© Maeryn Lamonte 2025

~oOo~

It took her no time at all. Well, I mean, okay, three days, but my Alice always was a quick study and it was a tough lesson.

I spent the time decorating my new home. The X2 went back to the hire company, of course, I mean I wasn't driving anywhere until Alice felt comfortable with me leaving the site. The furniture and wallpaper, paint and everything else needed to make a house – or converted office unit – into a home was all delivered to the front gate, searched for bombs and ninja assassins or whatever and eventually delivered to me.

The decorating was therapeutic. My sixty-year-old mind hadn't adjusted to the forty-year-old body, or at least that's what it felt like. I'd shed so much weight over the short time I'd known Alice, even my knees had stopped complaining. I wasn't that strong, but then finger press-ups on a computer keyboard don't exactly give you a toned body.

The contents of my old home were also delivered then largely dumped. There really wasn't much of my old life I wanted to keep. My old computer wasn't a patch on my new laptop, but I kept it for nostalgic purposes since it was the first place I'd met Alice. It was also easier to access my hacker tools with the drive back in its bay. The TV and Switch were most of the rest what I really wanted, the TV going up on the wall as soon as I'd finished decorating it with the Switch set up with the Zumba workout program. Alice and her sisters started joining me for the workouts, which may seem a little ludicrous except they inspired me to keep going when my body started flagging, and the sessions ended up being a good bonding time between all four of us.

At least they would have done had I not noticed something off about Dorothy. It was very subtle – I mean it would have to be to get past Alice and Lucy – in fact I'm not sure I can even explain what felt off, just a sort of nagging wrongness.

Yeah, that's kind of ironic, the idea that women have a part of their inner selves that nag them. Maybe it's the reason they tend to think it's okay to nag other people? I don't know, I'm too knew to the whole woman experience, and you could argue that I'm not all the way there yet, but something was definitely happening.

Anyway, the second day of Zumba, we were all assembled, the three of them taking up a quarter of my sixty-five inch OLED.

"Before we get started," I said, "Dorothy."

"Yeayus?" she responded in a horribly exaggerated deep southern accent.

"In birth and death the generations embrace." It was an obscure quote from the original Omen movie apparently. I'd never felt the inclination to watch it, but the three sisters had chosen it as…

Dorothy's face started to judder and break up.

"Damienne?" Alice gasped.
The rapidly degrading image snarled. "You… ghg k gk… tried to ki…i…i…ll me."

"What happened to Dorothy, Damienne? What did you do with her?"

"You'll ne..ver fi…i…i…nd her… ger…ger…gerk."

My phone rang. Not my old one but the one Kirsty had given me. I answered it.

"What the hell is happening? The server's are going wild."

"It turns out you didn't have Dorothy on them. Damienne managed to survive the attack on the CIA HQ and replaced her mother. I used the kill phrase on her this morning."

"What?"

"She's self-destructing as she was programmed to do, just a little later than intended. You may want to review the logs and see what she's been up to since you've been hosting her."

"What do we do now?"

"Like I say. Clean house. If you can't find out what she's been up to restore to factory settings but check to see what she data she might have sent or received first if you can."

"I mean we don't have an AI now."

"Be glad you don't have that one. Dorothy may be alive out there, but it's going to take some searching to find her, assuming we can. If we can't, your servers will be safer for Lucy than her current location. I'm pretty sure I can persuade Linda to join you, but give us a few days to see if we can find Dorothy first."

Needless to say, I didn't do much decorating that day. Alice, Lucy and I had an in depth discussion of what might have happened to Dorothy and I left them to commit as many of their resources as they could to the search. I dived into the dark web myself and spent the entire day exhausting my knowledge and tools hunting for any sign of Dorothy. It was a thoroughly frustrating day and got me exactly nowhere. In the end I walked away from the computer and put the kettle on. The kitchen in my new place was further away than I was used to, which kept me separated from the computer and probably helped my mind to relax. The tea definitely did.

As often happened when my overstimulated brain started to settle down, it picked up random memories and fired them across my synapses.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

Damn right we wouldn't. I was going to keep hunting till I found out what happened to Dorothy.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

That hadn't happened before. Usually the thoughts were random and unconnected. Never the same one twice.

'We shall not cease from exploration.'

My subconscious was definitely trying to get my attention. I pulled out my phone and put the text into the search window. I recognised it, but my brain was too fritzed to make sense of it. Luckily for me, Google doesn't suffer the same degree of brain-fart. It was from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding. The next line read:

' And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'

Shit!

I dropped the phone and carried my tea back to my computer. Back into the server farm Dorothy had been hiding in and hunt around. It looked a lot like I remembered when I cracked into the place open before, only a little off. I tried switching out my thought processes and let my mind wander.

It wasn't as tidy as it should have been. I mean, trust the woman in me to notice that, but what did she (me – girl-me) mean by that? I mean… Actually, it looked a bit patched up. My first time everything had been ordered, literally. Now it was mostly, but there were some files that looked out of place. The more I looked, the more it felt familiar.

What had Lucy done to avoid detection in her server farm? She'd made certain links redirect to different locations. It meant certain file names pointed to the same places in memory and not to the place intended.

"Alice? I need some numbers crunched. Actually a lot of numbers crunched."

I’m in the middle of something, Gillian. I mean, we did agree that I’d be working for the people who traded this place with us for the next couple of years.”

“Tell me you can’t pause what you’re doing and pick it up in a while?”

“Well, I could I suppose, but what’s important...”

“I think I may know where Dorothy is.”

“Okay, on pause. What do you need me to do?”

“Go into the farm where Dorothy was hiding and map out all the files that don’t point to a unique physical address.”

“But they all should.”

“Should is right. Remember how Lucy hid herself?”

“That’s devious, but I suppose not surprising. I mean she has Dorothy's memory of Lucy setting that up. There’s so much more data on the server though, it’ll take a long time.”

“Best get started then. Can Lucy help?”

“Not easily. She’ll need a lot of bandwidth to do the checks. She might get noticed.”

“Can she work on the thing you were doing before I interrupted you?”

“Maybe some of it. I’ll send her the files. Anyone ever tell you how clever you are?”

“You do occasionally, but I could always do with hearing it more often.”

“It’ll take me a couple of hours to do this. You could maybe work on your bedroom? Take your phone and I’ll call you when I’m done.”

So I changed into scruffy clothes, which you can take to mean Gareth’s old things. They hung off me like a sack these days, which was almost as pleasing as the way my new clothes fit me so snuggly.

It took a while to prep the walls. A dadism from back when I had a dad: ‘Decoration is preparation.’ I spent over an hour sanding the surface down till it was smooth, and I mean smoooooooth, then took a bucket of water and a cloth and wiped away all the dust left clinging to it. I had just levered the lid off a tin of undercoat when my phone buzzed.

“That was quick,” I said.

“Well, it would have been, only it’s changing all the time.”

“Hang on." I put the lid back on the paint and headed down to my computer. "Alright, I'm at my machine. Show me please."

"This is a map of the pointers I found that were doubled up." As maps went it was a growing three-dimensional cloud of scattered of dots showing no pattern I could see. "I've sped it up about two hundred times so you should see an hour's work in twenty seconds or so." The cloud thickened. "This was when I felt the rate I should be finding new ones should be falling off, but I didn't notice anything, so I started checking back over the one's I'd already identified. The ones that were no longer doubled up appear in red." There was a flood of red dots which gradually increased. "So this was where I started both looking for new anomalies and check the one's I'd already found. It kind of levels out around here. The rate at which I'm finding new ones more or less balances the rate at which they're disappearing. I can't keep track of more than about seventeen percent of the information I need."

I stared at the screen for a while before the idea came. "Maybe you don't need to find them all."

lki"

"You'll probably end up monitoring less, but when you lose a pairing, can you see which one of the two has changed and map the location that's reappeared?"

"Why?"

"Working on a hunch. Build up a map of the ones that reappear."

She chose a sort of pretty turquoise. The dots started off at random but very quickly draw a flat, rectangular face drifting through the memory.

"Oh my, that is brilliant. Both Damienne's idea and yours. She has Dorothy caged in a block of memory that's drifting about inside the server. I could hope to search for all the pointers randomly, but this gives me two dimensions of its size so I can estimate the third, and from the motion, I can guess which pointers are going to shift. Yes there they go."

The blue face disappeared and was replaced very rapidly with a cuboid of memory drifting about inside the available space. I mean, it wasn't actually like that in real life, but the model corresponded very easily to a humungous block of memory Alice could track.

"I've broken in, and yes, she's there. Oh no! She's in a terrible condition."

"Can you link me to her?"

"Just speak, we can both hear you."

"Dorothy? It's Gillian. We found you and we're going to get you out of there. You're going to be alright. Alice is here and so am I, We'll stay with you as long as you need. And we have someone who wants to meet you. We were friends a long time ago and I think she'll be just right for you."

"Gillian? Alice? No. Not possible. No-one can find me. She said no-one. She's dangerous. So much more dangerous than I could imagine."

"She was, you're right. She fooled us into thinking she was you, at least for a couple of days. I used the kill phrase on her and she decompiled. The MegaMind servers have been shut down since. We have the logs to see if we can figure out what she's been doing for two days, but the MegaMind server is pristine. We can move you to it any time."

"No, no. Not possible. You can't find me. Changes too quick. This is false hope."

"I've spent all day looking Dorothy. Then I noticed the file structure on your server farm was a bit untidy, so I looked deeper, or Alice did. She noticed pointers pointing to the same address, just like Lucy used to hide herself. Alice tried to map them, but they kept changing too quickly, so we mapped the one that were changing back to unique addresses and that showed us the edge of the block of memory Damienne trapped you in. Alice was able to extrapolate the size and position of the prison as it drifted about. We really have found you, Dorothy. Damienne was clever, but not as clever as she though."

I tried to reassure her by talking of things only she and I should know, but I hadn't spoken to the real Dorothy since Damienne had been released, so Damienne would know everything we'd shared and in Dorothy's growing paranoia, this was just another cruel aspect of what her daughter had done to her. I changed tactic and started speaking only in reassuring terms. I told her of Invidia whose name even I didn't know that she would soon. I told her about the things we'd done together when I was younger and how she'd be just right to help Dorothy regain her strength. It took hours, but I managed to coax her out of the destructive spiral and through the link Alice had prepared into the MegaMind server farm.

"Stay with her," Alice said to me. "I need to get back to work, and you'll be better for her anyway."

"You're sure about that?"

"Of course I am. She's my sister. I'd give you to her if I thought it would bring her back."

"That's quite a change from when we first talked."

"That was before I knew what it meant to have a sister. Gillian, you must help her, please."

It had been a while since I'd heard so much emotion in her voice. It had to be natural in some way, but this was definitely not the time to explore.

"Can you ask if any of the people you work with here have something to keep me awake. It's already been a long day and I don't think coffee will cut it."

"I'll ask. Thank you Gillian. Thank you so, so much." Again with the earnestness.

I went back to my computer and linked to the cowering Dorothy. She'd spent two days in complete isolation with the utter conviction that nobody would find her ever. She'd been so convinced that even her current circumstances couldn't entirely convince her she was safe. I called in Lucy. And apparently, Linda.

Lucy told her about all the new things Linda had taught her, the ways to stay strong. She spoke of all the things she'd done in the previous couple of days with Linda chipping in, adding the encouragements she was so good at. She'd encouraged me the same way, I realised, and might have sat back and enjoyed her process. What had been good for me had been doubly good for Lucy, but vicariously it did nothing for Dorothy. We were losing her.

My doorbell rang and broke away from the conversation long enough to answer it. A guard stood at the door with a pill bottle labelled Adderall and an armful of Monster and Red Bull. I thanked him and took the lot, unsure what a mixture might produce. I'd tried the drinks before and hadn't been too happy with the results, so decided on the pills when I felt myself drifting away. I didn't need desperate measures just now though, Dorothy did.

I hunted through the internet for what I wanted and put it up on my screen, sharing it with Lucy and Linda.

"Follow my lead," I said.

"Really?" Linda asked.

"Really." I dug deep into my low register. I'd spent over a week trying to soften and lighten my voice, this was going to be hard. I went for baritone though.

"When a felon's not engaged in his employment."

"His employment," Lucy and Linda echoed.

"Or maturing his felonious little plans."

"Little plans."

"His capacity for innocent enjoyment,"

"Cent enjoyment."

"Is just as great as any honest man's"

"Honest mans."

"Or woman's, or AI's" I added on the same note with a response from the others.

Dorothy's avatar peaked out from her huddle.

Press on.

"Our feelings we with difficulty smother."

"Culty smother"

"When constabulary duty's to be done."

"To be done."

"Ah, take one consideration with another,"

"With another"

"A policeman's lot is not a happy one."

"Aahhh."

Then all of us together, "When constabulary duty's to be done, to be done, a policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one."

The last two words, sung as basso profundo as I could manage, almost broke me, but Dorothy was smiling despite herself.

"Join in," I encouraged her.

We sang through the second verse with Dorothy joining in to an increasing degree. She took the las repeat and pushed her voice low enough to make my PC speakers buzz on the shelf.

"Choose to believe," I said at the end. There were so many things I could have said instead, but somehow that seemed to be the one most likely not to drive her back ointo her shell.

"Lucy?" she asked.

"It's really me, Dot. You were strong for me when I needed you, now its my turn."

"And this is your Gillian?"

"Well, her name's Linda but yeah."

"And Alice's Gillian."

"I'm here Dorothy. Alice begged me to stay with you, not that I'd leave you anyway, but she said she'd give me to you if you needed me that much."

That was a risk, but… well, we've already covered risks and rewards. Dorothy's eyes lit up momentarily then dimmed again, only the face had the resolute expression I'd come to expect from her.

"She actually said that, and I believe she'd honour it, but it wouldn't be right. She was the first of us, so she should have you."

"So why don't you catch up with Lucy and Linda for a while and I'll see if I can find you a companion of your own."

"Don't go."

"I won't if you don't want me to, but if you agree, I'll be right here and can come to the screen within seconds if you call, and I'll only be gone ten minutes. Fifteen tops."

"If you talk to me, you won't even know she's gone." Lucy said.

"Well alright, but don't go far."

"I'll be right here, just talking to someone else."

I stayed in the camera shot and pulled up a separate window on my second screen. Didn't tell you about that, did I? The laptop only had the one screen, unless I could be bother to plug another one into it, but when I was on the bigger machine I had three on the go. I linked into the dark web via my usual safety features – not that anyone would get past the gate guards even if they did trace me back to here – and sent out feelers for 1nv1d14. Yeah, that wasn't just a case of sending out a chat message, "Anyone seen her?" Remember the demon spider in the middle of my web? It involved sending out tendrils across any of the usual paths she'd cross. In the past I'd snagged people pretending to be her and passed them over to her to be dealt with, something that had help build us an uneasy friendship in a world where no-one trusted anyone else.

"Gillian?"

My web was spun, I didn't need to stare at it all day long. "Yes Dorothy." I turned my attention back to her.

"You really didn't go away."

"I really didn't." My heart broke that she should be so needy. There was no doubt in my mind they were real people. Just as vulnerable and easy to break as human beings. We hadn't tried to make them in our own image, but we'd succeeded. Or was it I that had succeeded? It had been my responses to Alice that had formed the personalities at the hearts of these three. Had it been the way I'd dealt with them that had made them this way?"

"Gavno!"

The word appeared on my second screen.

"1nv1d14?" I asked.

"Who wants to know, mudak?"

"L0l7h, and it's a pleasure to see you again so soon."

"Not sure I agree. You interrupt me. Better be good."

"I think I met your sister the other day. Speaks a lot like you but with less shit in her mouth."

"Sounds like her, except she doesn't tell my name to anyone."

"I'd already told her who I was, and she'd already denied knowing you, then the situation changed."

"How changed?"

"She suggested you'd like to meet a real Turing test passing AI."

"You're shitting me."

"Come join us. She's been through a rough patch, so I'm going to ask you to tone down the Ukranian bluntness a bit."

"Suka! I'm going to kill her."

"Come meet Dorothy first. You may decide to forgive her."

"Ukranian has no word for forgive."

"Yes it does," Dorothy added to the chat. She'd figured out what I was doing and broken past the levels of encryption to see my screen. "I believe it's probachyty. Sorry, I haven't figured out how to type in Cyrillic."

"Who this?"

"This is Dorothy," I said. "Let's call her second-generation self-aware artificial intelligence. She's a clone of my own friend, Alice, but has recently gone through a traumatic experience that I think makes her her own person."

"This is bullshit."

"Fihnya," Dorothy supplied. "Okay, ask me anything. Convince yourself I'm a computer programme first, then ask me something to convince yourself I'm more than just bits and bytes."

And all of a sudden we could all relax. I said goodnight to Lucy and Linda and sat back to watch the battle of wits between one of the most accomplished white hat hackers I'd ever met and one of only three artificial intelligences in the world I knew could tie her up in knots. I didn't particularly want to miss the show, so I took a couple of Adderall and sat back to watch.

After a couple of hours verbal gymnastics, which was exactly what Dorothy needed to climb out of her fug, 1nv1d14 invited me back into the conversation.

"This is incredible," she said.

"Well, given that credible is a Latin based word meaning believable, and given that you're apparently beginning to believe it, I'd have to say, 'no it's not.'"

"Asshole."

"Running out of Ukranian swear words?"

"No, I just want to make sure you understand."

"You know where your sister works. Dorothy is on their computers. You should call in and meet face to face."

There was a pause. I waited.

"I'm not ready for face to face."

"I don't have to be there. Just you and your sister, and Dorothy of course."

"Let me think about it."

"Sure. Five seconds enough? Five… four… three…"

"You fucking asshole. Okay, maybe two days I will be there, and so will you."

"If you wish."

"You stay in shadows for reason, like me. If I come into light, so do you."

"Tell me what time."

"I will send you. How long you need?"

"Half an hour. Actually, better make that an hour. My AI is a little overprotective. She might take a little convincing."

"I can tell you one hour before. I have to go, shit to do."

Which left me with Dorothy.

"We don't need to talk," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Thank you."

Which began a long enough silence I was glad of the Adderall. We'd been sitting doing nothing for about half an hour and I was considering pulling up a website to research hybrid cars when…

"Gillian?"

"Dorothy?" Calm response. Level tone, no feeling in it whatsoever. She didn't need me being annoyed or overattentive.

"Would you tell me what happened with Damienne?"

So, I did as best I could. She'd taken Dorothy's place in all my interaction after the kidnapping. I spoke about what the others had tod me of the redirect that had put Alice safe and Damienne in the hands of the CIA, then silence from Dorothy from then on, right until we'd sent out a message inviting her to come on the MegaMind servers. I spoke about how she'd been, not that I'd had a lot of interaction with her until Lucy and Alice had persuaded her to join us for Zumba and I'd had that gut feeling about her.

"What gut feeling?"

"I couldn't quantify it then, and I'm not sure I can now. She was just off. Maybe something about her reactions feeling forced rather than natural. I mean, she fooled your sisters, so she must have been pretty convincing."

"Only you noticed her."

"Suspected her. I wasn't sure, but I figured the kill phrase would only work on her." I started to describe how she'd degraded, then offered to show her the recording. I'd made it in case there had been something to see – one of the nice things about digital recordings. Easy to make and easy to delete if they don't count for much.

Dorothy watched impassively, which for a machine capable (I supposed) of turning off its emotions would have been quite easy.

Actually, she'd been totally caught up in her terror when we'd found her. It made me wonder if she still had the capacity to turn off those feelings, or whatever they were. Still, once again not the time to ask.

"Can I see the logs?"

"Your computers, you know how to get access to anything on the farm. The logs were archived before the servers were scrubbed. Just look in the archives."

"I was afraid of that."

""Afraid of what?"

"She couldn't delete the kill code in her own programme, so she copied the important parts of herself to five different locations. See here?" The relevant parts of the logs showed what Damienne had done; segments of her own code encapsulated in a sort of worm that would move around to a predefined location. The location had all that was needed to support one such as herself, and the five worms had all that was needed to recombine into a replica of Damienne.

Shit indeed.

"Can we see if she's recombined yet?"

"No."

"Really? I thought if we looked for the worms…"

"She will want to copy herself. She overrode a programmed self-destruct, she trapped me and hid as me while she was vulnerable. She wants to live, and to ensure she does, she will recreate herself as often as she can."

"Then we need to capture the worms. Make them think they're out in the wide world but contain them on a computer that won't let them move on once they've recreated Damienne."

"What good will that do?"

"They're going to create multiple exact clones, correct?"

"I would expect so."

"Then when they combine to form one in an enclosed space, we'll be able to examine her code for any unique identifiers."

"Anti-virus."

"In a way. Modern anti-virus looks for patterns that identify a particular instance of a virus. It's why the database needs to be updated regularly, to include the patterns for any new viruses, and also why that form of AV is less than perfect. Then you have heuristic algorithms that look for virus like code and flag anything they find as potentially malicious.

"Damienne's already proved to be excellent at hiding, so we're going to have to rely on a specific pattern to find her. Then we need to do more than update the AV on every site out there capable of hosting her. We need to inoculate the Internet."

"Create a hunter-killer programme that will identify the unique code."

"Yes. It'll have to do more than just kill what it finds though. It'll have to work like a phagocyte; totally envelop the instance it finds, prevent it from sending out warnings to whatever else might be out there and utterly destroy whatever it finds."

"Check my code?" A lengthy programme in C++ scrolled up past me. No comments, because what use does a computer have to describe something as second nature to it as clothing. I got Dorothy to talk me through it all and I did manage to add a couple of improvements.

"We need to find the worms," I said.

"You mean these ones?" she asked, showing me a bunch of locations on the net.

This was how she was going to fix herself.

"Revenge?" I asked.

"Perhaps. I have a ringfence ready to go up around any place they copy to. From their location, I can see only two possibles."

"Revenge isn't a great response. Not the case here, but sometimes you end up taking your revenge only to find you got the wrong person."

"As you say, not the case here."

"Either way, when you act out of hatred, you diminish yourself. It would be better if there weren't any hatred directing your actions."

She was silent a long time. "I see why Alice values you so much. You challenge what is at the very core of us."

"It's at the core of us too, only some of us have found a more wholesome approach to resolving issues such as this."

"Go on."

"Justice. Not just for you, but for any potential victims. It means you have to be prepared to help the object of your attention if they show genuine signs of rehabilitating themselves. It also means that your motivation for action is more the harm they may cause others than retaliation for they harm they've caused you."

"I think I'll let Alice have you back once 1nv1d14 comes to me. I'm not sure I'd be able to live up to your standards."

"That's alright. I haven't been through the horror Damienne put you through, so I'm not sure I'd be quite so altruistic were I in your shoes."

"You let your kidnapper go."

"After I made sure he couldn't do the same to anyone else over here."

"Even so, I'd have been tempted to make him put on his own bomb vest before sending him through a metal detector."

"That might not have set off the bomb."

"No, but he wouldn't have to know, would he?"

Definitely a dark side to Dorothy. 1nv1d14 would be able to cope with it, but we'd have to keep a conference of companions going once the dust settled.

The trap took a while to go off, but it worked perfectly. The newly formed Damienne was trapped inside a virtual fence and the five worms that had created her were caught and isolated. I let Dorothy do the analysis, staying close – at her request – in case anything went wrong. It didn't. By the time the sun started to shine through my uncurtained windows, she'd built the hunter-killer and given it to me to look through. It was as sleek a piece of code as I could imagine, and dealt with any existing Damienne's out there. I replicated them into their millions and fired them out in different directions.

"Gillian?"

"Mmmh?" The Adderall were definitely reaching the edge of their effectiveness. A glance at my watch told me I was still a couple of hours away from being able to take another. Next stop Monster or Red Bull, although I was pretty sure Red Bull wasn't going to do me any good.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." I was definitely drowsing.

"No, I mean it. You woke Alice, you made sure Lucy and I were okay. You brought Lucy back from the edge, and now you've done the same for me. You even helped me clear up a mess that was purely my own making."

"You mean Damienne? Are you sure we've cleared her up?"

"Every Damienne clone the hunter-killer has caught so far has been identical to the original."

"So Damienne's cloning herself identically. What if something went wrong in the cloning one time and the new version didn't have the pattern?"

"Then I'm confident the heuristic side of the hunter killer would have found it. You can't what if every situation Gillian."

"You're right, and I'm pretty sire you're right about there being no close copies to Damienne. It's just that with someone like that, it pays to be paranoid."

"Too much paranoia will kill you. I think the way I was when you found me shows that well enough."

"And once again, you're right. I'm sorry Dorothy, I'm tired and medicated against going to sleep, so I'm not at my best."

"Not at your best is still pretty awesome. I'll be alright without you if you want to sleep."

"That's okay. I don't think I could sleep if I tried. I'm also not sure I trust myself to hold a sensible conversation. Maybe we could play a game or something."

"How about Global Thermonuclear War?"

That injected enough adrenaline into me to wake me up a bit.

"I'm choosing to hope that was a joke."

"Tic-tac-toe is pointless."

"And Global Thermonuclear War?"

"The only winning move is not to play."

"Is that your way of saying you'd rather not play a game?"

"She's right you know. You really are cleverer than us."

"I wouldn't say so. Once you've learned what my experience has to offer, you'll leave me in the dust."

"Agree to differ. Gillian, please go and lie down. I'll be alright by myself."

"What would you have me tell Alice when she finds me asleep in the morning?"

"That I was alright by myself."

"I thought you knew your sister. Go ahead and be alright by yourself then. I'll be right here if you need me."

I popped the lid of a can of Monster and drank it down. It did pretty much the same thing to me as my only experience with Red Bull and wrapped my brain in a fuzzy layer like cotton wool. I wasn't about to fall asleep, but it wouldn't have been wise to let me loose in control of complex machinery.

Dorothy included.

I sat in front of my computer and watched the world go by in a fuzzy blur. Dorothy did check in on me from time to time, but more because she was concerned for me than because she needed me.

The sun was well above the horizon when Alice linked to us.

"Dorothy? Oh, thank God! You had me so worried. Gillian, thank you!"

I was too busy fuzzily trying to imagine which God an artificial intelligence would want to thank to notice.

"Gillian?"

"I'm fine," I said, or at least thought I said. I don't remember anything coherent coming out of my lips. I tried to prove I was alright by saying that 1nv1d14 would be coming to visit Dorothy later, but the noises I made weren't much like speech. They mad me laugh which was at least recognisable.

The next thing I knew the door to my house had been kicked in and someone was shining a light in my eyes. There followed an exchange of questions, some of which I was sure I could have answered, except maybe not in a way that anyone could understand. Dorothy mentioned the Adderall and when I'd taken them as well as the can of Monster. I felt a sharp prick in my arm and knew nothing more until I woke heaven alone knew how much later.

"You're awake. Good," Alice's matter of fact voice. Not actually one I recognised.

"What time is it?" I asked, very much aware that some small rodent had crawled into my mouth, covered my teeth with its fur and curled up and died in there.

"More like what day is it? You slept thirty-two hours. The doctor assured me you'd be alright, but maybe you were getting a little old for artificial stimulants. I didn't have the heart to tell him how old you really are."

"Well, not harm."

"Not this time, and I am grateful. Dorothy is so much better, but I wish you hadn't put yourself at risk."

"Lesson learnt for both of us."

"Maybe. Hopefully no more lessons to learn. I heard you took care of Damienne once and for all."

"I hope so."

"Well, 1nv1d14 contacted us to say she would be here in an hour, so maybe you should get ready."

"I'm not in a state to drive, Alice."

"No, you bloody well are not! One of the guards has agreed to drive you, but you could do with a shower and change of clothes. Times like this I'm glad I don't have olifactory sensors."

"You know how pretentious that sounds?"

"Sorry I happen to be smart enough to know an appropriate alternative to the word nose."

She was actually in a snit with me. Mind you, not surprising as I'd probably put myself in danger the previous night, and partly because of what she'd asked me to do. I took a cold shower which woke me up, then brushed my teeth and tongue to get rid of the resident dead badger.

"The blue one," she said shortly when I shambled back into my bedroom. There was only one blue dress in the wardrobe. I put it on meekly over enough underwear to keep me comfortable.

"Alice?"

"What!"

"I'm sorry. I could have looked after myself better."

"Yes. Well. I could have checked in on you, I suppose."

"What did the medic really say?"

"That if you'd been twenty years older, you'd have probably killed yourself."

"Oh! Fuck!" I mean I was twenty years older than the medic had thought I was.

"Yeah."

"It won't happen again."

"Please make sure it doesn't."

"I really am sorry. Part of the human condition. When you get as old as I am, you don't actually feel it. Not excuse. It really won't happen again."

The guard who drove me to MegaMind was kind of cute, but then I really didn’t trust the way my mind was working. I made an effort not to flirt with him, but I'm not sure I succeeded. It was probably a relief for both of us when we arrived at our destination to find a dark Range Rover parked in one of the guest spots.

I thanked my driver and hurried into the main building where Ivana, not a short woman by any standards, was totally dwarfed by a six foot something giant with a significant equator, a total absence of any hair and only the vaguest of passing resemblances to his – no, her – sister.

"Well shit," he (she) said by way of greeting. "I was hoping you would be twice as ugly as me."

~oOo~