So I decided to kick back and relax. It should come to me steadily, portions and ideas dripping into my mind the way a big decision should be made. Why the hell did I think this would be hard? Sure, most decisions are made in a few days- but that's a few days of blending it in with other work, not straight. Forget the mad procrastinator's way- in this situation, it probably is mad. Very mad, actually. I hate doing long, boring, drawn-out shit, but in this situation I better just do my fucking best- which is usually way up there. Like Daddy said, there are some things that an Inheritor, or any Illuminatus for that matter, simply has to do. I hate this whole bit, I wish those assholes would just fucking know their place, but they don't. They're greedy to the nth power, and I'm their leader so long as they accept me, and so to some degree I have to appease them.

But, for the moment, I was way too curious about Billy and I had a feeling he had some things he wanted to know too. Information is a commodity like anything else- the nice thing about information is when you give it to someone else you don't lose it for yourself. It is copiable, translatable, and malleable. He was vibrating with fear so I asked him, "What are you afraid that I'm going to do to you, Billy?" That was what I wanted to know. He was never free in the first place, and every bit of evidence I have suggests he knew that. I'm not all that familiar with the individual psychology of normals, but Billy isn't a normal anyway.

He seemed to falter a bit, fumbling for the answer in his shaking brain. I hope that wears off soon. He's giving me the chills with that and if I told him to stop, the vibrations would just get smaller and quicker. "Anything... you want." That utterly baffled me. To him it probably made absolute sense, but to me it didn't make a grain's worth of sense- he knew I'd have no reason to-

Oh. Duh. My thoughts kicked back to around my ninth birthday and Daddy was on the viewscreen again, telling me about all the fine points of normalcy and control, and the reason for the freedom illusion was finally explained. Why we let the Americans (and most other countries) believe they're free is simple- it improves stability. A people will not attempt to liberate themselves if they think they already have it. Add a complicated, unintelligible bureaucracy, a system of fake politicians, and as long as we pretend America is listening to the normals, they'll fight and die for whatever we want- such things usually being the control and assimilation of less industrialized nations. So, many parts of American culture are totally against the direct mind control they're so afraid of in cults and their own fringe groups. The very idea is associated with hate and fear over there. Ironic, isn't it? Great for us most of the time, but trying to get good servants from such a place is not easy.

Ergo, he probably believed he was in the literal, Christian Hell.

"Exactly. That's what I plan to do.", I said. "Billy, I can't afford information disparity between us. If you don't know something vitally important, ask it." When I realized that lacked something, I finished, "One question at a time."

"Just what... the hell.. have you done to me?!", he spat out.

I didn't know the exact list, but it's big. "Sarah, what did they do, anyway?" Sarah didn't mastermind this particular acquisition but she's done them a few times.

"Let's see... First, they used a temporary 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 contagions left. Then they vaccinated him for every disease known to man- in his case, including AIDS. Then they did some detoxification, definitely, then.. 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." Billy grimaced.

"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." His eyes bugged out of his head. He believed everything I was saying without question- not because he's a good servant, I realized, but because he'd believe anything at this point. "So if it's not fatal, it'll heal up."

"So why didn't you tell me about this earlier? Like- years?"

I sighed. "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, 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."

He took a second to ponder the brutally obvious. "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?", he said between tears and clenched teeth. Okay, that is getting annoying. I've seen and made people cry horribly before (all comes with the job), but hearing and watching myself do it is an annoyance all its own. It makes me wonder just how far I am from that.

I could have easily told him to stop, but I knew that would bring about no good. One of the first things about using implants is they don't affect the subconscious mind at all. Whatever he can't do consciously, I can't tell him to do. He'd freeze up again. And I could undo that with commands, certainly, but I knew from all my training as an Inheritor what that would do. The part of his brain that determines actions would be in a minefield, unable to step in any direction. I may as well feed it to Fido and make another Enforcer out of him. Gah! This is the second time I've been frustrated today.

"Until you or I get waxed, exactly. And I don't plan on that happening any time soon.", I said, acting confident (yes, acting- watching your clone cry is not a happy thing, and it's really starting to get to me). That's an important point- our lives are not infinite, they're indefinite. You can't point at us and say 'I can guarantee that person is going to be a corpse in two hundred years.' as you could a normal. The same with the age-related diseases. And as for all that crap about non-regenerating cells in the brain and muscle, we keep a constant supply of immature cells in our bodies and regrow everything.

He did not react with screaming as I expected; he did not cry more. He put his arms and head over his knees, wiping his face off. He did not sob at all. His muscle structure seemed to break apart as his tenseness dissolved. I realized then that something had broken somewhere inside him- not his mind, but a shield, the shield of normalcy which so many dumbfuck sheeple hide behind. He was totally uprooted. I had no idea it would happen so quickly, but here he is. Whether his freedom illusion is smashed or not is open to question, but his internal mental structure no longer operates on American moral philosophy, and a new self could develop- hopefully an Illuminated self, one more conniving, opportunistic, and reflexive, one that can handle the challenges that would come up in the course of his life. Even Sarah has changed a bit, from a simple assassin into someone who can think about the reactions of her actions, and anticipate- because it's part of her job now, she is basically my military advisor, knowing details I don't about operational activity. "Finally.", I thought out loud.

Sarah knew what I was talking about. "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?" I read Billy's face carefully as she said "accept it". Anyone with an active freedom illusion would have gritted his teeth or at least flinched at the words. He did neither.

"Well, the impossible just happened.", I said with a slight grin. She muttered something about Lucky Little Fuckers A and B.

"What?", asked Billy.

I told him everything I know, in summary, about the freedom illusion. He did not seem surprised in the least. I doubted a nuke strike on his ass could surprise him, after what we did to him.

"So it's all a lie, isn't it, Master...", he said, with unshocked sadness. "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 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." He nodded.

"Yes.. Howard. Speaking of 1984.. why did you use Orwellian as a swear word back in the arcade?"

"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 across America." Billy had his mouth slightly open. I doubt he's used to talking to intelligent people, and hearing the obvious discussed like that.

"Holy fuck..", he said without closing his mouth.

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

"So no one knows where I am?"

"Unless you count us, nope. No normal currently knows anything about you." I opened another window on the terminal and looked his project up, and read the official line. "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!" I grinned and chuckled. He rolled his eyes.

"What about her?"

"Sarah, tell him."

"Billy...", she began, "I'm not a normal. I don't have any identification. No social security number, no parents, nothing. 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 operation 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." Sarah shook her head slowly. Billy winced. She really did have no idea what the fuck was really going on, then again, no one ever told her. That's why it's called a conspiracy.

"Billy, you have no idea how nice it is to have an assassin around the house.", I said, grinning. His mouth cracked open and he just chuckled, shaking his head.

"I could have really used one.", he cracked. "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."

"Yeah, I can see it now.. 'Assholes found dead in their beds! Local community dances for joy! More at 11!'", he joked. I cracked up. Illuminated power used on the local level is the highest order of overkill. It's like killing a fly with a nuclear weapon.

"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. Now for this speech... ergh!"

I opened up a word processing program, brought out every text I ever read on the subject of control, looked up the power, interests, and ability of the top-ranking Illuminati, and did quite a bit of muttering. Let's see ... Gates would probably want this sort of monopoly but then we have the West faction over there opposing it (and only they know why, there seems to be no correlation). "Better let Gates take care of that himself.", I muttered. Let's see.. saleable drugs, ritalin and all that, guys fooling around with who controls what in that department, I'll leave all that alone.. fuck, we've got some asshole detecting miniscule amounts of our drugs, we better off him and his whole paranoid foundation- fire would work well, we could do that without secrecy violations.. shit, this one guy's a MAJOR thorn in the side of about fifty of us, he uses secrecy too, dunno why he's still alive.. why the hell did the Dominator leave all these fucking project-space timeshare programs unsolved, I can't leave that open, they'd crucify me.. With some small help from Sarah I had a lot of it done within forty minutes, most of it not even involving the speech- I'd solve their inter-personal problems, send them my decisions, and not have to announce them to the rest of the group. If I pull this off right I'll make zero enemies in there. I got a pounding headache from all the annoying work, my pulse doing the Monkey on my brain. Or maybe it's just the fact that this is the first time I've had to do this sort of thing in earnest.

"Hold up.. Billy? Read this shit over, and tell me if there's anything particularly crazy or esoteric."

He read it over, chuckled a few times, and pointed out that it was all crazy and esoteric. I asked him for the worst parts. "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 shit 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."

"You're fuckin crazy."

"By whose standards? The normals'?" He shrugged and said yeah. I got to work on the how-to parts... who could do what. I realized I was probably doing way more than I should, but what did they care? They'd love me even more, because this plan helps all of them. Besides, I'll be the Dominator. And boiled down to its simplest form, the Dominator dominates. And at least, if they fucking work together, I won't have all that shit the previous one had to do. Naturally, Murphy's Law is going to tear that apart, but even Dominators have hope...