I sincerely doubted that Wallace had ever read up on proper leadership strategies, yet somehow, he seemed to follow them instinctively. The topical example: Wallace was laying into Nesbit after his return from the parley, but unlike bad team leaders, he wasn’t doing the berating in public. The guide I’d found referred to this strategy as “Praise in Public, Criticize in Private”. It made sense too; occasionally disciplining gang members in front of others served as an infusion of discipline in the ranks of the Emerald Ones, but among his lieutenants, a united front was preferable for maintaining gang morale and discipline.

As the gang’s systems administrator though, not much was truly private to me. I had all the codes, all the financials, and all the security system feeds. That’s why I’d indulged in tapping into what I predicted would be a legendary dressing down of Nesbit—I’d complained to Wallace extensively about the failure of an op that was now being called “Dominik’s shootout” and Wallace had simply grunted and said something along the lines of, “I’ll handle it.”

On the feed of the boss’s office, Wallace was sitting in his chair/throne behind a spartan desk. His mouth, which didn’t quite close properly with the metallic shark’s teeth on display, was set in an expression I recognized as annoyance/dissatisfaction. This was a good sign. In general, Smiling Wallace was hard to get a read on, and about as expressive as an actual shark, but I’d known him for years and had a high-resolution feed with enough bitrate to evaluate microexpressions. With how clear his expression was, he must’ve truly have been dissatisfied.

Nesbit, on the other hand, looked unusually submissive: her eyes were twitching all over the place but generally downcast and she was sitting rather slouched in the supplicant’s chair. It was a… weird look on her. Time passed, and Nesbit grew twitchier while Wallace maintained his cool aura of command—a classic interrogation tactic—until eventually Nesbit couldn’t take it anymore and spoke up.

“Look, I don’t know what the bitch told ‘ya Smiles—”

“Boss” Wallace cut in with a slightly raised hand.

“Sorry!” Nesbit winced, and started again, “I don’t know what the bitch told ya, Boss, but how could I have known that’d put her in danger!? Jus’ a standard collection op and there were six of ours there—everything shoulda been fine! And it’s not like they’re pushovers—Sam’s a good shot and Megan’s fierce as all get out, but—”

“Stop” Wallace cut in again. Nesbit’s jaw clacked shut, and he continued.

“Look Nesbit, you’re a good lieutenant but you fucked up this time—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nesbit cut in with a bit more of her usual attitude, “I shouldn’t’ve sent that bit—Issa—on the stupid op okay? I’m sorry, alright—”

“Nesbit.”

“Sorry.”

“Listen carefully,” he said, leaning forwards slightly, “My problem isn’t that you sent Issa on the op.”

What. A second later, Nesbit echoed my thought, “What?”

“Yes,” Wallace continued, “Issa is valuable to the Emerald Ones and by extension me. Somehow, you seem to be the only one around here that doesn’t realize it—” Nesbit scowled aggressively “—but you’re also right: a collection op shouldn’t have caused this level of problems and Issa could do with a bit more combat tempering.”

Here, he leaned back and opened his mouth a bit more, clearly brandishing his teeth.

“No, the problem is that you undermined my authority. Before I left, we made and agreed on a plan for Aleksander and you to follow while I was gone. Then you go ahead and organize this nonsense—tell me, just WHAT THE FUCK were you thinking?”

“I—”

“What if, for example, the parley I was at was with the Snapbacks? What would slicin’ half a dozen of ‘em down do to negotiations that I’ve been laboring towards for months?”

Nesbit blanched, and in my command lair, I snickered. I knew the meeting hadn’t been with the Snapbacks.

“I—”

With a gesture, Wallace cut her off and let her stew for a couple beats.

“Well, you’re lucky it wasn’t with the Snapbacks.”

“Oh well th—”

“It still doesn’t excuse why you went against my explicit orders.” Wallace coolly interjected.

“Look, I just thought that Issa could use some field work…” Nesbit trailed off.

Wallace simply stared.

“Alright, she’s always such a stuck-up, sequestered in her ‘lair’ only coming out once a week to rave about ‘operational security’ while acting all superior and…”

Wallace continued to glare as Nesbit trailed off again.

“…Fine,” Nesbit bit out through clenched teeth, “it was raining, and I thought sending her into the rain for a couple hours would be funny.”

That utter bitch! I couldn’t believe that I’d almost been severely injured or killed for something so petty, but Wallace seemed satisfied with the answer and leaned back into his chair. A couple beats later, he spoke up, “Alright Nesbit. I trust you’ve learned your lesson? Remember, the Emerald Ones are mine and while I value input, I am the boss. Don’t forget that. I do not want a repeat of the ‘Janice’-incident. You got that?”

Nesbit, looking a bit sheepish replied with a quick “yes boss” and that was that. Then they continued on to talk about more mundane stuff—next week’s rotations—and I tuned out the feed.

That’d been an… interesting conversation. I probably shouldn’t tell Wallace that I was watching, but my feelings on the content of the meeting were mixed: on the one hand, seeing Nesbit disciplined was like a cool balm to my soul and finding out that her motivations were just forged of pure pettiness answered questions I’d had about her motivations. Conversely, I wasn’t that happy about what exactly Nesbit had been reamed about: Wallace hadn’t had any issues with pointlessly endangering me—or it hadn’t been his focus—but he’d taken issue with usurping his authority.

I understood his viewpoint of course, it made sense: reputation and discipline were critical to keeping the Emerald Ones profitable and alive. Still, that he’d said specifically that sending me on the op wasn’t the part of this clusterfuck that he took issue with, in fact, he even suggested that I could use some “combat tempering”. That really rankled. It wasn’t like I was some helpless babe who needed someone to hold her hands while she took her first try at kneecapping some poor shmuck for money with a crowbar. I’d done my time on the streets, I’d escalated all the way to lethal force before, and Wallace should’ve known that. It was specifically that time on the streets that’d led me to realize that direct combat wasn’t for me: my value was much higher when properly entrenched in a server room or combat information center.

Whenever I was on an op with the Emerald ones, I just felt exposed and unprotected. The exact feeling was difficult to describe, but I was reasonably sure that it had something to do with my spacer’s heritage: I wasn’t particularly opposed to combat, but my insides always twinged with a feeling of wrongness or discomfort whenever I found myself in a close-quarters fight—and don’t even get me started on the physical ‘ware. Yes, getting some synthetic fast-twitch muscle would give me an immediate boost to my direct combat capabilities. Especially with my boosted cognition bypassing all the reaction speed issues that most people used increasingly illegal combat stims to counteract, I’d have been able to handle the entire “Dominik incident” with ease, probably by myself. It wasn’t worth it though. Cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel ‘ware like the stuff dumb gangbangers put into themselves was right out. Even the expensive-for-a-gang leader ‘ware like Wallace or, to a lesser extent, Nesbit, had wasn’t super healthy in the long term. Also, the thought of some street-doc digging around in my body—doing who knows what—and even the slimmest chance of my uber-illegal braincase being discovered put a big damper on any “get strong quick!” schemes.

An alert popped up on my feed and I snapped to attention. I was “on duty” for a couple more hours.

Laying in my cot and listening to my servers’ gentle hum in the background, I confronted that which I’d pushed back since yesterday: Alpha and Beta.

They were unquestionably dead obviously. Beta was automatically deleted about a day ago and any bit of Alpha left in the drone would’ve been scattered into oblivion along with the demise of the drone. Since that incident, and the demise of my two copies—the first I’d ever interacted with—I hadn’t spun up any more agents of myself. It was the weekend anyways, so I didn’t have any lectures to “attend”.

I’d broken a cardinal rule that I’d set for myself years ago. Ever since the esoteric and very, very, scary “advanced features” had become available to me, I’d made some promises to myself. Of course, that naïve 16-year-old-me fervently swore to herself up and down that she’d never even look at the virtual “fork”, “merge”, and “backup” buttons so prominently displayed in her mind’s eye. She was even successful! A year and a half passed without me even giving them more than a passing glance.

Then, when I decided to attend university, the temptation crept in. I was a young applicant who’d finagled herself a respectable merit scholarship and was attending an entirely virtual program—a prerequisite for an otherwise full-time gang member. Two months in and closing on 18 years old, I’d found myself facing deadlines that I absolutely could not miss. There, I’d ratcheted my paranoia to 11, written the draconian safety protocols, and used the “fork” feature to divide and conquer my assignments. At the time, this was obviously a “one-time thing only, I swear Issa” but naturally it didn’t stick. The advantage was simply too great.

Since then, I’d found a stable system. Every weekday morning at 0600, I make two copies hosted on some of my private servers and they’d attend virtual university in my stead. With a fully packed schedule, they never attended two classes simultaneously but rather used the downtime when they weren’t the ones in the lecture to study and complete assignments. To attentive classmates, I was simply a scholarly sadomasochist who somehow attended as many classes as possible per day while maintaining near-perfect grades. Finally, at 1800 the two “forks” would “merge” with my—prime—consciousness and I’d recombine to become the sum total of all the memories, skills, slight personality drift, and whatever else the copies’ psyche had acquired that day.

Rethinking those draconian security protocols now and comparing the actions of Alpha and Beta along with my subjective memories of the past eight-ish years of university, I couldn’t help but think that I’d been hilariously wrong. One of the things I’d feared originally was personality drift: the idea that if a copy spent too much time independently developing, we’d become fundamentally un-mergeable and my brain would just lockup and I’d end up firmware-bricked or I’d develop some freaky digitally-induced schizophrenia.

Looking at the issue with fresh eyes and gently attempting to prod my interface with some pointed questions didn’t reveal anything new besides some vague security guidelines—guidelines that didn’t state a specific max subjective time difference for a successful merge but simply warned that “Large subjective-temporal fork differences may require extended reintegration period during merge process”. Straightforward, but not very helpful. Currently, fully merging with my two copies didn’t take more than a minute or two at most, but, they were a couple minutes where I was absolutely insensate: it was the only time my “string of consciousness” was truly cut.

The other side of the science-fiction horror spectrum, evil clones, probably wasn’t going to happen with me any time soon either. My subjective experience of the past four chronological was spent with the majority of my time in a VR avatar at university (as opposed to in my physical body) and the memories and thoughts I’d had while being a copy never had any unusually homicidal tendencies or daydreams about killing the “real me”. In fact, the whole “evil-clone killing and supplanting the host body” didn’t even make sense with my architecture. Anything short of radical psychosurgery or extremely nasty neural malware wouldn’t make me “evil” and even if one of my copies somehow became “evil” through a gradual process, they wouldn’t be incentivized to supplant me, we could just merge. Also, it’s not like I wouldn’t notice one of me becoming eviler—they’d probably start growing a mustache or something.

That brought back me to what I was debating: removing my self-imposed shackles on my forking systems. If I were going to do it, I’d have to commit. No remaining shackles, no remaining safeguards, no half-measures. Just me. Well, just us.

Mind made up, but not entirely without trepidations, I activated the script I’d written to remove the safeguards.

[email protected]_core > Safeguard removal initiated!

[email protected]_core > Please wait, process complete in… T-12:01:00.000

It would take just over 12 hours—another safety feature—to remove my safety features.

Satisfied and with a strange but permeating sense of satisfaction, I readjusted a pillow behind my head, tucked myself further into my cot and closed my eyes for a couple hours of rest-cycle.

Sunday mornings were always sleepy in the headquarters of the Emerald ones and I had to stifle my chuckles at the few of us who were sprawled about—some in compromising positions—around the lounge and kitchen. They were still sleeping off the standard Saturday-night revelry. They probably wouldn’t be awake till the general meeting later, and they didn’t need to be either—Church wasn’t mandatory but being out on the streets during Sunday service was a great way to get flagged by the Emperor’s Inquisitors and all the shops were closed anyways.

In our communal kitchen, next to a sleeping Megan, I found a stack of leftover boxes containing now cold pizzas. Score! Prize in hand, I reheated myself an unhealthy, but quick breakfast. Plate-in-hand, I headed up to the roof to eat. One staircase, an authentication key, and a creaky roof-hatch later and I was up.

I settled down into one of the chairs we kept up here just for occasions like this and watched the day begin while I ate my breakfast.

Our building, or at least the building that was owned by the Emerald Ones through a complicated and occasionally recursive interlinked structure of dummy corporations, was the tallest in the block, so from my vantage I had an excellent view. The sun, which was attempting to burn a hole through the thick cloud cover hadn’t been successful yet, so the city was lit in a dim-yet-dispersed ambient light that made it almost look like a poorly rendered VR scenario. Here and there, streetlights and holoprojectors illuminated the low cloud cover and occasionally, street-level fog patches formed from the ubiquitous thermal exhaust vents.

Aside from the fog and flickering colors of holographic ads, the sky was abuzz with drones of all shapes and sorts, mostly adhering to strict flight-corridors with only occasional breaks from the pattern where a drone would peel off to perform a local delivery or commit the drone-equivalent of jaywalking to shorten their routes. General activity was lower than normal though; I could tell by gauging the volume of the low, discordant hum that the flight units in the drones projected when in use. During workday peak hours, the not-quite white-noise that they produced shifted from “easily forgettable background sound” to “annoying background sound”. Sunday mornings weren’t peak hours though. Everyone was either sleeping in or at Church which meant the majority of the drones were probably delivering food or similar disposable items which couldn’t be fabbed using at-home printers.

The pizza I was eating was one such example. As our property was zoned “light commercial”, we had more feedstock lines and greater throughput than the residential average, but we didn’t find it prudent to spring for a bio-printer for food and the associated licenses and inspections. After all, a printer that can make palate-convincing food can theoretically also print bio-organics, bio-ware, or even living creatures which was a big no-no for the unlicensed everyman. We only had (higher end) consumer printers which let us print tools, weapons, and all the excess paraphernalia that a proper gang needed. No drugs or high-end computational units though. Authorities got nosy when they noticed certain feedstock types being consumed in above-average quantities and while bulk chemical synthesis was possible on our machines, producing product with conventional manufacturing was cheaper, stealthier, and quicker when it wasn’t a one-off.

Watching the thermal vents release their clouds of fog and the sun occasionally pierce the low cloud cover to highlight certain portions of the city, I requested an update from my main server.

[email protected]_core > status safeguard-removal

[email protected]_core > Safeguard removal script status: ACTIVE

[email protected]_core > Process complete in T-00:02:12.392

Two minutes left, I brushed crumbs off myself and onto the roof and retreated through the roof hatch to my lair.

“Lair” was perhaps a bit of an overstatement to what was otherwise simply “my room” or generally “the server room”. Yes, it had a reinforced door, and yes, it a couple rows of monolithically imposing servers liberally studded with winking red lights, and yes, I had a swivel chair with monitor array for the aesthetic. It even had—to my utter delight—an actual escape tunnel. It was one of the special stipulations that I snuck in when we bought and customized the building; officially it was on the plans as “server coolant maintenance access shaft” but I knew better.

I plopped down into my command chair, watched as the monitors flickered on, and then jacked myself into the unspooled hardline connector. The monitors and keyboard interface were only for backup and aesthetic purposes anyways. I mean, most people did have enough ‘ware wired into their skulls to run permanent AR and take extended dips into Virtual, but there was often still a degree of separation. I didn’t have any such problems though: direct computer-to-computer interfacing was almost as intuitive as breathing to me, so I did all my CTO/technical command duties exclusively on the network or in Virtual spaces. The monitors mostly just helped make people think I wasn’t slacking off. Their expectations of what a techie looks like had been primed by entertainments—which had difficulties showing viewers what people were doing on their interfaces—so for narrative simplicity, physical button-based interfaces and screens were still remarkably common for anything that was more complex than basic communication or lookup. My monitors helped sell the image of me being productive to any visitors I might have in my lair. If I wanted to, I could just as effectively do my job while wired in and drooling in bed.

[email protected]_core > Safeguard removal complete! Running cleanup…

[email protected]_core > Cleanup complete!

I spun up one of my favorite Virt spaces—a retro spaceship in orbit above a stunning gas giant—and summoned an avatar for myself on the virtual bridge. Next, I changed my avatar’s uniform’s nametag to “Prime” after which I copied my avatar and renamed it ‘Alpha’. Then, I took a deep breath. Forking myself had become routine long ago; hell, it was automated by a script. This though? This is different. This is new. I’d be creating a copy, but one that didn’t have an expiry date, network limitations, and that I could interact with like I would any other person in the Virt.

No reason to delay now.

Mentally, I reached into my internal control panels, checked all the settings were fine, and pressed the metaphorical big red button. A brief tingling later, and—

I blinked and my view shifted. Instead of standing behind the Virtual bridge control console, I was now looking at it and another avatar wearing ‘Prime’ on her uniform. Aha. Pulling on my uniform so I could see my nametag, I wasn’t surprised to see ‘Alpha’ written there in simple, stark lettering.

Looking up at back up at Prime whose mildly confused expression probably mirrored my own, I spoke:

“Well, this is certainly interesting. Do—” I struggled briefly to choose the right pronoun, “—we want to get a Beta?”

“Sure, I—we? Were planning on doing so anyways, do you—”

“Sure, sure it’s a good test.”

Reaching into my now-simulated mental control panel again, I hit the fork button and shunted it towards an avatar labeled ‘Beta’, and suddenly, we were three.

“Well, it’s good—and only mildly terrifying—to know that works.”

“Yeah, so who wants to do what?”

Prime spoke up, “Well, before I was thinking—and obviously, you all know this too duh—that I’d like to diversify a bit. We’ve got capacity for maybe two or three more copies on the server, provided they run at close to real time, so we should probably keep the university attendance pattern going. That way, one of us—probably me—can fork twice in the morning, and then Gamma and Delta attend university. When they get back, they merge into Gamma. Gamma then forks however many of us want that days’ university knowledge immediately, and merges with those of us.”

“Continuing, we’ve been super busy lately with university and stuff for the gang, so one of us could take a vacation, do something creative, whatever. Also, now that we’re doing this full time, I’d also like to revamp our security and contingencies. Finally, one of us needs to keep up the day-to-day with the gang, and that should probably be me for simplicity’s sake.”

“So,” Beta said, “choose randomly”

“Obviously” I spoke up. Of course, vacation sounded nice. Not merging with the university data every day, not dealing with the Emerald Ones, just chilling in some new virtual games or something could be quite pleasant.

“Alright, and…” Beta threw a random number, “Looks like I’m on vacation duty!” she cheered.

Mentally, I cursed, but it wasn’t all bad. “Alright, looks like I’m on security detail then” I said. Sure, not going on vacation now was a minor letdown, but I’d merge with Beta’s vacation experience eventually, and that’d be the same as if I’d gone instead—and isn’t this a weird train of thought. Shaking my head, and waving to the other two who were also going off to do their own things, I sat down on one of the comfortable lounge chairs on the bridge, took a deep breath, and then dove into revamping cybersecurity protocols. Joy.

I spent the next couple hours acting as overwatch and field command for the few ops we did have on Sundays. Most of it was terribly mundane: checking in on guards at regular intervals, checking in on remote safehouses, cooking the latest financial books properly so the authorities didn’t come sniffing, and laundering crypto currency among other minutiae. It was the type of task that was terribly mundane but just complex enough that a legal level two AI couldn’t hack it. Fortunately, a break was incoming: the weekly general meeting. Sundays, after lunch, Wallace gathered the entire gang and presented the upcoming week’s ops, presented promotions or praise as required, and often gave a short speech about short, medium, and long-term goals.

Unplugging myself and unfolding myself from my chair, I backburnered the general monitoring systems and headed out of the lair and down to the lounge/ “mess hall”. This room was an eclectic mix: sofas and comfortable seating solutions lined the walls while most of the central space was dominated by a handful of mismatched tables and accompanying chairs.

Already, Emerald Ones had started to trickle in: unofficial “church curfew” was over so the streets were starting to get busy again and those that lived off-site made their way here through the lunch rush. I made my way to the adjoining kitchen and stacked a tray with whatever the people on cooking duty had whipped up that day and moved towards my seat at the “leadership” table. This table, slightly apart from the rest, was reserved for lieutenants, occasional invited guests, the boss, and me. Already, Aleksander and Wallace were seated, occasionally nodding to each other or making gestures indicative of a conversation going on in a private comm channel. Nesbit wasn’t around yet, and the other lieutenants either weren’t here yet or were currently off doing something else. I plopped my tray down, nodded good morning to Wallace and Aleksander, and dug in. The cooking crew had done a good job: hash browns with fried chirnups and a fruit salad as a side.

As I ate, I watched and evaluated the room. By the number or people in the room, attendance was unusually high—but that wasn’t a surprise: gossip traveled at the speed of thought through comm-chatrooms so it wasn’t a surprise that everyone knew something big was going to be announced today. Wallace’s clandestine meeting hadn’t gone completely unnoticed, and from what I could overhear and the chatter going on in the public chatrooms, the rumors were flowing thick and fast. Eventually, all the other lieutenants—save Nesbit—had come, eaten, and lapsed into companionable conversation, silence, or peeled off to talk to other specific Emerald Ones.

Then it was time for the meeting. Wallace stood up and moved towards the slightly elevated stage in the corner of the room nearest to our table and the murmuring from the gathered crowd of gang members rapidly fell into silence. Wallace commanded respect, and as he stood there the last stragglers—including Nesbit—slipped in from the kitchen to find seats or coolly lean against walls.

Cold eyes and shiny incisors on display, he clapped his hands and let his gaze scan across the crowd. Then, in his slightly teeth-distorted voice, he spoke:

“Emerald Ones,” he paused with a signature shark’s smile, “This week marks—” and then he was abruptly cut off by a bright flash, an enormous bang, and in an instant, most of his head above the nose was suddenly missing along with a large circular patch of wall behind where his head had been.

There was an infinitesimal beat where everything stood still to my suddenly frozen perception. Then, the automatically-triggered synthetic combat-stim glands of those gang members who had them wired in finished dumping their potent cocktails into people’s heads and the room fell absolute chaos.