Watching violent movies with Howard, Sarah, and Paul is a little bit silly, particularly if we've watched it for the third time, but the fresh vampire slaughter of Blade goes well with the taste of cooked baby cows. Fido was at Howard's feet, munching on the gristlier parts. Howard wasn't taking non-urgent calls (damn, that makes him sound like a secretary..), so if we did get interrupted, it'd be for real violence.

Sarah was counting something- probably mistakes in combat. But she doesn't see the point, and likely neither does Howard. The point of violent movies is not to display realistic combat situations conducted by professional fighters. That would be boring, particularly to us, especially if portrayed by normals. The point is to show improbable events, physically impossible gravity-defying moves, and over-the-top fatalities. It's cheesy, and a bit weak in spots, and definitely intended for normal consumption, but it's fun. And that's the whole point.

But why is violence fun for us? I know it's a base response. We all want to kill things, even Sarah, which proves that this is a reflex beyond simple testosterone-created aggression. It probably has to do with our meat-eating metabolism, but this isn't a hunter instinct either- at least it doesn't feel like one. Perhaps it's a combination of our metabolism, our superiority, our frustration with idiotic normals, and our desire for simple solutions as opposed to the usual convoluted crap. Bashing someone's head in is just refreshing.

I can feel relieved, though, because no matter how long I live, the rest of my foreseeable future is going to be filled with violence. Free or never free, I'm going to get plenty of it either way. Perhaps after everyone's engineered and there's no one left to kill, it'll end in the real world and we'll just pretend-frag each other in virtual combat of some sort. Or maybe Northberg will rise to the challenge and make monsters just for us to slay- that would be kind of pointless, though. Or maybe among the stars, there's an infinite number of intelligent species, each of which want the universe all to themselves, intergalactic peace being a subject for normal wishful-thinking fiction alone. A galaxy of mortal enemies, all wanting to colonize habitable planets, and if we wake them up, they'll come gunning for us with technology far beyond our own.

I can't wait.

The screen hissed- ah, it's a non-urgent communication. The movie continued.

Fido left in the middle of it, going home to his den. There's no smell to the movie, is probably why he doesn't care.

The movie ended as violently as it started, and Howard checked out the communication. A man answered wearing a black robe and white gloves. Huh? What position does this signify? The name on the bottom was 'Fourth level, Dimitri Luxington'- huh? He's an Illuminatus? What, then...

"Dominator.. I have a request.", Mr. Luxington said.

"You and six thousand other people.", Howard replied casually.

"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." I realized immediately that this man was not going to get what he wanted, whatever it was. Trying to convince Howard in that kind of language is utterly pointless.

"And which dream is this, Beelzebub boy?", Howard asked flippantly. Beel.. ah. That's why the clothes. I didn't know they had them in the Illuminati- Dimitri is a Satanist.

"The dream of created personalities in genetic constructs. Think of what we could do with that!" Howard looked entirely nonplussed.

"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." Which would brush him and his group off as casually as Howard is.

"We already did. Northberg has it on 'medium priority.' It'll take years." The man was desperate, but Howard didn't care.

"And your poor, mortal body isn't going to stick around long enough to ever see them in action.", Howard replied knowingly.

The man fidgeted a bit and then decided to use truth, which won't work either. "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. I'm going to die, really damn soon, widespread brain cancer." Ah, so that's why he's not afraid of annoying Howard to his own death. With brain cancer, I'm surprised he's sane enough to even talk as he has. "They're already using the drugs, but the disease will eventually conquer." His voice grew soft- he didn't want to talk about it. "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!" The man was utterly, completely desperate, but he might as well have been begging to a wall. It wasn't because of what he's done to the normals that I didn't feel sorry for him- it was because his breed is simply, utterly, on the way out. 'You are not an object of pity by any measure, Mr. Luxington.', I envisioned Howard saying in a clinical, detached, authoritative voice. 'You are simply a dying manipulator to be replaced by manipulators who will never die. Begone.'

He didn't say that, but I was close. "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." There shouldn't be. Howard's the Dominator, after all.

"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. But please..."

Howard's reply was long, but sounded terse anyway. "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." Howard didn't check, didn't need to check. He doesn't own holdings, anyway, and parceling them out to various other Illuminati would yield little to him. "Now go follow your own Rule 2." Howard turned off the screen, and the man was not suicidal enough to call right back.

"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?", she asked, half-rhetorically.

"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.", Howard replied.

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

"Not a damn thing. But he should have considered that I can make his last years on earth a living hell." Don't ever piss off the Dominator, no matter who you are. Maybe if you were falling off a building or something, you could press a button to use some automatic system to make him really mad, then you might be able to die sooner than he could have you tortured. I'm just hypothesizing- nobody, except the suicidal, the beyond-emotional, or the incredibly stupid, intentionally pisses Howard off.

"I thought he liked that, I mean, he is a Satanist.", Paul replied, half-jokingly.

"Not that kind of hell, Paul. Electricity straight to the pain center. Make him hurt like nothing else can." Paul was startled and I could detect a very faint trace of relief.

"Bad fate. Glad Damien didn't have that shit..." Ah. That's the relief.

"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." Which would have meant that the video was amateurish from beginning to end, which from Damien would be expected.

Paul didn't take that well, which was also to be expected. "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 could have.", Howard explained. I'm so glad Howard explains things. Even though it might freak out Paul now, it makes it so much easier on everyone in the end. "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." Insanity and implants don't mix.

"Howard... I don't get traumatized.", Paul said, quietly. That, I can believe. If he could, he would have been already.

"I know, that's why I put your DNA into the database as prime candidacy." He did what?! Howard never told me about that. When the hell did he do that? "That reminds me, I never did ask- you got any siblings?"

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

"Probably not. The Illuminated demand isn't as high as you'd think."

There was another, better, reason not to. "Howard, you wouldn't want to. His older brother's a stupid asshole.", I told him. I wouldn't know, personally- I've only seen him once or twice- but Paul's convinced me with his myriad tales of annoyance, all of which look like happy fairyland when compared to what he's been through over the past half year.

"Yeah.. and that reminds me of something else, something I never understood.. Paul, tell me everything you know about sibling rivalry.", Howard commanded. Although I showed no signs, for a moment I almost broke out into hysterical, wild laughter- but I guess this doesn't really count as sibling rivalry, does it?

"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," Paul made no exceptions for siblings who actually care for each other; in the normal world I doubt he's seen any. "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."

Howard understood but was confused anyway. "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 made a fist and used his fingers to count off items, sticking out his left forefinger and whacking them against it. "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!", Howard replied. To him those things are nothing to be concerned about, and if Paul doesn't tell him why they are for them, I will.

"No kidding.", Paul replied. I guess he's not going to.

"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, annoyed with normal stupidity.

"They really are stupid like that, Sarah. And you know that.", Paul said, pointing at Sarah with his left forefinger. "And he knows that.", he continued, pointing at me. "And after listening to me say that combined with everything else he knows, he definitely knows that." Pointing at Howard. "And after I've thought about it, I know that." Pointing at himself. "But they don't know that." His left thumb over his shoulder. My turn, Paul. He should understand; let me try.

"It's because it's their whole world, Howard.", I explained, and Howard turned to look at me. "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. 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. 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." A lot of this was from watching others, not anything I experienced. The agents I thought were my parents were absolute professionals, and next to perfect. "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 can mine, but Howard's infinitely more stable than the normal parents I'm talking about. "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?" He nodded. If I had hours to make this one up, I would have done better- this was the best I could give on a moment's notice. But from the amazed and stunned expression on Howard's face, I think I got the message across rather well.

"Billy, let's play something fast and aggressive enough to get my mind off this for now.", Howard commanded, and I had no problems with that one. Two minutes later, two identical starships zoomed vertically up an alien landscape replete with powerups, enemies, and two-dimensional death in all directions, the difficulty set so unbelievably high that it needed even our full attention. All thoughts of anger or rivalry with anything but the masses of enemies quickly vanished- in a game like this, having Howard's full help was absolutely necessary for victory, as everything tried to kill us at once while we killed them in droves. In about half an hour, the (tough beyond compare) final boss was dead, Sarah and Paul clapped (I hadn't a clue they were even there), and Howard looked at me, relieved.

"Billy, I have an observation to make."

"Yes?"

"That was totally insane!"

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

"Okay!" And we did it again.