The next morning brought answers that led only to more questions.

They were on the move, the entire edifice that was Caligula’s Kingdom folded down into an almost unbelievably narrow footprint, compact enough to fit on the back of a wide-bed truck. Keri had heard of such precisely-engineered smart polymers before, but had never seen the reality close up. It had taken no more than a handful of minutes for the thin bedsheets to be removed from each room, after which Anisa and the others emerged with small bags of personal effects. These they dumped onto the truck with little ceremony atop the pile of red velvet that had bedecked the room from the night before.

The scar-faced man from that same evening, who introduced himself as Andreas, attached a cable to the nearest power outlet on the street, like a fire hose to a hydrant of old. From here he guided the other end into the correct socket at the side of the building and flicked a switch.

There was surprisingly little sound. The odd screech of plastic on plastic, the scraping of gravel under shifting weight, at one point a loud crack followed by a stream of curses from Cassandra regarding forgotten hair products, until finally what had been a solid, habitable building became a heavy cube only slightly taller than a man. This was hoisted onto the back of the truck with a chain designed specifically for this purpose.

They sat in the cramped passenger compartment, Anisa close to the never-used but still legally-required guidance wheel. She pulled up her corps interface upon getting in, the lines of light between her arms flicking between menus as she set the nav to drive aimlessly, then left it to its own devices.

The cabs of trucks such as these bore little similarity to the automobiles of previous generations. They were wider, for a start, lacking the space-consuming gasoline engines of old, though still not roomy with five people inside. There were two chairs forward and two back, plus the seat for the 'driver,' as the primary occupant was quaintly known. All the seats could be spun to face towards or away from each other, save the driver's, another holdover from the days when the automation of transport was not fully perfected.

Seat belts too had gone the way of the rhino; now, in the unlikely event of a crash, the cabin would be instantly filled with a momentum-sapping foam that left passengers uncomfortable, but uninjured.[1]

Still, with all that said, the truck instilled a disconcerting sense of disquiet in Keri. The thing was old. Like, time-for-recyc old. She told herself those couldn't have been retrofitted side sensors she had seen getting in. And it shuddered as if it were built with a combustion engine, which was frankly ridiculous.

She spoke to take her mind off it.

"So, you guys just set the computer to cruise and let it take you wherever?" she asked, even though the answer was obvious.

"Yep, that's about right," replied Andreas, smiling around the cabin. "They go wherever the wind takes them, these girls."

"They?" she asked. "Not you, as well?"

Andreas shook his head.

"Andreas only joins us for... special events," said Anisa, not turning around. Despite the randomness of their course, she maintained a hawk-like stare on the road ahead, as if searching for something.

"He's one of our best customers, is Andreas," said Eu.

She and Cassandra had spent the entire time since getting on the bus taking a bewildering amount of make-up and foundation out of their bags and laying it all around themselves. The shifting of the truck meant they spent almost as long preventing the small boxes from sliding away as they did putting on the thick layers of pale powder they wore.

Keri couldn't let those words slide.

"Customers?" she said, hesitantly at first. "Look, you know what Caligula's Kingdom looks like; you must."

"Mmm, dearie," replied Eu. "Maybe we do, but you should know that appearances can be deceiving."

There were moments when Keri was almost certain Eu was making fun of her. Almost, but not quite. Her voice, her affectations… sometimes it was as if she were from some sort of old-time vid clip of when people had truly aged. Other times, her voice and eyes were full of youth. She seemed to swing between these contrasts without warning, without reason.

"You sure we should be telling her all this?" said Andreas, cutting in.

His face was no better in the daylight, the ridges of scar tissue sharpened by what sun managed to get through both the window screen and the clouds on this overcast day. They ran along his features, neatly dividing nose, eyes, and mouth as if into separate sections, and a final wide circle of scar tissue could be seen, half-buried beneath facial hair, running all around his face as if to frame it.

"She got us the data, didn't she? Wouldn't have got anywhere without her," said Eu.

"Because Jayme got it to her first."

"Quiet, all of you," snapped Anisa.

There was a hush.

"We give Keri the choice."

Anisa swung herself around on her seat, straddling the backrest and locking her gaze on Keri. Keri felt her breath catch, and she wasn't sure if it was because of the intensity of the gaze or the fact that now no one was watching over the rickety machine in which they rode.

"If we tell you now, there will be no going back. It is possible there may be some… trouble over what we've done, and you could become a part of it. So, it's your decision; do we tell you, or do we drop you off somewhere of your choosing and part ways?"

Keri didn't hesitate.

"Tell me. I need to know what the hell is going on," she answered.

"Well, that was fast," said Cassandra, not taking her eyes off her own reflection in a hand-held mirror.

"No hesitation then? Well, good."

Even Anisa sounded somewhat surprised, but she recovered quickly.

"It's about the Conception," she continued, the capital letter clear.

Of course it is, thought Keri. What wasn't these days?

Anisa held up the data sphere from the night before.

"What we have here are the plans for the new AI."

This nearly made Keri choke.

"Wha..? But that's..." she stammered, words faltering.

"Impossible? Unbelievable?" said Andreas, filling in the blanks. "Ridiculous?"

"...unlikely?" Keri squeaked, slightly overwhelmed.

"That's what I keep telling them," he replied, with a smug smile of satisfaction. He placed his arms behind his head and tried to lean back, the effect hampered by the narrowness of his seating.

"Nevertheless, it's on this sphere," Anisa continued, flashing Andreas an irritated look.

"We think," said Eu. "Bloody hard to tell, though."

"I said the damn thing would be incomprehensible. Humans aren't meant to be able to understand it; that's the whole point of having machines build it. That's the singularity. The machines keep on bettering themselves, and leave us in the dust," said Andreas, half to himself and half to the heavens.[2]

"How could you get such a thing?" asked Keri, finally finding her voice.

The logical part of her mind knew it was ridiculous and refused to believe it. She could tell, however, that Anisa did.

"You could say... through a friend of a friend. Through a friend of Jayme's friend."

"And why do you want it?" Keri asked. "What could you possibly do with it?"

Anisa laughed.

"Do with it?" she said. "We don't want to do anything with it, we just want to know what it is."

"For the present. For the future. To know where we're going," said Cassandra.

"We haven't been doing so well with where we've been," Eu chimed in.

There was a short pause as Keri took all this in.

"So you're doing this because you're... what? Curious?"

"Curious? We are more than curious. We're scared."

This was Cassandra again.

"Scared?" Asked Keri. "Scared of what?"

Cassandra looked her right in the eye.

"Exactly how sheltered are you?" she asked, incredulously. "What do you think Caligula's Kingdom is?"

"She thinks it's a whore-house."

Eu spoke as if she was talking about the weather.

Anisa cut Keri's protestations off with a raised hand.

"Good. That's what people are meant to think."

Keri sat back in her seat, relieved.

"We... opted out," Anisa continued. "The Kingdom is a place for people who want to disconnect for a while. Or permanently, like Eu and Cass over there."

Keri looked over at the two in question.

"Disconnect from what?" she asked.

Cassandra held up an arm without a word, not pausing in her work.

Keri leaned closer to look. She saw nothing at first, only unblemished skin with the usual scar near the wrist that was the corps-line. Nothing out of the ordinary.

But...

Wasn't that rather a long corps line? Keri's was no longer than a handful of centimeters, at most, but Cassandra's was easily as long as a finger or more. And it looked... not fresh, but more recent.

She drew back in horror as realisation dawned.

"You're analogues," she gasped.

"And you're a goddam greenhouse," snapped Cassandra, anger clear in her voice.

"We do not use that word," said Andreas, with a slightly more understanding tone. He waved a placating hand at Cassandra. "Better just to say offline."

Offline.

Keri had heard the term somewhere before, part of some unimportant, unnecessary lesson learnt in the distant past and immediately discarded. It was one of those things you studied in childhood, how we lived before, in the same way you studied ancient events like plagues and wars. It wasn't relevant to today.

But analogues...

Analogues were, if not despised, pitied. People who had, for some reason, chosen to cut themselves off from the spheres. Some said they were deranged, some said they were sick, whilst others believed they were simply doing it for the lolz[3], but the overarching judgment was one of disgust. These people mutilated themselves, and it wasn't the physical mutilation that was the worst.

They cut out the corps, and they cut out a part of their humanity.

Keri forced herself to stay calm. They had been nothing but kind to her, and anyway...

"But you have a corps," she said, turning to Anisa, grasping at the fact like a swimmer to a lifeline in stormy seas.

Anisa nodded.

"Someone has to. You can't do anything without one these days. It used to be easier, just a few years ago, but now... Well, I had to have one put back in. A limited model, though, without bio-artificing."

Keri tried to hide the shudder. Anisa's corps wasn't even keyed to her genome. That meant there was no way she could access the Terminal on anything but the most superficial level. Without the key that was your genetic code there was no way to break that lock.

They couldn't access the spheres.

The panic swelled back up.

"You can't connect to the Terminal? You can't... you can barely run this truck!" She felt like she was hyperventilating. "How the hell are we supposed to handle a Butcher if you can't even connect to the Terminal!?"

Even Eu looked up at this. Keri saw confusion on every face. All except one, which was looking out the window.

"Butcher? What are you talking about? There haven't been any Butchers in..."

But Anisa's words were cut off by a tapping on her shoulder. Andreas, face pale under the scars, was staring fixedly at something in the distance. Keri followed his gaze.

The Butcher was waiting.

[1] Unfortunately, copies of Demolition Man had not made it through the tumultuous years of the third tech revolution, and no one knew how right it had been.

[2] He looked upwards, but generally the heavens were now thought of a being below. It was scientifically proven that they soon would be. That’s where most of the cables were.

[3] An ancient proverb whose origins were lost to time