Stone, chipped walls surrounded me, the ceiling being just as high as my head. Paths laid out in all different directions. I took one- the north one, I knew- and ran down the corridor, turning at right angles every so often. A T-junction was there- but a giant, white lion-beast was on the left. I ran to the right, leaping over flames and dodging traps, which the giant beast simply ignored. I continued- and a white dragon roared in front of me, and I ran to the right, navigating even more left-and-right turns. A flying demon- again, just as white as I am- screeched in front of me, and I ducked under it and kept running. And I kept going.. back to where I started, back through more passageways, into even more monsters, continuously being chased- and I KNEW, just KNEW that I couldn't get out, that there was simply no door to the outside at all, how the hell did I get here...

I sat up instantly, screaming with every ounce of power in my lungs, my throat burning and my diaphragm feeling bruised.

And almost screamed again as I remembered where I was. 'Calm down, dammit!!', I almost shouted out loud. 'You already know getting upset isn't going to help!'

Speaking of upset, the door opened, and Howard and Sarah were there, simply staring at me. For once I envisioned her being more dangerous than him; he was mildly annoyed and somewhat curious, while she had the Hell Hath No Fury™ scowl from hell.

"Uhh.. what time is it?", I asked, feeling more like a complete dick than anything else.

"Oh-dark-thirty.", Sarah responded in a grating voice. And she was right. Still no sunlight. Urgh.

"Billy," Howard commanded me, "never do that again."

"Do the rules for these things go something like 'if I can't control it, than neither can the implants'?" Wow! I was able to ask that question without sounding like I have something up my sleeve (which, unfortunately, I don't...)!

"Yes."

"Then that's not going to help." He rolled his eyes and muttered something in Latin. Sarah simply started chuckling darkly.

"They all scream.", she observed. "I screamed a bit at the start, you scream at night without thinking about it. Almost everyone in pain screams sooner or later. The only exceptions are those who don't live long enough to get the chance."

"Well, if he only screams at night, there are other solutions than commands..", Howard said, smiling. There was no need for me to ask what he had in mind.

"What the hell should I say? I didn't mean to, and I didn't like doing that.", I said, flopping back down on the bed. "Sorry." I closed my eyes.

"Billy, get up!", Howard shouted.

Damn it, am I going to be allowed to sleep or... I did sleep. The window proclaimed daytime. And I suppose now it's time for me to..

"Get dressed and make them work. I don't care what you do to them so long as every one of them can still work. If you ever intend to scare them, you may do it with this.", he said, setting down an incredibly large weapon that looked like a mutant cross between a bazooka and a shotgun.

I started putting on the same clothes as I had before (which were, surprisingly enough, off the floor and put away), and looked at the device. It looked like a shotgun with an extremely wide rifle clip attached to it. It must have been three feet long with a foot wide barrel, which had something strange in it- an automatic barrel blocker to close it up when not in use? "What do you kill with that?!"

He smiled, his grin reflecting every bit of his power. "Jets.. tanks.. battleships.. it's an atomic shotgun." The barrel blocker must be for the excess radiation, then. Holy shit. Now I'm carrying an atomic weapon, same as he was carrying a nuclear one.

"Ehh?! You managed to..?!" But as before, none of this really surprises me. Amazing, yes.. but weirdness continues to be par for the course here.

"That's right. We managed to micronize fission explosives as well. It's a good thing they can't get out of control."

I made a ka-boom sound and gesture in my all-black outfit. He nodded. I walked past him, down the stairs, across the thickly padded carpet, and out the door.

'I do not feel like putting up with any more shit than I absolutely have to.', I decided. And I didn't think I'd have to put up with much- the peasants, I knew, would be terrified. I did not have to walk far to get to the people- the farmland was only about fifty meters from the mansion itself, and the people stood on the edge of it.

Enforcers, all armed with assault rifles, physically blocked the terrified mass. A white line, I noticed, was painted around the rather large enclosure of farmland and the huts. The people tried to get as close as they could to the line, but not daring to try to push past the Enforcers and cross over- some had bruises on their faces, and I immediately realized what had happened. The Enforcers already had orders not to let them pass the line.

"Translate what I say, and what's directed at me.", I told the nearest Enforcer, who looked in my direction. "Attention!", I shouted, and the Enforcer did translate. Good. This should be relatively easy. "Let me make this perfectly clear- YOU ARE NOT GOING TO ESCAPE!" I used my echoed-voice trick, which immediately got their attention. "This, as has been said before, is an experiment! A test! And you will fulfill your roles in that test by doing what it was that I told you to do!"

"And what if we don't?", a young man asked, looking me right in the eye. I got the gist of his message before the Enforcer translated it back.

"If you don't, we will torture you." The reactions were predictable- shock and horror. I heard mutterings that I'm pretty sure were along the lines of 'America doesn't do that.' and 'That's insanely cruel!"

"Let me make this clear again. There is no resistance, no hope, no solidarity, and no way out." There was more muttering, a general, growing unease. They didn't look at my face, didn't pay attention, because they didn't want to- they couldn't, they refused to believe that a 5 foot tall ten year old was the one in charge.

I pointed the atomic shotgun at the sky and squeezed the trigger.

I will never forget the first time I heard that weapon. 'Incredibly loud' doesn't cover it- it was more like a concussion grenade than anything else. I was forced squarely on my ass by the recoil, and my ears felt like cotton had been smashed into them. The workers crammed their hands over their ears, shirking back. The Enforcers, as I could have guessed, did not react to the noise. 'Holy shit.', I thought, as I realized the power of the thing. I could have knocked a satellite out of orbit with that. "NOW do you understand?!"

They understood. Most of them, anyway. The worker who had spoken to me before told something short to another man, and I asked the Enforcer for a translation; what I got shouldn't have surprised me. "We can sneak out at night, kill them in their sleep." The Enforcer's near-monotone was chilling- I realized that it would use that same monotone no matter what I told it to do.

I remembered my strength, my power, the things I'd no longer be hiding anymore. "You're welcome to try if you think you can.", I said to the man, looking him in the eye. He was surprised that the Enforcer and I heard him- others were equally surprised and shrank away from him, leaving him exposed and afraid. "But you're going to have to deal with this." I lunged forward and kicked him in the diaphragm, sending him on his back and gasping for air. "Now get to work."

They got the tools and got to work. I walked back inside to find a chuckling Howard sitting on the couch, poring over something on the screen. "Not bad. That'll work- for maybe a few hours.", he said. "You will have to manage them in the long run. But fear should keep them going for a while."

"So what's that?", I asked him.

"Oh, just an ordinary IQ test..", he said, shrugging. "Ordinary for us, anyway." Which obviously means something like 'ridiculously hard'. "I'm just not allowed to make any mistakes."

"How many questions?", I asked.

"Twenty quick ones." I had expected more; these people obviously enjoy excess.

"Are you going to want help?"

"Not from you. Not yet, anyway. A lot of these questions talk about things you know nothing about." Why am I not surprised?

"So you have to get all the answers exactly right? What if you just ordinarily screw up? They're going to get rid of you just for one fucking question wrong?"

He looked at me, grimaced, and nodded. "Billy, you've never seen this kind of thing before. Almost nowhere in the normal world is there truly zero tolerance for errors. Remember, this is probably one of the few times they're ever going to be able to make demands of me, and so they want to make sure of one thing- that I don't screw up. Which I generally don't. Of course, that doesn't make it much easier..."

I shrugged. "You're going to get them all right and all done on time."

"How do you know?"

"Because I didn't get sent here just to watch you get tossed into a cage on the first day." He started burbling, then laughing.

"That's anti-logic which makes sense. I've heard a lot of that. But no, improbability does not closely correspond with truth in this organization." I'll have to remember that. "Make me some pancakes. Oh, crap. Cancel that. Shit." His brain was obviously too wrapped around the problems.

"Potatoes in the morning, potatoes in the evening, potatoes at suppertime..", I sung softly.

"Billy, there are fruit-bearing trees on this island. Go to the kitchen, take one of the larger bowls, and get it back here filled with various types of fruit." And, of course, I did just that. The 'larger' bowls were obviously made for someone with our appetite- that is, about a foot and a half wide and a foot deep. I spotted a back door to the mansion and took it- I didn't want to let the peasants see what I was doing and let them know that I'm not the master around here. It also gave me the chance to do something I've been meaning to do- explore the island. I looked around as I walked, looking for.. anything, really. Anything worth looking at. And everything was worth looking at.

The only word to describe this place is paradise, complete with bubbling streams, tall trees, and chirping birds. Verdant, lush, and varied, with a single, rocky hilltop visible between the trees and green everywhere else, except for the sandbars next to the ocean. Some serious group of landscapers had decided to create the Garden of Eden; in the natural world, grapevines, bananas, and apple trees do not coexist on the same acre of land. This was decidedly not natural, but rather pseudo-natural.. much like me, Howard, and Sarah. Alive, and living well, but not created from nature.

Bioengineered.

What does that mean, anyway? I'll get the details of my creation later- that's not the issue- but what does it mean to be created? It means superiority, that's what the hell it means. It means I can kill people with relative ease. It means I have better reflexes than a jackrabbit. It means that a team of scientists sat down and decided what features, abilities, and powers to imbue me with (whether they were imbuing him and I happened to get the abilities or they actually had me in mind as well is a completely moot point). It also means that I'm fundamentally different from just about every other life form on this planet; they were created by the process of evolution, whereas I was pieced together from various sequences of DNA and processed into a complete whole. That's scary and unnerving when you think about it, but I have a lot more things to be scared and unnerved by at the moment, such as huge conspiracies, insane tests, and mind control.

I said it aloud, softly so as not to be heard. "Mind control. My mind is currently being controlled." Ten seconds passed, as I continued to follow Howard's command. "What the hell?!", I shouted, still relatively softly but loud enough to get the point across to myself. What the hell?! Absolute pure mind control. When the HELL did they learn how to do that?! Never mind why they did it- particularly to one of a pair of twins- but how? How could they possibly work? I can't know. Even if they explained it to me- which would be effectively giving a prisoner a map to the dungeon- it would probably take me years to understand the underlying science. It's probably another whole set of neuro.. damn, what's the word.. neuromechanism science might be what they call it. At any rate, this may be only the tip of the iceberg- it can, and probably does, get worse.

The bowl quickly became full and I brought it back the same way I came in, watching Sarah finish up checking Howard's answers. She was only wearing a tank top and a pair of shorts and I noticed the tone of her muscles, a slight layer of flesh and fat covering a structure of what could have been solid stone.

He looked back at me, clicked what was apparently the Send button, and sighed. "I get the feeling that they're going to make it easy for me the first time and then get serious in a couple of days."

"Didn't you just say earlier that it was hard?", I asked him. He only looked at me and smiled. "Ah. I get it." I offered him the bowl and he put it into his lap and leaned back, popping grapes into his mouth.

"I suppose they want me to do that silly physical shit now.."

"It's only four weeks of it, Howard.", I replied.

"Taunt me all you want. Just make sure those peasants fucking work. I'll be back in eighteen minutes or I'll not be back at all." He put the bowl down on the couch's end table with a slight tink of metal, got up, and started walking out. Sarah and I followed him out, but went straight out the door and through the 70 yards of grass that separated us from the dirtier farmland, while Howard turned left to the chalk lines drawn on the grass to determine the start of his route.

"Shit.", Sarah said, looking at the rows of freshly-plowed land in front of us. "They don't realize how fast those damn potatoes grow. They'll die without soil." She walked over to one of the Enforcers, ordered it to translate, and shouted, "Put the potatoes in the soil NOW! You heard me, DO IT! Or Mr. Albino over here pulls out the shotgun again!" I forced down my urge to giggle at that, and instead decided to look intimidating, which was amazingly easy. The working peasants, startled, did as she commanded immediately.

"No resistance at all...", she said, sighing.

"Like Howard said, it's going to get harder. They're just still shocked at my This Is My Boomstick stunt."

"How do you keep in such good humor?", she asked. "I'm still trying to understand that."

"How do you?!", I countered. "His 'Daddy' stabbed you in the back!"

"Sanity retention? Because my wit is one of the few things keeping me from breaking down entirely?"

"Then there's your answer."

"Yeah, but I mean.. ah, screw it. I don't know why you are the way you are, any more than I know why he is the way he is. You just realized it so quickly.."

"Just what does that mean, anyway, 'realizing it'?"

"Psychological thing. It's when the shock finally just stops and the subject realizes he can't resist. It's even noticeable in animals."

"Great. Now I'm getting scared again."

"Oh, you'll get used to that. Be scared of what you want. Here's something else to be scared of: the life of a Dominator gets dangerous, and I assure you that he'll be fighting his battles with us."

"I'm not scared of that." Ass kicking is my strong suit.

"Then don't bother with fear at all. Don't be afraid of him. You could tell him off if you wanted to and he wouldn't do anything lasting."

"I'm afraid of.. losing myself.", I said, realizing how cheesy it sounded after it came out.

She started laughing. "A bit late, aren't we? If we would have been afraid of that before we got here, we just might have escaped this." She looked me in the eye. "We're gone. You know it." I knew it. "Enforcers, inform me if a work slowdown or stoppage occurs.", she told the stationary non-people.

"Well, it's good that we don't have to just stand here watching them.", I said, as we walked back to the mansion.

"Oh, I've learned Illuminated philosophy. If you can command someone or something else to do it, use them unless you can do it better or you really want to do it yourself. You know what he really wants you for. But you're going to be far too ignorant for that for a while."

"Well, being useful or not, I don't want to stay ignorant." I decided that yesterday.

"Then don't.", she said, turning on the screen and pressing the Windows-like operating system's bottom left button and moving to Search: All. "Search. All." I didn't need clarification. She walked back up to her room.

The text box's flashing cursor was mesmerizing, daring me to use it to insert letters.

Search:

Let's start with the obvious.

Search: mind control implants

Mind Control Implants: Go to Major Topic?
[ Yes ] [ No ] [ Cancel ]

Major Topic? Why am I not surprised? I clicked Yes and got a whole faceful of information about them. Insertion Procedure, Effects, Usage Information, Implant Withdrawal, and several others. I clicked on Implant Withdrawal- it was the most ominous- and I read through the jargon and learned something I didn't want to know. If I did manage to get the implants out of my head, I would die of my own brain frying itself with electrical signals. Even Enforcers can't handle it.

Freedom was already in the coffin but that bit of information buried it.

Okay.. I'll search for something else now..

Search: genetic engineering

As I should probably have expected, it was an overload of information. I read through the history- the first biologically modified human was born in 1968- and skimmed forward to 1984 and Project Dominator.

"I was wondering when your curiosity would get the better of you.", my own, slightly out-of-breath voice said from behind me. In reflex, I closed the search window and turned partway around.

"Are you kidding? As soon as Sarah told me about this, I had to start looking."

"Good. Sarah and the Enforcers can deal with the peasants, you'll have lots of extra time. I'm not going to be silly and try to command you to learn, but just remember that you're going to eventually have to know everything I know.. I'll help you with the Latin later." Eesh.

Snacking on the fruit, I learned far more than I expected was possible in a few hours, a period in which Howard did his route once more and Sarah shouted to the peasants twice. Eventually, Sarah left and returned, carrying an armful of potatoes on her way back.

"Hungry? Need I ask?"

"It would be just like them to make the things really bitter...", Howard said, pulling a potato out of Sarah's arms and biting into it raw. "Not bitter. Tasteless and a bit salty." I took one and ate. Bleh. Edible and that's about it. "Sarah, are we being watched?"

"Definitely. Not when we're in here, though. Just outside to make sure you're running."

"Can they tell us apart?"

"The implants transmit, Howard." He moved his head back a bit in a frustrated gesture. "If you want, I'll gladly spy on the spies and see what they're using."

"Get ready and do it.", he commanded her. She went upstairs. "So, Billy- what have you found out so far today?"

"A little bit of everything and a lot of mind control."

Howard nodded. "Good. For the rest of this test, when you don't have more pressing matters to attend to and it's not going to get anything of mine damaged or destroyed, you should listen to your curiosity." I walked upstairs, curiosity and command compelling. "Where are you going?"

"To follow Sarah. I want to know how you spy on Illuminati spies." He nodded some more and smiled.

I followed her upstairs to her room; she had finished putting on a suit that was covered by camouflage-colored hair. "Never seen a ghillie suit before?", she asked. I shook my head. "Check your closet." I left her room and went back in mine to search.

The clothing was a wide selection of styles, but almost all of it was stark black; there was nothing even remotely light-colored. There was a camouflage pattern, but nothing like what Sarah had. I left my room and found her waiting, a pair of binoculars in hand.

"Nothing?"

"Not like that, but there's camouflage."

She shook her head and I followed her out of the mansion, through the front door. "Forget it. Enforcers look for outlines. Just watch me from a distance. If I was sniping, I'd bring my thicker suit, but that might clue an Enforcer or someone in." As we stepped outside through the back door, she began looking around casually, and then pointed into the forest, into an area of thick underbrush. I looked carefully and saw nothing except plants. What the hell was she pointing at?

"Erm, Sarah?", I whispered.

"You don't see anything, right?", she said in an articulate but very quiet voice.

"Are our eyes different?", I asked, trying to mimic her tone and partially succeeding.

"Nope. I don't see it either. I can't even catch a glimpse. But I know it's there.", she continued in the same low tone. I tried listening and heard nothing but birds and peasants. I just looked at her. "It's where I would be. Watch, but don't follow." She walked a short distance into the forest, got down on her elbows and knees.. and just laid there. Huh? I doubt she can see it from that position either. Wait, she's moving.. slowly. Slow enough that it doesn't even look like motion. After about ten minutes (how does she stand the boredom?), I could no longer see her, she was too deep- I just squatted down and waited, thinking random thoughts. She wouldn't do it if it wasn't necessary, but damn that's slow.

Howard walked up to me. "Bored, Billy?", he asked next to my ear.

"Yeah.. what's that about?"

"It's how it's done. I watched someone do it on fast forward before, and still got bored watching it. I'll do the second circuit in a few minutes when she gets in a good spot. She'll come back, but it'll take time." I sighed. He passed the spy's point about five minutes later, and Sarah came back out about fifteen minutes after that.

"So tell me, exactly what did you do?", I asked.

"Crawled, looked, and crawled back. That's it."

"Why so slow?!", I asked, almost breaking my extra-quiet tone.

"Normals see motion and Enforcers are even worse.", she said, walking back inside. I followed her back in and her voice went back to normal. "The idea when wearing a ghillie suit is to look like nothing. Nothing doesn't move."

"Don't you get unbearably bored?"

"Training, Billy. Training."

"So what'd you find out?"

"No radio equipment of any kind. Just a stopwatch. The hard part was making sure that the stopwatch didn't have any radio equipment in it."

"So you had to look over his shoulder.."

"'Its', Billy, 'its'.", she corrected me. "Sometimes it's important not to get the pronoun confused." I nodded. "And yes, that's basically it. It's annoying, but not really difficult. Not for me, anyway."

"And how do you know they're not listening now?"

"Because then they'd have to bug the whole house and they're not about to do that. If I found one bug- which is easy for me, considering that I was also trained to do that- I'd definitely look for more. And even during a test, that would piss Howard off and I don't think they're going to do that."

"Yes, because he'll rule the world if he passes the tests."

"'When', Billy, not 'if'. Missions are accomplished in a 'when', not in an 'if'."

I found a verbal knife and decided to poke her with it. "Yes, and that'll be more important if we ever get out of this."

She growled. "It's also not a good idea to ascribe 'if' statements to what's not going to happen."

Howard entered through the front door, shaking his head. "Idiot peasants. One of them thought he could escape."

"What happened?", I asked.

"An Enforcer beat the shit out of him. They're still working, but they look at me like I'm Satan." I looked at him like he was Satan. He laughed. "So what's the answer?"

Sarah told him and he said I'd be doing half of it- which was an utter, total, bone-shocking surprise. Considering what our relationship is, I thought I'd be doing all of it. I didn't push my luck by asking him such silly questions as why. "Well, now to order a fake head of hair for you.", she told me. Oh crap! I totally forgot about that, and apparently Howard did too.

"Don't, Sarah.", Howard said. "No intentionally bringing anything except this jet or its current contents, remember?"

"Who were those rules given to?", she asked.

"Me. But you're my implanted servant, and commanding you to do something is.." Sarah grew a smile on her face from the word 'commanding'. "That really is the exact wording, isn't it? That does make things interesting. All right, you can do it if you want." She did, in moments. Wait, if she can do that, then- no, she can't bring down the food. That was covered separately. Definitely a violation of the spirit of the rules, but that means fuck all here. Similarly, he could command Sarah to bring stuff down anyway. Who'd know? He could always lie and say she did it on her own. Holy crap, I'm even starting to think like one of these guys...

"That reminds me- Billy, I forbid you to ever get your hair cut or otherwise have your body looking different from mine.", Howard told me, to my lack of surprise. But neither he nor Sarah noticed that they couldn't just get..

"Wait, wait.", I said. "Sarah, what do you mean, just order it? Obviously, if you're going to get something to make me look exactly like him, they'll know you're cheating."

"How?", she asked, shrugging. "They'd need to prove it. It's easy to claim that it scares the peasants more or something like that." Yes, I guess she's right, but..

"You two are so damn confident.", I said, and both Howard and Sarah laughed at me.

"Billy," Howard told me, smiling, "welcome to the Illuminati." Sarah ordered the fake head of hair to certain parameters and the Enforcer on the other end dutifully obeyed.

As per Howard's commands, we got more work out of the peasants and I satisfied as much of my curiosity as I could- it's sort of disappointing what the Illuminati don't do. No aliens, none of that mystical numerology shit, and orbital mind control lasers were not part of either the searchable index or Howard's big book of mind control devices- although there are such things as orbital killing lasers. Kept in reserve, of course; their use basically means instant destruction of secrecy.

Howard didn't say anything else particularly memorable, but I got a better look at his attitude towards life in general- which calmed me on one hand and chilled me to the bone on the other.

The nightmare, of course, was 100% bone-chill.