So I shut myself down. I turned off my emotions, my fear, everything, leaving only a thread of left-brain consciousness behind. I was going crazy, and I can't afford that- if I'm too worthless to him because of that, I know what will happen, I will simply be terminated as a failed project. He's calculating and understanding, and he knows how to balance costs versus benefits- of that, I'm certain. He was taught to do it, and I fucking envy him- not just because of his power, of his infinite advantage. I envy him because of his knowledge. He is my identical twin in every respect- I'm positive of that now. But he was taught- not 'taught' in the normal world and the public schools, but truly taught, told how to deal with situations as they arise. And he's being patient with me, showing me what he can do, because he's planning for the future, where I do his dirty work..

Maybe that's an error in thinking, then. Maybe part of the reason this isn't making sense is because I'm not thinking as he would, I'm only seeing things from one angle. So, I asked myself a simple question- what would I do, feel, and say if I were him right now? Well, it should be obvious. I'd be excited and happy. I would have recieved the biggest inheritance ever given, as well as a present that is literally irreplaceable. I wouldn't kill the servant, then, because any insanity he does develop will probably just wear off after so long. In fact, if I had someone like myself, and I was living a super-sheltered life, I'd do everything I wanted with him after being so company-deprived for so long.

No wonder I'm so scared- he's not going to torture me. He's going to use me for everything he'd use a ... friend for. And he'll act as he damn well pleases because there is no one to tell him otherwise. Who the hell would?! He runs the world! Anyone in a position to talk to him probably has other nation-size problems to deal with. I doubt Illuminati care about each other's personal lives. They certainly have jobs to do. And so I'll be his.. his... a wholly unfamiliar feeling I cannot name swept over me like a tidal wave. And he was watching me, taking a good look at his acquired brother.

"What are you afraid that I'm going to do to you, Billy?", he asked in a voice devoid of evil, hatred, and cruelty.

"Anything... you want.", I answered. It was the only answer. Anything he wants, he gets. The only other way to answer that would take twenty years to list every little thing he can do to me.

"Exactly. That's what I plan to do.", he replied with a slight smile. "Billy, I can't afford information disparity between us. If you don't know something vitally important, ask it. One question at a time." Let's start with the obvious.

"Just what.. the hell.. have you done to me?!"

"Sarah, what did they do, anyway?", he asked.

She thought about it for a few seconds before saying, "Let's see... First, they used the gas tranquilizer, then they put him on a plane here.. for a top level mission like that they almost certainly did his implantation mid-flight. Then they washed and disinfected him, inside and out, until there were no carrying contagions left." I don't feel anything in my ass or my throat.. but it figures that they'd make it painless. "Then they vaccinated him for every disease known to man- in his case, including AIDS." In my case? Only in my case? Maybe I can be vaccinated for it, other people can't.. "Then they did some quickie detoxification, definitely, then.." Detoxification. From the normal world's pollutants. That figures too. "they probably skipped most everything else. Ordinarily they'd do some minor surgery on any permanent scars or ailments, but he doesn't get any of that.. Oh, and Billy, feel lucky. They sometimes castrate, not like it would do much to you." Urk. And why is she insulting my penis at a time like this?

"Oh yeah, Billy, I think you better know now before you go on a bad assumption. Both of us are immortal and regenerate. She's a little slower on the regeneration but she'll live more than two thousand years, unless something bad happens." She wasn't insulting... my god. She wasn't because if it was chopped off, it would just grow back. I started to remember things I hadn't thought about. How fast I heal. How immune I am to poisons and disease. It explains this, too. We were created- not born, created. Their engineers sat down and calmly talked about how to make a superman, and then proceeded to do it. We have no parents or other relatives. Nothing. Made in a laboratory for this exact purpose. Created and immortal, because we heal our aging, certainly. Disbelief entered my mind and I killed it. They wouldn't lie to me about something like this. "So if it's not fatal, it'll heal up."

"So why didn't you tell me about this earlier? Like- years?" It would have saved me some grief.. but I'm asking stupid questions again. They wouldn't let someone immortal and regenerating in the normal world know about his abilities. Letting me in the open was probably dangerous enough.

"Billy, because you were to be the normal. Inheritors don't get to be with normals, at all, and as such we have absolutely no experience with what you'd call the 'real world'. So, after a lot of thinking (hopefully), they probably decided to send me a normal servant for my tenth birthday, so I wouldn't do something totally foundless. Not sure why they'd use a clone though."

Then I realized something- not just figured it out but realized it, and my emotions came back into my head. "Does that mean.. that I'm just here to help do your dirty work.. forever? Not just until I grow old, because I won't?" I won't grow old. Death will not be a respite from this. If I were like everyone else, I would be secure in the knowledge that 'forever' isn't forever and that I would eventually croak. Not here.

"Until you or I get waxed, exactly. And I don't plan on that happening any time soon." We can be killed, but by what? Who the hell is going to try to kill either of us? There's no one that would try anything that stupid. I suppose he has serious protections against assassination- more than any normal President, certainly.

So there is probably no way out of this. None. I am not free. I can't go back- where would I go back to, in a world owned by him? What would I do? I couldn't survive, even if I did somehow manage to get out of here. And even if I somehow did manage to kill him, they would certainly kill me. I bent over and awoke- truly awoke, knowing this isn't a dream. He is my master because he can be, not because of anything I did or said, but because of who I am and who I was created to be. I wiped my tear-encrusted face off and looked at him. What do you want, Howie?

"Finally.", he said, as if he was expecting this. Well, of course he's expecting this. He is an Illuminatus. He was waiting for me to simply realize it- that my rights are worth nothing and my will may as well be considered non-existent. Well, if that's what you want, Master Howard, you have it. And in that instant, I knew- just knew- that he would have some mercy on me and allow me to do some things I wanted, because I'm his.. the feeling came back in force, pushed Fear, Terror, and Horror out of the way, and proceeded to mosh on my forebrain.

"Oh no. That's impossible. There's no way in Hell, Howard. It took me three days to finally accept it, and you think that he did in a half hour?" Three days? Maybe for the horror to wear off, and for grim realization to settle in. Which I have, and this realization is fucking grim, all right.

"Well, the impossible just happened.", Howard said. Sarah muttered something about Lucky Little Fucker A and Lucky Little Fucker B.

"What?", I asked.

He then proceeded to tell me things about what he termed the 'freedom illusion' - the fact that people trained to think they were free would continue to think so even in the face of reality, and the control his organization used to keep it that way. With judicious word choice (he obviously expected me to understand all of it), he explained why newly-acquired servants were often confused and emotional. He explained how his people use mass media, schools, and every kind of organization normals will participate in or listen to, to befuddle them and make them think that everything they did was inevitably on their shoulders, and then told me that I had lost my internal illusion. It did not shock me; it saddened me. All this time. No hope for anyone. They wander around like the sheep they are, not understanding anything that goes on but assuming it's done by some normal- it's not. It's just puppet strings, being yanked around.

"So it's all a lie, isn't it, Master... It's just a lie... the government, the corporations, everything on the tv, all the news..."

"No, not all the news, and the government does perform needed functions. We just own it, that's all. The masses usually get told the truth, Billy. We do have to lie sometimes, but we like trust. We control what happens, so why lie about it? Oh, and Billy- cut that 'master' crap. I get called a lot of that high-sounding crap and Daddy gets called it even more- now that I'm going to be the Dominator, I guess I'm going to get a lot of it too. Everything from All-Knowing Lord to Wise Master to Benevolent One. It's all a lot of bullshit, meaning zilch except to sycophants and toadies. Never use any of it. My name's Howard." I read 1984, and only now am I beginning to understand the final meaning of doublethink- Howard's organization doesn't bother to do all the crap, they just do what they need to, to keep things going the way they are, and it doesn't mean editing information for the masses, only the important stuff, to shadow what they need to shadow and say what the people want to hear- no wonder politics is so confusing. It's a combination of doublethink and NO THINK. And Howard doesn't like being called Master. It figures. Why would he? He knows he's the master. 'Howard' is simply an identifier. If someone was to talk about the Ultimate World-Controlling Badass in the third person, using those exact words, Howard would know they're referring to him. But he knows that, and we know that, and so he feels it doesn't need to be said- and he's right. And of course he doesn't want his servants acting like toadies- what would be the point?! It's not like we don't already have to do whatever he says..

"Yes.. Howard. Speaking of 1984.. why did you use Orwellian as a swear word back in the arcade?", Logically, Orwell would be a curse because of what he told the masses without saying it outright..

"Ugh.. Orwell. The Bastard. Eric Blair used to be a second level, Billy, one of our best. He ran a lot of shit in World War II, the production, the politics, he had his hand in everything. He was our man for that war. But something happened to him.. he started bitching about how it's all a lie and how we're fucking over and killing everyone. Eventually he pumped out Animal Farm and 1984, under the name George Orwell. The funny thing was, he never told anyone he was one of us. He never said 'Hey, there's an Illuminati, they're running everything.' That would just have made people laugh. He did the most damaging thing he could- he got everyone paranoid by writing some very cutting books. He even used his power to put them to the front of the shelves. And people got paranoid, and he slowed us down majorly. We axed him after that and made a totally fake history for him, and the books are being misinterpreted in schools all over the world." That all figures. And he's telling it to me as if it were common knowledge.. because it is, to him.

"Holy fuck..", I found myself muttering.

"Billy, we do that kind of thing all the time."

"So no one knows where I am?" If no one does, it's total. Not gradual, not "some people know some things", it's total and airtight. Which it should, logically, be.

"Unless you count us, nope. No normal currently knows anything about you." He pushed some buttons on the jet's screen and called up a few things. "You're dead, Billy. A fire at the orphanage killed you. Everyone else was able to escape, but your clumsy ass tripped and fell into the flames. Everyone else was too busy running off to care, and when the firemen got there they found nothing but a pile of blackened flesh and bones, with six-fingered hands. Must have been you!" Not missing, dead. I wonder how many other people they've done this to? Probably few... I am a special case. Good fucking God, there weren't even any hints about this, it's just that you wake up one morning and you no longer have your life- like midnight heart attacks, only more surprising. And they have guys to cover every base, all the time. For the second time, I envied him- I wanted to throw around that kind of instant power, at least for a while. Don't like the TV programming? Change it without changing the channel! Teacher pissing you off? Kill her and get her replaced! Obnoxious fools gettin ya down? Snap your fingers and have giant musclemen raping their asses with a door handle! Whatever the problem, we can solve it..

"What about her?", I asked. I had to know.

"Sarah, tell him."

"Billy...", she began, "I'm not a normal. I'm just as engineered as you are. I was made to kill. I was their top project, 30 months before you two were created. They wanted the perfect assassin, they said. I've been killing people since the age of 7 and a half. No one suspects a little girl. When I'd be a witness to yet another murder, I'd give the cops some fake shit, then I'd go off with my parents, different each time, and do it again. I've got about a hundred personal kills- I lost track at twenty- and twice that acting as an operations master. I got promoted for it for some reason, and was all the way to a second level Illuminatus when they said they could make me first. Now, no one, and I mean no one, except the Dominator, messes with a first level Illuminatus. So I said yeah, and then they said they'd need to knock me out to do the necessary examination, and I was stupid and blind and too full of power-greed, so I said sure, and I woke up in Howard's mansion." So they don't limit their operations to people outside their organization. Makes sense. I found myself wincing- all that power, all those kills, and she falls into the same trap. Ugh.

"Billy, you have no idea how nice it is to have an assassin around the house.", Howard said, grinning a bit. I involuntarily laughed to myself, shaking my head. Of course it means nothing to him... and of course he'll take advantage of the power he wields.

"I could have really used one.", I said. "All those assholes, man.. hey, you mind sending a squad to waste some guys? No problem for you, right?"

"Well, it wouldn't be a problem, but I like to keep the tactical shit to a minimum. Don't wanna raise any more eyebrows than I have to." Yes, they are the masters, but they're the secret masters.

"Yeah, I can see it now.. 'Assholes found dead in their beds! Local community dances for joy! More at 11!'", I cracked. Why am I cracking jokes? Why not?

"Billy, I'm sorry, but I am not going to waste resources wasting my servant's old enemies. Besides, you'll probably outlive them by millennia anyway." Good point. "Now for this speech... ergh!" I am certain he would have commanded me to help, if I knew any of the details of what he was doing. What came on his screen was not one of those what-controls-what maps used by various conspiracy theorists to illustrate their beliefs, but just lists. Lists of unfinished business, lists of projects, lists of ideas. Dividing resources, selecting people, implementing policies- the same things, I realized, that you'd see discussed in the halls of any other kind of organization, large or small. What's the order of the day? Well, first we have to decide who should get what in this new industry, we have to decide who's worthy of promotion, and we have to decide what direction our string-pulling shall go in next. Perfectly normal, reasonable, and businesslike, using its own order and its own decision-making protocol. Well- how does one expect them to behave, anyway?

He did his job with efficiency. Had I known the details, I would have asked to help, because I want a hand in this. He's deciding the fate of nations with the click of a mouse, writing down things, nodding his head, and occasionally deleting something he didn't want to mention. Sarah seemed to know some things as well. Hmm, that is an interesting question- what should they do about Bosnia for global interests? Keep constant war going and make sure the larger countries' people have some enemy to point their fingers at or at least something to worry with? Or make peace and start some major conflict somewhere else to remind everyone that the military isn't totally worthless? We need these people to look like peacemakers, we need to make enemies of these people, that country's prevailing religious beliefs are starting to get in our way... he went from topic to topic with ease, indiscriminately judging government, corporate, and popular interests alike, deciding the issues that were left on the old Dominator's back burner. "Better let Gates take care of that himself.", he muttered in examining something labeled 'Public versus Private (Anti-Trust) in normal courts- theory, practice, ramifications' and some other, related articles from other people.

"Hold up.. Billy? Read this shit over, and tell me if there's anything particularly crazy or esoteric.", he said, gesturing me to read the notes, ideas, and outline he had transcribed.

"It's all crazy and esoteric...", I said after doing some semi-amused doubletakes on a few items, my mind flittering around with random jokes and half-thoughts. Domination.. manipulation.. re-education.. take coordination! Don't drink and dominate, kids! Of course, anything which would cause mistakes to be made in this field would be out of the question. This is complicated as hell. To figure out exactly what every little thing meant- the exact meaning, not just what it says- would require the years of training and exposure he's obviously had. I'm not sure what Globalism vs. Globality (Howard didn't put it in his speech, but it's an article that came up) means. I'm not sure what some of these items mean in these terms. But I know this much: I'm going to be sure, sooner or later.. and that thought would not quit pounding on my brain like a raging ape.

"So what's the worst of it?" The worst had to be the dates, which he had prepared if asked a question, but he didn't intend to speak about them. One thing I know about science fiction is that it tends to think that technology will advance unrealistically fast in certain ways and unrealistically slow in others. Unless they're hiding elephants behind palm trees, these dates are sci-fi dates.

"The worst? That would probably be this bit about checking the majority of the populace's brain chemistry by 2015.. and this bit over here about having a true visible world government in 2010. Howard, at least add some damn years to that. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to prevent this shit, remember? John Birch Society, all those militias.. you're begging for it if you think you can do all this in two decades."

"Billy, we own the John Birch Society. It's one of our tools. And the militias- any country in the world, any 'people's army' or whatever- are a bad joke. Fringe groups do not bother us. We can grind them into blood paste. The only thing I have to worry about is the mainstream disliking the idea, and if we put enough crap out in favor, they'll walk right into it like the sheep they are."

"This is crazy.." Which would fit him right in.

"By whose standards? The normals'?"

"Yeah.." What are the standards around here for insanity? I imagine they're much different. I suppose I'm not going crazy, in his terms. I'm just behaving as predicted... as planned.