The pieces, methodically and patiently placed over the preceding three years, were all falling into place, and having laid dormant, were apparently still undetected. The end game was ready to begin.

Over the months Aaron and I had spent many long nights discussing the situation, and I was beginning to truly feel like the partner and co-collaborator that everyone always presumed the fictitious Lade 3V3 to be.

I learned a little more about my mysterious knight in shining armor. The guy I thought of as the one who saved my life... and who thought of himself as the one who recklessly put it in danger in the first place. One thing we both agreed on. He changed my life completely. And, strange as it may seem, I can't imagine life as that shell of a human being living a solitary ….subsistance.... in his isolated cabin.

I had barely allowed myself to daydream of life as a woman. Nevermind working with a staggeringly gifted collection of software and hardware engineers, neuroscientists, statisticians and financial analysts, cryptographers and assorted geniuses and legends in their various fields. It seems, the cream always rises, and when it does the best of the best have their individual – and universal epiphany. Suddenly they all saw the puppet strings controlling the world as they knew it. And they all traced it back to the puppetmasters. And the same insight that allowed them to see the truth hidden in plain sight, also allowed them to see and recognize each other. They came together by mutual attraction and a shared vision and obsession.... to fix what was broken. To 'patch' human society.

As people shared their stories with me I was struck by how individual they were, yet how they fused seamlessly into the big picture. Like threads in a tapestry, or individual instruments in a massive orchestral symphony. The 'origin story' that resonated with me the most, for obvious reasons, was Aarons.

He was the typical atypical. Diagnosed as a problem child with all sorts of presumed mental deficiencies by bureaucrats who noted that his development wasn't where it should be and presumed that it meant he was behind, never even imagining that he was actually lightyears ahead and battling profound boredom and frustration. He kidded that he was lucky he was born when he was, where he just got shipped off to a mental health facility and not in a time where he would have simply been hidden or possibly killed for possessing blasphemous gifts. The doctors at the psychiatric hospital quickly figured out what was going on and wanted to keep him as a lab rabbit, but Aaron's parents quickly withdrew him from the care of the doctors – and the public school system, and managed to get him scholarships for the gifted to a number of private institutions. He finished his Doctorate at fifteen and a half and was immediately offered an 'advanced study' program at an elite think tank. Which turned out to be government run. He was courted by various three letter agencies – including NGOs – when mysteriously all offers but one were withdrawn. He didn't mind the lack of choice, since the one remaining was the one he was likely to take anyway. The opportunities they were offering a sixteen year old were too amazing to pass up. So he ended up going to work for 'the goons' – or as they referred to themselves 'the Enterprise'. He thought it was a sly Star Trek reference, but he quickly realized that there were no trekkies remotely involved with these folks. They just envied the way CIA referred to itself as 'the Company' so someone found a thesaurus and they became 'the Enterprise'. His first few years were a heady rush. He'd been assigned extremely daunting – some might say impossible, tasks. This was exactly the challenge he was looking for and he marveled at how his employer always gave him expectations that forced him to always push himself and be his best, which he loved after a lifetime of coasting with facile tasks that bored him to depression.

His first project was Cornerstone. The grid network and collaborated processing architecture that would support all his other projects. He was surprised at how his employers did not even blink at the staggering costs and scope of his initial project. And how they didn't seem the least surprised or excited that it worked flawlessly the first time this fractal mesh of edge-shattering technologies was actually powered up and tested.

Emboldened by his Cornerstone success, Aaron quickly got to work on Rosetta, the decryption UI that quickly sliced through to the order in any entropy and made the world's secrets an open book. It also had a welcome side effect of creating encryption that was unlikely to be cracked by any other technology to be developed in at least the next 50 years using current encryption paradigms. So, his bosses could read everyone's files and no one would be able to read theirs for at least half a century.

His next assignment was SIMon, and he practically salivated at the opportunity to create a network that fed nearly infinite inputs into a neural net, which he patterned after the brain of an insect with a myriad of eyes, to quickly wring order from the chaos of an impossibly expensive and pervasive network of surveillance systems as well as covertly leeching data from existing networks owned by individuals, corporations and even other nation states. SIMon could simultaneously process information from single cameras and the entire meta-network. Paired with impressive and ever improving pattern recognition, little happened in the world that SIMon wasn't aware of , and paying at least subliminal attention to. Aaron used to joke that he wanted to call SIMon SANTA because it knew when you were sleeping, it knew when you'd awake, it knew if you were bad or good.... etc.

After every 'impossible' task, his employers managed to raise the bar even higher. His next – and what was to turn out to be his final project, was the most ambitious yet. It was an A.I. Running atop Cornerstone, aided by Rosetta and SIMon, which would monitor markets. Not just financial and commodity and currency markets, but 'news futures' as well, which political or religious or social power structures were rising, which were due for a downturn, and predict – with astounding short term accuracy – economic and geopolitical currents. It also had a component that combined with its uncanny predictions, managed to add a few microseconds of latency into financial markets, enough to allow its own transactions to effectively 'jump queue' and benefit principally from any change of state. Like harvesting the tides whichever direction they were flowing. The transactions were infinitessimally small, and myriad. A few dollars profit on a transaction of hundreds of millions was pretty much noise-level to regulators and other monitoring interests, however when applied to hundreds of billions of transactions worldwide, this microskim resulted in such a windfall that his bosses need never had to worry again about congressional appropriations. They had essentially become autonomous. His latest creation was the mother of all A.I.s, which is why he chose to call it LILITH. The Logarithmic Iterated Largely-intuitive Interpreter of Transactional Heuristics. He had already begun unwinding by reading creation myths of various cultures, and he was quite familiar with Genesis from his own, reasonably secular yet seriously intellectual upbringing. He worried that people might think it was hubris on his part, that he was getting some sort of 'god complex' but he was really just curious to see how people tackled such profound yet fundamental issues as the nature and purpose of existence.

It was while he was finishing work on LILITH and wondering what his next project could be that he was approached by the ones he jokingly referred to as 'The Elders'. I guess most people would immediately think Elders of Zion or something equally lofty, but I immediately smirked when he said it, thinking of 'The Elders of the Internet' – an old joke from BBC's 'The I.T. Crowd'. He gave me a smile and said..... “you got I, didn't you?” I smiled back and nodded, then shuffled uncomfortably when I remembered other aspects of that particular episode. I saw Aaron's expression change at nearly the same instant as mine, and knew without a doubt we were having exactly the same thought... as we did alarmingly often.

He coughed slightly and shuffled a bit. “Well, they reached out to me as an intriguingly subtle anomally in a dataset that I quickly recognized as ….the first in a series of breadcrumbs. It was actually a quickly realized obsession as I detected and worked through the escalatingly obtuse puzzle that brought me into contact with ….them. It was a sort of a test. Although it quickly became clear that they had no doubt I'd pass, but seemed surprised by how quickly I'd progressed to the end and found myself deep down the rabbit hole. It was also a method of protecting themselves – and me. By the time I had dug my way down to the end, it was extremely unlikely that anyone – or anything, with the possible exception of LILITH, would be able to track where I was or what I was doing. They explained themselves a little. They watched over the world. Shifting balances of power and fortunes. Their only mission, they claimed, was the protection of modern civilization.... from nuclear war, financial collapse, religious upheaval by forces who villainized and vowed to 'cleanse' millenia of human progress, and other 'existential threats to human progress'. I thought it must be some kind of prank, but it was far too elaborate and too complex to be a joke. I asked what their interest was in me, and they claimed that they had been aware of me for quite a while. Usually, 'recruits' reached a certain point in their development where they became aware of and reached out to 'The Elders'. But for the first time they were reaching out... to me... because of the gravity of the threat. They followed with considerable interest... and I later learned, a bit of awe, as we deployed Cornerstone, Rosetta, and SIMon. That all turned to dismay when they learned of LILITH. They pointed out to me all the ways the powerful tools I crafted for my employer could also be used as weapons. Which I had never even imagined. They gave me proof that that was in fact their principal use. They also opened my eyes to the devastating power of LILITH, and how it would make my employers virtually invincible. At which point, I would be of no further use to them. Since I could offer no additional benefit and posed an immeasurable threat should my 'big brain' fall into other hands, it had already been decided that the moment I delivered LILITH that the asset – me, would be retired – killed.

This came as a shock to me, but I quickly came up with an idea which 'The Elders' vigorously approved. I would continue 'work' on LILITH, all the time building in additional hooks – modeling them after cellular protein receptors – in the machine code. I did the same to Cornerstone, Rosetta and SIMon too – explaining that I needed to 'evolve' the codebase to interact seamlesly with LILITH. This passed muster with their code inspectors, who.... not to be snide about it, were like a bunch of fourth grade arithmetic students proofing Fermat's Theorem.

So, once LILITH was finished, but not reported, I arranged one of the 'day trips' I sporadically took to clear my mind when I was working on an especially tough problem. With help from my new secret friends and a bit of the new functionality I build into SIMon, I was able to 'drop off' the grid. My new benefactors suggested that we move quickly on a distraction and a strategy to disarm my former employers. I was shuffled around in a covert human network, I guess others would call it an 'underground railroad' but that seemed a bit too 19th century, so I started referring to it as the 'undernet' and I guess people liked it because it caught on. I was surprised by how many of us there were, but we all remained anonymous. Something learned from French resistance fighters and many other roots-up groups. It seemed sound mesh architecture to me. Each puzzle piece knew only its adjoining pieces. Still, it was decided that this loose affiliation needed a face or at least a figurehead. I was approached with the idea of being the public face of the unseen movement, since I seemed to have by far the greatest means to protect myself – being the only one with access to the tools I built for my former employer. So, R00Tkid was born ...or hatched. I quickly found that while it was originally just an iconic identity, the image and I were quickly becoming the same thing....”

“Tell me about it” I laughed. Aaron smiled knowingly.

“So... R00Tkid. Grassroots organizing, getting the germ of the idea of what we would do. Lots of preliminaries and small steps... baby steps... laboriously designing the DNA of each and every seed we would plant in this vast jungle.... this entire ecosystem of taps and hooks and hacks and levers to rebuild the weapons of oppression as the tools of liberation and cut the strings of the sinister forces manipulating global events. Sure enough, R00tKid distracted the goons, who had already discovered that LILITH was complete and enabled her. Chasing me would preoccupy them while we laid the framework for deploying our ….patch. But, I was kind of tired of being the only face of the movement, so I dug into my old skillset and brushed up my VR chops. I had become pretty adept at A.I. after all my work for the goons, so crafting a photorealistic, semi-autonomous companion wasn't all that challenging. To my relief and satisfaction, not even my most elite associates twigged to the fact that The Lady 3V3 was ….not of this world. Until the events of which you are all too familiar.” He smiled. “Which brings us up to now. So where do we go from here?”

“Do you ever miss her?” I asked.

“Who?” He genuinely didn't know.

“3V3. Your EVE. Not.....” I scowled and looked down at my body “this pretender.”

“Wait wait wait wait....hold ON.... YOU are no pretender. It's uncanny how much you're like her.”

“Yeah, I know. ...Except for the scars...” I grimaced involuntarily.

“No, NO! The personality construct.... when... when you came into our... my... life.... as I got to know you I decided that it would be prudent for you and 3V3 to be as congruous as possible. So I dove into the A.I. Code to tweak her personality... her behavior, her tastes and temperment... and I found the required tweaks to be....inconsequential. OK, your sense of humor is far more developed and...um... she is more unreservedly fond of me.... at least openly fond....” I blushed as he eyed me quizically “...but yeah, she was already pretty much you. Just... kind of 2-dimensional.”

“Are you calling me FAT?” I glared. He went beet red and started moving his mouth like a fish. I couldn't hold my poker face and burst out laughing. That brought a slight scowl.

“As I was saying about her sense of humor. Anyway, 3V3 is now pretty much you. In fact, she's kind of your biggest fan. Her A.I. monitors all your activity...” Aaron caught himself “I mean PUBLIC activity.... emails, interviews, every appearance you've done. Everything you do becomes part of her memories. She is your shadow, your echo, your reflection in the virtual world. And because she is essentially you, yeah... she's your biggest fan and supporter.”