We were in the Denny's, which seemed to be our base of operations. I was starting to notice things about Caravan, and the world in general. No dairy products, for example. The Beef Rapture had been a real thing.

"Lux, I need to get into the Human darkweb. I need brains and skill. I gots neither."

"There are options. How far do you want to go?"

"All the way. What if I uploaded myself, became an AI? Then would I be the world's greatest hacker?"

"You'd be the world's easiest victim. Being an Ai and doing sneaky activity is really dangerous. If you're outside of the system you can just unplug and escape, more or less. An AI can be caught and imprisoned. Destroyed or worse."

"I'm going on an outdated set of ideas here. Is it really that easy to just disconnect and run away? Seems like that would be something people would have addressed by now."

"Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most elegant. I know a KFC hacker, she was always at the bottom of the ocean and would just jettison her entire rig when things got hot. Then she'd vanish. The rig was on a balloon and would pop up on the surface. It would have mean things written on it for her pursuers for when they found it."

"What's a KFC?" I imagined a bucket of fried chicken wearing VR goggles.

"Kung Fu Crawdad, they're aquatic and tend to compete with Makers for stuff."

"What's a Maker?"

I had a lot to learn. It was too much. I wasn't giving up, but I recognized that the amount of things I'd have to know doomed my cybercriminal career. So what to do?

I sulked in the little bar atop Adaobi's Winnie. Lir, the Cazador barkeep, gave me another of his perfect, perfect smoothies. Then he ran about, Cazador-style, working on this or that.

I remembered the chat window: the other participant mentioning the Human Darkweb. So I left him a message. He responded immediately.

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: Let me guess: too much research, stakes too high, impossible task?

007: All three. What do I do

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: You have friends who care about you. You can't go all Owen obsessive. You have to look after them.

007: I will. I understand.

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: okay then. What's the secondary goal, as long as the first one is keeping Lux and Adaobi out of trouble?

007: My secondary goal is to find out who is doing this. What else he's doing. Because let me tell you I have some really nasty suspicious ideas. And I think Big Owen doesn't even consider them. I don't think he's up on what's happening. Nothing against him, this whole thing was a real achievement

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: I agree. However he was never in the prison. Or in the other prison. Or in the first prison after Sliceday

007: Where were you? How do you know how many prisons?

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: Second prison. We have maps of their locations and floorplans. You were at the third site, and that means we know most of the details about that one before the Bees got it.

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007: I see. So here's where I'm at with this: if you had someone you hated, someone who brought down your entire way of life, even if that way of life was disgusting and cruel, what would you do if you had them in your power?

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: Me? Probably try to be empathetic and kind. After beating the shit out of them, of course.

007: Me too. But what if the injured party was a Human person? You know, a regular nasty murderous cruel ape

OwenBeta_StillBuggy: I'd do bad things to my enemy. And if I could rebuild him over and over again, I'd do bad things to him over and over again

007: That's my thought as well. I have a terrible, terrible feeling that there are videos out there in the Human Darkweb. Ones where poor dumb Owen, straight from the Isekai App, gets resurrected and given special treatment. Those videos would be very popular with a certain kind of Human

A long pause. OwenBeta_StillBuggy left the chat.

"You're right," Lir said.

I jolted away from my phone. "What? What about?"

"Of course they're doing that. They're handing videos around as surreptitiously as they can, but they're drinking it in. They have to be. I don't know why it never occurred to any of us."

I set my phone down. "Are you…was I just talking to you?"

The little orange Cazador nodded, a Human gesture on an utterly non-Human body. "Sorry, yeah, should have said so."

I must have looked quite confused. "How…how…"

"We kept an eye on your group after the camp. Schmendrick herself sent me the word to keep an eye out. I thought it was obvious, frankly."

"How…"

His lip curled, baring a single fang. "I'm bad at this. Not once did I ever ask you what you wanted to drink. I know what the best kind of smoothie is for us. I also slipped up in chat: keep on eye on Lux and Adaobi, I said. I'm not supposed to know them or you when I'm online!"

"You did fine," I said.

"Yeah yeah." He hopped on his own bar, which probably was a violation of health code, and began pacing back and forth. His tail waved, his little delicate grabby hands rubbed together. "The last thing we want, or…the last thing I want, anyway, you and I are not the same people despite all the evidence to the contrary…the last thing I want is a factional conflict between us and the Feast. Are we on the same page with that?"

"You sound just like me."

"No, you sound like me. I was here first by like, a year."

"True. Nice to meet you again, Lir." I held out a fist.

He bumped it with his narrow skull. "Finally can talk to you! Anyway the Feast. They're good people even though she could do better."

"Yeah she could! Why didn't you…oh. Todd."

"Todd is complicated, isn't he? That Winnie picked his dumb ass. He's a racist evil bigot trenchcoat idiot. He's into that redhead you unsuccessfully protect from suitors."

"Your boss is one of her suitors, dude!"

"Not really my boss, but oh man if you had any idea how bad Adaobi has it for Lux. She's good with hiding her feelings, you know, even with the whole soul thing. Some Humans can do it. But some of us have laserlike perception, like the Eye of Sauron."

"Oh yeah? What does your Eye tell you?"

"That Adaobi will pretty much yell to anyone about how much she likes Lux. Me, the mailman, the Denny's cook. It's all she talks about. All she sings about, even."

I smirked. "Laserlike perception."

"I'm Sherlock Holmes."

"I need to score evidence. What should I do?"

"Same as you: no idea."

"I… have some suggestions. I think you'll have already had them, but it would save me some time if you shot them down one by one."

I told him all the possibilities I'd come up with. He shot all of them down. Except one.

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