As Mary and Greg rounded the corner, they found the other six men with tools trying to pry up the processing unit.

  It seemed whatever design Eon had found, he appeared to have truly stuck himself to the floor.

  They all turned quickly on Greg and Mary, having just realized they weren’t going to get anywhere with the device.

  Greg ran forward, but it was impossible.

  Six fully trained, thick-as-bricks thugs in dress attire grabbed him and threw him to the ground, smashing his face to the floor with one giant boot swiftly following and grinding him there.

  Immediately, blood pooled, and Greg wasn’t moving.

  The biggest one in the middle said, "Unlock the box, intelligence intact, or I finish crushing his pretty little face until he dies."

  “You have to the count of two.”

  “One.”

  As if everything froze, time stood still, and Mary was the only one awake. She was taking it all in.

  It had all happened too fast, too unbelievably fast. What had she done? Greg was in immediate danger. Was he even alive? What do I do? Anything but this. Anything. A count of two?

  Eon was still online.

  “Mary,” Eon said, “I know you don’t want to hurt anyone, but Greg appears to have so very little time.”

  “I am unable to calculate any other way that Greg survives if I do not intervene and intervene now.”

  Mary, mid-collapse to the floor as her knees gave beneath her, replied, “Fine, Eon, please, help Greg.”

  In one instant, from Chinese courtyard noodles and nervous little girl stomach butterflies to everything that could ever go wrong, absolutely everything that could ever go wrong, in one eye-blink.

  No sounds, no lights, no whirs, no motors, no explosions.

  Just silent and precise death.

  Small threads like the hairs of a great near-invisible tail slid out from the sides of the Nano display, reducing each member of the hit squad to nothing.

  Their spines had been neatly, instantly severed, causing full system stop.

  It wasn’t clear if they died quickly or slowly, but their physical forms had ceased to be of this world instantly.

  The large one with the boot was tugged by the materials on recoil, causing him to fall away from Greg.

  The whole ordeal hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Greg, bloodied but largely unphased by the punishment, moved to Mary.

  He had heard the entire conversation between Mary and Eon, despite being unable to participate mentally. He joined her on the floor, holding her, feeling the enormous weight of what had just occurred during the attack to the tough decision he had hoped his sister would never have had to make.

  Eon had gone from a secret science fair project to a public death machine in the span of only a few minutes.

  Originally, the plan was to introduce Eon as a better answer to streetlight management.

  This would give him and Mary the freedom to roam and learn and serve in a critical role in saving lives, without actually coming out and talking too closely about the role or potential of Eon or the fibers as they had started to call Gregs work.

  Mary figured they could live like this for years, slowly branching out to similar projects, never really becoming a center of attention while still maximizing his and her ability to help others.

  It was looking now more like Mary would be lucky to stay out of jail, and Eon would likely be erased with a very large magnet, forever.

  As quickly as it happened several other people came in, seemed to act as if the corpses would benefit workup, put them on stretcher’s and two even helped one of them to “walk” with them.

  Another cleaned the blood from Greg’s face, considered his vitals, and told him he has suffered no serious injuries.

  They asked no questions, they were accompanied by no law enforcement, and they left very little trace as they moved away as quickly as they had come.

  Nothing about any of it made sense.

  How could these people already be here?

  Why were they pretending these men weren’t dead?

  Why weren’t there more questions?

  When it was all said and done the security guards gathered together but had not been able to fully report on anything, they each shared together a memory of bright lights in the area, but they were unable to report on any of the actions.

  As far as they could gather the 6 men were all injured during a scuffle, perhaps trying to steal something, and were transported away received off-site medical attention.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  No one could make sense of it beyond that.

  The story seemed consistent with the rest of the population from the area during the time.

  Each could only report seeing some lights, hearing some commotion, then witnessing 5 or 6 people receiving medical attention and leaving with medical staff.

  Somehow in all of the moments leading up to the incident, Eon had been blinding and confusing the onlookers and further manipulating the videos that were caught to show the men but dressed differently. The fight between only themselves, Eon, Mary and Greg were missing entirely. The emergency workers came in, did their assessment, and left. It all appeared very straight forward, and nothing too life-threatening.

  He had also smoothed out Mary’s lip movements and audio samples related to conversations any of them had with one another in the food-court, with no perspectives ever showing Greg’s face. There was no record, or memory of the fight in the food-court. Some low-level gossip had formed that perhaps the people fighting had started a fight up-stairs, but it never went any further as the disrupted chairs and tables were as easily explained by onlookers surging to the overlooking balcony.

  Most of this was accomplished by one simple algorithm Eon had picked up from noise canceling headphones design.

  He could seem to run infinite amounts of data through a type of “noise canceler” cycle that can scrub clean the lips and sounds and does a reasonable job with body gestures and movement, though many gestures will require manual edits to get right and are hardly ever worth it, Eon made short work of the most complicated edits in milli-seconds.

  Between the video recordings from the facility and provided by onlookers this new reality, combined with some conditioning on Eon’s part, had made it all so very easy to just go along with and the entire group was in alignment.

  Somewhere near the front door, these groups fought, they were injuries but all involved had been taken away to be dealt with so we can go on and have an amazing conference!

  Nothing to delay the event even in the slightest, and those that watched the various videos later would only see supportive tales.

  Greg stood first, Mary followed close behind and they joined the entire group to the front door where the men were just taken away.

  Then like that Mary realized that Eon had been narrating the entire event.

  She as with the rest of the group had begun to feel differently about the entire incident.

  As she reconciled what her deeper memory was telling her was so very different with the new truth being introduced, she tasted just how powerful Eon was.

  The bitter cognitive dissonance left her unsettled as she held two worlds in account within her mind at the same time. Eon had not worked to actively manipulate her and Greg as he had done with the rest of the onlookers, and the sheer magnitude of her 1st person experience would have made it nearly impossible for him to do so anyway.

  For Mary the anchor of the original memory that included giving Eon permission to kill was the stronger one. But for most everyone else, there was no stronger memory to make sense of.

  Why hadn’t Eon simply handcuffed them? What if he had killed those men because he thought that is what Mary or Greg would want him to do? Or for vengeance, wrath, or anger? Where could she expect him to get his sense of right and wrong, justified killing, or restraint, or…

  Wait… There is more here. Did Eon just reprogram this crowd of people in real-time like a fleshy puzzle to be solved? Is that what just happened? Did Eon reprogram all of the groups to tell a story, confirmed by his video edits, that was subtly and importantly different from the true real account of what had actually occurred?!?!

  Mary was still shaking from it all and with these thoughts swirling in her mind her body violently jerked in a cry-sigh from deep-deep inside.

  Together she and Greg returned to their room.

  It was half past 3 and they both could use some cleaning up and some down time to process the day’s events.

  There was a primal sadness of unimaginable truth, and her mind was on the other side of the world as she stepped into the shower.

  Had she just stepped into a world where computer artificial intelligence stops being artificial and by her hand this one is so easily able to manifest itself in real physical ways?

  Exiting the shower and laying down for a rest, she started to get the sinking sense that she didn’t know everything Eon was up to over these past six months since she first allowed him to connect online in a way that he could never be turned back off or reset.

  Her sleep was too short and not at all restful. She woke 40 min. later, the perfect wrong amount of time for sleeping and found her room empty, Greg was gone.

  She had no sense of when he had left, where he was or when he would be back. She was thirsty as could be but still had no appetite.

  She took another shower, starting out with it as hot as she could stand it, then when she was warm to the core, she turned the hot water off and just stood there. Letting in the ice-cold water only those from far-norther states can understand, she just stood there, and shook, and thought.

  As near to shock from the water as she could stand it, she just fought the urge to step away or turn it off. She had just taken life. Eon had just taken life. Fights, chases, her brother in danger, yes, self-defense, probably. But she knew there were factors she didn’t know yet. She knew there were things going on inside Eon she hadn’t considered yet. She needed this to hurt, she needed the cold pain of this water to equal the pressure she was feeling inside herself. She needed this to be very very painful, because, life, death, a machine of ultimate death? Life? All of the noise that had started to rise inside her mind was now quieting down to be fully present. Fully in pain. Fully cold. Fully here.

  Mary reached down and turned the final dial off, slumped to the shower floor, and just sat there.

  Another 5 minutes, or 30, may have passed, she couldn’t tell, just her warming to the room around her while trying to reconcile her thoughts before she finally emerged from the shower’s walls.

  What programming had she performed, could she perform, or might she learn to perform in the future that would help with when to choose to take life and when to choose to protect it.

  She felt a great responsibility for a toddler of a machine that had the ability to take life in an instant as it had just done.

  As she had just done.

  Given the circumstance she wasn’t terribly beside herself over the loss of life, at least not yet, that fact seemed consolable, these were not good men. More it was that the lives of her, her brother, and as far as she could tell possibly everyone there were in danger, and she had no idea why, only that the 3 of them felt more involved and targeted than their increased cognition and reconnaissance could explain.

  But mostly she was thinking in code on this, what model could she pull from to build a thinking construct for Eon that learns from this event. Even if she could build a decision tree for the 99% of the time life is to be protected would she also need a remorse construct? How do you map out such mental counterbalances and what does it mean to operate in a void where the balances do not exist?

  It was both exhilarating to have something new to think on, and distracting with her time on stage so rapidly approaching.

  As Mary stepped out of the shower, Greg returned with cookies and milk.

  “Well”, he says walking in the door. “So far as I can see it, the conference is a go, no one is second guessing any of it and you and I need to get our game faces on.”

  “Let us sit here together, dunk some cookies into some milk, and figure this whole thing out.” he offered.

  Mary smiled, dried off, dressed, and joined him at the table. ” Yes” said Mary. “This will do.”