Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Jorgensen leaned back on his reclining couch and perused a popular novel, some of his long blond hair hanging over the back of the seat, glad he'd never need reading glasses again. His eyes were still growing, but when they started to blur at any distance he simply went to Northberg to get them repaired, like everyone else in the Illuminati. Three years ago he would have marveled at the prospect, but these days he wondered how he got along without it.

The novel in question was 1984.

"Reading an old enemy's book, I see," a very familiar voice asked to his left. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was, in fact, a traitor to the Illuminati. Before the Second World War, the Illuminati had far less real power than it did in the twenty-first century, and Blair lived long enough to publish something he thought would help undermine their authority, by showing men what may happen under total control. Like many things in history, it seems far sillier today than it did then.

Jeremy Jorgensen didn't need to turn his head and look at them- they could practically read his face from behind- but did so as a gesture of respect. They'd decided to have fun by simply showing up uninvited and walking in, Jeremy's Enforcers opening the door for them. Few Illuminati, especially after last year, would deny the Dominator access to anywhere unless they had a very good reason, because of both formal statute and physical power. It was a common-sense order that many hundreds had given: if the Dominator wants something, give it to him, and if he wants to enter somewhere, let him the fuck in! Jeremy's own personal servant was an exception because of Jeremy's unusual insistence that he have no standing orders of any kind, meaning that Joey would happily let them in on his own initiative.

Jeremy wondered if it would have been more embarrassing had the twins walked in on him when he was naked, instead of when he was wearing comfortable white shorts and a Duumvirate-logo T-shirt. Jeremy wasn't quite sure when the Real News-derived logo had become so popular in the organization, but almost every teenager had at least one, and he wore one of his regularly.

"So how many times have you read this?" the twin to his right asked. Jeremy recognized the look- 'I'm going to teach you something, so listen up'- instantly, even though it had been about two years since the Dominator had personally given him his unique brand of pedagogy. He- they- had a bit more height, strength, and a slightly deeper voice since they last did this, but they gave both the impression of eternal youth and that they had all the wisdom of the ages, so that two, five, a thousand years would make little if any difference. Both statements were backed up by scientific fact. "And where's Joey?" the one on the left added.

"This would be my third. Joey's in the basement doing weapons testing." With no retrovirus, a perceived need for intensely personal defense, and many Illuminati being of limited physical strength, there was an obvious demand for some weapons to be carried and used by people you wouldn't expect to be combatants, as a last resort. Unfortunately, as the events of last year had shown, a lot of things could end up at last resorts, so the people who would be carrying these weapons would do so with the knowledge that they just might have to pull them out against a far superior set of combatants. On the bright side, it gave a great opportunity for a pair of normal-born fourteen-year-old boys to play with them.

"So how many mistakes of the Party's do you recognize?" the one on the right asked, casually flipping over the couch and plopping at Jeremy's right, looking over his shoulder, as the other sat to his left. Jeremy realized the signal honor he was getting. Sitting in the center of the Duumvirate symbolized that he was the most powerful person in the world at the moment, and the twins didn't give the privilege to anyone except their dearest friends.

"Quite a few, but I wasn't focusing on that. I was thinking about how they're like us in controlling the perceived opposition."

"Yes, but they do it inefficiently," the one sitting to his left said. It was probably Howard, with the familiar pedagogy, but Jeremy knew he could never be sure. "Think about it. All that waste for each dead prisoner. They disobeyed their own logic. They could have wasted him and wished him out of existence." Jeremy nodded- he'd seen it too, but took it as just a literary phantom. "All that bullshit about power being attained through someone else's suffering." All three of them took that part as a vulgarity, almost a personal affront. "And that whole nonsense about doublethink- the changing of allies, the bullshit about believing two thoughts at once. Wholly unnecessary. Jeremy, how many of us are there?" the one on his right asked.

"Two of you. But there might as well be one, since you do the same things and agree with each other all the time. It's just more familiar for us to think Dominator instead of Duumvirate, you've declared yourselves to mutually have the one position, and of course all the old formal documents still say 'Dominator', and the position is still called that. It's habit, especially since we can't even identify you by first name. Why don't you let people tell the difference, anyway?" What Jeremy had in mind was an 'H' and 'B' embroidered somewhere near their heart- an 'H' and 'W', he mentally corrected himself. He had a hard time thinking of Howard's brother and former servant as anything but 'Billy'.

"Just a proclivity," the one on the right said with a smile. "It adds to the mystique. My point is that you know what the truth is, and you don't deny it, you don't say the truth is anything else, you simply move around it for reasons of convenience. Suppose the Operator royally fucked up and there was a huge bulbous growth on the end of our noses." Jeremy smiled in spite of himself. The idea of the genetically refined Dominator having a deformity of any sort was humorously absurd. "You would notice it- you couldn't help but notice it, and if asked, of course you'd say you notice it- but you wouldn't stare at it. You'd ignore it, for politeness. Sure, it'd be a running joke, and everyone would constantly poke fun at it, but in a very real sense, eventually it would be as if it wasn't there at all."

The one on the left started speaking as soon as his brother finished- another truth to ignore, Jeremy thought. "This is where Orwell is wrong, and I don't think he's being intentionally wrong to make a better story. You don't make people believe two contradictory things at the same time. You don't try to edit reality. That's insane. What you do is make it so that it doesn't matter what the truth is. This is why we don't need to lie about the news or about politics."

"I thought that was just because we control both sides of everything that's newsworthy."

"It is, but that's only part of it. Any move we make towards control is going to leave some kind of evidence. There's just no way around it. All laws are public in most civilized countries, and there's no real way we could make it otherwise. So what we do is we put up stuff that doesn't matter as if it does matter, and move the public stuff that really matters to the back."

"I was wondering why you report it at all." This was actually disheartening to hear for the twins. Howard had been preaching Advanced Recursive Encompassization- full control of the social results of what the Illuminati did, while they did it- since he took the reins of power. Nice in theory, great speech fodder, devastatingly difficult to find Illuminati able to carry it out.

"Because we need to raise the stink as well. Now, this is utterly unlikely, but let's say that we got really ambitious tomorrow in, say, the United States of America, and built a really big facility making mind control implants with the eye-in-triangle symbol all over everything in the industrial part of a city." Jeremy couldn't help but laugh. "Now, what do you think we'd do in the city papers and on the local networks? Would we put it on Page One, 'Industrialists who believe they control the world building huge facility in middle of city!' Of course not. Would we not report it at all? No, because people would get suspicious. What we do is just lower the importance a notch, maybe a small blurb on a few pages, a few paragraphs, 'Neurotechnology innovators open up new facility downtown', with some volunteer requests in the classifieds." Jeremy laughed even harder, and the twins chuckled along with him. "This is obviously an extreme example to make a point, but you get the idea. News of that nature we have to report, since it's big, it's obvious, and it can affect a lot of people. A lot of our real operations just get passed along in thick bureaucratese, available to anyone who wants them.. but who the hell would? It doesn't matter, it's pointless to read through, and since the world and its politics are all already being dealt with anyway by people with suitably different political opinions, who cares? They might argue over stuff we've set up, but usually the masses just say 'Let them deal with it.' and go about their business, and they vote for people who serve us when the time comes. It's true what happens, it's true that the laws are passed, it's true that who they elect gets into nominal power, but it doesn't matter. We've already set up the game board and determined the players. They don't realize that anything has been taken away from them, and in an important way, not much has."

"Which one's better?" the one on his right asked. "To focus on controlling everyone's mind absolutely, even your own Inner Party, or to make it so that the real happenings in the world simply don't matter, are controlled by things they know they can't really affect anyway, and can be ignored as part of everyday life, or argued about to make them feel like they're accomplishing something? Remember.. oh, the American presidential election?" Although his residence was in England, Jeremy and his servant grew up together in American suburbia.

"I don't want to. It's not my department, and I've got enough complicated crap to deal with." The difference between ignorance and apathy: Don't know, and don't care. But Jeremy was good at what he did, and knew more about European social balance and imbalance, particularly in relation to the recent twisting of Western-Islamic relations, than the twins ever would.

"See? Even you don't want to think about things that don't directly matter to you. Why would you? The only difference is that you're one of us so you know your group's interests are being served, if not yours personally. To the masses, they don't know, and they think it does matter to them, so they argue. They can't do anything else, and even if they could, it really wouldn't matter. Let them argue. Let them fight, let them whine, let them ignore what doesn't matter to them and pontificate over what does. Even the highest levels of normal government not controlled by us can whine and pull this way and that. These votes are illegal, that party is trying to steal the election, and of course, the servants are given instructions to do exactly that. We haven't made anyone do any doublethink, we haven't told any direct lies. Any normal who knows who to contact can get the information and write articles, even whole books about it. It's not bullshit rewritten over and over like Winston's Ministry of Truth does. It all actually happened."

"Now this is something that Orwell was right about. There's a part in this that the best books tell you what you already know. I've known all of this in fragments, the whole business of recursive encompassization, the idea that they shouldn't affect anything.. but I've never thought about it like this. And here I was thinking you were going to start with some sort of defense advice," Jeremy said with a slight smile.

"What advice could we possibly give you?" the one on the left asked. "We've let you have a larger force for a reason. I hope those weapons Joey's testing can save your ass in a pinch."

"I hope I don't ever have to find out. I better keep my ass away from pinches."

It was out instantly: "Better watch which third levels you talk to, then," and Jeremy exploded laughing. Some Illuminatus had at one point decided to pinch the butt of his female colleague, who took it very poorly indeed. There are no sexual harassment lawsuits in the Illuminati. The resulting holdings-stealing, servant-manipulation, disinformation-and-backstabbing, full-on war ended up in front of the Duumvirate and in the Real News and was a source of jokes for months.

Jeremy, like his Duumvirate, had an elevator in his home, although it wasn't quite as good; they could hear it coming. It opened to reveal Joey, who blinked in surprise on seeing the twins. He and his master looked somewhat similar, but Joey had a slimmer face, dark hair, no freckles, and the color-inverted version of his master's clothes.

"You're hurt!" Jeremy exclaimed. There were a number of purplish marks on his servant's right arm, just below the sleeve of his shirt.

"What.. oh, damn. I didn't know I actually had bruises."

"Lift up your shirt," Jeremy commanded him, and Joey exposed some uglier bruises on his chest.

"Oh, woah. I guess we're going to have to tell Barnum to go halfway back to the drawing board," Joey said.

"Maybe, if whoever's firing it doesn't realize he's about to break his own ribs! Damn, Joey!" Jeremy shouted.

"If he'd put his eye against it, you'd need another servant," the twin on the right said. That was accepted as good humor by everyone in the room.

"I don't get it! I actually fired a few shots to make sure it wouldn't do that before I opened up.," Joey protested.

Most boys Jeremy's age could never have figured it out, which is why they're not in the Illuminati. "And then you set it to full-auto, and it was probably vibrating like crazy in your hands and smacking repeatedly against your chest, wasn't it?"

"Yeah.. it didn't start moving upward or anything, though." Illuminated weapons are balanced specifically to avoid that problem; the recoil always goes directly backward and weapon jiggle is usually minimized. By putting the bullets in a straight line, the increased accuracy actually makes the machinegun-type weapons easier to dodge. (That fact is not disclosed by the engineereds who discover it firsthand.)

"The recoil springs didn't have enough chance to push themselves back. Make sure that's the case, and if it is, let Barnum know to give it an option to automatically slow the fire rate after a certain point, and it'll be okay." As implanted servants do, Joey immediately left to obey, intuitively knowing that the engineering difficulties inherent in making such an option wouldn't be balked at by the manufacturer, because it was known to be possible, and so it would be done. "And don't hurt yourself this time!" Jeremy commanded before the doors closed.

"Is this a common problem?" Jeremy asked, after he was sure Joey was out of earshot.

"You mean having a servant so devoted that he subconsciously ignores his own safety and injuries?" one of the twins asked. Jeremy nodded.

"It's not too rare," the other one said. "Generally the solution is a standing order not to get themselves hurt unless it's in your direct defense. But in this case, all you really have to do is make sure he understands where on your hierarchy of holdings he sits." It didn't need to be said: the top. Without question. If an Illuminatus's house, car, or jet gets annihilated in an attack, oh well. Shit happens. Get a squad of Enforcers and maybe a good Enforcer-wielder (an informal servant designation, occasionally applied to some lower levels) to acquire or build a new one. Lose resources to something ugly, like plots or weird normal-world shit? Hey, call in the Dominator if it's appropriate, marshal your forces, get 'em back or an equivalent. Frustrating shit still happens. But good sentient personal servants are utterly irreplaceable, and Joey's love and loyalty made him one of the very best. Leaving emotional concerns aside, even if there were no such things as nerve-controlled prosthetics or superior medical technology, it would, in several ways, be worse for Jeremy to lose Joey than to lose his own arm.

"By the way, there's an assault cannon that's a pretty efficient Enforcer killer. Is this a variant?" one of the twins asked, in a slightly suspicious tone. Jeremy knew why they were suspicious, and all three of them knew how the conversation would go.

"Yes. Better. Wider spread, faster and heavier pellets, much lower profile, recoil system is a beast if he can make it work right. And I can hear it in your voice, you think it's for use against you. It's not. The manufacturer is Barnum himself and he swears he won't let an enemy get a hold of these if he can possibly help it."

"Related to P.T. Barnum?" the twin on the right asked, and Jeremy finally told them apart.

"Yes, William," Jeremy said, smiling. Howard wouldn't recognize the name as important. "Jeff Barnum is P.T.'s grandson. Jeff's dad promised himself to be an even bigger con artist than his father- he was so big he ended up here. Jeff can't manipulate worth a shit- his words- but he knows his engineering."

"Handing these out as goods is asking for Finagle," Howard said.

"Well, what else can we do? It's not like he can not make them," Restricting nuclear technology was one thing, but trying to deny Illuminati personal defense would lose the Duumvirate too many friends. "and he obviously can't put tracking devices in them either." Tracking devices can be tracked by anyone, after all, and anything RFID-related gleefully taken apart and misused. His best hope if he wanted that, Jeremy thought, would be to stamp encoded, nanoscale, serial numbers on them. And take them off the corpses...

"So he can't possibly help it if some friend-of-a-friend decides to trade his new toys in a reasonably fair exchange," William said, eyebrows raised. Arms control? In the Illuminati?

"Come on, guys!" Jeremy shouted. "If Barnum doesn't make them, your enemies will. If I was one of your enemies I think we'd have weapons like this already. What, you think that one of them can't make a better assault cannon?" The Illuminati assault cannon that Paul had put to great effect was a relatively heavy, cumbersome thing, using larger pellets that didn't have quite the same spread. "It's better that we control the supply. And if we find some not made by him, we can use the intellectual property rules," Jeremy finished, smiling. That would be an interesting way to go about discovering enemies.

"Either way, the only way we know when they have it is when they use it against us," William replied.

"If you have a way to stop that, Dominator..," Jeremy trailed off, looking at each of them.

"...we would have told it to you by now," Howard finished ruefully as Joey started coming back. "Joey," Howard said, and the servant looked at him attentively. "Is it physically possible that you could kill us with those?"

"I don't.. probably, well.. depends on the circumstances."

"As we are now," William said.

"No. I know how fast you guys are. I'll start to aim and you'll blow me away."

"Unarmed and a hundred feet away," Howard offered.

"Assuming no cover to duck behind? Yeah. Yeah, I probably could." Joey hated explaining this, but Jeremy's look told him to go on. "You can't dodge this shit. It's.. everywhere. It doesn't rick-o-shet, though."

"Rick-o-shay," Jeremy corrected him automatically.

"How much armor would we need to stop it?" William asked.

"Barnum said 'two and a half inches of high-grade steel'. We use like.. three feet of soft stuff in the basement," Joey replied. Soft to armor-piercing flechettes, anyway. Punching would find it hard.

"Then cover's probably not going to help," William said. Great, just great. The twins would have to fall back on the tactic they already relied on: shooting first.

"Good point," Joey replied.

"I want to see this," Howard said, with a bit of an edge to his voice. Jeremy and Joey gave him chill-out looks.

"Hold up. We've got it on vid," Jeremy said. Joey got space to sit next to his master, extending the honor further, and they played the recording of Joey emptying pellets into soft foam, annihilating quite a lot of ballistic-gelatin targets in the way. The targets didn't fall over- they disintegrated.

"Can you guys see it?" Jeremy asked. The specialized camera recorded at 4800 fps, and this screen's refresh rate was a quarter of that. The twins' visual centers were specially designed for fast-moving objects and they could see most bullets mid-flight.

"Barely," William replied. The pellets were very fast and very small, many times more powerful than a normal shotgun. Great. He'd have to face this shit personally, sooner or later. He just fucking knew it.

"What the hell kind of propellant is that?" Howard asked.

"It's like.. rocket fuel," Joey said.

"Exactly the opposite," William said. "Rocket fuel burns steadily. This stuff.. heh. That's some kick." Joey's idea of holding it was basically to stick it out from him and let it blast hot death in the general vicinity of what it was pointed at. The way it was meant to be used, apparently. No wonder he got bruises.

"It'll be patented like the rest of it," Jeremy replied. "I think that's where he's going to get his resources, actually. Even if people use regular weapons, they're going to still want this stuff. Unless you guys...?"

"What can we do?" Howard asked, almost spitting out the words. "Factories are almost impossible to find. Someone is going to reverse engineer this shit in a chem lab." Which, in the Illuminati, could be the size of a suitcase.

"Don't get us wrong," William said. "We're not mad at you, or even at Barnum. We're mad that there's still fucking enemies out there who would use it on us." A year was a very long time to be stalemated. How many more would this drag on before it was finally over?

"You guys going to threaten him?" Joey asked.

"Of course we're going to threaten him," Howard replied. "The only problem is what we can threaten him with."

"On the bright side, we can do that right now," William said. "Jeremy, if you would?" Suddenly Jeremy's position between the twins was something he didn't want. Being forced to call up another Illuminatus to help the Dominator make threats was not something that would be good for his social life. He did it anyway, gritting his teeth and reminding himself that he wore their T-shirt for a reason.

Barnum answered immediately, a shocked look as he saw the twins on Jeremy's couch with him. He'd just talked to Jeremy's servant a minute ago and was not expecting this. "Dominator! To what do I owe the.. pleasure?"

"Oh hey, Barnum!" William greeted him in a conversational, friendly tone. "We were just hanging out with Jeremy here and we found out you've been making some good weapons."

"Yes. Yes, I am. Reinventing the firearm from nearly first principles. There's so much work to be done," he replied, clearly nervous.

"Look, we know that you're going to make a lot of friends and a lot of power selling these things for people to kill each other with, but there is a certain minor problem, can you guess what that is?" Howard asked in the same friendly tone.

"Dominator, I'm not going to sell to anyone I think is going to use them on you or your friends. I swear."

"Mmm-hmm," William replied. "Can you also swear that you're going to keep any and all sales of them logged in the database, as well as keep a hidden mark in each one so we can know which one's which when we start picking them off the bodies?"

Barnum screwed up his face and looked at each twin in turn, unsure how to phrase his objections. "Dominator, if you don't.. I mean.. if it got out that I was doing that.. nobody likes to be traced. That's.. normal stuff."

"Then you're not going to tell anyone else you're doing it. Make it a system of embedded scratches on a very small scale, it will look like tiny flaws and not a code," Howard said.

Barnum's face twisted up as he realized how he could do it: he'd put the nano-scale imperfections on the inside of the metal, and ablate the layers atom by atom to read them. Technically, it was workable, but... "They.. still might find out."

"Do it anyway," the twins commanded him.

"Dominator.. I.." What he obviously wanted to say was no, but that's what he couldn't say. "Yes, Dominator." He clicked off, to Jeremy's relief; Jeremy thought the conversation would be much worse.

"Well, now that that's over with, you guys want to stick around for a while?" Jeremy asked.

"For political reasons, we really shouldn't accept invitations," William said, smiling. Which was one of the reasons they walked in without one. The Dominator, by custom, goes where he chooses and does what he wants, and no one else may influence his decisions. Absolute power means absolute neutrality. They had accepted invitations in the past, but that was before politics became something vitally important to their survival.

"So we're just going to decide on our own to stick around for a while," Howard finished.

Jeremy chuckled. "Joey, tea and pizza." The combination was one of Jeremy's favorites and he figured the twins would enjoy it as well. Joey immediately started for the kitchen. "The good stuff, the usual toppings, and remember how much they eat." Jeremy rested his arms behind the couch, relaxing. His couch was comfortable, his eyes were fixed, he was pals with the emperors of the world, and his best friend did everything he said. How did he live before he came here?