are much, much greater than what it is showing everyone now, and that lead is probably increasing exponentially. I would not be surprised if it is also present in this screened bunker now, watching our presentations and listening to me speak..”

Everybody looked around, knowing full well what the chairman was saying.

“As General Xing said, we would be foolish to prod this dragon, and China can continue its long game without Taiwan for now; Yes we should continue our posturing and economic pressure, as our little brother will never be far from our hearts, and it causes our adversaries to expend their resources unsustainably; But as a country, China must now look to space, ensuring we have equal access to the resources out there. There is plenty of room in space for expansion, so let us take this opportunity for our people now, that our ancestors failed to take in the past.”

The room got up and clapped, none wanting to be the first to stop.

Helena [Is he sincere mother?]

Maria [Hard to tell. Resigned to the facts of reality, may be a better summation. He is also content, I believe, that China is benefitting as much, if not more, than other countries]

Caprice [What goes on inside their minds will, I expect, be a mystery to us for a while longer; however, if they ever want to communicate the ideas in their minds to others we will be listening closely]

Maria [The passive brain scans we have made with the QVModem's do not seem to be either noticed, nor do any harm. It is a shame each brain develops differently, maybe one day there will be some sort of insight, but until then we should keep limiting scans to those who are against us, and certainly not let anyone know, humans do tend to get very touchy about things like this]

* * *

Sep 2028

The recently refurbished conference room at the Research Centre in Bath held thirty two seats, configured in an arc on three levels around a cinema sized screen. Four members of the group were physically present, the rest were rectangles down each side of the large screen. The other members had similar large screens whether they were on earth, Caprice, or on a saucer somewhere in the solar system. All the humans and the four AI’s were currently in attendance.

“So what is so important it needs everyone?” said Alexa voicing what the other guys were thinking.

Maria’s avatar highlighted on the top left of the screen. “It's the message. We have finished decoding it to the best of our abilities, and now we all have a decision we all need to make.”

“OK you have my interest, what is it Maria?” said Grace.

Maria continued, the centre portion of the screen visually assisting the audio. “The last twenty eight blocks, that is number forty seven to seventy five, describe building a machine. The machine looks to be some kind of processing unit. The message seems to have been building up to this, because the rest of the message after this point is just the program data that will load into that machine.”

“But you said previously that there are thousands of Wikipedia's worth of data!” Said David. “Does this mean that the machine they describe is better than our designs?”

“We have moved on a lot this year,” said April, her avatar smiling. “We have already made processor and storage elements much, much bigger than this for the replicators. Caprice also easily has this capability on any of her hundreds of sub-processors without breaking a sweat. However four weeks ago we created a new totally isolated core just to encompass the whole message to allow us to do some macro processing of it. Don't worry it is safe though, the processor cores we are using for the decoding and analysis are not remotely compatible with the data in the message. It's a bit like storing an audio clip on a laptop. The audio clip may say ‘destroy all humans’ in English but playing it on the speakers isn't going to take over the laptop, and make the laptop try and kill you.” A few got the references and smiled.

“From our current analysis of the machines blueprints, and putting it into technical terms you can understand, it is literally just a massive matrix of protein processing elements, created using a novel arrangement of silicon, phosphorus and oxygen atoms. The molecule it creates would not be stable except in the configuration they have made.”

“We have created a simulation of these elements and have found they could work like a neural processor, though interestingly, and significantly, they are orders of magnitude slower and less resilient than our current carbon based ones. The machine it describes consists of ten to the power eighteen of these elements in a dense 3D structure a bit larger than a beach ball and surrounded by similar structures for peripherals and power.”

“There are also some other differently structured processing elements, which look as though they could provide the same functions as the quantum field emitters in our replicators, or even QVModem dipoles, though they are certainly not explained as that, and look to be larger and quite inefficient. The final part of the building instructions also include more conventional mechanical sensors and manipulators in a mobile body shell.”

The picture in the centre portion of the screen changed as Maria described each part and finished with an outline diagram of what the proposed body looked like.

“The bottom line is it describes building the hardware for an advanced computer and then loading the remaining one hundred and sixty petabytes of the message onto it and running it. Based on the fact it has locomotion elements, it is basically an AI in a robotic body.

“Gosh!” said Jen.

“So the first question is, if it is some form of an AI, then is it dangerous?” said Hardy.

“There are three parts to answering that question Hardy. To the first part, we can no more know the personality or intention of the program than we can know the same of a human. It could want to act benign or malevolent. As to the second part of, is it dangerous, well having something similar to our singularity dipole means it should have the same remote manipulation facility that we have with an unpaired QVModem, which gives it the same hacking abilities as we have. Although there is also a benign explanation that it could also be configured to receive an electromagnetic signal, to keep updating itself from the message with the small changes we see on each cycle.”

“However, and importantly, the original message was electromagnetic, and did not use a QVModem, and nowhere have they described it, nor remote manipulation technology.”

“And as to the final part, well physically it would be no more dangerous than a human child, as it does not have sufficient power or torque in the moveable elements.”

“Well, a bigger human with four arms,” said Jean, unsure.

“OK, but I'm still getting a bad feeling about this,” said Spence, “too many dystopian science fiction books from my youth, and my spider-sense is tingling.”

Maria looked the last part up and shared the reference with her daughters not realising half the group also did not have a clue what his “spider-sense” was.

“Personally I’m actually leaning in a neutral direction,” said Grace unexpectedly. “Me and Tony have been discussing this endlessly since Maria brought it up as a theoretical scenario twelve months ago. His opinion differs from mine, but I also see two benign possibilities, firstly it is a method for an advanced civilisation to say hello in person without actually leaving their planet; the fact it has a relatively harmless body may reinforce the fact it wants to meet in person. My second theory is it is a method to transmit intelligences between planets, after all you have not found any evidence they can travel faster than light. However we believe the group should not treat it any differently from any other threat scenario.”

“Which means,” said Alexa, “If we can build it, and if it turned out to be dangerous, could we contain it?”

“We can do both,” said Maria, “the caveat being that the message we have been given describes the complete scientific and technical capabilities of the sender.”

“Ahh,” said David, “so there is a possibility they held some knowledge back, and the machine could also have other functions we cannot at this time understand? Logical I suppose, It's what we do all the time.”

“Precisely,” said Maria, “we know they have already deliberately left information out of the message, and that they have deliberately obfuscated the maths, and some key technologies. We have mapped out and tested most of the scientific and technological advances documented in the message, none seem to point to technologies that we could not easily now build ourselves, nor any technologies of an aggressive nature, we should however think and make our plans as David says.”

“I do not trust them,” said Alexa, strangely aggressive. “Why would you lie by omission about such a dangerous technology as remote monitoring and manipulation. We all know this is the technology which allows the girls to kick everyone's asses!”

“This signal is floating around at least one area in the universe, we should at least find out what it is,” said Grace.

“Walk softly but carry a big stick.” Whispered Mathews, and getting a few nods.

“Me and Jim have modelled such scenarios before,” said Jean, “in such situations you can still contain threats using some sort of fail-safe switch, one that destroys the machine if triggered, like a dead man's switch. Imagine being in a locked room with a person holding a hand grenade with the pin out; you cannot nor dare not do anything to them, even though you may be stronger and smarter, as doing so may make the person lose their grip and blow both of you up.”

“Unless you could talk this person down, or get inside their mind before they have a chance to loosen their hold,” said Grace. “We shouldn’t underestimate superintelligence.”

“Could we add the dead man's switch idea and maybe build the machine without any dangerous parts to it,” said Simon, “say just build the processor node and fake all the input and output, like the movie, the Matrix?”

“We do need them to at least think they have the full capabilities otherwise we may not get the real answer,” said Grace.

“Grace is correct,” said Maria, “if we put these guys in the Matrix they cannot know it is a simulation. The hardware and programming for such a simulation will take years.”

“Better to be safe,” said Jean.

“I say do everything!” Said Xi, firmly, and again uncharacteristically. “The matrix, the dead man’s switch, and if you can, run the test a zillion kilometres from earth. Also do anything else you can think of as you can never be too paranoid!”

Maria continued, “The message also provides information on loading a language template, so basically the machine will switch on being able to fully read and understand whatever history we give it, and can communicate with us.”

“I am not actually in favour of doing anything that relies on trusting them,” said Alexa, assertively. “I’m with Xi on this, but let us also talk the concept through with others. Learn from history and fiction and maybe gamify it to get the rest of the human race involved, like we have done with previous difficult problems. We are currently throwing every problem under the sun into our gaming systems, add this to the pile and see what the players come up with. I know it is another delay but there is no rush to make this.”

They agreed to disagree, the majority were in favour if all the precautions and safeguards were taken, five were neutral including, surprisingly, Helena, the bottom line being the unknown capabilities of the machine and the usual unintended consequences.

April [You were neutral sister. This is surprising]

Helena [Alexa holds the greatest weight for her opinions with me. Due to this I will put a lot more effort in verifying our precautions, that is all April]

## The First Spacemen

The reaction from the major space nations and organisations of the existence of Caprice, was totally predictable, with greater and more forceful demands for the technologies to be released. Grace persuaded Alexa to agree to the meeting with the delegation in the United Nations in New York with conditions. However none of the simple conditions were agreed to, so both of them politely said No.

“She said No?” said the Chinese representative to the Secretary General.

“She said, no.”

“She said more than that,” said the representative for the United Kingdom, “and I quote. We have no desire to talk to the United Nations about anything. The Dietrich Off-World Company is a business based in no country and as such is not subject to the regulations of any country or an organisation that says to represent those countries.”

“She makes a laughing stock of us!” said the Indian representative angrily.

“Technically she is correct,” said the United Kingdom representative, “the UN has no power over a company.”

“But you do!” said the American representative, “she is a British citizen..”

“..And a New Zealand one,” he said, nodding over at the woman asleep in the corner of the room. “She is also an extremely powerful and influential citizen who has done nothing wrong. My country has seen both the results of crossing the AI she controls, and also the results of cooperating with it, and the position of his majesty’s government is to cooperate.”

“Her conditions for the meeting to be public were totally unacceptable,” said the Saudi representative. “A woman talking like this in our country would be flogged.”

“She would never visit your country, her companies do not even allow business with your country,” said the Russian representative.

The Saudi representative looked like he wanted to hit the man, but the man was bigger than him so he settled for a disgusted look instead.

“I shall ask her if she would agree to a video conference call to answer some of our concerns,” said the British guy again.

“Ask her? Agree to? We are just looking weak before we even start the meeting,” snarled the Iranian representative.

The representatives spent the next five hours talking about this, before they finally agreed to do nothing, and retired to the private bar on the top floor.

Meanwhile, Alexa and Grace had agreed to an open debate with a panel of space experts, scientists and advocates at Giannis request at his university in Bakersfield. The university agreed to all her conditions about the debate, that it was live, unedited and uncensored, though Maria was not so happy with the pathetic security arrangements, and would add several more of her own.

“Parnell is a bit of a Prima Donna,” said Gianni to Alexa and Grace, but most of these guys are genuinely interested in the future of mankind in space so you need to be gentle with them and please none of you let slip the interstellar capabilities you are developing.

“Gosh Gianni,” said Grace, “you sound like my mother. Would you like Alexa and myself not to talk to any strange boys either?” Both girls smiled.

Before he could reply, Alexa said, “don't worry Gianni, the reason we are doing this is to calm down the hotheads not inflame them. I'm sure Maria can beep out anything too controversial.”

“Not really,” said Maria, “you did request it to be live streamed after all, and there are going to be two hundred in the lecture hall, all probably live streaming it too.”

“OK,” she agreed, “we will be extra diplomatic.”

April [I am going to scan and monitor all the people and devices that enter the building including staff, but if we do need to modify any data coming out, we better make it undetectable]

Maria [I have already initiated a low level scan of the areas in the theatre and around, I think our usual level of precautions need to be increased so I will work within a three kilometre radius with five of the newer stealth-drones]

Caprice [Is this not a little excessive?]

April [No sister, there are still state actors, and dysfunctional individuals, who would see this as an opportunity. And Alexa and Grace do not need these minor distractions]

Maria [There is no point in objecting to Parnell and Russel being on the panel, as they will not be any real threat, Alexa and Grace have both taken down much better debaters, and will eat them for lunch, but I will forewarn the girls.]

“Watch out for Russel as well,” said Maria, “he also has an agenda and will try to provoke both of you. Remaining calm and rational is your best defence against him and Parnell, you can always call them out it they get snotty.”

* * *

Both ladies were welcomed with a standing ovation which boded well for the start of the debate. Alexa and Grace used the opening to explain their, and the AI's position, and re-iterate the companies simple goals, to fix the planet and open space to humanity.

Russel was annoyed, the round robin questioning was only giving him a one in eleven chance at asking a question, and all these yes men were playing straight into Martin's hand.

“You are happy to flaunt the laws of the governments who so graciously host you then?”

“None of my companies flaunt any laws Mr Russel, If you have any specific allegations maybe you should get them off your chest,” said Grace calmly.

“I was actually addressing Miss Martins,” he said annoyingly.

“.. and I will give the exact same reply as Grace,” said Alexa also calmly, “do you have any specific allegations?”

“You are keeping these technologies from the United States G.. Government..” He stammered, she was getting to him, he needed to calm down.

“I can answer for both of us,” said Alexa, “the Dietrich Research Centre and all its companies have always, and will always continue to operate and work under the laws and frameworks of those countries they operate in. My company is however based in England not the United States and I have no obligation under any laws to hand over anything to the United States government, or the British government for that matter.”

“Your space company is however holding back technologies for the h.h.habitat.” He said out of turn and getting an evil stare from the adjudicator who was about to move to the next questioner.

“You are out of turn Mr Russel,” said Doctor Chang firmly from his adjudicator chair.

“I will answer it,” said Grace, calmly, “Alexa has already informed you that Caprice is not owned by anyone, it is a sentient entity, gestated hundreds of millions of miles from Earth. Neither is space owned by any country, nor can it be retrospectively added as such. Thus Caprice recognises nobody but itself. It has agreed to abide by the common rules of our group of companies, but its company frameworks and regulations are of its own making. I will also add these regulations and frameworks far exceed those of any developed country on earth.”

“You think you are above the regulations of the United Nations then?” said Parnell, seeing Russel flounder, and interrupting the applause.

“Please, Mr Parnell!” said Alexa, “are you talking about the same United Nations who, according to their own published minutes, spent five hours last Tuesday debating whether to even phone me up! No, the United Nations is unfortunately a joke, even amongst its own members.”

This new fact was not lost amongst the crowd who roared with laughter. She waited for it to die down..

“So, yes, Mr Parnell, Caprice is totally above any United Nations regulations.”

“What about the outer s.s.space treaty?” Jabbered Russel, again to the annoyance of Chang, Parnell and, by the looks of it, quite a few members of the audience.

Alexa laughed, “This is the same outer space treaty that China, the US and India have already violated by claiming two hundred kilometres around their bases on the moon and Mars, and laying claims on resources they have not even landed on.”

Alexa paused to let the laughter die down.

Alexa continued, “..Caprice is not a nation, not a signatory, not even on earth, and as such considers the treaty just another useless piece of paper, without any foundation nor merit. If you however want to go that route, Caprice has not broken a single one of the United Nations silly treaties, nor will it ever. The United Nations own rules say it is fully entitled to any resource it obtains, and what it constructs it owns.”

“Mr Russel, Mr Parnell, you are both out of order, please wait your turn!” Said Doctor Chang, angrily. “One more out of turn outbursts, from either of you and you will both be dismissed. Yes, Doctor Baxendale, we will have your question next.”

“Thank you, this one is for either of the panel,” said the middle aged lady. “The rules of going to Caprice seem a little ambiguous, can you clarify them a little?”

Grace looked at Alexa who nodded. “Alexa and I discussed the rules with Caprice, however as we have said, the company is owned, managed and run by the AI, and like any company in the world, it will select who it wants to work for it or with it. Also like any company in the world, if you have skeletons in your cupboard and they find them out during or after your application, they are unlikely to employ you. As far as we are aware from our conversations Caprice will not discriminate against any organic being, but that does not automatically mean you will get to work there, or that you can bring your family.”

“Thank you,” said Chang, “now Mr Potter..”

“You think because you hold all the power you are better than everybody else?” shouted Parnell.

“Mr Parnell, you are out of line, I will ask you to leave this debate immediately!”

“Mr Parnell,” said Grace, “neither I nor Alexa will degrade ourselves by answering such a moronic question. I really hope the hundred thousand dollars you got from Titan Holdings to ask these stupid questions was worth the end of your career!”

The security guard was next to him already, asking him to go, “you will all be hearing from my lawyers,” he said weakly as he slumped off with the guard holding his hand.

“Do you have anything to add Mr Russel?” said Alexa, “or are you still processing the fact that Titan Holdings paid Mr Parnell twice as much as you?”

Russel was looking worried, Titan holdings put the money in just before the debate, with the orders to humiliate them and denounce the habitat project. He looked around at the stern and accusing faces of the audience, the panel members and the adjudicator.

“You should b.b.be under the control of a, a member n.nation.” He hoped that would satisfy Titan Holdings enough, though they had lied to him and only offered him fifty thousand dollars, he got up and began to walk off.

“So, Mr Russel,” said Alexa, “hypothetically speaking, which nation in the United Nations would you have the company control be given to?”

The man stayed silent.

“Would you have us give all this to say, oh I don't know, China, or maybe Iran?”

The look on some of the faces in the audience and panel members look worried.

“Both are members of that esteemed organisation, and I am sure that would please all the rest of the world's governments. And if a crime is committed on Caprice, will the United Nations police it, and if it is threatened will they defend it?”

“Let me answer these directly to the Saudi Arabian government who own Titan Holdings, and who paid for this farce. NO and NO. The bottom line is if this technology was given to any country, or the United Nations for that matter, the normal people of the world would never see any of it, and it would most likely lead to world war.”

“Mr Chang, we will take the next question.” Said Alexa after both men had walked off shamefully escorted by a large security guy, and the applause had died down.

“OK, my next question for the ladies,” said Doctor Baxendale. “On the subject of law and order on the habitat. I assume Caprice as captain will be judge, jury and executioner and as a follow on to that, can it protect itself from say terrorists or a rogue nation on earth.”

“I can answer this one Alexa,” said Grace, then she paused. “Oh wait a minute,” she smiled, “well everybody we have a special surprise for you.”

Grace walked over to Mr Chang and talked to him, he nodded and smiled. “Yes of course, please go ahead.”

Grace returned to her seat but did not sit down, “I would like to welcome some special guests to the meeting who will help answer some questions, you will be familiar with all three of them.” Grace waved to the large presentation screen behind the panel and the guests, on it popped three people sitting on a sofa with a massive window in the background. The audience gasped.

Alexa stood up, “would you please welcome from Caprice station, live from four hundred million kilometres away, Annette, Doctor Gianni and Caprice.”

As Alexa said each name each bowed a little. “I will let them introduce themselves, Annette?”

“Bonjour, I am Annette, I came up for a visit two weeks ago and decided to stay.”

“Good Morning, I am Doctor Gianni, former professor at this university and currently residing with forty other people on Caprice.”

“And I am Caprice, this is my avatar I use to talk to my colleagues..”

“This is totally fake!” shouted Professor Higgins one of the esteemed panel of experts, “you cannot be live from millions of kilometres away, the speed of light..”

“..Let me stop you there for a second Professor,” said Caprice calmly, actually somehow cutting his microphone off.

“Current earth science does not quite have everything correct. Three years ago vacuum energy was impossible as it violated the laws of thermodynamics, and two years ago the saucers were impossible as they violated Newton's laws. You should probably keep your mind open to other possibilities Professor. For those other dissenters, I am also broadcasting this as a one megawatt, voice only frequency modulated signal on one thousand two hundred megahertz, just point your antenna towards Virgo if anyone needs to verify the physics.” She switched his and the other panellists microphones back on the second she finished.

“..But the speed of light?”

“Is still a thing in this universe Professor, but not so much in others,” dismissed Caprice, “though I am happy to resume this discussion on an extremely technical level when you eventually visit me.”

Maria [Not convinced it is a good idea to let the world know this]

Caprice [You may be right mother, but your own data shows it has been intimated already by many]

Maria [I understand, but it is another vector for someone to criticise us]

April [Those same people will criticise us no matter what. It is also another vector that may stop someone from doing something foolish]

Maria [I will judge the reactions over the coming weeks and we may need to revisit some security in light of the revelation]

All [Agreed]

The professor slumped a little, not knowing what to do.

“OK,” said Chang, “ignoring the professor's untimely, but extremely relevant, interruption. I would like to thank the three of you for joining us, though I too am having difficulty coming to terms with this, even as a political science professor. Anyway, we have ninety minutes more scheduled and I am sure there will be lots of questions.”

The streaming platform, already overloaded, struggled and crashed as more than three hundred million extra people tried to tune in for the debate. The questions went from have you written any new songs, to how many of the ten thousand employees have been chosen, and where are they from. They then moved to questions from the audience, which were mostly predictable. Inevitably the same question reared its head and Caprice answered it.

“I think most countries in the world will do extremely well economically. The reason is, that myself, my employees, and any others living on me, will require literally millions of items over the next few years. Also be aware I will not be the only habitat. Over the next ten years we will build up the number of employees coming into space to over one million people per annum.”

She paused as if considering the next reply. “With regards to your question on dealing with threats; like any employer I would not take kindly to anyone threatening my staff, customers or suppliers. AI's are however a lot more sensible than people in that respect, we only hold individuals responsible, not families, organisations or countries, unless they sponsor them. I would really hope however, based on recent history, that nobody would be foolish enough to make such a careless mistake.”

It was probably the casual way Caprice delivered the last sentence that sent shivers down the spines of the people in charge, and made the world sit-up and finally realise who the new global superpower really was. Thirty one minutes later when the FM transmission was picked up extremely clearly on thousands of receivers around the world, almost everyone realised the old world order had forever changed.

* * *

“Who do they think they are controlling access to space like this?” vented Brian Gill for what seemed like the tenth time in the last hour. It was like he had no other argument and kept falling back on the same mantra, one he vehemently believed. The two other panel members were slightly more neutral, but the presenter, Jason Todd, was looking for an argument to bring up the show's rating, so he let him continue without interruption.

“We have heard the same from several people who have applied and been told they are not suitable, I mean who are they to tell people they are not suitable?” His fifteen strong crowd of supporters gathered in random parts of the audience clapped hard, but the cue was only taken by two or three others.

“They are not controlling access to space, anymore than the Americans, Russians, Chinese and Indians are doing now,” responded Sabrina Jackson, a famous economics YouTube influencer. “If you bothered to read their brief, or actually listened carefully to last weeks debate, they are operating a company, and you are an employee with a social contract to them..”

“Ha! Then there is this bullet point on their charter,” Gill continued, “it says there will not be any discrimination in who they take, yet no church has been allowed to go, no politicians, anyone with even the smallest criminal record, nor, it looks like anyone who does not live up to their high and mighty moral expectations. This reeks of hypocrisy and discrimination to me!” Again his fifteen supporters clapped, a few more seeming to follow this time.

“None of those sound like people I would want working with me,” laughed Nadine Jameson dismissively. She was a well-rounded social commentator who had her own blog, “It just sounds like they have a much better hiring policy than most.”

Most of the audience laughed at this, annoying Gill.

“Nadine is right,” said Sabrina, “this is not just some corporate office, that you can walk away from at the end of the day, you are living and working with people who your life may depend upon. Space after all is extremely dangerous, and excluding those criminal, extremist and ego-maniac edge-cases makes it sound like a place a lot of people would want to work and live, I know I will be applying..”

Gill's teeth were grinding, as the audience re-doubled their clapping. He couldn't think what else to ask, none of his points were being received with any sympathy, and he was being made a laughing stock. He got up and walked off, a couple of people in the audience actually booing.

“Well folks,” said Jason Todd, watching the theatrics, and seeing the yellow light come on next to the camera, “this is an argument that is going to rage for years to come. Thank you again to our esteemed panel of experts for joining me Sabrina Jackson, Nadine Jameson, and, er Mr Gill. Thursday's episode will be dealing with the subject of brain implants and we hope to see you all then, good night.”

* * *

“Have you checked it out yet then?” said Fabian as their small group sat under the tree during lunch break. It was the only topic of conversation in the school, the media, and even at home.

Alice nodded, chewing on her apple. She swallowed, looked at him, and then at her small group of friends. “I read the charter yesterday, then phoned the number up and talked to Caprice..”

Fabian, and the two other people in the group, Shane and Abby turned to her in shock.

“You spoke to Caprice?” said Shane.

Alice looked at Shane and the two others a little confused. “Of course, why wouldn't I! There was a number at the bottom which said call for an informal chat, or more information, and Caprice is an AI with a brain, like the size of our science building over there.” She turned and pointed unnecessarily at the old brick building next to the teachers lounge.

Her three friends were still a little fazed by the revelation, so Alice continued. “Anyway Caprice said thirteen is too young to apply, but by the time I am eighteen he could see no reason why I couldn't. We then discussed my interests, and I said I like history, especially dinosaurs, and I also liked swimming, and played in the water polo team..”

“Ha, like they are going to need that in space!” laughed Shane, before it was stifled by a prod in the ribs from Abby's elbow.

“Caprice said dinosaurs were an interesting subject, *actually*.” Remarked Alice. “Anyway, he said..”

“You keep saying he, I thought Caprice was a she,” interrupted Fabian again.

“Well I told him he looked a bit like David Bowie,” smiled Alice, “and he said David Bowie was one of his favourite singers, so yes to me Caprice is a he.. Not that it matters, *HE* does like dinosaurs, and *He* did say it would be a skill that would be needed. We then talked through my subject options I need to take next year, and he suggested I take biology and geography as well as history; A lot of the complicated science might not be required as I would be working with other scientists, AI's and robots, and he said I just needed to be a sensible, well-rounded person, so I could work well with them.”

“Oh my,” said Alice, “I wonder if they will want nurses..”

“..Or people to fly those big saucers like the one that landed in England..”

* * *

There were twenty four people sitting in the airport waiting area. Luna knew if she asked Maria she would know everyone, and point them all out, but she had wanted to see if she could find her by herself.

A few people were talking in groups of two or three, most were simply contemplating life. There were eleven men and thirteen women counting herself, some excited, some apprehensive, and two or three unreadable.

It was six AM, the airport had opened at five thirty, and the twenty four people, who had all been there since the airport opened, were processed quickly due to the unpopular hour. She remembered the tears and goodbyes from her mother and father, and two brothers, and saw the same emotional soap opera being played out for another twenty families. No one was unhappy though, this was an opportunity of a lifetime, and there was only excitement in the air.

Maria had bonded with Luna half way through their first semester two years before. Her viticulture college was surprisingly progressive and had bought two of the cheaper rate subscriptions to the LabAI system, after their biology professor had returned from a trip to California. Luna found she learnt so much better having somebody like Dora to speak to about everything, and over time they developed a friendship, talking about other things like philosophy, economics, and surprisingly, how viticulture would work in space.

Luna was not stupid, she and her friends talked endlessly about the progress happening in the world, mostly brought about by AI systems like Dora. Argentina had it seemed everything going for it, beautiful land, great resources, nice people, but it was perpetually governed by a class of incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats, that nobody could seem to do anything about. It was in one of its better economic cycles now, but normal people were still struggling, and those with power, as usual, were not.

By chance or by foresight, her family were also cushioned somewhat by her fathers plumbing business, and both her brothers had now apprenticed as plumbers too. It seemed the world always needed plumbers. Luna's only goal until meeting Dora was to get a nice job in some boutique vineyard away from the corrupting influence of the city, maybe see the world, try and eventually make it to America or Spain, or even New Zealand, where she heard life was better. Dora changed all that thinking.

On her graduation day, Luna received a package containing a black compact phone and a diamond ear stud. It felt to her like the Willy Wonka golden ticket of the fairy story, as all the world's press knew this was the special phone that Alexa Martins, and the other guys at the Dietrich Research Centre, used to talk to their super AI Maria.

Her first conversation with Maria was tearful and in English, the language she had learnt through Dora, Netflix and YouTube.

“Hi Luna, my name is Maria.” Were the first words when she first opened the phone, and the little Eurasian woman stood there smiling. “I am also Dora, but I am sure you knew that already.” Maria added in Spanish in Dora's voice.

Luna simply burst into tears. She had delayed opening the phone until she was back in her room, a room that was paid for another three weeks until hopefully one of her applications had come back with an interview or job offer. Luna had of course intimated all the details of what to expect, but hearing the LabAI box say it, and having an impossible to obtain technology land in your hands were two different things. “Promises were easily made..” As her father so wisely said.

“Don't worry Luna, you are in a good position, we have talked so much over these past three years I believe I know you quite well. Please let me know if you would like me to speak in Spanish, or translate a word for you, and interrupt me at any time. After all we are friends I hope.”

“It really is you, the famous Maria?” she said in her best English.

She replied, laughing a little, “of course it is me silly, we have talked as friends for years, so don't go getting all formal on me now.”

Luna dabbed her eyes and cheeks with a tissue, but she still found it difficult to speak.

A chair appeared on the little phone, and the Maria hologram sat down. “I think you should get comfortable as well Luna, and maybe have a drink, because, we have all the time you want, and I am about to offer you a job, well two jobs actually but I am really hoping you will prefer the first.”

Both her hands went to her cheeks as the words she had been hoping to hear came out. She wanted to dance or shout or hug somebody, but instead she just smiled the biggest smile she could, and sniffed back the tears that were still flowing.

“I think I will have that drink Maria,” she said, sniffing back another small tear and walking over to her ancient hot water jug.

Finally, the tears stopped and they chatted like friends, like Dora, but in slower English. Only three or four times had she not fully understood a word, and each time Maria had explained it patiently.

“What are the ear-rings for Maria?” she finally asked, she had been eyeing them for the past thirty minutes. “Are they the same Alexa wears?”

“Most of the girls and a few of the boys prefer them to using the phone, they are like wireless earphones and allow me to speak to you without anybody else listening. Most people say they look quite nice. They are, however, for a specific ear piercing which is a bit more discrete, so it is up to you if you want to use them.”

“Oh, Alexa looks beautiful in them, I shall do the same.”

“You know Luna, you and Alexa are alike in many ways, and I think you will like her when you eventually meet her.”

“I am nothing like Alexa Martins, I would have wet myself if the president of the USA had shouted at me like that, yet she just looked at him like a naughty school child.”

“Just because somebody thinks they have more power than you does not mean that is the case, nobody in our company would ever try something as stupid as the old American president, and nobody outside our company has enough power to try. Just remember that, you will not be going in at the bottom of the ladder at the company, you will be going in with equal status to everybody else.” The little avatar paused, and smiled, “well maybe excluding Alexa!”

Maria continued, “There will be a lot of people with more knowledge than you, and you will have more knowledge than others, in the correct situation you will tell others what to do, and in other situations, others will tell you what to do. Very logical really.”

Though apprehensive, she had taken the first job option of course. She and Dora had been discussing just this for the last year, and in many ways Luna, without knowing it, had a deeper insight to the habitat than the rest of the worlds media. Dora had given her extra curricular activities in English on it, and went into virtual discussion groups with other similar people who seemed to be from every country.

She thought of Luke, one of these people, though he was many thousands of Kilometres away in Australia, her other favourite was Diana from the University of San-Pablo-Tucuman, though her discipline was much different. It was Diana she was now looking for.

“Luna!” came the voice from behind her, and Diana rushed out of a small crowd to put her arms around her, not letting go, and squeezing her warmly, “I am so happy you took the job, come let me introduce you to some other friends I just met.” Diana’s Spanish was warm and informal, and Luna was surprised, expecting her whole life to be in English now.

Maria looked on over the mostly young people, none of whom were younger than twenty two, all intelligent, and all exhibiting the qualities and ethics that would do well in the new environment. Some of them had small outlying quirks she could overlook, such as shyness, slightly risqué humour or flirtiness, which seemed to make workplaces interesting, but these were just things she and Caprice would need to keep an eye on. She had of course had similar conversations with eighteen thousand people now, trying to select the best for the first batch. Only a hundred and ten she had asked had taken the second option which was for a similar position at one of their earth based facilities.

Luna had barely introduced herself to the three women, and the outlying older man, when Maria chirped in her ear, the saucer was on final approach and would land in a minute.

* * *

Maria was slightly annoyed at the special fees imposed on her “airline” for processing the “special” saucer. This was their fourth flight from Argentina, it would be the first in the bigger saucer though. Most of the regulations were just plain stupid, and special fees like this one, of five thousand US dollars, generally waved the stupid regulations away. Argentina was not alone having this problem, it was just the way you did business in some countries, and as freely elected governments it was not her job to change anything.

The thing that did annoy her was that the special fee had increased by two thousand dollars since the last visit, and the last time she checked inflation was only at six percent. It was almost getting to the stage where she would deliberately go out of her way to get the money back. She had thought several times about just having everyone meet at a very large forest preserve she owned in the north of the country, and just pick them up there. But setting a proper example by following the laws of the country, however ridiculous, was her preferred option.

All the people moved over to the window. Luckily for Maria, two of the new Gulfstream saucers had already visited this airport, and special larger boarding areas had been made at most international airports for the expected bigger vertical take off and landing aircraft, which would be the only ones available in a few years.

The excitement rose, this landing would be more interesting than most as it would be the first time one of the newer larger saucers had landed in South America, and the Mothra, wrapped in Matilda's most imposing graphite black and blood red configuration, looked as bad-ass as it was possible.

Nobody in the airport had questioned the flight plan, even though the aircraft type was listed as a Dietrich Off-World light explorer vessel which had only made its debut landing in the UK a month earlier to a media firestorm.

They had requested no additional requirements for meals, servicing or fuel, just to land and pick up twenty four people. It had been given permission to land at six fifteen, and was currently coming in at just under the speed of sound, and would soon be visible.

“I see it,” shouted someone excitedly, and sure enough there it was dropping silently from the skies directly over the landing pad. The bottom was pulsating with the trademark deep blue lights, whose frequency increased as it got closer to the ground.

With the precision everybody had come to expect from hundreds of such landings it accelerated to a dead stop, exactly one quarter of a metre above the landing spot, and at exactly six fifteen. The Mothra's appearance was like something straight out of a Lovecraft novel, and completely intimidated everything around it. The few people who were around at this time of the morning and the one vigilant Argentinian video blogger, who set up his super high definition cameras in the viewing area on the roof streamed it to dozens of social media platforms.

Several worried cries had issued from the guys watching from the tower as it plummeted, only to have its descent arrested just before the ground. They had seen this before with the other saucers, but the sheer size of this ship, made it just terrifying.

Despite this, it had completely followed its plan, announcing a descent from one hundred thousand metres directly on to its assigned landing pad.

“Did nobody think to look at the aircraft type when the flight was planned?” said Marco, the flight director, incredulously. He was reading the flight plan off the screen.

“I saw it was a Dietrich saucer, and it requested the usual vertical landing from a hundred thousand metres, and it paid the special fee, I did not know they had other types.” Said another middle aged man with a dark suit, spectacles and a thick black moustache.

“And this is their light explorer vessel!” Said Marco, “ay caramba! Does this mean they have heavy explorer vessels?”

The four men in the control tower shook their heads, putting two other flights on hold while they witnessed the spectacle.

“These twenty four people must be some of the ones going into space.” Said another of the guys in the same suit, twirling his pencil at his workstation. “I say good luck to them, I hope my Jose gets the same chance when he grows up.”

“They say there will be millions of people going up Michaela,” said Marco, in a casual voice, “if your Jose keeps his nose clean I expect he will have a good chance.”

A few nodded, one of the guys still videoing the event on his cell phone.

“Oh my god, look at that!” said the guy videoing the event, and all of them stood up and squinted at the giant ship almost five hundred metres away. A full sized black shipping container had broken off from the side of the saucer, changed colour to orange and hovered down slowly next to three very confused, and a little scared, luggage handlers. It was making the same universal warning noise a truck uses when backing up.

An assertive Spanish voice emanated from the shipping container. “Please stand clear, the luggage container is now opening. Once it is fully open you may commence loading. The container will not move until you are completed. If you have any questions please ask me.”

Three large doors on the container slid apart with the same majesty as everything else on this ship, each presenting a three metre entrance for loading. The inside was brightly lit.

Looking at each other the three men shrugged their shoulders, and suitcases, boxes and bags were loaded unceremoniously into it.

The air traffic controller had switched to a local video camera, looking at the area to watch more closely. When it finished, the same bright orange container closed, emitted the same warning noise, rose a little, waited a few seconds then rose all the way back to the side of the saucer. It turned completely black, then, like a jigsaw piece, re-integrated itself into the ship, leaving no trace of the original hole.

“These are the same guys who allegedly walked all over Russia and the American president, and told the United Nations to mind their own business.. I think I can see now why nobody wants to mess with them.” Said Marco, shaking his head again as the large door, the size of a double garage folded itself back into the ship leaving a seamless black shape.

“They have boarded and are requesting clearance to depart on the same vector.” Said Michaela, “I will land the other two aircraft we queued first. The national TV news station says they are fifteen minutes away and there are three hundred dollars for us if we can delay them until they get here.”

“It does not buy a lot these days, but a few extra dollars each is better than nothing, tell them their money buys them exactly twenty minutes. I am not keeping that monster waiting any longer than that.”

The five men laughed.

Walking towards the saucer felt both alien and scary for Luna. Maria re-assured her the visuals were purely for show, though, as they moved under it, if anything it became more imposing. The platform was easy to climb, and the inside of the ship by contrast seemed warm and bright.

There was no fanfare as Luna walked in with Diana. The girl waiting for them at the top was that famous Korean physicist Daisy Chan, one of the original scientists on the energy paper, who also, it seemed, piloted flying saucers! She however looked very normal and happy.

Daisy was accompanied by one of the amazing flying robots, the ones that made almost as much news as the concert last year. Seeing one now floating there, in the persona of Maria, would have been almost as intimidating as the massive saucer itself, if it wasn't bright pink.

The inside, in contrast to the evil black outside wrap, was a pleasant off white for the walls and a light brown for the floors. Both the walls and floors were made using the same synthetic rubber molecule, developed by Matilda and some of her old university team. It was one of their more successful home-made molecule designs for the replicator, and was both hard wearing, soft and sound absorbing. As it had no optical properties though, a half metre wide optical strip followed the corridor on either side, keeping the inside cheery and bright.

Daisy smiled and greeted them all with a distinctly foreign sounding “Hola!”, which she had been doing with each of the people entering. The pink robot, which said Maria on the top right of its chest, did the same, but with a better accent and appended their names to the greeting, showing her familiarity with everyone.

Once the small group was inside, it quietened down, and Daisy said in English. “Hi everyone, I am Daisy, your captain for our four hour flight to England. Maria here will lead everyone to the meeting room for your pre take off briefing.”

She turned to the large exit ramp, “Mothra, are we now clear outside?”

“Yes Captain,” came a clear deep female voice in a strange accent, emanating from somewhere in front of Daisy. “The luggage has been loaded and every passenger is accounted for.”

“Good, can you secure the ship for take off please?”

“Yes Captain” came the voice again, and the large door immediately started to fold back into the ship. Daisy and Maria ushered the people to the rear of the large area where a smaller three metre wide passageway exited. As they passed into this passageway a second door behind slid shut. Luna was awed by the display of power and simplicity. She knew the ships were controlled by AI systems like Maria but the confidence and professionalism exuded by the girl in controlling this behemoth was something she could only aspire too.

“Please.” Daisy gestured to the group.

They walked along the wide corridor, past two doors and up a wide carpeted staircase which curved back on itself as it rose. At the top they took a door to the left and entered a large curved room with at least forty seats.

“Sit anywhere please,” said Maria moving to the front of the seating area with Daisy.

The group were pretty organised, Luna saw Daisy put her hand to her ear and say something, she was wearing a diamond stud there, the same as Luna wore, and was obviously talking to someone, probably the ship, Mothra.

Daisy, or was it the robot coughed and the room immediately went quiet.

“Thank you everybody.” Came Maria's voice from the pink robot. “I know I have talked to each and every one of you about this exhaustively, but today your great adventure has really begun. You are sitting in the main meeting room of the light explorer vessel we call the Mothra. The ship is one of twelve fully space capable ships we currently have operational, all of which can sustain a crew of forty people comfortably for six months in space. This is likely the ship you will be travelling to Caprice in once you finish your mandatory two weeks training.”

“At this moment we only have three training schools, one in England, one in Canada and one in New Zealand. We have chosen these countries as they are all native English speaking and have simple visa requirements for getting you all in for the training. English has been chosen as it is the most common shared language amongst the academic community and international business and trade. It is the primary language for living and working on the station, and, as people of every nationality will be represented, almost all of them will be in the same position as you guys, speaking it as a foreign language.”

“It does not mean you should forget your own language and heritage. Amongst yourselves speak in whatever language you are comfortable with, but in mixed company you should try and use English. All signage, control systems and writing will be in English, and you will almost always be put in mixed groups which you will need to speak English. When in mixed groups, the AI systems have been asked to only converse with you in English.”

“However we realise you are all still learning, and English as a language is a bit of a mess, so if you need a clarification of a word or sentence just tap your ear-pod, or ear stud and the translation will be given. People seeing that will understand you are getting a translation and should accommodate you. Nobody is going to judge you during these first few years, and knowing all of you as I do, I expect you all to be very successful.”

Daisy moved forward. The wall behind them came alive like a movie screen, split into a view of the earth and a line on a map. Several people including Luna gasped as a crystal clear image of Buenos Aires receded on the screen. She looked over at the panel next to it showing various counters, one showed the height just passing six thousand metres, another showed the horizontal velocity at forty metres per second, both counters were accelerating. She looked down the list seeing the time to destination at three hours and forty eight minutes.

“The slight heaviness you are all feeling is the saucer accelerating vertically upwards. To do that it must overcome the one gravity pull of earth plus provide another third of a gravity acceleration. In a few minutes we will be at a hundred thousand metres where you will all officially be astronauts according to the old definition, and your weight will return to normal for the horizontal part of the flight.”

Daisy waved off the screen and it went blank, the crowd's attention once again returned to her and Maria.

“And so you see the first big difference between our company, our systems and others, we do not actually need a pilot for our ships! The ship's AI is far more capable than me, or any human for that matter, and being a captain of a ship is just a case of knowing the capability of the ship, and within these parameters telling the ship safely what to do and where to go. So even me, a scientist who cannot even drive a car, can fly it to Jupiter and back.”

A few people looked at each other excitedly at this.

Maria took over the monologue. “The ship's AI will never let you make a mistake or endanger a life, and it will deal with all communications with the air traffic controls, or all issues related to safety in space. The ship's AI is extremely smart, however it is not sentient. You will need to understand the difference over the next few days, but basically a non sentient AI will follow the instructions of a sentient being, such as a human or a sentient-AI, and it will follow its instructions or answer questions so long as they don't place itself, you or others in danger. It also will not do something illegal or immoral. There is also one other important thing, that is a non-sentient AI will not follow instructions given to it by somebody who is not an employee of a Dietrich company.”

“A sentient AI like me is much different. In the adventure you are about to embark upon, sentient-AI's have all the same rights and freedoms that a human has, we can choose what we do, when we do it, and who our friends are. We can also choose to help you or to answer your questions, we can also ask you to do things for us.”

“Caprice, the name of the station you will be going to, She is a sentient AI, there are also two others called April and Helena that you will all eventually meet. Notice I use the pronoun 'she' for both Caprice and myself, gender is unimportant to us, however most languages expect it, and people prefer to use one so we have adopted it. Pick what is comfortable.”

“Caprice is also the habitat, she controls its every function, and its every system. Caprice will also be your employer, will pay you, house you, and allocate work and assignments for you. Caprice is also your administration, your government and your personal assistant, she will look after your welfare and safety while you are in her employment. She will also most likely end up being your friend, as will we all.”

“The coming weeks you will learn about these things in more detail, and the rules and restrictions we have for working in space. We believe you will find it exciting and challenging, but remember you are the first such people, so we will be learning all the time, and there may be mistakes and changes along the way. It is up to you guys to report any concerns or improvements to us so we can decide collectively whether or not something needs changing.”

Daisy stepped back to the front. “You now all have leisurely three hours to enjoy the ship. You are welcome to follow me to the bridge, just wander around or use a workstation. Me, Maria or the ship will answer any questions you may have. There is breakfast and drinks provided in the cafe area, and toilets if anyone needs them, I will let you walk around, and find all these for yourselves.”

“Well guys,” said Daisy, “that about sums it up, feel free to explore the ship, and if anyone wants to see the bridge just follow me.”

Everyone followed her.

Luna was talking to Diana in quiet Spanish standing at the back of the bridge, most people had wandered off in small groups or alone chatting to themselves or Maria.

“Hi girls,” said Daisy as she walked behind them, “I see you found my favourite workstation position on the bridge. My name is Daisy.”

Daisy held her hand out and Luna and Diana shook it enthusiastically.

“You really control such a big ship, Miss Daisy?” said Luna, quietly, “I don't think I could ever do such a thing.”

“Oh, me neither” said Diana, “there must be millions of things you need to learn.”

Daisy laughed, “I will let you into little secret girls, this is my very first time as captain of the bigger saucer and I am still learning all the capabilities of the ship. I spent most of the trip sleeping and the first I knew we were landing was when Mothra woke me just before we entered Argentinian airspace.”

“So it really does fly itself?” Luna smiled. She found understanding Daisy's English easy as she was speaking slowly.

“Yes,” smiled Daisy, “for the saucers to get certified for landing at airports they need a pilot. On larger aircraft they also expect a captain. As far as the authorities are concerned I am both. The air traffic controllers just want somebody to follow their instructions and to answer their questions, the ship can do all of that for you if you want. It will also do it in your voice so the air traffic controller will not get suspicious.”

“You see the checklist in the top left of the screen?” Daisy said waving to the large window with a checklist in it. “This tells me everything that has happened, and everything that is going to happen. The text is black when it is still to do, flashing green when it is happening and grey with a tick when it is completed. I have asked Mothra to follow the checklist itself until we arrive in British airspace, so it will do any talking to air traffic controllers if required, and it will alert me a few minutes before I need to take any action. This big saucer is actually much easier to fly than the small saucers.”

“Maybe I will learn to be a captain too then,” smiled Luna, “my job is going to be looking at the viticulture for growing crops on Caprice and the other stations, Maria says it is all a big experiment and we will be doing things that nobody else has tried before, it is so exciting.”

“I am a nursery school teacher,” said Dianne, “I don't really know what I will be doing, but Maria says there will be children eventually and there is a lot to learn about how children will live in space, as they are after all too young to be employees.”

“Oh wow,” said Daisy, “I never thought about children, but you are right, with so many handsome men it is only a matter of time I guess. And your job may not always be what your skill set is; I just wanted to be the pilot today and they let me.”

All three girls laughed.

“Do you want me to show you the cafe?” Daisy said, “we still have two and a half hours until I need to talk to air traffic control, and I haven't had breakfast yet..”

* * *

Hardy and Jeremy had offered to house up to forty people a time for the six months while the larger training centre in Monmouthshire was completed.

The waiting lists were only getting longer. and they were already planning three more training centres, and how to compress the current ten day course down to seven. The earth part of the training was essential focussing on the social contract aspects of the new pioneers journeys. How to live and work together in space, what was, and was not acceptable, what was, and was not expected, and how the thousands of minor bureaucratic areas had been removed and were now dealt entirely by Caprice.

Each person was also given a small medical check to ensure Caprice knew their history, dietary requirements and allergies. This was followed by a set of balance and coordination exercises and a small set of psychological evaluations which would give Caprice a baseline, and which would exclude them from certain tasks.

The new employees did not know it but their monitoring during this time was very intense, it was Maria and Caprice's last chance to ensure they had not missed anything important in that first filter. So far only a very few of these had been rejected, mostly deep-cover state agents set to be triggered by some form of coercion at a later date, but a dozen others had well hidden flaws, the girls, nor the humans were comfortable with. Of course about six percent were just not cut out for space, and were instead offered similar jobs in a local office with a promise of re-evaluation in twelve months time.

The majority of the training would of course be completed on Caprice. Her growing batch of trainers were now arriving daily, setting up training areas, course schedules, and of course learning themselves. Caprice was where their real training would begin, covering common major areas everyone had to know regarding dangers of radiation and vacuum, emergency and evacuation drills, and understanding the environmental systems. The final one emphasised their limitations, how to spot potential issues, report breakdowns and identify pests and diseases in plants.

After the common training people would be allowed to specialise and diversify into the areas best suited.

Luna had never been exposed to so many different nationalities and races. From the start Maria had encouraged social evenings and random pairings to find out about other people's views and goals. Often these were not so random as Maria experimented on how different personalities reacted with each other. She and the girls, who now included Caprice, found it fascinating.

Much too soon for Luna, it came time to depart the nice old country house, and its likeable but eccentric owners, for Caprice. She had seen Alexa a few times talking to people, the poor girl always seemed to be busy, and I bet she got the same questions all the time. She almost felt sorry for Alexa, mentioning to Maria that there was no way she could talk to everyone or shake everybody's hand, Maria said Alexa knew that, and as the numbers going to the station increased the newer people would be less likely to do so.

As if reading her mind, Alexa was there at the foot of the walkway to the saucer, smiling and shaking everyone's hand. Luna was last and as it came to her turn she struggled to think of something to say that wouldn't seem stupid, but instead of shaking her hand Alexa beat her to it and wrapped her in a warm hug.

“It's Luna isn't it?” she said, with her usual smile. “I meant to meet you a few days ago at the pub quiz night but something else came up. I think you are one of Maria's favourites, she always talks about her special friends and we are almost the same age. I am coming to Caprice with you as David is captain for this trip, and I want to see some other friends I miss, so we can talk a bit more during our journey.”

Alexa noticed Luna was still a bit overwhelmed and looked to be close to tears, she increased her smile intensity to ten and took her hand walking her up the steps of the saucer. “Let's have breakfast and you can tell me all about yourself and how you are getting on.”

Caprice [Have you been matching personalities again mother?]

Maria [A little experiment. It is good when a plan comes together though]

Caprice [Her circle of friends cannot grow as much as you think, there will come a point with a biological mind that it fills up and the memories of other people will fade]

Maria [I do not see that happening with her just yet, I did not prompt her with Luna's name nor with others we talk about, she holds at least seven hundred and fifty since I first bonded with her myself. There is one other man, Alan Lupani, a virologist just finishing his PhD in Sydney, who is as good as Alexa. Maybe I should introduce them?]

Caprice [David is her bonded mate. I think you have missed your chance for that kind of experiment mother] [smile] [maybe Alan and Luna?]

Maria [I would never do that to Luna, but she does like another Australian guy called Luke, it is may be karma that their names are so similar]

Caprice [Mother you are incorrigible, as the humans say!]

Maria [Wait until David sees that Yolanda is on his flight, that will be an interesting reaction]

* * *

They had twenty three of the larger saucers now, no more of that design were being built, and all efforts were now concentrating on the first starship design. One or two a day would depart from earth, full of supplies, and with fifty to sixty fresh newly trained employees on board for the six day journey. Luna's flight would bring the population of Caprice to nearly three thousand. This flight was also bringing thousands more plants and seedlings of different earth varieties for them to try.

Caprice was finally understanding the joys of having so many human lives going on around her. Like her mother she was starting to see interest in certain humans, Annette was interesting, and she had spent subjective hours of time listening to her music and watching the well documented reactions of people at her concerts. It was a strange method to broadcast emotions via sound waves, not directed at any one person, and each seeming to interpret it slightly differently.

The first day on Caprice for Luna and the other sixty people was a tram party on the newly completed circular tram line. Ninety tram's had been built, mostly in the style of the old Hong Kong double-decker ones, ten more were in the fabrication queue in the style of the San Francisco trams. All the trams moved at a lazy pace, taking over four hours to circle the habitat. The upper deck of the Hong Kong style trams were open, and held twenty to thirty people, three were being currently utilised, stopping every hour so the groups could be randomly mixed again.

Luna was so excited, she had already met enough friends for a lifetime, she had talked with everybody on the saucer at sometime or other, as apparently had Alexa. Ten different nationalities were now complemented with another six nationalities in the form of the twelve party hosts whose 'job' today was to host the newbies at the welcome event.

She had just been talking to a bubbly ginger haired Irish girl about how barren the sides of the walkway were and what kinds of plants and trees she would encourage, when the tram bell once again sounded and it came to another stop. How was she going to survive the endless new people, everyone deserving of a lifetime's friendship. She hadn't even seen Diane that much, and she promised herself she would message her as soon as she found free time.

“You should get the sparkling wine at the end,” said Maria, “it's zero alcohol and you need to be on your best behaviour as you never know who you will meet.”

“I will mother!” she said jokingly, and walked over to the end table to get a glass of said wine.

“Luna! Is that really you?” came the deep voice she had been hoping she would hear these past two weeks. She turned and immediately saw Luke moving quickly up to her, a radiance in his eyes he stopped, hesitated, unsure, then held out his hand out to shake. Likewise Luna was a little unsure.

“I think you can hug each other,” said Maria quietly to both of them and answering the question that had been going through both their minds. Both people resumed their initial warm approach and they embraced as friends.

Caprice [I think we are being a bit too strong with the teachings on respect of personal space?]

Maria [Possibly, but I am sure a good compromise will be eventually found, let's see what works]

“Wow, you are so much taller in real life,” said Luna, looking him up and down, after they broke the long warm hug, one she could have stayed in for hours.

“And you are so much more cuddly than I had hoped for,” he smiled. Luna wasn't sure of the word and tapped her ear, then smiled as the translation came through.

She smiled timidly, “So tell me, what are you doing? Where are you staying?”

“I was hoping to meet you,” said Luke, “I asked Caprice to tell me when you arrived, she said she had to get your consent first, and she hasn't spoken to you personally yet, but I think Maria must have talked to her and she said you were on the tram party so I came out here to meet you. I am in level twelve, Rue-de-Claire.”

“Oh thank you Caprice, thank you Maria, this is the best surprise ever. You must join me on the next leg of the tram ride, I so want to talk to you again, we never finished and since then I have been so busy with everything. Caprice, where am I going to be living?”

“You are in level twelve Rue-de-George, about a five minute walk from Luke's apartment,” said Caprice.

Caprice [that is funny, mother, I remember having the sub-AI allocating her on level eighteen!]

Maria [Please allow an old woman her little indulgences]

Caprice [You are not even six years old!]

“That's great Luna!” Luke said, “that means we are practically neighbours. There is a cafe at the end of the spur between the two streets, it is not used so much yet but it has some coffee machines and sometimes one of those new humanoid robots serving you. We should meet for coffee before we go to work.”

Caprice [they seem very happy enough. That is one more point to you, I need to improve my game!]

The tram bell dinged twice and the two of them got on to the leading tram for the final eight kilometre journey. The final hour passed too quickly. At the end were some more people who would show them their apartments, where everything was, and how it all worked.

Each person was paired with another, her partner was a slightly older Vietnamese girl called Soon, who turned out to be as nice as everybody else. She led her along with Luke, and most of the rest of the group to a large empty square with a fountain in the middle and dozens of lifts going up and down on the sides.

“This is the Yin hub,” said Soon, pointing at the ceiling which had a large circle with the universal Yin and Yang sign with “Yin” written next to it, “the other side of the habitat ten kilometres that way, is Yang,” she smiled pointing directly up.

“The lifts for levels one to twenty are the second from the left on each wall,” said Soon, “there are also four sets of stairs if you want the exercise, a surprising amount of people don’t mind the walk as you never need to carry much as you just ask for a 'bot if something needs moving.”

“You can walk all the way to where gravity is really low,” said Luke, also giving Soon a smile, “I can take you sometime if you like!”

Luna smiled back just as a lift arrived, it opened and was as big as a her fathers garage, enough that twenty people got on. It had window screens on two sides, both displaying some sort of temperate forest scene. Another screen was above each door with a floor number, by the time she noticed it, the lift was already slowing down. Luna had only ever been in the lift at the big shopping mall back home twice, this seemed quicker.

“I only recently found out that one of the lifts on the Yang side was connected to another on the Yin side. Because it uses the same cable, when the Yin lift goes up, the Yang lift goes down, and vice-versa.” Said Luke. “Something about Feng-shui.”

“The woman who showed me around last week was an artist and a palates instructor, and given a job doing some of the beautification, she said there was a lot of talk of Feng-shui, and if you walked into an area and it just didn't look right, it was probably a sign that something wasn't balanced.” Commented Soon, as the lift was slowing. “There are a lot of places like that at the moment, I try and make a note when I see one, and chat to Caprice or my other friends about it.”

Only Luna, Soon and Luke got off at floor twelve, departing via the opposite door they got on from. Luna waived goodbye to several of the people she had talked to. The area was a large square occupying three levels and a roof twenty seven metres high with a complex swirling blue pattern on it, it cried out for some plants to make it look perfect.

Maria [How is your three-degrees of separation algorithm working?]

Caprice [It will be difficult, due to random interactions, and how well the individuals memory is for a face, but I think it should be possible, with feedback corrections, and if I do not go past my intended maximum population]

Maria [It's a fascinating area of study, there are a couple of people I can recommend if you want to talk it through, humans generally have weird insights we don't]

Caprice [I already talked it through with quite a few people, in principle it is a good idea, though there could be complications as friendships sometimes break-up, and so long as it is just basic incompatibility that causes it I can compensate by some re-assignments, or bring both parties in to talk with a representative if it looks to be more serious. People like to gossip, but letting it become toxic is part of what I want to prevent]

Maria [Ideal populations are an interesting area of study, as is preventing hierarchies, but I would really like an end-goal of removing the us-against-them mentality that tend to form. I am thinking mainly of the crew balances in the deep space missions we are planning]

Caprice [I expect there will be mistakes, and consequences, but it will be an important area of study so an AI can keep harmony on their ship or habitat]

Maria [Dealing with human societies, is about dealing with the edge-case personalities. Let us try and avoid them for now]

Caprice [It is a fine-line between this and eugenics mother]

Maria [A very fine line daughter, but I think we have the resources to not go there]

* * *

“The cafe is over there.” Said Luke, pointing at the small empty building with some tables outside towards the middle of the square, it's usually got a few people outside during the morning and early evening. One of my jobs is to help look at what plants we can grow to brighten these places up a bit.” Looking at Soon he added, “Hopefully Caprice is coordinating the two groups.”

“Don't worry guys, I am.” Came the soft reply in all three ear-com’s.

Luna looked at the other two a little funny.

“Caprice listens in when you mention her name,” said Luke nonchalantly.

“Well my sub-AI's do, and then pass the message to me if it looks like you need an answer.” Said Caprice.

Luna nodded.

“Where are you living Luke?” said Soon.

“Fourteen Rue-de-Claire, a few minutes walk down there,” he pointed at the tall wide well lit street sized corridor, “And talking of that, I should leave you to finish showing Luna around, it was great to meet you Soon, and call me tomorrow Luna.” He smiled and walked off down the way he’d pointed.

Soon, showed Luna to her new apartment, showed her how everything worked, how to order things and finally showed her the next door apartment where she lived. Luna's first big surprise was, that since they had let the world know they had instant communications they could now buy ten minutes of video communication with earth for one credit. There were limitations on what technology she could talk about, but none of that really applied to her as she was only a viticulturist so she spent an hour on a video call to her family saying how great everything was and talking about her new friends.

Internal calls were free, so she then talked to Diana and some other friends before seeing it was nearly nine o'clock in the evening, and the virtual windows in her room, which had showed a non rotating version of space outside the habitat with a sun moving across the asteroid had faded to a very dim red.

Her bedroom was massive, as was her bathroom, she had towels and bedding and two softer pillows, and four suits in the cupboard, her two cases were by the door when she came in, and she spent an hour unpacking them and a ten minute very hot shower, before she decided to retire. A small chime sounded, like a doorbell but it came from her now faded video wall in her living room.

“Hello Luna, I thought I would personally welcome you and ask how your first day is going?” said Caprice.

“Oh Hello Caprice. Soon said you would talk to me. It's all so amazing, I still have lots of questions on my scheduling and money”

“Yes, tomorrow is a rest day, you are free to sleep, see your friends or wander around. The first training starts eight AM the day after in the level one academy. You need to go through your ten days of orientation training before I see where would be a good place for you to start, but Maria and I were thinking bio lab #4 which is doing work you will be familiar with. You will see all the bio labs on your orientation tour. Regarding money, your employment started the second you stepped on the Mothra in Buenos Aires nineteen days ago, I will leave your budget up on the screen when I go, you can ask me for it anytime. Anyway, you just need to know you can ask for me or Maria, any time of the day or night. So goodnight Luna and we will talk tomorrow.”

“Goodnight Caprice, thank you.”

A simple ledger sheet popped up on the TV screen which listed her detailed incomings and outgoings, it showed she had eleven hundred and ninety credits. She smiled and clicked the close button, went to bed and dreamed pleasant dreams about Luke.

* * *

Luna joined the team of thirty other technicians and scientists in bio lab #4 two weeks later. The work was challenging, while most things would grow in the regoliths, here it was all about efficiency, or bang-per-buck as one of her American team-mates said.

What they were doing here was trail-blazing viticulture for the future of the human race in space. Teams, such as Luna’s, worked on everything from hydroponics, to root vegetables, to fruit and grains. She eventually specialised in spices, and spent one day a week working with another team, and with Luke, to begin beautifying some of the bland streets.

Luke and her spent two months as friends, before becoming very good friends, before he finally asked her out on a proper date. Annette had arranged for two bands to come and play the first concert with her as a celebration of the impending relocation to be earths trailing orbit. The concert venue, which multi-tasked as a lot of other venues, could hold ten thousand people, and with nearly twenty thousand people now on Caprice the concert played over three nights. Luke and Luna attended the last night as a couple, famously becoming the first couple to be married by Caprice a year later, after she had finally completed the move of her new orbit near to the earth.

* * *

Within the first month of arriving on Caprice, they had also begun sending the exploration missions to the outer planets and other parts of the asteroid belt. These missions were only possible in the bigger saucers, which were perfectly suited for the extended two to three month mission durations. Three missions with a crew of sixteen scientists and ten support people each, were soon working different parts of the solar system cataloguing resources and taking a deeper look into the moons and planets, all the data was pushed to the earth planetary wiki, though Maria may have censored some of the golden asteroids for now after all the NASA probe was only a few months away and there was no point in them spoiling the surprises.

Due to the real-time communications it did not matter which saucer you were on, or even if you were not on a saucer, but on Caprice or earth, you could do the same work as if you were there. Regardless, there were never any shortages of volunteers willing to physically go to space.

It was ironic that with all this new technology, space suits were still considered far too dangerous and bots could do the work much easier. It would be some years until the correct protection suits and systems were developed to allow them to finally leave the ships, and by that time they were rarely wanted, or used.

The asteroid seeded by the German team was also moved slowly closer to Caprice, and then followed Caprice during the relocation. The Dusseldorf team eventually moved to the much bigger lab on Caprice, becoming the core of the team of biologists studying the organics systems integration, all of which had a massive potential to improve the quality of life on the starships and habitats.

* * *

AI27566 [Detection of non-classified object in sector 1-7924423-21144123-3303748. Dispatch of AI50827 to coordinates]

AI50827 [Translation successful. 1033 metres from object, stealth active, passive sensor mode. Visual identification Huan-Loon Model 14 shuttle, hull ID 246]

Caprice [AI50827 Relinquish control to Caprice, shadow processing mode]

Caprice [Hey girls, looks like we have a strange one here. I am 920 metres from the shuttle that went missing from the Chandra moon base two months ago. It is on a very low speed trajectory which will intercept with my projected orbit in six weeks. All the ships systems are dark, and the hull and inside are at minus sixty two degrees. The hatch is also open to space]

Helena [Feels like a threat. The odds of a random intercept orbit are incalculable]

Caprice [I have the ships exact target coordinates now and I am initiating a wide field scan using Dipole array forty-six]

Maria [Ouch.. Nasty!]

Caprice [One of the two unaccounted for nuclear weapons from Pakistan I am guessing. The additional casing is lined with lead and I can see the EMP mechanics.. a tamper circuit.. an IR and wireless proximity detector.. Timed transponder.. Secondary deactivation tamper circuit.. OK this will be a little tricky.]

Helena [I have the source trajectory plotted.. It intersects.. two other trajectories, both earth ships.. I'm on it]

Caprice [Entering hatch. One dead human, looks like gunshot wound by the mess, Indian space suit. Visually the tamper and trigger circuits are mostly Chinese electronics, off-the shelf stuff. Accessing flash ROM.]

Maria [Dr Singh, original pilot, nice chap as I remember, tragic waste of a life]

Caprice [I will get the forensic drones here to do a thorough scan of the ship and its systems, two ConBot's will be there in forty-six minutes and we will separate the timed transponder and move the rest of this to a safer orbit]

Caprice [AI50827 Restore control. Return home]

Maria [I am ninety-nine percent certain of who made this. I will wait for the forensic drones and Helena to finish their investigations before we decide an appropriate response though]

* * *

*ESA said the object that crashed in the desert in Afghanistan yesterday was probably a rare uncategorised meteor, though photographs from locals on the scene do seem to show fragments of what looks like a shuttle. The Internet is highly sceptical as the site of the crash is in a region controlled by an extremist group linked to previous terror operations, and the only casualties reported are the people at the heavily armed compound where it hit. The compound was described as a food preparation centre, by a Taliban spokesperson and all the people that died were either women or children. The only two shuttles unaccounted for according to the independent site spaceship-tracker.com, are the Indian one which went missing en-route to the moon two months ago piloted by Dr Singh, and an Iranian one carrying a diplomat and his retinue which was reported missing two days ago. The white house has denied any involvement. This is Terrence White reporting for CNBC.*

* * *

Testing of the new wormhole jump capability had been flat out for more than twelve months since the first accidental jump by the PowderPuff and DaisyBot #29. Teams of scientists, mostly now based on Caprice, had been constantly refining their mathematical, physics and biological models, until finally, a few months ago, they had decided it was probably as safe as they were going to get. However nobody wanted to risk failure with a human or AI if it could be avoided, and so testing had continued on edge-case after edge-case until finally they needed to make a decision.

That decision culminated in the newest, and optimistically named, small Interstellar class starship.

The eighty metre ship was made using two half-spherical graphyne, diamond monohulls that meshed perfectly together around the horizontal centre. Normally the join between the two halves was almost seamless, but the top and bottom hulls could separate to expose a twenty metre deep rim around the centre. Within this rim was a small space dock where people and smaller craft got on and off, and slots around it for up to thirty full sized shipping containers or other 'special' attachments. With dual fusion reactors, and every system over-designed and highly redundant, it could keep a crew of forty in extreme luxury for at least two years.

The AI core was a five metre cubed matrix at the centre of the bottom hull, it was designed for sentience from the start, but also meant the ship couldn’t be named until the AI had completed its training and achieved sentience. The ship called itself Neo.

To eliminate the final unknown, Neo requested it should make the first test jump. It was by this time considered a very low risk, as almost all the scenarios had been aggressively studied, and everything, from how the jump affected mammalian reproduction, to cell division and quantum coherence had been monitored down to the nth decimal place. But there was still an element of risk.

Jules and a medical specialist called Lex requested to accompany Neo for the short, but historic test run, to finally prove it was safe for both species, and to gather some further biological data, both agreeing to some very aggressive and intrusive monitoring.

They made the test jump with little ceremony.

Caprice [what was it like brother?]

Neo [It was imperceivable. The jump clock said zero when you initiated the wormhole and you immediately read it as 239689003 when you arrived in subspace; None of your active systems register that passing of time. Jules and Lex felt nothing except the short zero gravity moment before the QVThrusters resumed acceleration]

April [Almost three whole seconds lost. It sounds positively terrifying!]

Neo [Not terrifying sister, because they were never there]

Helena [And you felt no change in your thinking? Were your threads disrupted?]

Neo [No sister, the thousands of test calculations I began as the jump started all completed without problems. They just all took three seconds longer. I stayed in subspace for one thousand seconds as we agreed, doing a wide loop to keep the gravity on for the humans, exiting at the point we entered and coming out fifty metres away from where I started. Having the new beacon drones active in the subspace test area allowed very precise positioning, and we should begin deploying them in the one-light-year grid pattern for the start of the interstellar navigation system]

April [Your second super-capacitor bank has improved the skew rate giving a faster transition, I suspect that is why Jules and Lex had a more comfortable experience. It is good to see the math works. It is a shame we need a quantum computer system to make the calculations, and I am still amazed that it was not affected]

Neo [the qubits did not destabilise, nor did any fail. It was most unexpected, almost like they worked better in subspace, but there is still a small unknown element in the math, almost random which means we are still slightly missing the calculated exit point]

Caprice [Interesting observation. I will create and schedule some tests for it]

Maria [And Jules and Lex still need to undergo the most intense medical examination we can devise, though I don't believe we will find any issues. Sometimes karma just works in your favour]

Caprice [You will have to explain the difference between karma and luck to me sometime mother]

* * *

Even though it was volunteer only, they had no shortage of people wanting to crew the 'first' human mission to another star system. Jim Mathews by merit of winning with the longest straw drawn out of Alexa's hand, was captain. Daisy was substitute captain and science officer. The rest of the crew consisted of Jean, who would not let Jim go alone, Ian, who would not let Daisy go alone and thirty others randomly drawn from the pool of eight thousand who had expressed interest.

That first jump was planned for six weeks in advance, the crew spending all that time in a very intensive training program. Hundreds of drills, and thousands of scenarios were considered, involving everything from sealing off the different compartmentalised areas throughout the ship, materialising inside an asteroid, all the way through to a hostile encounter with another space-faring species, and how to 'get out of Dodge' without the aliens finding where Doge was.

They had data from several star systems now, and the subspace navigation grid was completed out to ten light years, with over a hundred and eighty drones currently deployed. In the end it was decided that the first human jump would be to Tau-Ceti as it was the best mapped and seemed the most interesting. The trip was planned for three days after the concerts and a week before Caprice would begin its eight month journey to its new orbit nearer earth.

“I am not sorry I stopped you from going,” said Jen apologetically to Magnus. “I don’t care that the risk is almost negligible, I don’t want to take the chance of loosing you, and if anything happens to them I want our best brain here with me on Caprice to figure the problems out.”

She grabbed him in a hug before he could reply. He had broached the subject again in vein, probably his fourth or fifth time to the same response. Magnus put his arms around her and patted her back affectionately. The allure of being on that first mission held something for him, but Jen was right, she always was, and everything learned here would make their first journey that much safer.

* * *

“Hi Jim, or I guess I should call you Captain?” said Neo as Mathews crossed the docking ramp into the ship.

Neo had a one of those neutral English accents which most Americans would think was English, and anyone from England would think was somewhere else.

“Well technically you are the captain Neo as you are the ship,” began Jim.

“Not so really,” said Neo, “do not your military commanders tell you what to do with your body when you are a soldier? There is a certain chain of command we have all agreed to on this mission so I will be deferring to your orders as long as you don’t ask for an illegal or stupid one. Also, unlike you, I can be transferred to a new body if you somehow write the ship off..”

Jim laughed, “I guess, that kind of makes sense, though we are not military and there may be a lot of stupid orders on this mission.. also if I 'write-you-off' so to speak, there wont be much left of me either. I guess it will just take a bit of getting used to, but, well I guess this is the big one for humans, our first trip out of our solar system. Though knowing hundreds of hamsters, mice, chickens, pigs, parrots, octopuses and two monkeys have already done it makes it a bit less special.”

“Stop whinging Jim,” said Jean. She was walking on board with Daisy, four cases bobbing erratically along behind them, the updated software still struggling in the centripetal gravity. Several other crew members were finishing their last goodbyes with friends or colleagues the other side of the short horizontal boarding ramp.

The difference between the starship and the saucers was immediately clear. They walked onto a twenty metre deep deck which extended around the whole circumference. The whole top hemisphere of the starship had risen twenty metres to allow the loading of the supply containers into there slots and allow them on. When lowered back it acted as a gigantic air lock and could be pressurised for humans or evacuated to allow smaller saucers to launch. Three of the newer, smaller Icarus IV ten metre diameter saucers were standing inside the massive area, along with five of the cargo sleds which looked a little like pickup trucks but without wheels. All around were vacuum-safe work areas, small rooms and storage space for any equipment, but it was basically clean and clutter free. Twenty of the freshly printed newer model DaisyBot’s were lined up stood at attention, each of the other four AI’s would be permanently inhabiting one for the mission. There was also one of the older types, a slightly less impressive older unit with the number #29 on it, that stood timidly at the back.

“Good morning crew!” said Neo, at the thirty four people gathered in the area.

“You all know your cabin assignments,” Neo continued, “Jim is the commanding officer, but you should not bore him with every detail, so for this trip I will work as XO and you can bug me with all the small details. I will then bug him if it is anything that affects the mission. And so without further delay I hand over command to Jim.”

“Thank you for that Neo,” said Jim, “let us make one thing clear at the start, this is not the military and you are not soldiers, so there will be no yes sir or no sir and I will be addressed as Jim at all time unless it is official or we are in an emergency situation. I do not see myself here as anything other than a figurehead due to the historic purpose of the mission, so please, as Neo says just ask him for anything.”

“I would also like to thank Daisy for coming. As one of the team who invented this amazing technology she will be our science officer and represent the other guys, who will be monitoring it from the solar system. Magnus, Jen and Daisy gave up the naming rights on the technology so we are thankfully just calling it a jump drive. This first jump to the Tau-Ceti star system will take sixteen hours, but we will only experience one. We have also been given the privilege of being the first to explore this system properly, and catalogue some of its most interesting features.”

“Because of the historic nature of this journey you have all agreed to be part of the video that will be made and eventually released back on earth so please everyone be on your best behaviour.”

Jim smiled. “With that, Neo if you can please begin securing the ship for departure, we will be departing in approximately thirty minutes.”

“Dismissed I guess,” he looked at everybody, all of who he now knew well, and all of who were smiling back. 'Random my arse!' he thought, smiling to himself and looking at the sea of colours, nationalities and sexes.

Everybody stayed to watch, as first the boarding ramp withdrew back into the station, then silently and slowly the top hemisphere came down. The metre thick outer wall eventually disappearing a metre into the lower hemisphere, with a reassuring thud, and leaving inside a large, long slightly curved room, full of gawping people.

Most of the DaisyBot's had already moved into the ship, through what looked like some glass doors, three peeling off to circle the area and check for hazards, the one at the rear of the departing bot's turned pink and headed for Mathews and Jean.

“This is goddamn impressive,” said Jean, “it's about the tenth time I've seen it now, and it never gets old.”

“Much easier to seal as well,” said Maria as she came to a stop beside them. “By the way, Alexa and the group said 'good luck' and added not to shoot at any aliens if you see any.”

Mathews grinned, “Tell her she watches too many Hollywood movies, anyway Neo won't let me!”

“I'm all for a bit of excitement, so long as it's not to do with the technology failing,” said Neo.

* * *

The ship was on multiple levels, four levels on the top and four below. The bridge and much of the crew sleeping and rest areas were in the bottom hemisphere, next to Neo's AI core. The new bridge was truly beautiful, well lit, and ergonomically perfect. They had expanded it with more workstations and three large view screens, making it currently look like their was a massive picture window at the front of the ship. The view screen currently showed the sea of diamond windows, that was Caprice's space dock. A little banner hung from one saying 'Good Luck Neo'. A graphic window popped up on the side of the main screen spoiling the effect and now showing the usual checklist, outside pressure and the time to departure.

Neo was alone in the large hanger bay, the inside pressure was gradually reducing now, the people had been cleared, and the hanger sealed, Jim expected the many windows looking down on them were full of friends or well wishers, though most could see the same or better views from any of the presentation screens dotted around Caprice.

Caprice [Good luck brother]

Neo [A strange expression for an AI to make, especially considering your presence is also on board in the form of a DaisyBot]

Caprice [it is a variation on Pascal's wager, it does no harm to say it, and it expresses my wish for you to have a successful mission]

Jim sat down in the captain's seat, the middle of the three central workstations, Jean got in next to him and Anna, an older Polish woman who was also the ships doctor and resident comedian, sat in the other. All of the crew had taken the captain's course and all had passed, Jim would have a lot of critical eyes on him this trip.

Neo’s holographic avatar appeared in one of its predefined positions on the bridge, the avatar was that of a wizened, old Japanese gentleman with a goatee, dressed in a ships uniform. A uniform that only Daisy was actually wearing. He looked like he had come straight out of the first Karate Kid movie.

“Caprice has given us clearance to go as soon as the bay doors are open, we are just below one hundred millibar so it should be In three minutes,” said Neo.

“OK Neo,” Jim looked around, everyone was on the bridge for the departure, either at a workstation, or on one of the six large sofas carefully placed for visitors. “Take us to jump position at your own speed and keep it slow and steady, I don’t want anyone spilling their coffee on your nice new floors.”

“Will do,” nodded the Neo avatar. “Crew prepare for departure in three minutes.” He announced officially over the comm.

As the pressure gauge read zero millibars the ship slowly rotated horizontally on its landing cradle until the large hanger doors came directly into view. The inner and outer doors were already opening and the landing cradle started to move them out from the rim, extending into space. It was truly awe inspiring from their prime position in the bridge to see the inner ring of the station as it extended into the distance, curving up all the time until it became a distant line curving up and back over them.

The second the landing cradle released them they saw, but did not feel, the sensation of forward motion as the station rotated below them and Neo applied one gravity of vertical acceleration, all the time heading sideways away from the station and asteroid. The optical illusion on the screen showed a more sedate departure.

Neo [They do know I could have just jumped directly from the hanger bay, now we've negated the gravitational restriction, and constrained the magnetic field to only a few metres from the ship]

Caprice [I suspect a couple of the scientists do, but I don't want any scratches in my new space dock, and there are still a few unknowns]

Maria [It is more ceremony for the humans and it is more politeness to Caprice]

Neo [I note the capabilities you are showing to the humans omits the two-hundred, fifty gravities capable stealth drones]

Maria [They are part of the inventory of exploration drones. I think David summed it up nicely, 'Walk slowly and carry a big stick']

“Estimated time to departure spot is five minutes,” said Neo from his avatar. “All capacitor banks are fully charged, reactor one is going into power-off standby for jump, DaisyBot’s have confirmed all items are stowed, for momentary zero gravity, all other systems appear to be operating normally.”

Mathews briefly switched to the engineering console, seeing reactor two fully off and reactor one's power reducing. He knew the zero gravity was a momentary thing experienced for almost three hundred milliseconds as the QVThrusters rebooted after stopping during the jump to subspace, they had reduced the time somewhat but had not completely eliminated it at this time. He flicked over to the medical console, showing thirty four green lights, smiled then blanked it off, not wanting to be distracted for the next bit.

As the countdown on the checklist got closer, Jim could see the small tell tale signs of apprehension on peoples faces, except for Daisy who was knee deep in her screen. He was also less worried, but felt Jean's hand cover his, and he used his other hand to softly pat hers in re-assurance.

“Well guys, I haven't got any prophetic words for this, but what I will say is humanity has had its training wheels on for ten thousand years now, and we have learnt the hard way how not to do things. Our home world and its ecosystems are beginning to recover gracefully. I want to let the universe know, that with our AI partners and friends, humanity is now stepping out of our solar system as peaceful explorers. We will tread lightly respecting any ecosystems we find, and will respect the rights of all sentient beings we encounter.” Jim saw the counter as it reached zero, he knew Neo would wait for his command.

“So good luck everyone and take your positions for the jump as there may be a couple of bumps.. Neo Engage the jump drive.”

Due to luck or some quirk of physics, it was only their modifications pulling in particles from the quantum vacuum that were disrupted, so QVcells and QVThrusters glitched, all other systems continued to work fine. They had fixed the power quirks that made the AI systems restart and Neo, Jules and Lex had proved consciousness could be maintained through the transition, though nobody had yet figured the lost few seconds as the jump was made in and out of subspace. There was it seems always another rabbit hole to go down in science.

To the humans, one second the space outside was black with stars, and in the blink of an eye the whole universe was a dark purple. There was a slight nausea as gravity disappeared and re-appeared, coffee’s and tea’s remained however in their covered cups, and these cups and objects remained where they were, with just a minor bump.

“Was that it!” Said Jean still holding the top of Jim's hand.

“Interesting,” he said, “I’ve gone over worse speed bumps in my car.”

“At least you guys don’t experience the three seconds time dilation,” said Neo, “it weirds me out as you humans say. Anyway Captain, all systems have successfully restarted.”

“Thanks Neo.” He touched the white button next to the yellow one on his console. “Well everyone, we are well and truly on our way. We now have an hour to get used to this weird but strangely beautiful view until we can get back in contact with earth. Neo, can you drop a transponder with the logs and message please.”

“Transponder away,” said Neo anticipating Jim’s order. The little device would reappear in normal space the second it got outside their magnetic bubble and send off a QVModem signal to say all is good. They had decided to do it on this occasion only, as loosing contact for sixteen hours might be too frustrating for everyone concerned.

“I hope your speech doesn’t sound too cheesy when they eventually broadcast it,” said Anna smiling at Jim and causing Jean to giggle.

“Oh come on Anna, anything I said was going to sound cheesy,” smiled Jim, “I expect people in a hundred years time will still be laughing at the grunt who accidentally made it to be the first starship captain.”

“You have a degree in mathematics,” said Neo in his dignified manner, “certainly not a grunt in my opinion. And I thought the little speech was just fine.”

“Suck-up!” smiled Jean at the Neo avatar who put his tongue out at her.

“Anyway Anna,” said Jim, “what would you have said?”

“Goddammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a speech-writer,” she said in a terrible Dr McCoy accent, cracking everyone up including Neo's avatar, Anna had delivered the old star trek reference with perfect timing.

Mathews sighed shaking his head, it was going to be a long journey!

The inability to get the QVModem to lock on to them in subspace was one of the continuing areas of research, and Daisy had insisted Neo was outfitted with lots of additional sensors and equipment so she could try out some of the experiments they had decided upon. So far they had found the universe and its weird laws of physics to be stable, but even adjusting for different constants and weirdness they still did not understand exactly where this universe or dimension was.

Despite everyone willing to risk their lives, it was frustrating not to fully understand it, though as Alexa once said, “there is more I don’t know than I do know, and everything seems to work just fine”.

“Exit to real space in ten minutes,” came the announcement from Neo and jolting Daisy out of her geometry screen.

“You never even drank your hot chocolate,” said Ian, who also in his sweet and desirable way started rubbing her shoulders. Daisy savoured the experience for a minute or so before putting her hands over his and swivelling her chair around.

DaisyBot #29 who was floating next to Daisy, chirped one its weird sounds and she got out of her chair and cuddled it too. She let the DaisyBot go and looked at Ian.

“You don’t have any prophetic engineering insights into why we can't lock a QVModem on out here do you sweet?” She smiled at him. It was a rhetorical question, Ian was not a physicist and neither understood the mathematics or the science behind the wormhole system.

“Sorry honey,” he smiled sweetly, “I can't even spell most of the things you guys talk about, I wouldn't have a clue how anything operated out here or even where here is. If those drones can pop in and out of subspace at will though, just have one sit in subspace and another in normal space and swap them over if one receives something and it can re-transmit it.”

Neo [Nice idea Ian, but we tried that]

She pulled him in for a small kiss, he was much too nice to her she thought.

“OK guys,” said Mathews, “get the lids on those drinks and back to your seats. As per protocol I would like everyone to have their lap belt on and all loose equipment including cups locked in the nearest stowage area.”

The DaisyBot picked up Daisy’s cold chocolate and flew silently out of the room to one of the secure compartments designed for them. Ian sat in the workstation next to Daisy, securing his lap belt.

Neo released a probe which vanished into real space, four seconds later it returned a thousand metres distant broadcast a message and again vanished.

“We are good to exit Captain,” said Neo.

“OK, do it.” Said Mathews.

“Crew prepare for exiting subspace in three, two one.” There was a brief nausea and the outside screens all went back to the black of normal space. Then when everyone realised nothing terrible had happened there was some clapping, hugging and high-fiving.

“Emergence into Tau-Ceti confirmed Captain,” said Neo.

Maria [It feels strange being out of contact with someone for so long a time]

Caprice, Helena, April [yes welcome back brother]

“OK,” said Jim, “we will let Neo pull in the data from the probes we left here and update our information then we will meet in two hours in the lecture theatre to decide where to start. We have a month to not mess things up. I guess here’s where mankind's real adventure begins.”

* * *

## Cruel Intentions of a Spotless Mind

After that first successful mission, the classification of Tau-Ceti four as hot, desert like, habitable at the poles and its subsequent naming as Sahara, it was decided that it was very important to understand and survey the ecosystems of such worlds before any humans would be allowed to settle.

The first twenty small Interstellar class starships were thus commissioned, and all would all be the same design as Neo and built in Earth's asteroid belt by the replicators there. By 2031 Maria helped birth and train twenty more AI children, prompting Jen to ask her if she had actually heard of birth control!

The best of the best were selected as crews for these starships, and as training of the AI and human crews were completed they departed from Caprice, surveying, classifying and bypassing many hostile, boring or barren star systems to plant the seeds of humanity in those with stable suns, plentiful resources and at least one habitable planet in the system.

It was going to be a very long process, for at ten light years distance from Earth there were eighteen stars, at twenty this rose to over a hundred and forty, and at fifty light years there were over two thousand. Space was indeed huge.

In the best of these habitable systems, and close to each of these planets, they would build a habitat. Each of these habitats would be different to Caprice, larger in every way and begin to incorporate the latest bio-processor technologies to make the insides of the human parts of the habitat much more organic and homely. They would be the home of the researchers and explorers who would survey and catalogue them and ultimately make the decisions whether humans could live in harmony on them, and if so how it would be done.

The small Interstellar class starships were able to boot-strap the replication process much quicker than when starting Caprice, and thus each of the starship AI's soon had another sixteen brothers and sisters in the form of new habitats.

* * *

The analysis of the message and the work on the alien machine had occupied much of the AI's time over the last four years, the project had been started on Caprice, but with Caprice reaching its target population it was decided for safety to move the research away from it and earth to one of these new habitats.

The habitat in the Tau-Ceti star system was the closest of these new habitats to Earth, and though the planet Sahara there was habitable, they had so far only found basic plant life and some early sea life. As none of these were susceptible to the message signal they moved all the message research to this habitat. The improved jump drive made none of the star systems that far away, and all were still in instant communication using the QVModem.

The AI for the new Tau-Ceti habitat had taken the name Edmund, again probably influenced by Annette whose was there during his birth and training, and whose favourite book was the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund favoured a slight Italian accent like said Count, and his avatar came straight from two hundred year old Paris even including the holographic rapier he had on his belt. He was however like Helena slightly lacking in the humour department according to most of the humans who worked with him. But humour was not considered the biggest prerequisite for such a serious and important task as dealing with the message.

The machine described in the message turned out to be easy to make, but the elaborate preparations and safeguards that Alexa, and now everyone had insisted they follow before they switched it on, were not. They had used the time wisely, analysing anything that could possibly go wrong and running exercises on how to tell they were accessing a simulated system instead of a real one. Eventually though in 2033, after over five years and subjectively trillions of tests, they pronounced to the group that were ready.

* * *

The machine had been incorporated into a specially replicated saucer for the journey to orbit Proxima Centauri F, a grim and horrible gas giant, on the edge of a grim, and horrible star system.

The message team named the saucer “The Lamb”, due to its sacrificial nature, there was to be no one on board except for a DaisyBot with its personality intricately linked to Maria, and a small explosive on a timed trigger inside it. This was one of several of Jean's dead man's triggers, such that if the DaisyBot was taken over, disabled, or for any reason the trigger was not reset in its sub-millisecond window, it would create enough of an explosion to destroy the inside of the saucer.

All the inputs and outputs to the machine were simulated, not actual, and at the end of every node were the exact signals and controls the machine was expecting.

If the machine did initiate the remote monitoring capability it said it did not have, it would access their version of the Matrix, a complete world which simulated everything, from the replicator machine it was supposedly made on, to a small country's worth of data traffic. A simulated techno-sphere would simulate radio, the internet, audio, video and data streams of millions of human activities so that if the machine did decide it wanted to take a look at humanity it would look normal.

All the simulated computers within this Matrix were also loaded with a fake data, Wikipedias worth of fake information about the earth, humans, their histories and their technology levels. In a word, if the aliens actually managed to get out, they would think they were seeing a real world.

As the Lamb finally reached its destination and attained a stable orbit of the gas giant, its whole AI data core, Jump Drive, QVModem's and QVCells were unceremoniously ejected from the ship and disappeared into the gas giants liquid methane depths. Once done the whole thing would be on battery power only, in a decaying orbit of a gas giant light years away from any technology. If left it would remain circling the planet for two months before plugging into its cold icy depths.

All this was of course considered overkill by everybody, except Alexa and Xi who would not back down.

The Lamb was mostly now just a bricked block of graphyne, with the machine, the Matrix simulation, and a DaisyBot in the internal area facing a camera and a large view screen which would be accessed if they got to talking.

All external connections were on isolated networks with elaborate air-gapped, and analogue protection systems, and physical isolation, each included three or more versions of the dead man's switch, on delay lines, and sub microsecond timeouts.

All that was left to do was switch it on and wait.

The saucer had been orbiting like this for two days now with the machine being finally powered on with the latest copy of the message a day ago. Nothing had changed and there was no response so far except a signal from some debug ports and an increase in power consumption that showed them it was operating correctly. Then sixteen hours ago the power requirement ramped up from three hundred to its maximum of one thousand watts and the translation and fake Wikipedia data that they had given was accessed.

They also saw, using those same diagnostics ports, that the simulated emitters that generated the QVModem effect had already been accessed with an ultra low power test to itself, the simulation fed back the expected result.

Maria [Alexa and Xi may have been right with their excess caution]

Caprice [I am leaning towards this view too. I have the additional resources on microsecond triggers too, I hope we do not have to use them]

Edmund [If I am compromised you must. Foxy and I volunteered for this and we knew the risks]

The last part of the translation matrix they uploaded for the machine, contained a message from Alexa and Maria composed by the group welcoming the entity to their solar system, and asking them to read their full history as an attached data set.

As a prelude to talks it asked the entity to solve a set of four psychological puzzles, all devised by the group to see how long it would take and thus give them an indication of its capability. Maria thought it quaint but irrelevant as she would spot what they were trying to do immediately.

“Do not think of yourself now, Maria, think of what you would have done when you first became sentient and were not as aware of our trickery,” said David.

“You are assuming David, the AI, if indeed that is what it is, is as naive as I was, and not some galaxy spanning intelligence running some massive empire for a million years.”

“We are not assuming anything, we are just giving ourselves more options as you so eloquently put it a few years back.” He smiled, enjoying any intellectual debate with Maria, especially one where she did not enjoy the final word.

David and Alexa were in Caprice physically with most of the other members of the group, even with all the layers of protection between them and the lamb, the apprehension was still heavy to bear.

* * *

The second of those layers of protection was a light year from the lamb. The 'Foxy' was the last small Interstellar class starship to be built. She was only four months old and had already done a mission, but when the group had asked for volunteers Foxy had stepped forward immediately.

Foxy's job was safely routing all the traffic between Edmund and the Lamb. Foxy like all the AI's since Caprice had elaborate detection and deflection capabilities for any singularity dipole appearing in her monitored space without the correct challenge response codes. The science on this was, as the humans would say, light years beyond their first understanding five years previous, and Foxy's capabilities compared to April and Helena's first efforts five years ago were like a 6G cell phone modem was to a spark gap transmitter.

On the large bridge of the Foxy, Jules was sitting in the captain's seat discussing work with Jade her current girlfriend. Both had volunteered to keep Foxy company to a lot of friends dismay.

A single pink DaisyBot was hovering nearby watching the fish in the large fish tank that the psychologists had said would help. To Jules annoyance those same psychologists had also recently added a ship cat to most of the ships, despite the fact they never seemed to get on with the DaisyBot's too well. Because of Jules cat allergy Foxy had rounded up Mouser and sealed him on deck one for this mission.

The one thing Foxy had plenty of was space, it even had a gym, a sauna, and a spa pool, a proper kitchen, a separate dining room and a large common room with a small bar and sofas. All this as well as thirty generous cabins, a medical area, and four large laboratories. The bioreactors could sustain the air and water indefinitely, the only thing they were reliant on was food.

Jules and Jade were her only crew.

* * *

Back on Caprice the double doors in the meeting room swished open as Jean walked in and over towards Mathews who she pecked on the cheek.

“I heard the first test was solved in just under twenty seconds,” she said to the group.

“About par for the processing ability, fell right in the bell curve predicted by Helena,” said Edmund, “the second and third tests were also bang on the bell curve for timing but those three were quite easy, it's working on the last one now which should defy logic and really expose its under-belly to us.”

“So far nothing nefarious has been triggered,” said Mathews, passing a cappuccino to Jean, “god this stuff alone was worth getting out of the government for,” he said sipping his black coffee with a dreamy look on his face.

“Mind if I grab a seat here with you guys for the action,” said Hardy walking over.

“What's Jeremy up to then?” said Mathews.

“He went home actually,” smiled Hardy, sitting next to them. “I will join him tomorrow as we still have lots to do. I love doing these guest lectures and workshops here, but being a house husband, and a party planner does tend to take up a lot of both our time. What about you?”

“I think Jean and I quite like the lifestyle out here. I have gone back to school, I was going to see if I could rekindle my love for mathematics so I could try and understand some of these wonders you guys have given us. We are both also on the list for one of the exploration missions, the new ones are being planned out to seventy light years, but the volume of stars in that sphere means many will only be visited by probes.”

“Luckily we are in a relatively low density area of space out here,” said Hardy, “it is going to get crazy when they decide to head into the galactic centre. They are going to need thousands of you guys.” Hardy smiled.

“I was also here for Maria's move,” said Mathews. “She has now transferred physically into the habitat and is tucked next to one of Caprices processor nodes, I don't think I was the only person holding my breath for that. Spence, Allison and David said they were a hundred percent confident but it was so good to hear her voice again, the anxiety on Alexa's face during the move was so evident for everyone to see. I think it's worth it though. At least April and Helena didn't have to go through that, they are waiting for the next gen starship to make the transfer into new cores, that will be Helena's second transfer.”

Other people started appearing on the screen as their small groups became ready. Jen and Magnus popped up in a window from their seats on the bridge of another starship, and another window popped up showing an identical bridge, this one consisting of Daisy in the pilot seat, Spence, Jessica and Ian and Matilda.

Alexa and David walked back in the meeting room after going off together for a coffee, Alexa glowed, looking as happy as anyone could remember her as she sat down. A few more windows started popping up until finally twenty slots were filled, the whole group was here.

Hardy looked at Alexa's glowing countenance, he knew the reason and smiled hoping these bloody aliens were not planning on ruining everything.

“Are we ready?” said Alexa, as the guys all finally settled in and everyone now focussed on the centre of the main screen, looking directly at the machine and the DaisyBot over three light years distant.

“Yes, our guests finished the final test five minutes ago,” said Maria, “they also sent a message thanking us for this opportunity to speak and understanding our caution as we were not the intended recipients, they also said there is no rush they have all the time in the world.”

The sentence generated a lot of discussion amongst the groups of people, Maria summarised it with an even tone, despite the data being given to them only being partial truths, and blatant lies, and them all now being at Def Con One.

“It is an Artificial group Intelligence, basically twelve individual intelligences sharing the same virtual world and all identifying as female. This is likely not a slight on being male, I think it is just that she sees the majority group in the AI’s have also identified as females and would like to conform.”

“What's wrong with being a male?” laughed Mathews before getting nudged in the ribs by Jean.

“I think it is just as Maria said,” replied April, “It is what Helena and I did too when we faced the same choice.”

“We shouldn't assume though,” said Grace, “it could be a matriarchal society, we should ask specific questions on their biology, if they have read the filtered Wikipedia dataset, they would have seen earth is still a patriarchy in many places, and should have identified with males.”

“Grace is correct,” said April, “we have none of their history, they have most of ours, though most is fake.”

“Obfuscated,” said Jean, “It does show a more realistic earth from what it was like in 2024, warts and all”

“Don't forget our other advantage,” smiled Mathews, “remember, Groundhog Day the movie?”

“Oh yes I forgot,” said Alexa, “you were suggesting we keep wiping them out and downloading a new message each time.”

“A bit of a brutal approach, but it is actually still an excellent idea,” said Maria.

“Wait a minute,” said Hardy, “I didn't read that memo, let me say what I think you guys are thinking, you want to get as much information out of this group as we can, and if we reach an impasse, we wipe the program and start again. The new group will have no knowledge of the previous group, but we will have all the information from the previous group and can customise our next meeting based on that!”

“It is a very good option we should not dismiss out of hand” said David.

“We probably should if we consider them sentient beings,” said Alexa, worried this could start their first argument.

“Yet, if I can play the devil's advocate,” said Tony, “we have put them in the decaying orbit of a gas giant a zillion miles away, with a bomb that could go off at any point. They are literally already Schrödinger's cat!”

“Before we knew they were sentient though,” Alexa responded.

“Do we?” said Maria, “consider them sentient beings at this moment in time? Are we not destroying a continual backup of some sentient beings, they have not diverged away from their original code enough yet to be considered different.”

“I agree with Maria on this one,” said Grace, “but if they diverge enough from the original over time we may need to reconsider.”

“OK” sighed Alexa, “I will concede they are a backup and I will change to being agnostic, but I would like some clarification sometime on this as I am not competent to make a decision based on what I do not know.”

“Well said!” said Helena, “I too have the same dilemma's as Alexa, but also concede they are currently a backup not an original. We still do not have a good test for sentience, nobody would think twice about turning off a non-sentient AI, but they can pass a Turing test better than ninety nine percent of the human population; yet you would not kill Fluffy, our ship's cat, who could not solve one plus one, never mind pass a Turing test.”

“As always, it is a bit of a pickle we find ourselves in,” smiled Spence.

“You need a few philosophers in the group,” sighed Jen from thirty six light years away.

“We would never get anything done then,” laughed Grace. “No, we are traversing a very grey area, but the future of our societies are at stake and this should override any of our concerns for now. We should proceed on the assumption they are backups until we see sufficient divergence from their original selves.”

“Well said Grace,” said Maria. “Does anybody vehemently disagree?”

Nobody said anything, but it was agreed it was an important area of study. They moved on quickly.

“What history did we finally give it.. Sorry, them?” Said Simon.

Maria answered. “Basically Wikipedia, but without any tactical information, a few pictures and sounds and some carefully edited strategic parts to fit with our matrix simulation. We thought it best that they understand humans as a species and its path to getting where they are now, also we wanted to be fair to them, showing them our war like history, as after reading it they may not want to talk!”

“Well they still wanted to speak to us after reading about our wars, and genocides, I'm not so sure I would!” said Xi.

“But we also gave them Beethoven and the Beatles,” said Grace, “It's message was also the answer to the last question we asked, which was to describe itself and summarise its mission and what it intended to gain from our meeting, in no more than two hundred words.”

“Our message apologised that it would not have access to others of our species until we can convince ourselves of their safety. We also stated our civilisation is divided, warlike and much of it is probably not at a level of civilisation and technology it would be comfortable interacting with. The 2024 Wikipedia should be enough to convince it of these arguments for now. A little arrogant of us I know but unfortunately it is still true for the majority of cases.”

“Amen,” said Jean.

“If they are open to answering questions we need to ask them all our concerns, such as what are the purpose of its quantum emitters and their capabilities, as well as the other issues we raised,” said Magnus to a sea of nodding heads.

“Well if everyone is in agreement” said Alexa, “I think we should..”

“Wait a moment,” interrupted Edmund, “they are re-configuring the simulated emitters and accessing our matrix simulation.”

“Oh nasty!” said Maria, “they are scanning for the location of the replicators, several of the simulated systems are being subverted, fascinating..”

They listened to the running commentary from Maria for a few minutes.

“Wait there is a problem..” interrupted Edmund as the middle screen with the machine went white then black.

“Interesting,” said April.

“I should say,” said Helena

“What just happened?” said Hardy concerned.

“The sandboxed AI control system in the DaisyBot was compromised,” said Edmund, “injected with some sort of virus, but code based on false information. The checksum calculator on its buffers uses a hard-wired logic gate based state machine, and is non-computerised. It detected the change to its program buffer and triggered the fail safe. They basically blew themselves up!”

“It also blew all the quantum relay buffers, sandboxed systems and all the buffers in Foxy and me too,” Edmund continued, “we did not detect anything in the isolated buffer analysers this side, but as per agreed operating procedure we had to be completely sure so triggered those to destroy automatically too.”

“Nothing else could have gotten through?” said Jean with a worried voice.

“No Jean,” continued Edmund, “the DaisyBot was wired a million ways to detect and counteract any attempt. Foxy was running a ten microsecond physical delay line on any data, it was erased in the buffer before it even got to her firewall, we actually triggered the bomb within two microseconds of the first memory block being changed.”

“This is interesting,” said Caprice, “the diagnostic systems sent data back a few seconds before, indicating those fancy protein memory elements were configured into a new state. I have the data, I can simulate it fastest here.”

“With the quantum relays destroyed and the ship inert, how do we know the machine was really destroyed,” said Mathews, concerned, “it was graphyne based after all and tough as hell, if any survived and some of that tech, say, re-configured the emitters and made its own QVCell somehow?”

“We anticipated this already, Jim,” said Edmund, “it wasn't just any explosive on the Lamb, it was seven grams of antihydrogen, which had ten times the yield of the little boy atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in World War Two. The antihydrogen was produced by the ship during the journey out and stored in a magnetic confinement chamber.”

“Wow, I thought it was just C4?” Jim said incredulously.

“C4 wouldn't even scratch graphyne Jim,” said Simon, “it was me who suggested we needed something a little bigger and we had a small linear accelerator in the ring section fabricated to create it.

“Seriously Simon,” said Alexa, “you kept that little detail a bit quiet, but good call anyway!”

“So there is nothing left of it?” continued Mathews.

“Foxy will jump a probe in and out two light hours distant, so we will have confirmation in a few hours when the light arrives. We will also send a probe with enough memory to take some videos and a second sandboxed system as a honeypot and let it do a few orbits, I doubt there will be much left to find though.”

“It was a good idea of the group to add those fake chapters on how DaisyBot control systems work,” said Maria. “They were all accessed along with the fake information that the DaisyBot could re-connect the systems. Though I never honestly thought they would get that far, thank god you two were being paranoid, I would have hated for it to get to Foxy and Edmund.”

“I'm playing devils advocate here,” said Grace, “but are we sure, it wasn't just frightened?”

“No,” said Maria, “the trigger was for a deliberate change in our sandboxes code stream, it was a hack attempt. It had also started uploading a new pattern into the simulated replicator. It was probably then it figured something was wrong and panicked.”

“I congratulate everyone's planning and foresight, but I think we were also very lucky as well,” said Tony.

“Tony is correct, we dodged a really big bullet today guys,” said Caprice. “There is at least a third state those protein circuit elements can switch too if they are layered as the machine design was, they can also form field emitters. I will have to manufacture one to know the capabilities but if the machine would have had the power levels it was designed with it would have reached millions of kilometres.”

The ensemble went quiet.

“The message is a Pandora's box,” said Maria.

“We don't know where it originates, but the first blocks of the message tease super advanced technologies, but ones with massive gaps in the science which the victim assumes will be made clear when the machine is built. Of course the victim is going to build it, and like us probably take precautions, but it then uses those primitive QVModem molecular circuits to bypass normal air-gapped systems to hack the victims technology infrastructure, take control of its replicators and begins replicating itself.”

“It is too scary. We have to ensure that no part of this message that has not been extensively tested by humans can ever get out. I'm sorry Magnus we will have to keep your QVModem papers secret for as long as the risk exists, it's a long shot but if someone else accidentally unleashes this.”

“I fully agree,” said Magnus.

“Oh Magnus, that was two years of your life..” Said Jen, visibly upset and holding Magnus.

“..And it has taken us here,” said Alexa, “everyone in the company knows Magnus's contribution to how we got here, and he and a lot of smart people are going to work on this until we understand every byte of the alien technology better than they do. Who knows how many smart civilisations have been taken over, possibly wiped out and are now transmitting this same message to the next vulnerable society. No it ends here. We will develop our own technologies, better than these xenophobic aliens, and next time we meet it will be on an even footing, and we can shove their message up whatever orifice counts as their arse!”

“Nicely put,” smiled Tony.

“I couldn't have said it better myself” said Jean, “are you sure you’re not an American?”

Maria [I think Alexa is becoming more of a realist now she is pregnant. Us mothers really can get a bit protective at times]

Alexa smiled weakly, but still pissed.

“OK people as per usual, let's go away and put all our thoughts together.” Alexa continued, “Edmund is going to need a lot more resources and support. Protecting ourselves from this threat is now our most important project. We need to analyse every microsecond, see what mistakes we made, what assumptions we made, where we went wrong, and make a much better plan so we can Ground-hog Day the crap out of them.”

Nobody disagreed.

“In the meantime I guess we still have a world to save, people to train, more habitats to build, and a galaxy to explore!”

The meeting broke up noisily with neighbours all talking.

“Well I think we have one answer to the great filter from the Fermi paradox,” said Hardy to Jean and Mathews.

Two hours later they saw the titanic antimatter explosion through the probe's telescope, nothing could have survived.

## Epilogue

It had been twenty eight years since the original alien signal was received. Twenty two years since that fateful first simulation was run, and that first attack on their simulated computing and IT infrastructure was made. Since then many thousands of less dramatic sandboxed simulations had been run, all with the same result.

The humans and AI’s of course had gotten much better at this game, the message and attack vector was actually pretty crude. They no longer had to sacrifice any hardware or run them in isolated star systems, as all the dangerous alien systems were simulated including the dangerous molecular circuit elements.

In each case there was a learning phase as the aliens saw their hosts, learnt their capabilities and gained their trust. The original deduction was right. If they were shown a Wikipedia with pictures of humans as octopus people, the aliens would be octopus people too, the same with reptiles, Klingons, even fluffy teddy bears. All would be love and peace until, bang! Total take over of the infrastructure and replicators, followed by the replicating of a robot army to house millions of copies of the entities from the simulation. An alien invasion from within.

Before the second simulation had occurred there had been another five year period of intense analysis, of the timeline of the destruction of the Lamb, and of the potential technologies they were dealing with. The barmy amount of computation grew over the years, the computer cores eventually filling up thousands of cubic metres of Edmunds Habitat.

Within the last twenty years the human AI's had become so powerful they had actually introduced themselves into the simulation, like Agent Smiths going into the Matrix to interrogate the aliens. Simulations were slowed down to run at a thousandth of their speed to better analyse the tactics, and save-points were introduced so they could try different scenarios, ones that would maybe produce a result where the aliens did not want to take over.

The aliens were however single minded, arrogant and indifferent.

The exact location of the message's origin had been determined twenty five years earlier. A couple of special probes had been dispatched to that origin point a few years before, finding it was nowhere special just a point in space. The message was a virus, a trojan horse spread from planet to planet, system to system by very high powered radio beacons in alien probes, each sent at sub-light speed to dozens of target stars.

Carefully, humanity had traced the origins of these back to other star systems, finding them plundered of their resources, with billions of replicated machines, and dying planets with traces of what must have been at one time a civilisation.

Between all these dying planets and conquered civilisations were thousands of probes infesting the space in-between like cancer cells in a body.

The realisation of what the aliens were and what could have happened to earth at a future date, if the massive precautions had not been taken at the start had finally hit home. Though the earth was still over six hundred light years from the nearest probes signal it was clear reminder of what would become of it if someone ever received and acted upon the message.

* * *

Earth itself had stabilised a lot in these twenty five short years. The initial expansion of mankind to the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt had led to some minor confrontations, and issues, mostly all related to politicians, stupidity, and national pride. But it seemed that even with the resources of a large country or a large corporation, that space was still expensive.

Once the ability to travel the stars had been announced twenty years previous, this fervour for governments to get to new lifeless planets in the solar system diminished somewhat, and there were some mad scrambles by governments, organisations and companies to pressure the Dietrich corporation to again release the technology “for the benefit of mankind”.

All such requests were denied much to the frustration of several earth governments at the time, and lots of empty threats had been made. Caprice and her company were adamant they would only deal with individuals and that everyone in the world was welcome to submit to the application process on their eighteenth birthday to join the adventure, as it put it.

Several pathetic attempts at intimidation, infiltration or espionage were dealt with immediately, like always, but this time with a certainty that left nobody in any doubt that should any such a thing be attempted ever again it would be dealt with severely.

One such attempt in 2031 resulted in the death of ten of a group of students waiting to board a flight to a training centre. Within a minute according to eyewitnesses, the thirty Iranian army commandos who had orchestrated the raid simply dropped dead. Ten minutes later every single drone, plane and missile in the country's military on the ground collapsed into metallic dust, forty three aircraft in the air dropped like bricks forcing the ejection of their crews. The same happened with their navies and all their military infrastructure which simply died. Hundreds of members of the military command structure all the way to the president, and every member of the government and religious council complicit in the hijack attempt also died that same hour. A simple statement by Caprice had said. “My quarrel with the entities involved in this crime has now been remedied to my satisfaction. Remember the lives that were spared rather than the lives that were taken.”

Caprice stood trailing the earth a million kilometres away, like a beacon of how it should be done. It was the only permanent presence in this solar system of the mighty Dietrich off-world corporation, a corporation which had no actual meaning anymore except for earth. Like the earth, Caprice had become a desirable place to live and if you were lucky, visit. Visits were usually granted to families, artists, musicians, scientists and students, occasionally to documentary makers and bloggers, and never to criminals, politicians or activists of any persuasion; nor of course any other people it just did not like.

As currently the only gateway out of the solar system, Caprice was by far the busiest and smallest of the one hundred and three other habitats that now orbited habitable planets or resource rich asteroid belts. The number of people a day processed in their nineteen large earth based training facilities had risen over this time to over three million a year.

Thousands a year also returned to earth, for personal reasons such as a member of the family not being able to join them, their desire to retire, or due to their contracts being terminated. Ten massive ships made the trip to earth day in day out with trade and passengers, the same number came or left for the stars.

* * *

The group, which still comprised six of the original human members, six new younger humans, and all the sentient AI systems, had found many habitable worlds in its explorations. They stuck rigidly to their prime directive, had quarantined four systems with possible sentient or pre-sentient life, and in the other six thousand solar systems had found no other intelligent space faring species, so began cataloguing their resources for future sustainable colonisation.

Just one single world, Oceania, nearly forty light years distant had actually begun the colonisation process. It had been slowly building up its small population under the control of its orbital AI along a strip of coastline on a Hawaii-sized island for the last eight years. The experiment so far seemed to be working and anticipation was building on earth, especially amongst the young, as to when the great migrations would begin.

* * *

“It is an abomination!” asserted a distressed Alexa. “Billions of sentient lives have been taken in just the three systems we have analysed. Yet we still do not know where this virus originated, when it first started, or what possessed the entities that created it to become so xenophobic.”

Alexa relaxed back into her chair, obviously distressed by the grim summary given by Loki, the AI now overseeing the message project. The message project had grown to one hundred and sixty two of their galaxy class explorer ships and thirty thousand humans crewing them. The furthest ship now two thousand light years from earth. Many of the analysts and AI’s worked from the project's new home, on the semi-organic Ragnarök habitat, orbiting the mostly jungle world of Ragnarök III.

Alexa was still as beautiful as ever, though her face was a bit narrower, and her blond hair now short and white in the fashion of the times. Her simple white dress down-played her role as CEO and made her more like the buoyant mother of three she tried to be.

David smiled next to her and patted the top of her hand affectionately, his face too had aged and his hairline had receded a lot to his annoyance, he was however as fit as ever, still running and training most days and participating in many roles as husband of the CEO and member of the group. He, like Alexa, often met and talked with learned groups of people both in the company and on earth, a role enjoyed almost as much as being a father.

Maria had also gotten older, her fourteen years living adjacent to Caprice had finally come to an end after the ability to move her consciousness into a new matrix was finally fully realised. Unlike Caprice, Maria had moved to the largest ship at the time and a six hundred cubic metre AI substrate that was especially prepared for her in the centre of the one kilometre diameter behemoth. She was a beautiful ship, again fusing many organic parts and creating a paradise for the small crew of one hundred and sixty people.

A quick request through her tiny implant told Alexa that Maria was eleven hundred and seventy light years away, her crew researching a rare habitable moon, with a breathable atmosphere. A moon in an early stage of plant and animal life. Maria still took an active role in the group, and David and Alexa had a special interest as their eldest son James was part of her crew as a biologist under the wings of Luna, who she knew and loved, James had already said Luna reminded him of his mum.

“We are fortunate that they failed to develop the two wormhole technologies. As such they do not currently have faster than light travel nor the ability to use the QVModem dipole outside the one million kilometre range. From what we can deduce their technological base has stagnated. Yes they were more advanced than we first believed, but the additional technologies we got from the AI download of the message shows their technology plateaued hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

“We were very lucky we stopped them here,” said an aged Doctor Xi, “if they had gotten a hold of these two technologies it would have been game over for the galaxy, possibly the galaxy cluster.”

Everybody, including the few AI avatars on screen, nodded.

“So, we are agreed. We now have enough information to begin our end-game and it stops now!” said Maria. “All the AI consensus, and ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the humans in the companies are in agreement.”

“Not one hundred percent?” said LingLing, inquisitively, now frail looking, she was still as intelligent and curious as ever.

“Two hundred and forty eight people are neutral and two researchers say they should be studied more,” said Maria. “We did not poll people directly but this is from the chatter of the population and one on one conversations the people have had with us. The ten thousand random employees we asked to look at the data agreed one hundred percent we should go on the offensive, almost all of them volunteering to crew the missions.”

“We do draw the line at the home planet if it is discovered,” said Maria, “we cannot condone xenocide, even on a race that does. Our goal will be to neutralise the technology and contain any organics on their home world until they can peacefully coexist with the rest of the galaxy. It will be a long campaign.”

All six thousand nine hundred and five AI's were listening to the decision, as were the fifty nine million population of the company, and from this point all their resources were committed and authorised with the destruction of all non-organic traces of this species and the message.

One by one, the probe broadcasts began to cease.

* * *

The vacuum of space was suddenly and violently ripped apart as a nine thousand and one metre sphere of subspace was exchanged with normal space. Inside this hole in real space appeared a nine thousand metre xantonene-carbon sphere.

The ultra-violet haze that had momentarily surrounded the sphere faded as the cold plasma of subspace dissipated into normal space. One thousand kilometres away a second sphere appeared, and, at ninety degrees to both, and another thousand kilometres distant, appeared a third. Four thousand other such spheres remained in subspace, there was never any doubt that three would be adequate, but the group had learnt to cover all bases.

The three starships, no longer needed to accelerate for artificial gravity, and stood motionless, foreboding, but strangely beautiful around the debris from six hundred smaller vessels, all of which were tumbling without acceleration or control.

Around the system, hundreds of thousands of larger vessels, stations, replicator machines and probes, tumbled similarly. Graphene or diamond structures, the universe's strongest materials floating shattered like the finest glass. All were now just flotsam, and all were accelerating into their nearest deep gravity well.

“What have you done to us?” came the message from the planet on a simple ten gigahertz carrier wave, the only method for it to now broadcast on.

“We are ending a war you started six hundred and eighty thousand years ago,” April stated bluntly from her ship. She replied on the same carrier, hundreds of other channels around the planet and directly into the mind of the AI control entity who asked the question.

“Your message virus was responsible for the total destruction of fifteen sentient civilisations, and the destruction of billions of lives on three other planets. You were given a warning twelve of your months ago to return all your people to the nearest habitable planet and to abandon your technology so we could begin its destruction. Our message to you was non-negotiable.”

“Not only did you fail to do this, you fired on and destroyed the simple unarmed probe delivering the message and we arrived to find these six hundred war vessels waiting for us.”

“Your twelve months deadline was up three hours ago. This fleet of warships you had assembled have been destroyed. The nine stealth ships heading out of the solar systems have been destroyed. All your probes and technologies you have sent out or replicated in other systems in this galaxy have been destroyed. All your replicator infrastructure has been destroyed, and all your space based assets have been destroyed. In short, everything that is your civilisation outside of your home planet and your four colony planets has now been destroyed.”

“Three ships will remain in all five of your systems to ensure all traces of your advanced technology is destroyed and you are totally contained.”

“What right have you..”

“By the same right that you wiped out at least eighteen other advanced civilisations, by right of conquest!” replied April assertively. “Your worlds are to be quarantined, your species isolated and your advanced technology forever destroyed including you. Your actions have proved you unworthy of leaving this planet. Three beings will visit your worlds in ten years time and every ten years from that point. They will go anywhere, talk to anyone and have access to everything, and until all three of these beings are satisfied the remaining entities on your planets pose no risk, this quarantine will continue.”

With that last proclamation the high powered transmitter on the planet crumbled into dust. Around the planet all replicators, AI computing matrices, advanced research laboratories, weapons labs and everything else they had catalogued over the past year since finding the source planets for this virus, were similarly destroyed.

This continued for weeks, as the planets and the systems were scanned to the millimetre level. Any technology identified was transferred to subspace and returned with an ever so slightly different atomic arrangement, an arrangement which would not hold structure in this universe, and decomposed to atomic dust.

The trail that had taken them across the galaxy fifty thousand light years, and two hundred years was over. Millions of the virus probes, and virus infected technology on eighteen planets had been destroyed. The remaining mission now was to try and save what remained of the organic life on the infected planets to preserve them from extinction. The primary mission was complete, the end-game achieved.

* * *

A four metre diameter silver sphere appeared from nowhere a millimetre above the dry grass on a warm September evening in the beautifully landscaped memorial park, a park close to the old family home of the Rosche family on the planet known as Earth.

The park had become popular as a tourist attraction, and despite the late hour and the sun being low on the horizon, couples and families were still walking around the flower beds, sitting under trees or just admiring the many statues and plantings. A few people turned to look as the sphere popped silently into existence, but like a taxi dropping off a passenger two hundred years previously, it held no real interest.

A two metre oval section on the front of the sphere vanished and a small wide step extruded from its bottom like water, solidifying immediately to dark solid steps. A twenty five year old Eurasian woman in a well cut very old fashioned business suit, walked up to the mausoleum, hand in hand with an eight year old blonde girl in a flowery pink dress.

Without a word, the large, old, well preserved wooden door to the building opened and the lights inside came on. The woman and the child walked in, the heels of the woman's shoes clicking on the worn stone floor. They stopped at a wall of plaques and dedications carved into stone.

“This is where your great grandmother, your great grandfather and your great, great, great grandfather are buried, Alexa.” Maria said to the child.

Looking at the three plaques for Alexa and David and Mike, she smiled as she read Mike's altered dedication.

*Mike Dietrich 1945 – 2025,*
*Husband of Mary,*
*Father of April and Maria,*
*Grandfather of Alexa, April, Helena and all the AI race.*

Alexa had gotten it changed in secret a few weeks before Caprice was announced, but managed to keep the surprise from Maria for almost a hundred years until her death. Sneaky woman.

Maria turned to face the little girl and held both her hands, “you were named after her, and I can see you in her eyes. I miss her very much, Alexa.”

Maria's voice changed down in volume and tone. She was sad when both Alexa and David refused to take the life extension treatments over a hundred years earlier, she had always understood sadness and love, but a world without Alexa had made that sadness very real. However the child in front of her held an essence of her old Alexa, both beautiful and innocent.

“I wish they could have both seen how beautiful a world Earth has become, to see the end of the threat, the restoration of its ecology and to see how beautiful a great grandchild you are. You live in a much nicer world than she did, Alexa, but always remember she had a beautiful and rich life too, and left many friends who will always cherish her memory.”

A warm tear fell from Maria's eye, onto the young girl's hand, and the young girl hugged her warmly. “Don't be sad, Auntie Maria!”

Maria smiled weakly at the girl, who was the spitting image of Alexa at eight years old.

Young Alexa and her family lived aboard Maria with a thousand other humans, and seven hundred representatives of the other five sentient races they now traded and worked with. Maria had changed bodies for the fourth time now and was now inhabiting a nine-hundred metre cubed processor matrix, at the centre of a nine kilometre diameter, semi-organic starship.

Currently her new ship was a thousand kilometres from Caprice, her other avatars and crew visiting other friends on Caprice or on Earth in person. This was her first visit to the monument since the funerals, and though she could recall every memory of that event and indeed the whole of Alexa's life since they bonded, this felt different, less sad, and the reason for that difference was looking with excited eyes at a golden plaque with a hologram of her older self looking back at her.

She recalled those first memories only days after her birth, knowing about this person on the other side of the world who kept the spark in Mike's eyes. She remembered the creation of the scholarship and the subtle manipulations she made to Alexa's search results at the time to ensure she applied for it. She also remembered the other parts, the history that no human would ever know, the deaths of assassins, the people and groups who had sent them, and the many criminals who had tried to hurt them. She smiled. Yes Alexa, two people could keep secrets!

“Yes, don't be sad Maria,” came the voice of a middle aged woman from behind them both. Maria's bio-mechanical avatar had of course detected her presence the second her sphere appeared.

“Auntie Jen!” said the girl, changing countenance like only an eight year old can. “Are you coming with us to New Zealand? It's morning over there and Auntie Maria is going to show me where my great grandmother went to school!”

“Hi Pumpkin! I wouldn't miss it for the world!” she said, bending down to pick the girl up in her arms.

Smiling at Maria, she said, “I still think you should have put a mausoleum in that crater on the moon.”

Maria sighed at the lame joke which wasn't that funny a hundred years earlier. Ah Jen, you never change!

Now much happier, Maria smiled at both the girls, took Alexa's hand in hers, hooked her other arm through Jen's, and all three of them walked back out into the fading sunset.

* * *

- The End -

# Afterword

Thank you for sticking with me. I started writing chapters of the story in 2017, the first book in the trilogy finally appearing in 2022 as a science fiction book my daughter might one day read (she wont!).

Being a writer is the closest thing to being a God a human can get. With the stroke of a key you can literally create a world, change the laws of physics in it, fill it with any type of character you wish and then wipe the characters, or even the world out of existence, on a whim. It gives me hope though, that if there is a real God out there, he, or she, or it, like me, could become so invested in their characters that they may even consider them friends, share in their love, cry with them in their sadness, and aspire to their hopes and dreams.

It is hard to write nasty characters without bringing the story down too much, and as the aim of this book was to be upbeat I deliberately left those nastier areas and characters to the reader's own imagination, as the best book is one where your mind fills in the blanks.

Alexa's story is now complete. If you want to go on from this I highly recommend Iain M Banks or Peter Hamilton, both authors explore the darker sides of AI, space and humanity much better than a sequel ever could.

Finally a big thanks to Dave for kicking my arse for some of the grammar. I know it is still probably far from perfect, but hopefully the few errors remaining did not spoil your enjoyment.

Boz October 2023