January 15, 1999, boredom galore, sitting on the couch with Sarah on my left, Billy to my right, and Paul at the far right end, Blade playing on the screen for the third time, all non-urgent messages put off until later, veal in hand, Fido at my feet eating the gristlier parts, I relax, go out of focus with reality (and the movie) for a while, and ponder things.

Why the fuck do I feel so much like some superhero? Superheroes in general all have superhuman powers (Check!), access to powerful weapons and technologies (definitely Check!), run around with high risks of getting killed (big fat Check!), are always on call (Check, and that pisses me off still), get into and out of terrifying, near-death situations (Check!!), and command high degrees of respect. (Tehehe... I think that counts as a check too.) The only differences seem to be in the morals department; I don't have any and I don't really give a fuck how many sheeple croak unless it disrupts things. I suppose that makes me more of a supervillain, then. I'd power-laugh, but I reserve that for special occasions.

The action begins, and I chuckle as some poor sap gets his ass handed to him by the vampires to the tune of techno music. Mmm, blood showers. I chuckle louder as Blade walks in and starts randomly disintegrating vampires. Sarah is counting something, probably mistakes, under her breath. Yup, had Blade cut the fancy shit, he could have gotten lots more frags. But some of the fancy shit was funny, no matter how staged. Billy was simply grinning and licking his lips, his usual response to violence.

I'm like that hero, a bit. Only I can call down men and firepower to do my dirty work for me. The people- and the dog- in this room alone can destroy platoons of normal soldiers. And that's nearly unarmed. And we're not even grown up yet. In the future... will everyone be like this? I do not ponder that question idly... I can always wait until later to decide... but ultimately, the decisions of the future rest at least partially on my unblemished hands. It would destroy my uniqueness, surely. But to generate people... to make everyone, in Huxley's words, an Alpha Double Plus... evolve mankind at thousands of times his normal rate... the implications are staggering.

And an implanted society of such...

I think I will put pondering this question off until later. In fact, much later, when I get the resources and information I need to properly decide it. Let's leave the uninformed judgments to the normals, shall we? Besides, if all the fuckers have our speed, wits, and strength, then we wouldn't be able to destroy platoons of them, now would we? Of course, I won't need to..

The screen hissed, signifying a non-urgent communication. The movie ignored it.

Fido left mid-movie, going back to his den and the puppies therein.

When it finally ended in a large splash of blood and gibs, I checked out the caller. Someone answered immediately - wearing black, but with a white hood and white gloves. Strange. As he spoke, it was readily apparent that this, indeed, is an Illuminatus. The only ones of us who wear black are either servants - or Satanists, the LaVeyan kind. This guy was fairly obviously the latter.

"Dominator.. I have a request.", said the fourth level, fifty-year-old man named Dimitri Luxington.

"You and six thousand other people."

"I believe you will find this interesting. I- we- want to help you in something special. We will devote all our resources to you- whatever you need- so that we may see a dream come true."

"And which dream is this, Beelzebub boy?" All three of my servants repressed chuckles. The joker was going to give me a correction on his religion then decided against it. I find needless aggravation to be great on whiners. If they mean it, and they need it, they'll keep going. If they're just here to beg, they usually go away. Usually. Of course, I have a special place at the end of my Micro for those that don't.

"The dream of created personalities in genetic constructs. Think of what we could do with that!" He made it sound as if it was an original idea. Can't he just use Enforcers? They don't have personalities, but the ones used to replace normals can act as if they do.

"You disgusting, wannabe-sneaky fuck. I knew you guys were after Artificial Human Companions when I was eight. This isn't anything new to me. If you fiddlefuckers want to do it, get the resources on your own, or talk to Northberg."

"We already did. Northberg has it on 'medium priority.' It'll take years." I'm surprised it's that high. Most of the qualities of personality-created constructs are equaled by implanted servants.

"And your poor, mortal body isn't going to stick around long enough to ever see them in action." He gasped a bit, fiddled with his robe, then finally decided I already knew and decided to speak the truth.

"You've hit the nail on the head, Howard. It's why I came to the Illuminati in the first place. I thought the dream could be realized It's my seventieth birthday today." He became a Satanist after 30? There's a rare bird for that group. "I'm going to die, really damn soon, widespread brain cancer. They're already using the drugs, but the disease will eventually conquer." His voice grew lower and softer with every word. "They could rip out the disease, but the ones making up my personality will die.. not like it would make any difference anyway, the body is simply too weak now. If they had developed it sooner, and I had done the test earlier, maybe I could have been saved. But.. with my fading memory... I want to see the dream realized. Please.. Howard.. I'll give you everything I own!" He started sobbing and crying. No one in the room gave him any sympathy. His dramatic effect simply didn't work. Of course, some of his brain cells are dead already, otherwise he probably would have thought up something better.

"Just because you're going to croak of a highly unpleasant degenerative disease does not make anything more important for me or the people at Northberg. Are there any holdings of yours that I can't already find out about?"

"No."

"Did you already try to do this deal with anyone at Northberg?"

"Yes.. but not with everything. Howard.. I already know they won't make the research go any faster unless you order it." So not that many cells have died after all. "But please..."

"Look, you joker. You and your ilk have been lobbying like crazy for this. It'll come when it comes. Even if I did put it on the highest priority, you'd probably be too damn senile to even know what you were looking at when it did come. We can't do the brain-cell mapping like that just yet. We're lucky the implants operate as simply as they do, and we're damn lucky we have the nanotechnology for them. But it would take even more decades to be able to create personalities. Think of all the connections we'd have to make. Sorry. You won't see your dream. Besides, there's nothing you have I want. Now go follow your own Rule 2." I turned the screen off.

"What's their own Rule 2?", Sarah asked.

"Not telling someone else your problems unless you know they want to hear them."

"Ohhh... a bit hypocritical, aren't they?"

"People get hypocritical when they get desperate. That wasn't his only hypocrisy, by the way. He's supposed to understand and accept natural selection and survival of the fittest, instead of whining for his own way before he croaks."

"What does he have to lose?", pointed out Paul.

"Not a damn thing. But he should have considered that I can make his last years on earth a living hell."

"I thought he liked that, I mean, he is a Satanist.", he replied in a half-joking tone. The rest of us gave low chuckles.

"Not that kind of hell, Paul. Electricity straight to the pain center. Make him hurt like nothing else can." Paul would actually have been scared if he believed that it had a chance of being used on him.

"Bad fate. Glad Damien didn't have that shit..."

"Actually, he probably did, he just didn't know about it. He probably got his shit out of a big box of torture items and didn't bother to do research on the shit he didn't understand."

"Fucking... a big box of torture items? You're telling me that all that crap, the fucking rack, the electrical whip, whatever the fuck that big metal thing was.. you mean to say he just ordered a 'big box of torture items'?! Howard, what the fuck?!", he almost screamed with his mouth stark open.

"He could have. There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of torture devices. He probably had no idea what he wanted so he ordered a mixed bag of shit. I know how this sounds to you. He picked it out at random because he wasn't too sure how to use it until he tried it, and I'm guessing he had all kinds of results, probably driving you closer to insanity every time he tried something. Actually, I'm surprised you're not already insane from the trauma and the assorted mental problems that creates. Most normals would probably have gone total looney tune by now, which, as you can probably guess, makes most of us put stringent controls over the kinds of normals used as servants."

"Howard... I don't get traumatized.", he said in a low voice. I chuckled darkly, knowing that if he could get really mentally fucked up, he would have probably already done it the moment he was implanted, and further with Damien's abuse. Odd circumstances do different things to different normals. Threats of death fuck up the mind, I've seen that fact demonstrated to me. The brain demands to live when physics demands it die. Chemistry gets altered when people sincerely believe they are going to die. Trauma sets in and psychological damage is the result. Permanent maiming (or what looks like it) also has effects, but that depends even more on the normal's personal brain configuration. Some guys lose a foot and their willpower. Other guys lose most of both legs and run marathons on the remainder and some prosthetics.

A Satanist with firm beliefs in natural selection and human order starts whining like a petulant child when he realizes that time is running out- he is an Illuminatus, so societal reactions mean nothing compared to his personal want, which is commendable because it takes balls (or serious stupidity) to whine at a bloodthirsty young Dominator with way too much time and power on his hands. Paul hasn't been affected by any of that, and he doesn't seem too weird to me. Then again, I'm so used to weird that normal really has no relevance, except when dealing with the masses of human filth, aka the sheeple, aka the Great Unwashed. But Paul isn't any of those. Billy's taste in friends, and my choice to keep him, were good.

"I know, that's why I put your DNA into the database as prime candidacy. That reminds me, I never did ask- you got any siblings?"

"An older brother, off in college... Howard, you're not going to-"

"Probably not. The Illuminated demand isn't as high as you'd think." Mostly because the Illuminati I've come into contact with are too used to Enforcers, and true humans as servants would be an unwelcome change for quite a few.

"Howard, you wouldn't want to. His older brother's a stupid asshole."

"Yeah.. and that reminds me of something else, something I never understood.. Paul, tell me everything you know about sibling rivalry."

"Damn, how do I put this.. all right, let's say we have some nations on an island, and all of them are overpopulated and without enough resources. And all of them hate each other, and some are more powerful than others, and so they fight for their resources. But this is in the modern world, and if they fight too much, a greater 'peace-keeping' power like America comes in and holds them back until they settle down. Then that intervention stops and they go back to fighting, and it keeps going back and forth like that, between war and peace. And they appeal to America to send them foreign aid all the time, and they always do what they can to get more resources, dirty tricks, lying to America about how badly they need aid, that kind of thing. All the time. Sibling rivalry is just like that."

"Now that is the... Paul, that was good. I got that part.. but tell me, what the fuck could they possibly be fighting over?"

"Name it! They're what you'd call normal children, anything that normal children'd want is on the list." Paul held out a fist and smacked his left forefinger against his right forefinger, going down his fingers simultaneous with saying every item on his list. "Parental affection, toys, privileges, power (of course that's just a bad joke now)... Howard, seriously, if they can possibly get it, the whining will not end."

"That is petty as shit!" It was my only reply. Damn... the masses really will squabble unto the end, as I've heard a 30-something Illuminated lady shout at the rest in a meeting a few years back. I thought she was exaggerating a bit. If they do this with their own families, no telling what they'd do with their own nations.

"No kidding."

"Paul, that is just sad. Any idiot knows that if they worked together they could extort a lot more out of their parents, because they have a really hard time saying no to more than one at a time. From what I've seen, they're stupid like that.", Sarah said with some ire in her voice. She hates it when normals are too stupid. It makes her job too easy.

"They really are stupid like that, Sarah. And you know that.", he said, using his left forefinger again, pointing at Sarah. "And he knows that. And after listening to me say that combined with everything else he knows, he definitely knows that. And after I've thought about it, I know that.", he continued, pointing at Billy, me, and himself. "But they don't know that.", he finished, throwing his left thumb over his shoulder. I just sighed.

"It's because it's their whole world, Howard.", Billy said, and I turned to look at him. "You fly around the world in a plane, dealing with things of world-class importance. Everything here is set up so that you don't even have to think about small stuff like what to eat or what you're going to be watching. Now, listen carefully and try to imagine this." Billy was telling me that because he thought it would be hard for me to comprehend. Which it is. "Those little things are these normal children's world, Howard. Their whole lives revolve around television, cheap toys, pointless schoolwork, their siblings, whatever friends they've managed to pick up, and their parents, who are random idiots with functional reproductive organs. They have nothing else." Billy's explanation was almost hypnotic in the imagery it evoked for me. No wonder so many techniques work that shouldn't. They never learned to see beyond their own noses. "Their geography is limited to a few square miles and their economics are measured in single dollars. They see the Earth on a globe but they really have no idea what they're looking at when they do. Things that you consider petty are matters of critical importance to them, because it's all they ever see or deal with. They're governed, loosely or tightly on a generally random basis, by people who have no real idea how to care for them, however much they pretend otherwise. Things you don't even think about worrying about having are denied to them regularly, on idiotic reasons. Their entire boxed-in, shallow lives can be toppled by someone doing something crazy. So they battle with their siblings, trying to squeeze every last bit of joy or property out of their meager existences. The smart ones retreat into fantasy and wait to grow up to get to see the big world. The stupid ones never see anything else, even when they're grown and have kids of their own. Now do you understand what being a normal kid is, Howard?" I nodded. Holy shit. No wonder the normals are so screwed up. How could they possibly be otherwise? I mean, yes, they're normals, they don't have the abilities, travel, or access I do. But for their entire worlds to be closer to prison (it was the only analogy I had) than anything else..

"Billy, let's play something fast and aggressive enough to get my mind off this for now.", I commanded, and he eagerly found one I've never heard of with a Japanese name, the controllers shot out, he set it to the maximum speed, enemy density, and enemy durability, and we were quickly beset by a shitload of pixelated foes, with no helpful third dimension to dodge in. Sibling rivalry wouldn't even be a joke here- even with commands, as was proved in the amusement park, I can't make him use his adrenalized power, and it was those super reflexes we both needed in abundance to have a chance against this madness. Thirty minutes or so later, over a vast field of little-dot stars, we killed the incredibly well-armored final boss. Sarah and Paul, who I hadn't even noticed were watching, clapped.

"Billy, I have an observation to make."

"Yes?"

"That was totally insane!"

"I know. Want to play it again, Howie?"

"Okay!"