Still, he knew better than to protest to Sobol's Daemon. It had grown phenomenally in power. Better to give thanks for their good fortune.

Voelker lifted his safety goggles and glanced around the cluttered shop. It was thirty thousand square feet of 1930s factory floor. Brick walls, twenty-foot ceilings, skylights, and concrete floors. The smell of oil, burnt metal, and ozone from arc welding filled the air. Parts littered workbenches, and a dozen brand-new vehicles stood in varying stages of completion. Voelker's company was officially a fleet vehicle customization business-licensed to operate by the AQMD. A legitimate California corporation. Their close ties to major car leasing companies, on-time tax payments, and contributions to civic causes put them above reproach. They had friends in high places now. High-powered attorneys would slide down the fire pole in their defense if anyone so much as looked at them cross-eyed. God help anyone who tried to shake them down or impede their business. There was a Daemon work request for just such contingencies. Their future was secure.

Voelker saw Tingit Khan and Rob McCruder struggling with the steering column of a new AutoM8 variant-a 400-horsepower Mustang interceptor. They were bitching at each other like brothers, as always. Voelker smiled to himself. They were like a family. A family with a stern authority figure that would flay the flesh from their bones if they stepped out of line for even an instant.

Still. The rules were clear, the work always changing, and the rewards enormous. Barely in their mid-twenties, they were all millionaires on paper. They would receive five weeks' vacation every year. Retirement with benefits in twenty years. They received financial advice money couldn't buy. Their medical plan, too, was top-notch. The Daemon took care of its own.

Voelker turned toward his Haas milling machine. It was busy churning out grooved steel plates, six inches long and an inch wide. He had no idea what they were for. But they had a work order for three hundred copies. Some strategic plan somewhere required them. A plan born in the mind of a dead genius and enacted now, when the time was right. But right for what? Only the Daemon knew. Certainly no one among the living did.

Voelker took one of the finished plates and placed it in a laser scanner. He tapped a button and the object was instantly measured at two thousand critical points for accuracy. It was dead-on. It was always dead-on. The Haas knew what it was doing.

A two- tone chime came in over the loudspeakers. Voelker, Khan, and McCruder looked up at the same time, then at each other. They all knew what it meant. New plans were in the queue.

Voelker motioned to them. I got it.They looked back down and kept working on the Mustang, while Voelker took off his gloves. He moved to a nearby computer workstation.

A new 3- D plan file was in their company inbox. He noticed from the byte count that it was a big one. He moved it into a central share and then opened it in AutoCAD. It took several seconds, even on his powerful Unix workstation.

When it was finished loading, he stared for some moments at the wire frame model now rotating in three dimensions on his screen. Ours is not to wonder why, but to do or…

What the hell was he looking at? He turned back to the Mustang. "Guys, get over here and look at this."

Khan wiped his forehead, smudging grease across it. "Later, man. This steering column's a bitch."

"No. I think you should take a look at this now."

Khan rolled his eyes dramatically, then tapped forcefully on McCruder's shoulder.

"What?"

Khan pointed. "Goggles says we gotta see the new plans. It's urgent."

"Fuck…" McCruder threw down his wrench with a clang, and the two of them strode leisurely toward Voelker's workstation.

"This had better be good, Kurt."

Voelker simply gestured to the screen. Both men wrinkled their brows.

"What the?"

"You have got to be kidding me…"

Voelker shook his head.

They exchanged looks. It had always remained unsaid. They knew that some would suffer the Daemon's wrath. After the events at Sobol's mansion, the purpose of the AutoM8s could scarcely be a mystery-but they always nursed a hope that perhaps they would be used for transporting critical materials, operatives, or something unimaginably brilliant.

Voelker sighed and sat on a nearby stool.

Khan pointed at the screen. "What isthat?"

McCruder pointed, too. "This is serious shit, Kurt."

Voelker kept his eyes on the floor. "It's just after-market customization."

McCruder laughed. "No kidding. That's not what I mean."

Khan was nodding. "He's right, Kurt. This is designed for one thing, and one thing only: killing people."

They contemplated this silently. This raised the stakes. They were now clearly producing weaponry. The pleasant fiction was over.

Khan added, "I mean, it's cool-looking and all, but this is real life-not a fucking computer game."

"What do we do?"

Voelker tapped his fingers on the workbench, thinking. "I've almost got the current order filled. While I finish that we can decide the best course of action."

McCruder threw up his hands. "Like we have any choice,Kurt? If we don't make these things, our own toys are going to come back to kill us."

"All right, calm down."

Khan gripped his own head. "I should have known this was going to happen. It was too perfect."

McCruder waved it aside. "Let's stop kidding ourselves. We all know we're going to build these things-so why go through the theatrics of feeling bad about it?" McCruder grabbed a grease pencil and turned to a whiteboard. He started drawing a casualty list with little human stick figures. "If we don't make them, someone else will and people will die- along with us. That's X number of people plus three. If we do make them, then people will die, but not us. That's X number of people plus zero." He looked up, vindicated by mathematics. "So we take the course that harms the least number of people."

Voelker threw a glove at him. "That's fucking convenient."

McCruder held up his hands. "Don't blame me. We all got into this, and I don't feel like finding out what happens if we quit. Big things are changing in the world-things we can't stop. We're just cogs in the machine, and if we malfunction, we'll be replaced. We owe it to ourselves to survive. Shit, we owe it to ourselves to thrive.That's what our ancestors did, and that's what we're gonna do. It's our natural fucking purpose."

Everyone was quiet as they sat listening to the grinding sound coming from the Haas.

Eventually Voelker nodded. "I know you're right. I just didn't think I'd ever be playing this role. I wanted to design consumer electronics."

Khan leaned against the workbench. "I wanted to build suspension bridges. News flash: nobody gives a fuck what we want."

McCruder rapped his knuckles on the countertop. "So how does the board of Autocracy, Inc., vote? Do we elect to continue in our present endeavor?"

They glanced at each other, then all raised their hands. "Aye."

McCruder nodded. "The ayes have it. This will make a massively parallel cybernetic organism very happy." He pointed to the busy Haas. "When are these pieces due?"

Voelker thought for a moment. "They need to be placed at the waypoints by tomorrow, noon."

McCruder was back to examining the computer screen. "We'll need time to study these schematics. They look involved." He peered closely at the screen. "This is serious engineering-look at that flywheel housing-and those hydraulics."

Voelker nodded. "Graphite-epoxy flywheel spinning at seventy thousand rpm in a vacuum. Floating on a bed of magnetism."

Khan was pointing at the screen again. "You gotta admit, that's some cool shit. It even looks nasty. We should render it to see what it looks like in color."