I would love to tell you that after that surprisingly fun night, I had another fun day. It shouldn’t be though.

The next morning, a few minutes after eight, I was woken up by an emergency message. That was especially unfortunate as, thanks to the ball, and all the effort to remove the layers upon layers of clothes, jewelry, and makeup, we had managed to get to bed just a tad after five.

Not that the way home was any fun at all. As soon as I relaxed my will, and felt my emotions again, the wave of remorse that broke over me was devastating. Despite my tearful apologies all the others informed me that I was not that bad and that they understood what had happened. Still, I felt bad about it.

Nonetheless, it could be said that I was a bit… grumpy when I was woken up. And I was not the only one when I arrived in the virtual meeting room.

The only one looking even remotely alert was Naveen, the rest of us, well you could not see anything on the avatars, but the postures spoke sentences.

From holding the forehead while groaning, to being nearly asleep on the table.

Maggie was ‘berating’ Naveen, as in, she was standing in front of him, her left fist pressed into her hip, while her right index finger was weaving in front of Naveen’s face.

“… really waited until we are all awake. Fuck it Naveen, we have New Year. What the fuck were you thinking getting us all here, now, at this time of the day?”

I would say she was a bit irate. Marcel, who was doing his best to cover his head, which was laying on the table, with his arms, complained:

“Not so loud!”

Finally, Michael shuffled from the point where he had materialized to his seat.

He looked into the round and then cleared his throat.

“Ok, sit down, please. Let’s get this done and over with so that we can go back to sleep.”

Yeah, sure, as if that was an option. At least for me, it was not. Nonetheless, I sat down and materialized a coffee in front of me.

Eli stared at the cup with some trepidation.

“How can you drink that now? Any caffeine and you can’t sleep anymore.”

I smiled broadly at her.

“Eli, we are in VR. This coffee is not real. I could drink gallons of it, and it would change nothing.”

I could practically see the cogs turn in the heads of the others, and Jessi voiced what most of them were probably thinking:

“Oh… oh right.” Followed by her summoning a cup for herself. It arrived along with cups for all of the others, though Naveen’s suspiciously looked like tea.

Naturally, the coffee was exactly how I liked it, and I enjoyed the first sip. Then Michael decided it was time for business.

“Ok, we are all here, we are all somewhat awake, now… Naveen, care to explain why you called us all here at eight in the morning on New Year? Fuck, I bet most of us are still mostly drunk.”

For some reason, Naveen was not the slightest concerned.

“I just thought you would like to know that we had our inauguration into the Shadow Wars last night.”

We all stared at him for a moment, and Michael succinctly made our all feelings on the matter clear:

“Well, shit!”

I would not have used the exact phrasing… but in general, yeah.

James shook his head and murmured something undistinguishable before he spoke out loud:

“Fuck it, do we have anything specific?”

Naveen nodded slowly.

“Yes, we have. The mercenaries assumed that the majority of our guards would be celebrating New Year’s Eve. They were, of course, correct about our human guards.

They also assumed that they could outwit our bot guards. Here… they might have been right, but probably not. But more important, they did not outwit Cerberus, who had some fun during the night.”

Maynard gulped very blatantly and then asked hesitantly:

“Are there… is there much clean up? How many bullet holes? And what are we planning to do with the remains?”

Naveen remained unconcerned.

“Not much clean up, and you should trust Vivian a bit more. Cerberus is quite a bit more discerning about force levels. The bots mostly used their integrated E-lasers to incapacitate the mercenaries. Though two of them have minor bullet wounds as they were wearing isolated armor.

Three of the bots were damaged but are already repaired. By the way, Vivian, the optical stealth system works marvelously.”

Michael rubbed his eyes and sighed.

“So, we got them alive? Any idea who sent them?”

“They don’t know. We are right now investigating the fixer who was the go-between, but it is unlikely that we find out more. You know how it is.”

“Yes, unfortunately. And what were they after?”

“They wanted to get into the research annex, and from what they said, they were hired to steal our computer research.”

That made James recoil.

“Computer research? We have computer research?”

Maynard snorted:

“Of course, we do. It is just not in the annex. Hell, our computer research is done either by Vivian or by Calliope. All the rest is just applying what those two managed to figure out. But honestly, right now, the only thing that we do not have patented is the Grendel.”

I shook my head.

“That is patented too. From the technical point of view, the Grendel is ‘just’ an oversized Chronos. The same core, the same architecture, the same cooling solution, just more of everything.”

Maynard smiled.

“I stand corrected, we have no computer research that is not already patented.”

Marcel lifted his head from the table.

“But… if they want to use it internally, would they need a patent?”

Eli answered him:

“That was one of the points of the patent protection protocol in the replicators. You can’t use them to make anything that is patented unless you have a license. And you need a replicator to make a Grendel.”

Arnedra scowled as a reaction.

“Do I understand you correctly? There is nothing in computer research that could have been stolen? And those people still tried to do that?”

James shook his head.

“They don’t know that. They only know that we upended the world of computers a few months ago.”

Maynard sighed.

“The best they could have gotten are the designs for a few motherboards for the new CPUs. But honestly, that is nothing spectacular. Just adding or removing features. The rest, power conditioning, cooling, and such are standard, and there is no point in stealing the positioning of the components as the whole communication is done by Q-links.

Everybody can create equal motherboards in a couple of days.”

Michael rubbed his chin.

“So… this was all for nothing?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe not. At this point, I would guess that this was just a probe to test our response. What I am wondering is why did they not include a hacker in the operation. If they knew about the bots, they should have used one to help them out.”

Naveem looked at the papers in front of him.

“That is the strange thing. They did include a hacker. But the Jack in question, a certain D4ydre4m, never showed up. The ones we have questioned so far are somewhat pissed about that.”

From behind me, I heard:

“He did show up. Briefly. Right now, he needs a new board.”

Warden strolled into the room, in her typical nondescript multicolored avatar, and Tiffany groaned.

“Please, choose another avatar. I get sick.”

Naveen on the other hand frowned.

“You took in on yourself to destroy his board?”

“I am the cybersecurity division of Enki. Of course I did.”

That made Naveen just close his eyes and shake his head.

“Damn, ok, you are right, but why did you not notify anybody?”

“That was not necessary. The attack was over in a few seconds, and the only thing he learned is that we use demons.”

That made me listen up.

“Uh, Warden, I hope you did not use a Balrog. Those are way too valuable to burn on some probing attack from a hacker who does not even walk the Abyss.”

“I agree with that. I only used a couple of Gremlins. It is telling that two of those were enough to destroy his board.”

That made me recoil in surprise.

“Wait, a couple of Gremlins were enough to kill his board? What was he using? Cardboard?”

“It seemed to be a heavily, and amateurishly, modified Enertech Cyber-Max T-43.”

I had to shake my head. Yes, on an abstract level, I knew that Enertech made cyber boards, but seriously, I never heard of anybody actually using one!

Well, not quite. They made – barely – adequate starter boards. Not much worse than the Dalgon I had started out with, but that one was utter trash as well.

And seriously, nobody with even a single working brain cell would even consider a combat dive against an A-tier corporation, much less a double-A, with any Enertech board.

And seriously, nobody in the fricking Abyss would try to attack a corporation where I was responsible for cyber security. It just did not make any sense. At all.

While I was still digesting that, Naveen complained to Warden.

“Can we get back to informing us of the attack? Why the fuck did you not tell us about it. It could have been valuable warning time.”

“It was not necessary because it was an amateur trying it. I informed Cerberus, and he decided that human intervention was not needed.”

Naveen groaned and buried his head in his hands, while Michael sighed and shook his head.

I rolled my eyes and intervened here:

“Warden, would you please, in future inform Naveen about any cyber attack?”

Naturally, the answer was: “As you wish.”

Naveen nodded satisfied.

“Do we have any idea what any observer might have found out about our reaction times?”

Michael was back in charge, and Naveen shrugged.

“I guess not much. For some reason, Cerberus decided to let them walk nearly into the annex before he stopped them.”

We all frowned at that, and Kenneth voiced what we all were thinking:

“Why? Why should he do that?”

Naveem shrugged again.

“I have no fucking clue. Why don’t we ask him?”

On that cue, Cerberus materialized. His avatar was a very big, muscular man with three dog heads, Doberman heads from what I had learned, and black and dark tan fur all over his upper body. His lower body thankfully was covered by dark blue cargo pants.

He began speaking without being prompted:

“Situation was under control. Danger level was considered marginal. Identification of target was considered more important.”

Michael leaned forward.

“We captured them, and from what Naveen told us, they told us everything. So why accept that risk?”

“Risk negligible. Attackers incompetent. Weapons substandard, coherence insufficient, communication insufficient. Probability of successful attack less than 2%. Probability of attackers revealing target less than 94%.

Risk deemed acceptable for gained intelligence.”

I… what the heck, that was not how I had envisioned him. Did something go wrong?

“Your objectives should have placed the security of our facilities above nearly everything else. Why did you decide to assume this risk, as small as it was?”

“Information about target of attack deemed important for future protection of Enki. No humans on location to protect. Lethal force was ready.”

Ok, he was not wrong, but he could have been. Obviously, I was not the only one who thought that, as Alena spoke into the room:

“I don’t know about you, but I am not really comfortable about Cerberus making decisions like that on his own. At least not yet.”

Maynard rubbed his chin.

“But… wasn’t it the right decision?”

Naveen just sighed.

“It probably was, but not for the right reasons. Neither Cerberus nor any of my officers could know that it was a red flag.”

Michael took a deep breath before he spoke:

“Just a question here, but how difficult will it be to keep a human in the loop? At all times?”

Naveen shrugged.

“That depends. Some of those decisions have to be made in a few seconds, a minute or two at the most. Not this time, I agree, but at some point it will be. We can’t have Cerberus’ response crippled because we are uncomfortable.”

Maggie was the one who made the obvious observation.

“Don’t your officers of the watch have a jack? If they are in VR at the time, at 40:1 or whatever, 10 seconds warning should be enough for them to make a decision.”

“But then we would have them spend hours at 40:1 and do nothing. That will be bad for morale.”

Michael sighed.

“Use groups, and let them do in VR what they want as long as Cerberus can interrupt it at any given time. They can read, watch movies, play games, spend a day on a virtual beach, whatever. And we’ll pay them 10% of the hourly wage for each virtual hour.

That should ensure that they compete for the job I think.”

Naveen rubbed his chin before he nodded.

“That might actually work.”

Then Michael continued:

“And now, do you care to explain why this could not wait until we all were at least close to being awake? I bet except for Vivian nobody of us had his or her necessary sleep in.”

I snorted at that.

“Nope, count me in as well.”

For a moment they all looked at me with incredulity, before Maggie chuckled.

“Oh fuck, now you’ve done it!”

Michael ignored her though, and stared at Naveen, who sat there completely unperturbed.

“I just thought it was important. It isn’t as if those mercs were in any way considerate of the day.”

“But we caught them, and thanks to Cerberus mixing up his priorities even what we think the real objective they had is fucked up. So there is no time pressure or anything.”

It seemed to me as if Naveen was desperately trying to suppress an evil grin, but failed to do so.

Finally, he shook his head, rolled his eyes, and threw up his hands.

“Fine. I just thought I shouldn’t be the only one to suffer, ok?”

I spare you the expressions of outrage that followed, but needless to say, nobody was very happy about it.

After things had calmed down, Michael asked in a tired voice:

“Is there anything else ‘important’?”

When nobody said anything, he let out a sigh of relief and continued:

“Then I would say we go back to sleep and see each other next week.”

It took only a few seconds for all of them to vanish, though I was pretty sure that sleep was not in the cards for me.

I tried, mind you, but no, I could not enter the dreamland again.

That meant I had to find other things to occupy my time. After some consideration, and a copious amount of coffee in the real world, I decided to work on the research VR system I promised the other K4.

Should be easy, right? Yeah, not so much. Oh, the basics were pretty easy. Just a fast, lean VR OS with the tools and utilities to do science.

The big problem here was that despite what many people wanted, Envision Office was still the standard for documentation and communication.

I know, I could have simply created an alternative to it. Heck, I could even revive one of the old open-source office suites if I wanted.

But therein laid the crux. I did not want to. Doing so would be tantamount to declaring war on Ralcon. And while we were already beyond the point where they could use their political power to destroy us, a corporate war would not be pretty. And I was not so sure we would survive it, much less win it.

That of course meant that I needed to create something that the researchers could use from the new board without leaving VR. Only one problem here. Envision was riddled with ‘telemetric systems’, ‘performance evaluators’, or whatever else Ralcon deigned to name their spyware.

Nobody would trust a system running Envision for their research department except on the periphery.

The actual research had to happen in another environment. I could run Envision on a virtual machine, but that would mean a significant performance hit. Another option was to have the customer simply connect an Envision system to the box. That might actually have been the easiest solution. But… it felt clumsy to me.

The problem was that with Envision's propensity to snoop, it was pretty hard to keep data safe with an Envision system in the network.

Yes, I know it was possible. But it was hard work. More than many big corporations were willing to invest. At least for medium-level projects.

Nobody cared if some office drone tables surfaced somewhere, or if the new flavor for the synthetic snack got known beforehand.

And for anything genuinely important, the corporations did invest the effort and money to make it safe.

But it was a situation that I… was not happy with. Yes, it would have been easy to have Calliope create an all-in-one safety package for Envision. It was easy, in fact. And it became the basis of what I was creating now. Or was it the other way around?

Who cares.

The thing is that unless the box I was creating kept iron control of the data that the scientist in question did not want to disseminate, some Envision update or another would break any security I would integrate on the Envision side of the equation.

Sure, I would give Calliope a standing order to update the protection program on her own, but that still was not a sure bet.

And I could also not count on the network administrator to configure the network securely enough.

No… what I had to do was to force the connection between the new OS that Calliope was already working on and Envision through an eminently secure path that I had designed, and that remained under the control of my OS.

On the other hand, if I designed this connection path separately, I could almost guarantee that some penny-wise and pound-foolish bean counter or another decided to forgo that extra expense and use some cheap knockoff if they decided to use a specialized system at all.

And while I was certainly providing those options, I would not see it as a high-tier solution.

To be fair, the basics of the hardware were… easy. I started with an early design iteration of Glory.

Before I had tailored her to my specific needs. And then moved in the opposite direction. I removed virtually everything that was specialized for cyber-warfare. A scientist would not need a big buffer, an encryption-decryption module, or a utility accelerator.

The box would not need heaps and heaps of insanely fast ram either. It did need the very fast network controller though.

And I needed to make substantially more I/O available, along with the possibility of increasing it even more.

The OS was similarly based on an earlier project that I had worked on. Again, it was a relatively blank Unix variant, and Calliope slaved away to not only remove any flaws that I had left in it but adapt it according to my design ideas of what a scientist needed.

That included an interface for creating their own utilities, though I would offer Calliope’s service for that as well.

And while the hardware was relatively easy and even somewhat scalable, the OS would take a few days to be finished. Not that I was in a hurry, honestly.

But that left the other side of the box. The Envision side. That is right, I had decided to create a single research board that contained essentially two separate computers, with a specialized bus between them.

Again, the basic hardware was trivial. As it was only there to provide basic Envision Office functionality, it did not need more than a garbage can. The basic Hyperion 3 1200 I, the version where we integrated something like a Theia 5 or half the power of a Theia 10, into the CPU to forgo a separate GPU.

Minimal RAM, minimal non-volatile storage, the absolute bottom tier of a desktop computer.

That left the interesting part for last. The bus controller. The problem here was that I had to make absolutely painstakingly sure that communication between the two computers was one-sided and only what the user actually wanted to communicate.

The solution was… still a bit clumsy I fear, as I used the bus controller as the hook for the jack, and let the subconscious of the scientist decide on what was transferred from one side to the other.

That essentially meant that the bus controller grew to a third fully functional computer in the same chassis.

The connection to the full-sized research computer was much more substantial, and I could forgo the GPU in the controller and use the one in the main box instead.

The rest of the functionality was essentially a sandbox that mirrored what the user wanted to have mirrored from the respective full-sized system.

Naturally, that was a problem that took me several days to get done correctly. Not because it was so much hard work, but because I spent most of my days not working on it.

It was something that I did when I had nothing better to do, and honestly, every minute with Ben was something better to do.

Heck, even playing with my cat was often of higher priority. But not by much, and Nibbles only wanted to spend so much time playing.

Considering that Calliope was creating a new OS almost from scratch, as every OS I had created, even the early iterations, were aimed at cyber-warfare, and she had to rewrite nearly 80% of it, the delay was not unwelcome.

Still, on Monday, January 7th, 2250, I had a functioning research box to play with. To be fair, I also gave the two discrete systems, the research box and the bus controller, to the minions to try to break.

As it was, I liked the new box for research. It was… well not really better than Glory. It was different. Better in things that were peripheral for Glory, or any cyber-warfare board.

Abysmally bad in things that were important for cyber-warfare though.

But as I rarely did any excursions into the dark areas of the matrix anymore, the new box, which I called Archimedes, was quite a bit better for my circumstances.

Which, by all means, did not mean that I would simply mothball Glory, mind you. Just that I used Archimedes for science work.

At the least, Glory was still portable. Archimedes… technically it was, but only because I decided to include casters on the case. I am sure that Kate would be able to carry it, but almost every human would have to push or pull it around.

Not that that would be a big problem. Unlike a cyber-warfare board like Glory, Archimedes would be parked in some lab and be used mostly stationary. So nothing lost here.