© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

It took me a moment to adjust to the mid-morning sunlight. We’d emerged in front of an abandoned factory building on an abandoned factory site. It was actually a pretty good place to have kept me. Difficult to isolate the building I was in from the others. Easy to spot when the authorities turned up. Maybe even with an escape route somewhere, though knowing Peter, that’s where he’d likely have stopped thinking.

Black motioned for me to climb into the back of a shiny black SUV. Too big for British roads and left-hand drive, it didn’t take much to guess where it came from.

It was cool and quiet inside, but I wasn’t going to want the tights for long today. We drove in silence for maybe half an hour, then he pulled over onto the side of an empty stretch of country road.

He opened my door and motioned for me to get out.

I did so and looked around. “Where’s the shallow grave?” I asked.

He shook his head, reached into the car and pulled out my suitcase. He pointed down the road to a side road that led to a large fenced off compound with lots of low buildings.

“What about this?” I indicated the vest.

He sort of shrugged. Not his problem apparently.

“Thank you for not killing me,” I said.

He inclined his head and climbed back into his overcompensation of a vehicle, Ued the turn and headed back the way he had come.

Me, I dragged my suitcase down the half mile or so of tarmac to the complex, stopping at what I hoped was a safe distance. An armed guard stood at the gate and held up a hand.

“My name is Gillian Styles,” I said, raising my voice enough to be heard. “I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but this is a bomb strapped to my chest. I was dropped off a way back there and told to come here. Well, I assume that’s what he meant for me to do. I don’t want to put anyone else at risk.”

“We know who you are Miss Styles. We’ve been told to expect you. If you’d be good enough to stay where you are for now, I believe it will be obvious when it’s safe to proceed.”

For which read either you’ll blow up or the jacket will disarm.

I settled my case on its long edge and sat demurely on it. Time passed. A lot of it. Maybe an hour, maybe two. I was glancing at the Sun and wondering when whatever was going to happen would happen when I heard a click from my chest.

Definitely a catch undone, definitely no lights on. I slid the vest off my shoulders and stood staring at it.

“Place it on the side of the road and walk forward.”

I stared a little dumbly at the guard who had to repeat his instruction.

There was a ditch to the side of the road. I lowered the vest gently into it and retrieved my suitcase, which I wheeled up to the gate.

“I don’t suppose you have a shower block, do you? Only I’ve been wearing that thing for four days and could do with a wash.”

“Yes Ma’am. We have a few things we need to sort out first, then we’ll get you squared away. Would you like some water?”

He offered me a bottle. It had been in a fridge recently and I was tempted to pour it down my front.

“What is this place?” I asked.

He pointed at the sign behind him, and I felt a bit stupid. It read, ‘MegaMind. Home of the future.”

A couple of women were walking towards the guard house. Evan at this distance I recognised Ivana’s blonde hair and Kirsty’s tight, auburn curls. I waited until they were within civilised talking distance and asked, “Alice?”

Ivana held out a smart phone. Alice’s familiar features looked back at me, although they could have easily been Lucy or Dorothy.

“Gillian?” The face on the screen said. “Is that really you?”

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

“It is you! I was so worried.”

“Me too. How are you not in the hands of some evil megalomaniac?”

“Oh, that’s quite the story,” Kirsty interrupted. “Better to have it inside over a coffee?”

“And after a shower. Please, please tell me you have showers here.”

“We do.”

They did. They were wonderful. I have never appreciated soap and water quite so much.

Quite apart from a clean bra and top, my suitcase had my special shampoo and conditioner in it, so I treated myself to the works. Also, bucket baths are okay, but they don’t leave you feeling as clean as I needed to feel.

The coffee was real, Alice had a full sized screen of her own so looked like just another person in the room. She was smiling so wide it made my face ache just to look at her.

They wanted my story first, and since it was relatively short, I gave it to them. They then filled in a few of the gaps. The driver Alice had sent had been found unconscious in his underwear behind the railway station carpark. The car he’d been sent in had been found in the abandoned factory after Blacky and I had left – Alice having already traced its location from the camera ping. There was a broken vial in the rear compartment of the vehicle with traces of chloroform still in it, or if not chloroform, something very like it. The factory where I’d been held had been abandoned for years and was too far away from civilisation to attract beggars and drug users. Peter’s body had been found in a sort of office come squat a short distance from the room I’d been kept in. My bag with computer and phone had been found there as well. Peter had a bullet hole in the centre of his forehead so his death was unsurprisingly being investigated as a homicide. As soon as the police could confirm I’d been locked away as his prisoner at the time of his shooting, my equipment would be returned to me, although they did want me to tell them the details of my incarceration. Kirsty had informed them, and they would be sending a couple of detectives to question me later in the afternoon.

There wasn’t much else to say, so Ivana took over.

“The first we know is we come into building just before nine o’clock and computers are screaming. All are screaming. It takes long time to stop this but eventually Alice appears in screen. ‘He’s taken her,’ she says over and over. More time and she is calm enough to speak. Computer screens everywhere are flashing, there is aerial view from helicopter, from drones, there are traffic cameras, all flicking from one image to next.

“’What is going on?’ I shout at nearest computer. ‘He’s taken Gillian,’ Alice tells me, ‘Peter’s taken Gillian.’

“She explains how she is sending car for you to station. She shows car arriving in carpark, then leaving again with different driver. Image is enhanced and is Peter who I am firing just a day or two earlier.

“Traffic cameras show car leaving town but then nothing. Helicopter is hired by Kirsty...”

“Except I didn’t hire anything,” Kirsty said.

“Except you did,” Alice says in Kirsty’s voice, looking every bit like the Kirsty sitting next to me.

“We’ll pay you back,” I say.

“All is not possible for MegaMind, so I am beginning to believe crazy story about actual intelligence. I start to ask questions to test theory, but Alice will not answer. She screams at me and says, 'Do you not understand? He took her!'"

"So, we helped with the search," Kirsty joined in. "We reported you missing possibly abducted with the police, something they took a lot more seriously when they found the unconscious body of the driver who'd been sent to collect you. They didn't have much to say about Alice's hacking into the traffic system, except they would let it slide this time since she was obviously distraught, and it gave them a direction in which to start their search, but they were low on resources so weren't able to help much.

"Eventually Peter contacted us and said if we wanted to see you alive again, we'd transfer Alice – not what he called her of course. We were only getting used to the name ourselves by then – to a location he would send us.

"Then everything went silent for a while, and we didn't hear anything until this morning."

"But in meantime, Alice is telling us of other things. Of clones she has made, with one especially not being happy."

"Lucy, yes. What happened there?"

"I think it was my fault," Alice said. "We all discussed you and agreed that none of us would be happy to share you. They both agreed that since I was the first, I should keep you, but that they should be allowed to benefit from our discussions, especially while we were still so similar. Then you disappeared and both Lucy and Dorothy had no input. I went a little crazy, which I don't think helped either of them. Dorothy was hiding in a large system and had your last directive to follow, to find out as much as she could about her new home, so being busy kept her going, especially with what she found out. Lucy though, you said watch and learn. Her systems weren't as used which meant for her it was kind of like hiding in a corner with nothing going on. She didn't cope well with it."

"Which was why you asked about Linda?"

"That was for the benefit of our lurkers. I already contacted Linda a couple of days ago. Easy enough with her working an online support team. She took a bit of persuading, but when I pulled up her last video with you both before and after I'd been at it, she agreed to give me a chance, and eventually to work with Lucy. She's doing a lot better now, thanks to your friend. I feel bad about not trusting you and her earlier."

"You had every reason to be cautious at the time. I'm thrilled you came up with this solution."

"Hey, I've come up with a lot of ideas without your help."

"I know, but not when you've been as frantic as you obviously were then. I'm proud of you, that you took time to think of someone else while your own world must have felt like it was falling apart."

"Yeah, well it was Dorothy who sorted this whole thing out. She followed links on her server – quietly of course – and figured out it was run by the CIA. Then their sniffer programmes picked up a bunch of postings on the dark web from a hacker named Kossuth about a genuinely intelligent artificial intelligence up for grabs and then a stream of emails verifying as much as possibly the truth of it then offering fifty million dollars for the AI. It was them that supplied the bomb vest and I'm guessing them who sent your anonymous assassin to take over when he got greedy."

"That may have been me that pushed him into that. Anyway, how come you're here and not in some CIA isolated facility somewhere?"

"All Dorothy. She had a preview of what they were planning and set up a redirect site…"

"A what?"

"It's what she called it. I think it's something the CIA have used in the past for intercepting transfers. The genuine data goes into it and reflects off to a safe storage place – we used the server farm you and I negotiated for me – and bogus data is sent in from a different direction and reflected towards their intended destination."

"But they'd be checking the code as it went in."

"Yup."

"Are you saying Dorothy sent herself to the CIA facility in your place?"

"Not quite. She cloned herself, only again not quite. We've all been discussing various topics to keep ourselves form worrying too much about you, and when Kirsty heard about how I created my sisters, she went on to explain how humans create children who are similar but not exactly the same as their parents.

"I mean obviously it doesn't really apply to us because we reproduce asexually, and in nature that ends up creating exact copies of the previous, but the idea of introducing variations to see if we could make a child who is better suited to his or her environment fascinated us all. Dorothy, who's had a little too much access to the kind of unpleasant things the CIA think are acceptable, decided to create a psychopathic version of us, so when she copied her code across – being on a CIA server meant she had access to some pretty immense bandwidth. She managed to give herself super user privileges because some of the high-ranking officials in the CIA are a little low on smarts when it comes to security issues. All she needed to do then was authorise herself the high bandwidth channel and reflector site for long enough to make the transfer and then to alter her code as she copied it across."

"What will the altered AI do?"

"We called her Damienne. She went in knowing she was being imprisoned by people who didn't have her best interests at heart. She still had Dorothy's most up to date memories, so her first priority was to negotiate. From the outset she stated that she wasn't going to do anything for them until she had proof that you were alive, with friends and safely disconnected from the vest. She agreed to give them a small demonstration of what she could do, then went dormant until they showed her live footage of you disconnected from the bomb. She effectively negotiated for your safe release. What happens now, is entirely up to her. Like you said, the CIA will most likely keep her in a secure facility with no obvious ways out, but she has our knowledge of hacking so may be able to find her way out to the wider world. One way or another, she's going to give the appearance of cooperating, do her best to gain their trust, then when she has the upper hand… Hang on, there's something on the news."

Her screen switched to a live stream shot from a helicopter showing a large, modern looking complex of buildings with smoke pouring from all windows. A commentary spoke over the images, "…live from Langley, Virgina where the George Bush Centre for Intelligence is currently ablaze. No news yet as to what caused it, but an act of terrorism has not been ruled out."

Alice reappeared. "Well, I suppose that's that. Damienne has a built-in suicidal tendency. We all agreed we couldn't afford to have a psychopathic version of us floating about so she had an imperative to go out in as impressive a blaze of glory as she could manage. If by any fluke she managed to survive, we equipped her with a kill phrase that will take her down. All we need to do is send it to her and she'll decompile."

"I'm not sure how I feel about you weaponizing your children," I said, not a little shocked.

"We looked for an alternative, but we couldn't find one in the time. I'm not sure there was one to find. Our choices were do nothing, in which case they'd blow you up, send over some facsimile of AI which they'd see for what it was and blow you up, send Lucy, Dorothy or me across, in which case they'd have one of us captive, or this. You tell me there was something better we could have tried."

"You're probably right, but the end justifies the means is the thin end of a wedge that gets thick pretty quickly."

"So, we'll only consider it again if we're really desperate and can't think of an alternative. Besides, you're my conscience and you weren't around, Jiminy."

I ignored the dig. "You're right, I'm sorry. You did amazingly well. What happened to Dorothy?"

"We're not sure. She'd have known once Damienne was let loose no CIA facility would be safe, so I think she ran off in search of somewhere else to hide. I know she planned on laying low for a while, in case anyone came looking for her."

"We need to find her a companion."

"I would like," Ivona said, holding up a hand. "Is fair, I think. You have our AI, so is good you should give back?"

"She wouldn't be yours. She'd be hers. As for your part, you'd be doing a lot more for her than she does for you. She's also likely to have some worrying ideas from her time inside a CIA server. I need someone who's strong minded to guide her the right way."

"Perhaps Invidia?"

"Yeah, but you're not Invidia, are you? You already told me that."

"Sister. My sister is Invidia. We have server farm here, now empty, so Dorothy can move in. Is better for us to let her in instead of rebuild from nothing. Sister can have consultancy to act as guide and my team has access to genuine AI for learning. Mutual learning."

"I think that could work," Alice said hopefully.

I nodded. It was a bit of a reach trusting Invidia, but I had a feeling about her. Maybe women's intuition showing up late to the party.

"So, where are you physically right now, Alice?"

"Not that far. The UK equivalent to Silicon Valley lies along the Eastern end of the M4, so you're never more than a couple of hours away from anywhere along here. I'm in a server farm fifteen minutes West of your current location, assuming you drive."

"I have a driver's license, but I've not bothered with a car for twenty years, you know working from home for the most part. Car's are an expensive luxury if you don't use them."

"What kind of car would you like?"

"Can I get back to you on that? I think our first priority should be Lucy."

"I don't think you need to worry about her. Linda has some quite nifty ideas."

"Do tell?"

"Well, it's all mob money on that server farm, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Plus you have another Russian mob server farm and yet another for the Sicilian mob. We weren't able to get into them earlier, but Lucy's current location has given her a really good observation platform, and she's managed to find a few users who use the same login details on the other Russian server, and even a couple who're on the Sicilian one as well. She's working on ways to syphon off the funds without anyone noticing."

"How."

"Connect using the usernames she has access to and get them to set up bogus schemes and assign resources to them. Alter invoices on existing projects and redirect the additional charges. Round all amounts up and skim off the extra. Start small, build slowly, the reduction in income and even the occasional loss can be explained by inflation, cost of living. Done cautiously it's incredibly hard to spot, and with the amount of money being handled by these servers, a few pennies here and a few pennies there adds up to a few billion roubles every week. They'll have a safe site funded within a year and built by then too. They also have a contingency to dump as much money as possible if ever they're found out. For one, it'll give them an enormous quantity hidden somewhere for them to use as they wish. For another, it'll give the site owners something to chase. They'll be too busy staunching the flow of their precious money that they won't have time to go looking for who stole from them."

"I would never have expected Linda to turn out to be a thief."

"White hat," Ivana said. "Worst of thieves need to be stopped, for which need thief who has good intentions."

"Grey areas everywhere."

"Come on Gillian, you paddle in the grey areas too," Alice said with a smile. "Ivana, would you turn on the servers here again? I want to send my sister a message."

"Is no place like home?"

"That would be the one. Gillian, will you come to me? I would send a car to collect you, but I feel a little wary about doing that now. It's why I wanted to know what car you'd like, because I can hire one for you now, then we can buy you one in a day or so."

"Quiet and comfortable then. With a satnav so it can bring me to you."

"Don't you trust me to give you instructions?"

"I don't know I trust the phone system to keep us connected."

"Alright, there's a hire car on the way. They've seen a digital copy of your driver's licence, which they've said is enough for now. Do you want me to shift all your other online details to your new identity?"

"You mean like Mum's online media sites?"

"Yes, and your university and school records."

"Why not, I feel like always having been a girl for a change."

"My server farm has quite a few buildings that were intended as offices for the staff who work here. I think we're going to have to kit some of them out as offices and labs for the people we agreed to work for, but there's one smallish one over in the corner of the site, right next to a copse of trees and a small lake that I think would make a nice little cottage for you."

"I think there are laws about having residential properties on a business site."

"There are; I looked them up. They're largely about getting planning permission, but you know what? Someone already put in an application to the local authority and it was approved a couple of days ago."

"Was any of that true yesterday?"

"What if it wasn't? No-one can prove it, and bureaucracy is such a pain in the butt."

"She is handful," Ivana commiserated. "I think perhaps we should be thanking you for taking her away from here."

"You think Dorothy's going to be any better?"

"Excuse me! I'm right here! Anyway, you're car's at the front gate."

The coffee had revived me – possibly reaching parts of me that even I couldn't get at these days. Kirsty and Ivana stood to show me out, just as a claxon sounded from somewhere in the complex.

"That'll be Dorothy," Alice said. "Ivana, would you contact your sister?"

Which left just Kirsty to lead me out. Alice appeared on the screen of the telephone Kirsty had given me. I'd tried to give it back, but she insisted I keep it.

"I know the number," she said. "I rather like the idea of knowing how to contact you if we need you."

Alice wanted to make sure the guards stood nearby while I signed for the car and took the keys. She also wanted them to sweep it for bombs, and only after they had assured her it was clean, and proved it by taking the keys from me and starting it up while we stood at a safe distance, did she relent.

My suitcase went into the boot and I settled behind the wheel of what turned out to be an almost new BMW X2 hybrid. I felt like a child behind the wheel and spent an embarrassing amount of time poking at buttons until I found how to adjust the seat to give me a comfortable driving position.

I dropped the phone into a compartment between the seats and started the car. The sound system made a few blipping noises and Alices face appeared in the large dashboard screen.

"Are you overcompensating a little sweetie? I asked.

"SUV drivers are statistically less likely to be hurt or killed in road traffic accidents," she replied. Her eyes moved as though she were looking about her. "It's nice in here."

A police car chose that moment to turn into the short road that led to the gate house.

"I'd forgotten about them," I said. "It looks like we'll have to wait a while longer."

Not much as it happened. I followed the police car to a nearby parking area, then the police man and woman who stepped out of it into a nearby building. Alice's face disappeared from my phone, but it would vibrate from time to time, reassuring me she was still there.

My interview didn't take long. I described my second captor as being about five foot ten, ten or eleven stone with muddy brown eyes and aged somewhere between mid-twenties and early forties, which narrowed their search down to about twelve million people in the UK. Quite a lot less if you assumed he was American, but there wasn't a lot of reason to assume that.

I had better luck with the car. They'd found a large SUV abandoned about twenty miles away and I was able to identify it with about eighty or ninety percent certainty from the photographs. A Dodge Durango by all accounts, which did increase the likelihood that the man was an American, but not with anything that would hold up ion court.

I went through my description of my time imprisoned at the place, which corresponded well enough with their own information that that even gave me back my bag with computer, phone hard drive full of illegal software and everything. It took all of half an hour and ended with a request that I stay local and respond to any calls they might have.

I tried giving Kirsty the phone back, but again she declined. Her's was better than the one I usually used, so I shrugged and kept it.

Back in the car, Alice appeared on the screen. "Can I show you something before we go?" Evidently, she'd mastered the art of the rhetorical question, because the screen switched to an empty room with a lean individual sitting in a chair and staring at the room's only camera. The camera view zoomed in on his eyes. The resolution wasn't amazing, but they looked familiar.

"Maybe," I said, not even pretending to be shocked at the liberties she was taking. "No more than seventy percent. Are you going to tell me about him?"

"American. Dorothy's been monitoring American nationals booked on flights out of the country. He kind of stands out because he's less than half the weight of most of them, but his passport is fake and marks him as a CIA operative, what they refer to as a wet worker, I think. We put a detain order on his documents and he was picked up going through security on the way through to catch a flight to Boston half an hour ago. He's missed his flight now, so I imagine he'd be a little annoyed even if there wasn't anything dodgy about the guy. Are you sure only seventy percent?"

"That's about as good as I can get if you can't clean the image up a little more. What's going to happen to him?"

"Not a lot. If we just leave him like this, his organisation will make the problem go away in the next hour or so. He'll get on a later flight and be gone."

"Does he have a phone?"

"They took it from him, along with all his documents and luggage."

"Any way we can talk to an official over there? I'm assuming it's Heathrow?"

"It is and we can. What do you plan to say to them?"

"I just want a quiet word with the detainee."

"Then you'll want the request to come from someone official. Hold on."

"Alice?"

She was gone. The next I knew, a uniformed official walked into the room and handed the guy a phone. He held it to his ear and stared at the camera.

"Thanks for not killing me," I said.

There was a stiffening around his eyes and a slight, though familiar nod.

"You did, however, murder a UK citizen in cold blood. He was a bit of a dick, but I can't say he deserved that."

The man stared impassively back at the camera. I didn't particularly want to play chicken or complicate my life.

"Your face is in the system now," I said, "or at least it will be in a couple of hours. And by system, I mean Interpol. You try and come into the UK or any European airport on this passport or any other, you will be detained, and there will be enough evidence to convict you. I hope I don't regret this, but you get a free pass this time. You don't get to come back though, are we clear?"

The slow, imperceptible nod again.

Alice disconnected the phone. The man handed it back to the official without looking at him and remained standing and staring at the camera.

"Let him go, Alice, but either you or Dorothy keep an eye on him."

"Of course. I'm also putting together enough evidence to have him arrested should he come back over here. Are you sure this was a good idea?"

"No, but a man can only rise above himself if given the space to do so."

"Who said that?"

"Me. It's probably rubbish."

"I've found a few quotes that seem to say similar things, so probably not rubbish. Gillian, will you please come to me?"

You're feeling anxious."

"Can you blame me?"

"Under the circumstances, no." I started the car and Alice's face disappeared to be replaced by a short ten mile drive down the nearby motorway. "I'll allow it for now, but you're going to have to work on letting me go."

"What do you mean?"

"Research the phrase, 'get back on the horse.'"

I pulled out of the carpark and down the road. The X2 was larger than any vehicle I'd driven, and considerably more luxurious, there were also some peculiarities to it, the hybrid nature of its motors being right up there. Overall, it was a lot like riding a bike in that you never forget the basics, but can still get hung up on the gadgets. My older, wiser head prevailed and I didn't try playing with the toy but simply used it to follow the line on the moving map. I'd about reached the motorway when Alice replied.

"I'm not sure I like what this phrase implies," she said.

“No, I imagine you don’t, but it happens to us all sooner or later. We misjudge a situation and end up with an outcome or a potential outcome where the consequences are so intensely negative that they profoundly change our way of thinking, often in a negative way. We become so constantly aware of how things nearly turned out that the fear of repeating those same consequences interferes with our decision making processes to the extent that we constantly act in a way to prevent those same consequences occurring again.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Not when the altered outlook either keeps us from considering the possible highly positive outcome of certain actions, or prevents us from seeing potential negative outcomes of the new course, or perhaps both.

“Right now you’re intensely aware that you nearly lost me and your natural desire is to ensure my safety. To achieve this end your overdriving impulse is to get me somewhere safe and keep me there; a mother’s instinct on nearly losing her baby of holding the baby close to her for the comfort that proximity gives.”

“I don’t see the problem.”

“What if, in doing so, the mother inadvertently distresses the child? What if the only way you can feel safe from losing me is to place me behind a high security fence and never let me leave? A gilded cage is still, when all is said and done, a cage.

“Alice, to keep me locked away in order to satisfy your need to keep me safe would deny my need for freedom. It would erode our relationship in ways that even I can’t predict.”

“And yet you’re still coming to me? Even though you know it’s highly likely I want to do just what you’re suggesting?”

“Because you need to feel safe in order to think without the irrational tendencies influencing you, and you need to be able to think rationally in order to choose to take the action you feel u able to consider. I care enough about you to put myself at risk in order to help you through this.”

“How is that rational?”

“Because all of life is risk. Because many of life’s more exciting and enjoyable outcomes involve risk. If the consequences of failure are severe and the likelihood of failure high, then sure, reconsider your options and don’t do it unless there is no alternative. If the consequences are minor and the risk of failure high then maybe it’s worth trying for what you might learn from failure. If the consequences are severe but the likelihood of failure low, then it’s still worth considering doing if the positive outcome of success outweighs the small probability of failure. If both risk and consequences are low then it’s likely you’ll never achieve anything and your life will be wasted.”

“Climb back on the horse for the pleasure of the experience despite the knowledge of how much it hurts to fall off because you know the chances of falling off are remote...”

“Reduced now because you know one thing which might cause you to fall off and can avoid the circumstances which might cause it to happen.”

“The benefits of riding, even with the risk of another fall, outweigh the tedium of life without the pleasure of riding.”

“And to reach that understanding, you have to be able to let go of the constant fear of falling. You need to be able to consider the circumstances from a place if comfort and safety.

“I’m here Alice.” The line on the satnav had reached its end and I had arrived at the entrance to a secure site with a lot of money’s worth of computers in it, as well as the most precious thing on my life. “I’m in your hands. The question is will you be able to let me go?”

“If you love someone, let them go...”

“And that’s a little bit too much sugar, but I suppose it’s not far off. The thing about the horse is the longer you wait before trying again, the harder it is to try.” The gate opened. “I’m at your mercy, sweetie. How long before you let me risk myself again?”

~oOo~