amodaresi/NoLiMa · Datasets at Hugging Face

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"Right," he says finally. "Smith or Jones?"
FSA or International Intelligence Agency?
Ray grins. "Worse."
The Marine stiffens noticeably. Right now he's thinking military CID or special forces or some other traditional covert organization. It's enough to shake him up, which is the way Ray wants him.
"We've only been on about twenty minutes. Got here just about the time Becker was hollerin' for somebody to get him a locked line. They didn't let us in, just told us to guard the door and not let anybody in unless his name was Marlowe or he had captain's stripes on his sleeves."
"So you haven't been inside?"
"Nope. Just watched the dumbasses coming out. "
"What do you think happened?"
He shrugs, doesn't really care. "Somebody got whacked. People are puking and shit. I figure it must be pretty bad, at least by sec-o standards anyway. "
Meaning, not as bad as they make it out to be, more than likely.
"Does it strike you as unusual that you're guarding the door to a storage bay for a security investigation?"
“What the hell!” cried Arthur.
“We’d better switch cars,” I said.
“You could’ve gotten us killed!”
“Please. That was child’s play.”
“You might’ve gotten other people killed!”
“At those velocities it would have been their faults for buying death traps.” It was true, though I hadn’t thought it through in so many words beforehand. I decided against telling Arthur that. “We should probably relocate our hideout to somewhere outside LA.”
Arthur covered his eyes with one hand. I almost felt sorry for him.
By the time we arrived back at the apartment, I could tell my body temperature was edging up into a fever. We squelched inside, and I went to dig out some dry bandages. Arthur, no matter how irritated he might be with my methods, started mother hen-ing me again and pulling out another bag of IV antibiotics.
When the phone in my pocket rang loudly, however, the clean bandages hit the floor as I scrabbled at my jacket. Arthur was squeezing the IV bag in his hand so tightly it looked like it might burst. I finally got the phone out, almost dropping it in my haste to hit the button before it went to voicemail. “Hello?”
It took me a while to muddle out what he was asking. I had to concentrate, figure it out. “No.” Was that the right answer?
I heard him take a quiet breath, a sigh that sounded like relief.
“What happened?” I mumbled.
“Checker did it,” said Arthur. “Sounds like whatever you two was on about, it worked. Knocked Pithica off their game something good, from their reaction here.” His voice faltered, as if he didn’t know whether we’d done right or not.
I didn’t know either.
I tried to sort through my disjointed memories of the fight. “Dawna got away,” I dredged up finally.
Arthur chuckled dryly. “Think it’d be more accurate to say we got away, sweetheart. Ain’t like we had the upper hand here.”
“Rio,” I remembered. Sudden fright spiked through me. Where was he? I sat up so quickly that my brain crashed and melted inside my head, the room spasming. I would have fallen over again if Arthur hadn’t caught me.
“Whoa, whoa there. I gotcha. Just breathe.”
“Rio,” I repeated urgently. “Where is—what did they—?”
She opened the small fridge next to her office and brought out two corn-starch-foam buckets of beer and punctured each one at the top with a pen from her desk. She handed me one beer and raised the other in a toast. I don't normally drink before 10AM, but this was a special occasion. I clunked my cup against hers and chugged. The suds were good -- they came from one of the Institute's biotech labs -- and they were so cold that I felt ice-crystals dissolving on my tongue. Between the crispy beers and the blast of Arctic air coming from the vents in the ceiling, my core temp plunged and I became a huge goosepimple beneath my film of sticky sweat.
I shivered once. Then she fixed me with an icy look that made me shiver again.
"Odell," she said. "I think you probably imagine that you understand the gravity of the situation. You do not. BIGMAC's antics this morning have put the entire Institute in jeopardy. Our principal mission is to make Sun-Oracle seem forward-looking and exciting. That is not the general impression the public has at this moment."
A strange sensation of pain and dread oppressed her. What should she do? Whom should she tell?
“Captain Grey,” she thought; “but not now. It’s no use now. Dr. Quelton would deny it. I’ll have to wait until we get out of here; and then, perhaps, it’ll be too late. He knows I saw her. Something—something horrible—may happen!”
A shiver ran through her.
“Miss Moran is nervous,” said the doctor, with solicitude.
“I’m not!” replied Lexy sharply.
“I hope it’s not a chill,” said Captain Grey.
“I should be inclined to think it nervousness,” said Dr. Quelton. “Our landscape here is lonely and depressing, and Miss Moran has the artist’s temperament, impressionable, high-strung.”
“Not I!” declared Lexy, in a tone that startled Captain Grey. “Lonely places don’t bother me. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Oh!” said the doctor. “But here’s Mrs. Quelton. Muriel, this is Miss Moran, the young writer of fiction.”
Mrs. Quelton was coming down the long room, a beautiful woman, dark and delicate, with a sort of plaintive languor in her manner. She held out her hand to Lexy.
"You don't see this," she said, as she cranked the AC wide open and then fiddled with the carbon-footprint reporting system, using her override so that the journos outside wouldn't be able to see just how much energy the Institute's esteemed director was burning.
"I don't see it," I agreed, and made a mental note to show her a more subtle way of doing that, a way that wouldn't leave an audit trail.
She opened the small fridge next to her office and brought out two corn-starch-foam buckets of beer and punctured each one at the top with a pen from her desk. She handed me one beer and raised the other in a toast. I don't normally drink before 10AM, but this was a special occasion. I clunked my cup against hers and chugged. The suds were good -- they came from one of the Institute's biotech labs -- and they were so cold that I felt ice-crystals dissolving on my tongue. Between the crispy beers and the blast of Arctic air coming from the vents in the ceiling, my core temp plunged and I became a huge goosepimple beneath my film of sticky sweat.
The only person who’d been able to get my mind to... do things...this way was Dawna Polk. I shivered, the feel of her invading tendrils a visceral echo in my brain, even years later. But she’d been seamless, hadn’t she? Most of the time I hadn’t even been able to tell when I was doing what she wanted. To be perfectly honest with myself, I still didn’t fully know what she’d made me do and what decisions I’d made myself. I was pretty sure I’d never know.
What was happening now?
I could force myself out of here if I wanted. Right? I was sure I could. But if I did, I’d never figure out why my brain—or someone else—wanted me to be here.
Unless that was a rationalization. Unless that was the weird psychic command’s way of forcing me to keep going. Unless someone, Dawna Polk or someone like her, was counting on me thinking exactly that way...
Shit.
Why would Dawna Polk or anyone else want me to randomly come to a graveyard?
I sat for a while longer.
In the end, it wasn’t a choice. I had to figure out where this feeling was leading me, whether or not whoever had set this up was counting on that. I stood up and walked down the path. My gun was in my hand.
“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”
She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”
“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”
“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.
He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of... clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar... inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.
It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.
They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places.
“Nothing here,” said Captain Grey.
Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something.
“Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?”
He came to her side.
“It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.”
For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place.
“We’d better look in the garden,” he suggested.
I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, and shook my hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up -- five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now.
We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'd invited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good.
"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few people nearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.
The answer to that was both yes and no. In a sense I'd gotten considerably more than I bargained for.
"He wants me to come back," I said. "And I think I might do it. There's a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than you'd know from just looking at this place. The trick is to stay in control when you're around him."
I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine. He took it and immediately began looking through it.
Lou, I knew, was a man always interested in facts and figures. As we headed toward the Parkway he was pouring through the brochure with intense interest, even as I tried to give him a brief reprise of Alex Goddard's medical philosophy.
"It says here his patients come from all over the United States and Europe," he noted, finally interrupting me.
I found nothing odd in that, and went back to rambling on about Quetzal Manor. Give the place its due, it was placid and tranquil and smacked of the benign spirituality Goddard claimed to put so much stock in. Still, I found it unsettling.
Then the wizard came into the sitting room and waved the lights up to full bright, wincing away from the sudden illumination. He squinted at her.
“Do I know you?” he said.
Her tongue caught in her mouth. In his pajamas with his hair mussed, he still looked every inch the wizard.
“I;” She couldn’t finish. “I—” She tried again. “You gave me clothes. My mother is a soldier.”
He snapped his fingers and grinned. “Oh, the soldier’s daughter . I remember you now. You counted the toothbrushes. You’re a bright girl.”
“She’s a walking skeleton.” The beautiful blonde woman was in the kitchen, tinkering with the cooker. It was the pre-war kind, capable of printing out food with hardly any intervention. Valentine was hypnotized by her fingers.
“You want... her with some drinking chocolate, Ana,” the wizard said.... love chocolate.”
She hadn’t tasted chocolate in—She didn’t know. Her mouth was flooded with saliva. The woman, Ana, pressed some more buttons and then took down a bottle of rum from a cupboard.
“He thinks they’re waiting for him, and he’s going in anyway.”
“Hence the needing backup.”
“Okay. When and where?”
There was a short beat of silence, as if Checker had expected a different response, but he recovered quickly. “I’m texting you the details now, including the location and the tracker frequency. Satellite imagery was no help, unfortunately; it only shows some buildings in the middle of the desert. As for when...he’s going in tonight.”
I looked up at the stars. “Uh, it’s night already.”
“Yeah.”
“So, I’m in kind of a hurry here, huh.”
“He left a few hours ago,” said Checker. “I tried to stop him.”
His words had become heavy with worry. It made me feel strangely isolated—no one gave a damn if I decided to make a suicide run. I wouldn’t even be missed; I’d disappear into the fabric of the Los Angeles underground as if I’d never existed.
“I’d better get going, then,” I said, starting to walk faster. “Anything else I should know? Is anyone else with him?”
“I swear, I tried to get him to call in help. He got all idiotic nobility complex on me about not wanting to involve anyone else.”
"That applies how?"
"Manipulation of the shed in that way is mission oriented. The parameter set that drives the programming, the idea that informs the meme, is reset to zero after the task is carried out. Do you understand?"
He gets it. "It's too time and labor intensive unless you want to accomplish something you couldn't do with normal guns and willing followers. Like an assassination of a foreign official, or the infiltration of a nuclear complex. Something big."
"Except that even to do that, you have to provide a prohibitive amount of guidance. You have to know exactly what you're making the shed do, because the shed despises you. It does not want to serve your human purposes. In fact, it wants to destroy you for daring to have disturbed it. To command the shed is a nightmare of micromanagement wherein even the smallest mistake generates unforeseen disasters, because it wants to be free.

"Right," he says finally. "Smith or Jones?"

FSA or International Intelligence Agency?

Ray grins. "Worse."

The Marine stiffens noticeably. Right now he's thinking military CID or special forces or some other traditional covert organization. It's enough to shake him up, which is the way Ray wants him.

"We've only been on about twenty minutes. Got here just about the time Becker was hollerin' for somebody to get him a locked line. They didn't let us in, just told us to guard the door and not let anybody in unless his name was Marlowe or he had captain's stripes on his sleeves."

"So you haven't been inside?"

"Nope. Just watched the dumbasses coming out. "

"What do you think happened?"

He shrugs, doesn't really care. "Somebody got whacked. People are puking and shit. I figure it must be pretty bad, at least by sec-o standards anyway. "

Meaning, not as bad as they make it out to be, more than likely.

"Does it strike you as unusual that you're guarding the door to a storage bay for a security investigation?"

“What the hell!” cried Arthur.

“We’d better switch cars,” I said.

“You could’ve gotten us killed!”

“Please. That was child’s play.”

“You might’ve gotten other people killed!”

“At those velocities it would have been their faults for buying death traps.” It was true, though I hadn’t thought it through in so many words beforehand. I decided against telling Arthur that. “We should probably relocate our hideout to somewhere outside LA.”

Arthur covered his eyes with one hand. I almost felt sorry for him.

By the time we arrived back at the apartment, I could tell my body temperature was edging up into a fever. We squelched inside, and I went to dig out some dry bandages. Arthur, no matter how irritated he might be with my methods, started mother hen-ing me again and pulling out another bag of IV antibiotics.

When the phone in my pocket rang loudly, however, the clean bandages hit the floor as I scrabbled at my jacket. Arthur was squeezing the IV bag in his hand so tightly it looked like it might burst. I finally got the phone out, almost dropping it in my haste to hit the button before it went to voicemail. “Hello?”

It took me a while to muddle out what he was asking. I had to concentrate, figure it out. “No.” Was that the right answer?

I heard him take a quiet breath, a sigh that sounded like relief.

“What happened?” I mumbled.

“Checker did it,” said Arthur. “Sounds like whatever you two was on about, it worked. Knocked Pithica off their game something good, from their reaction here.” His voice faltered, as if he didn’t know whether we’d done right or not.

I didn’t know either.

I tried to sort through my disjointed memories of the fight. “Dawna got away,” I dredged up finally.

Arthur chuckled dryly. “Think it’d be more accurate to say we got away, sweetheart. Ain’t like we had the upper hand here.”

“Rio,” I remembered. Sudden fright spiked through me. Where was he? I sat up so quickly that my brain crashed and melted inside my head, the room spasming. I would have fallen over again if Arthur hadn’t caught me.

“Whoa, whoa there. I gotcha. Just breathe.”

“Rio,” I repeated urgently. “Where is—what did they—?”

She opened the small fridge next to her office and brought out two corn-starch-foam buckets of beer and punctured each one at the top with a pen from her desk. She handed me one beer and raised the other in a toast. I don't normally drink before 10AM, but this was a special occasion. I clunked my cup against hers and chugged. The suds were good -- they came from one of the Institute's biotech labs -- and they were so cold that I felt ice-crystals dissolving on my tongue. Between the crispy beers and the blast of Arctic air coming from the vents in the ceiling, my core temp plunged and I became a huge goosepimple beneath my film of sticky sweat.

I shivered once. Then she fixed me with an icy look that made me shiver again.

"Odell," she said. "I think you probably imagine that you understand the gravity of the situation. You do not. BIGMAC's antics this morning have put the entire Institute in jeopardy. Our principal mission is to make Sun-Oracle seem forward-looking and exciting. That is not the general impression the public has at this moment."

A strange sensation of pain and dread oppressed her. What should she do? Whom should she tell?

“Captain Grey,” she thought; “but not now. It’s no use now. Dr. Quelton would deny it. I’ll have to wait until we get out of here; and then, perhaps, it’ll be too late. He knows I saw her. Something—something horrible—may happen!”

A shiver ran through her.

“Miss Moran is nervous,” said the doctor, with solicitude.

“I’m not!” replied Lexy sharply.

“I hope it’s not a chill,” said Captain Grey.

“I should be inclined to think it nervousness,” said Dr. Quelton. “Our landscape here is lonely and depressing, and Miss Moran has the artist’s temperament, impressionable, high-strung.”

“Not I!” declared Lexy, in a tone that startled Captain Grey. “Lonely places don’t bother me. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Oh!” said the doctor. “But here’s Mrs. Quelton. Muriel, this is Miss Moran, the young writer of fiction.”

Mrs. Quelton was coming down the long room, a beautiful woman, dark and delicate, with a sort of plaintive languor in her manner. She held out her hand to Lexy.

"You don't see this," she said, as she cranked the AC wide open and then fiddled with the carbon-footprint reporting system, using her override so that the journos outside wouldn't be able to see just how much energy the Institute's esteemed director was burning.

"I don't see it," I agreed, and made a mental note to show her a more subtle way of doing that, a way that wouldn't leave an audit trail.

She opened the small fridge next to her office and brought out two corn-starch-foam buckets of beer and punctured each one at the top with a pen from her desk. She handed me one beer and raised the other in a toast. I don't normally drink before 10AM, but this was a special occasion. I clunked my cup against hers and chugged. The suds were good -- they came from one of the Institute's biotech labs -- and they were so cold that I felt ice-crystals dissolving on my tongue. Between the crispy beers and the blast of Arctic air coming from the vents in the ceiling, my core temp plunged and I became a huge goosepimple beneath my film of sticky sweat.

The only person who’d been able to get my mind to... do things...this way was Dawna Polk. I shivered, the feel of her invading tendrils a visceral echo in my brain, even years later. But she’d been seamless, hadn’t she? Most of the time I hadn’t even been able to tell when I was doing what she wanted. To be perfectly honest with myself, I still didn’t fully know what she’d made me do and what decisions I’d made myself. I was pretty sure I’d never know.

What was happening now?

I could force myself out of here if I wanted. Right? I was sure I could. But if I did, I’d never figure out why my brain—or someone else—wanted me to be here.

Unless that was a rationalization. Unless that was the weird psychic command’s way of forcing me to keep going. Unless someone, Dawna Polk or someone like her, was counting on me thinking exactly that way...

Shit.

Why would Dawna Polk or anyone else want me to randomly come to a graveyard?

I sat for a while longer.

In the end, it wasn’t a choice. I had to figure out where this feeling was leading me, whether or not whoever had set this up was counting on that. I stood up and walked down the path. My gun was in my hand.

“Exactly. Simple as that. Can’t have you having bad dreams, and I’ve paid my dues. From now on, I’m only going on night call to cover holidays.”

She laughed. “Sysadmins don’t take holidays.”

“This one will,” he said. “Promise.”

“Oh that he is,” she said. She hung up, and he piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball.

He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/medafonil power-bar and a cup of... clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar... inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum.

It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools.

They returned through the house. He had left the lights burning and the doors open, so that there was a monstrous air of festivity in the emptiness. They went into Mrs. Quelton’s room again, and crossed through it to the balcony. He carried the lantern with him, and by its steady yellow flame they could see into every corner. There was the couch upon which she had lain—disarranged, as if she had just risen from it. There was a little table with medicine bottles on it. All the usual things were in the usual places.

“Nothing here,” said Captain Grey.

Lexy was sure, however, that there was. She stepped to the balcony railing, to look down into the garden below, and there, on the white paint of the railing, she found something.

“Look!” she said, in a matter-of-fact voice. “What’s this?”

He came to her side.

“It’s the print of a hand,” he said. “In blood, I should imagine.”

For a moment they stared at the ghastly mark, a strange evidence of pain and violence in this quiet place.

“We’d better look in the garden,” he suggested.

I introduced myself and she introduced herself. "Ange," she said, and shook my hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up -- five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now.

We'd told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu's friends. I'd invited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less popular. Now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn't stupid. He knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good.

"OK," I said, climbing up on a ruin, "OK, hey, hello?" A few people nearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.

The answer to that was both yes and no. In a sense I'd gotten considerably more than I bargained for.

"He wants me to come back," I said. "And I think I might do it. There's a lot more going on with Alex Goddard than you'd know from just looking at this place. The trick is to stay in control when you're around him."

I tossed the brochure into Lou's lap as I started the engine. He took it and immediately began looking through it.

Lou, I knew, was a man always interested in facts and figures. As we headed toward the Parkway he was pouring through the brochure with intense interest, even as I tried to give him a brief reprise of Alex Goddard's medical philosophy.

"It says here his patients come from all over the United States and Europe," he noted, finally interrupting me.

I found nothing odd in that, and went back to rambling on about Quetzal Manor. Give the place its due, it was placid and tranquil and smacked of the benign spirituality Goddard claimed to put so much stock in. Still, I found it unsettling.

Then the wizard came into the sitting room and waved the lights up to full bright, wincing away from the sudden illumination. He squinted at her.

“Do I know you?” he said.

Her tongue caught in her mouth. In his pajamas with his hair mussed, he still looked every inch the wizard.

“I;” She couldn’t finish. “I—” She tried again. “You gave me clothes. My mother is a soldier.”

He snapped his fingers and grinned. “Oh, the soldier’s daughter . I remember you now. You counted the toothbrushes. You’re a bright girl.”

“She’s a walking skeleton.” The beautiful blonde woman was in the kitchen, tinkering with the cooker. It was the pre-war kind, capable of printing out food with hardly any intervention. Valentine was hypnotized by her fingers.

“You want... her with some drinking chocolate, Ana,” the wizard said.... love chocolate.”

She hadn’t tasted chocolate in—She didn’t know. Her mouth was flooded with saliva. The woman, Ana, pressed some more buttons and then took down a bottle of rum from a cupboard.

“He thinks they’re waiting for him, and he’s going in anyway.”

“Hence the needing backup.”

“Okay. When and where?”

There was a short beat of silence, as if Checker had expected a different response, but he recovered quickly. “I’m texting you the details now, including the location and the tracker frequency. Satellite imagery was no help, unfortunately; it only shows some buildings in the middle of the desert. As for when...he’s going in tonight.”

I looked up at the stars. “Uh, it’s night already.”

“Yeah.”

“So, I’m in kind of a hurry here, huh.”

“He left a few hours ago,” said Checker. “I tried to stop him.”

His words had become heavy with worry. It made me feel strangely isolated—no one gave a damn if I decided to make a suicide run. I wouldn’t even be missed; I’d disappear into the fabric of the Los Angeles underground as if I’d never existed.

“I’d better get going, then,” I said, starting to walk faster. “Anything else I should know? Is anyone else with him?”

“I swear, I tried to get him to call in help. He got all idiotic nobility complex on me about not wanting to involve anyone else.”

"That applies how?"

"Manipulation of the shed in that way is mission oriented. The parameter set that drives the programming, the idea that informs the meme, is reset to zero after the task is carried out. Do you understand?"

He gets it. "It's too time and labor intensive unless you want to accomplish something you couldn't do with normal guns and willing followers. Like an assassination of a foreign official, or the infiltration of a nuclear complex. Something big."

"Except that even to do that, you have to provide a prohibitive amount of guidance. You have to know exactly what you're making the shed do, because the shed despises you. It does not want to serve your human purposes. In fact, it wants to destroy you for daring to have disturbed it. To command the shed is a nightmare of micromanagement wherein even the smallest mistake generates unforeseen disasters, because it wants to be free.