I got the taste of the forbidden fruit, and I must admit… I liked it.

It felt right somehow; I now totally dig why Robin Hood did it. If you think about the scope of our future endeavors and what they will entail, we are still somewhat poor and acutely need truckloads of money. OK, that may be a cop-out, and justification after the fact, but I got the taste baby, and papa is hungry for more. (To be clear, I was referring to money… there are many dirty minds out there.)

Let me explain how I came to the realization that under certain circumstances, stealing money is something I wholeheartedly support… and enjoy. (Not an activity I would have ever thought to be involved in; then again, life has a way of surprising you.)

Where was I? Oh yes, it all started with Elizabeth and Anna’s day out in the town.

It is not in my nature to leave anything to chance, so I put a tap on Elizabeth’s cell phone. And let’s face it, today’s cell phones are basically miniaturized computers with a microphone and a camera that can be turned on remotely, it is a surprisingly simple thing to do. (A part of me wonders if they were designed with that purpose in the first place.)

As you may have guessed, I am highly flexible on the whole ‘invasion of privacy’ issue, and I tend to look at the entire thing as an easily dismissible suggestion, not an unbreakable rule. Besides, the remaining nanites, in both of them, were in constant communication with my automated medical subroutines; especially those in Anna, as I was still monitoring her for any changes in her primary motor cortex.

There was not a moment that I did not know their exact location. Triangulation between cell phone towers was an option, but why go through all that trouble, when all newer phones have a GPS chip. (To those of you who are not familiar with this particular piece of technology, it is a Global Positioning System, a space-based radio-navigation, owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Air Force.)

Because of that, I was immediately aware of what was happening; alerted when a small monitoring program I put on their phones, picked up a certain combination of words that were a red flag. Elizabeth had just said to Anna that they were being followed.

I maxed all my AI-core computational power and came to a disturbing conclusion; there was nothing that I (or Michael) could do to prevent them from being taken.

The bad guys’ actions suggested they wanted to capture the girls alive, and my prediction algorithms agreed that such an outcome was unavoidable. Therefore, I concentrated on things that I could control and ignored everything I had no influence over.

The most important thing was putting the girls under visual surveillance; it was another mistake on my part for not doing it sooner. Since there were no convenient spy satellites above them, to hack and take over, I redirected two of the gold operation cargo drones towards their location. I sent the command for them to dump the gold they were carrying to the ship, allowing them to achieve their maximum speed. Their new power source insured enough flight time for any probable time duration, and improved optics enabled them to observe from far greater heights, making them practically unnoticeable.

The next thing on my priorities list was contacting the girls, by turning on the loudspeaker on Elizabeth’s cell phone, making sure they knew I would be monitoring them all the way, and that help was coming soon.

Then I contacted Michael, informing him of the developing situation. I did that last, as I could see right away that he was too far away to reach them in time.

It felt so infuriating and powerless to see them going through such a disturbing and debasing ordeal. The drones arrived before Elizabeth and Anna were dragged out of the car; I could see everything but was helpless to do a single damn thing.

I had to fight my inner self to remain calm when all I wanted was to rage and inflict pain on those lowlifes that took them.

In my digital existence, there are no chemical processes to influence my thinking; just the same, I barely managed to stay in control, so I can imagine what Michael was going through. In spite of our divergence, we used to have an identical thought matrix; I may have evolved in a different direction recently, but the core of my being from where all decisions and values spring from, was unchanged.

The drones were used to follow the kidnappers’ cars, all the way to a secluded mansion on a big private estate in the woods. At the same time, I hacked the hell out of traffic control, so Michael and the team would have an uninterrupted trip towards it. Let me tell you, they broke so many laws and speed records, it would have been highly entertaining if the situation was not so dire. Making every single police patrol go on bogus emergency calls took some creative explanations (or as I like to call it, lying through my teeth).

Well, Michael and the team arrived at the mansion and dished out a can of whoop-ass you would not believe. Those sorry SOBs did not stand a snowball’s chance in hell; they were a bunch of amateurs facing highly trained professionals—it was not pretty. (Well, maybe it was if you are into bloodshed and mayhem.)

They freed the girls and found a ton of money in the basement, which made me particularly happy. Then planned and executed a perfect ambush for Basim’s boss, or as I called him afterward, a golden goose.

The main show, (at least for me), came when Alice was questioning the now late Ariz Rama after the ambush.

The interrogation Alice performed on him was a work of art, and that poor excuse for a human being did not deserve any mercy. Nevertheless, it was not traditional torture she conducted, it was a well-honed performance of psychological warfare, and I say that with the full meaning of the phrase. In the beginning, there were two people fighting for dominance within that room, except Ariz Rama was way out of his league.

OK, there was a considerable amount of pain involved, and she inflicted that by stimulating specific nerve endings in his body, using acupuncture needles that hardly left any marks. Yet, the thing that broke him, and made him talk, was her clinical and elaborate explanation of what she intended to do to him next. When someone has a needle perforating your scrotum, while explaining what other horrific sensations you are about to experience, you tend to believe her. The abominable pain those needles produced was only a promise of things to come.

Imagine finding yourself strapped to a chair, and you are alone in the room with someone clearly psychotic, who has thrown the burden of humanity, compassion, and mercy away a long time ago. To that person, you are nothing but a piece of meat, deserving no more consideration than a cow in a slaughterhouse, being prepared for processing.

At first, he spat at her while calling her an infidel whore, then he screamed, and after that, he begged. In the end, Alice was the center of his diminished universe; three hours from the beginning and nothing outside that room mattered to him. Alice broke his outlook on reality and placed him in a real-life horror movie. At that moment, I was 100% glad that Michael was the one who stayed behind in a physical body; to be a slave of its impulses did not appeal to me anymore, not one little bit.

Strange as it may seem, Alice is a very nice person, with a positive outlook on life; despite all the things that happened to her when she was still a child. All the same, she has missed her calling; if instead of the Army she had chosen Hollywood, they would have thrown Oscars at her.

Ariz Rama did talk, he wanted to confess his sins and unburden his soul… well not really, but he did it anyway (I said Alice is an artist). Then I started my questioning, the things I was really after.

They say the information is power, and they are right. I got everything about his operation and the things he knew about his ultimate bosses, this ‘High Council’, a shadow power group in the criminal world. There was not a doubt in my mind that we will need to confront them eventually; I knew how Michael’s mind functions, and their existence would be a thorn in his side. Oh, he may procrastinate that desire to clean them off the face of the world, but deep inside, his core convictions are that of justice and righting all wrongs, so it was unavoidable.

What put a grin on my digital face was when Mr. Rama (with a little prodding from Alice), told me where the money was. I do not mean the cash Al found in the basement; I mean the real Jackpot—the money in all the accounts he had access to.

I will say this about Ariz, the man had a phenomenal memory. Not trusting computers or paper, he kept everything in his head. It took awhile for him to recite them all, together with the passwords and safe words for the banks. But as soon as he did, I popped my virtual knuckles and got to work.

Yes, I know, stealing is bad, but if you take it from the bad guys, is it still a crime? If I’m being honest with myself, I must admit that my ethical compass is a little wonky, especially concerning those particular elements of society. As long as they are the only ones being harmed, everything goes.

Besides, we need the money, piles of it. The gold from grandpa’s mother lode will bring a few more million, to that I can add the money we appropriated in that warehouse and the Jackpot from the basement of the mansion. It is a substantial sum, but it is not enough… not even close.

To implement Michael’s grand plan, a few measly millions will not do, it will take billions of dollars (with the big B in front), and that is if we spend it frugally.

You may disagree, but it takes an insane amount of money to put people into space; look at how much NASA is spending annually. Everything they and the other space agencies did so far is lame if compared with Michael’s endgame. (When I said billions, I meant hundreds of them.)

As you well may know, such amounts are hard to come by, but then again, I have no intentions of playing fair.

All the money from Ariz Rama’s accounts amounted to the neighborhood of fifty million dollars; so… not bad for a day’s work. I transferred it so many times around the world that it would take an army of accountants to figure everything out. And in case someone decided to make an effort, I put out so many false trails, it would take them decades.

I felt so good about myself until I realized something disturbing… I have been robbed!

To add insult to injury, everything was done legally. The culprits of this highway robbery were the biggest thieves on the face of the planet… I’m talking about banks. Forget about regular thieves and robbers, these villains had turned legal theft into an art form, and not a single person on the face of the planet was safe from them.

By the time I finished all the money transfers, the original sum was short for a few million. All those zeroes disappeared into the bottomless pockets of the banks I used for the transactions. They didn’t work for it since everything was done by machines, and for that service they were taking my millions, making themselves richer while sitting on their fat asses. Where is the justice in that?

I took some time and dug a little deeper into the entire banking system; the things I discovered were simply appalling. All those reprobates were in cahoots with one another, participating in a pseudo-conspiracy on a planetary level, with the purpose to milk money from the people.

They charged for every single thing they did, even when they advertised that something was free, it wasn’t. And you couldn’t escape from them since they rigged the system so everything goes through them. You could honestly say that the banks owned, if not the soul, then the body of humanity… and that is plain wrong.

Right then, I made an oath to myself; eventually, I would deal with these scoundrels, and make them obsolete. Unfortunately, it will have to wait, doing anything drastic now would cause some serious social upheavals, and that would have messed up our plans. Yet, in my book, those leeches were operating on a borrowed time.

I am a freaking AI, and the digital world is my domain… OK, parts of it anyway, but I am a quick learner. Also, there was one thing that was practically a cheat and made the whole thing considerably easier for me. You see, all that money, all that incalculable wealth was digital. That is right, it was placed into a world that I call my own… sweet.

As I said, it’s too soon for that; my plan for resolving our cash flow problems is simple… I am going to steal it. Not from banks, even if they deserve it, but from those that are asking for it. Terrorists and their financiers, drug cartels and their dealers, human traffickers, arms smugglers… you get the picture.

Yep, I’m going after the bad apples, all those miscreants that should have never been allowed to get rich on the misery of others. All that wealth that they amassed will be used for something worthwhile, to turn Michael’s plan into a reality.

I’m not planning to explain everything to him, he would have objected to some things I’m planning to do and would have felt uneasy about my future acts of social engineering and wealth redistribution.

No biggie, a wise man once said that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.