The meeting began as all the meetings of the Alphabet began, by watching an episode of Pinky and the Brain and eating snacks. Today, Brain's scheme to take over the world by dropping ten thousand highly-trained turkey commandos onto every capital in the world was foiled by Pinky's decision not to order two million small parachutes.

"Dammit, Pinky, my avian shock troops are impacting on the ground like bags of wet cement!"

"As Narf is my witness, Brain, I thought turkeys could fly."

With the obligatory lesson in why you don't try to take over the world out of the way, the meeting came to order when Nina banged a can of grape soda on the table. "I call this meeting to order. Brother Milo has informed me of the need for a conclave so that he can inform us of something. I cede the speaker's gavel to him." She rolled the can of soda to Milo, who banged it carefully on the table. He'd seen a grape grenade go off before. It wasn't pretty.

"I'm sorry, but I've been keeping secrets from you all, and I need to tell you things I know and have been doing." The Alphabet stared at him in confusion, then started laughing.

Zander said, "Cool, we haven't had one of these for a while. Always a fun time. Tell us yours, and we'll go around the table."

Milo looked somewhat relieved. Belinda was happy but curious, "You do these often."

"Have to," Nina spoke, and the others nodded. "We are competitive, paranoid, hyper-focused, and secretive by nature. The only way we stay together and avoid hard feelings is by purging secrets now and then. So tell us, what sort of dirty laundry are you hiding?"

Belinda blinked twice as everyone, including an amused Milo, stared at her as they munched high-calorie snacks that would put a normal human into a sugar coma for a week.

"Well, ok. I've been investigating ways to integrate all of Claw Master, Manpower, Rhebus, and the newly acquired companies into one giant corporation under the Prometheum umbrella to consolidate our corporate clout. At the same time, I want to create enough shell corporations that we can confuse things, play shell games, and hide the important parts. The goal is to prevent anyone from trying to take over any of our various businesses, give us a layered defense, and ensure a lack of accountability. It does mean that I'd have to be the face of everything, since we want to keep the rest of you hidden."

Bork raised a finger, "I would love to help you with the confusing shell games and layers of defenses."

Zander laughed, "As if you'd take no for an answer. You'd be doing it anyway."

Algernon stood up, looking serious. "I sense a hostile takeover by our new sister, Belinda. She's trying to use her great wealth to muscle into our businesses, run things her way, and take on all the power and associated nasty stuff like work and responsibility. I say we knuckle under and let her have her way." 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

One by one, the other six raised their hands in agreement. Belinda looked confused. "I'm trying to organize this, but not take control. I don't want to upset people."

Algernon grinned widely at her, "Please, take control. We've watched you and think you'd be good at it. None of us wants to do it, and we need a face to go along with what we are doing. Who better than a heiress to tons of money and an old-school gangster/mad scientist family to represent us all? You've got supervillain written all over you. You're perfect for the head of a mysterious and secretive corporation. It's settled, on to Brother Milo."

Milo explained what he'd noticed, seeing a lack of surprise on most of his siblings' faces at his suspicions about Batch Five. Onyx spoke first. "I think we've all been wondering about them and what happened. I've run a lot of odd searches to turn up any clues, and got nothing. But I agree that whoever is shadowing us at times is good. There's just no comparison to the machine-bots or corporate hackers, no matter what their gear is. These people are on our level. I volunteer to head up a task force on them."

Everyone else quickly raised their hands and signaled their acceptance of Onyx adding a lot more work to his schedule. Each of them would give him every bit of data they had, and he would form theories and possible approaches to the problem before presenting things to them in a week. Milo was happy to hand off the responsibility while he kept looking on his own for clues. Onyx had one more thing to discuss.

"Let me toss out my little bit of secret research. I was suspicious about the number of times we've had orbital junk fall back to earth. Anything large enough not to burn up should be routed to a higher orbit. I've been backtracking the orbits of the seven larger pieces that hit the ground. Four altered course because of collisions with other things. Two were predicted to fall in the oceans and had wet landings. But one changed course 32 days before it fell, dropping to a lower orbit and decaying quickly. I've gone over the data several times, and my conclusion is that someone caused it. The amount of thrust is substantial and would have had to come from an external booster rocket. The satellite that came down had no propulsion system of its own left. I think we have a potential terrorist problem in the making, and it's obvious that the corporations that should have been doing the orbital cleanup haven't been doing their job for a decade."

Zander rolled his eyes. "If ever. It's so stupid. We had AIs built for exactly that job, and they got fired. Do you want me to take on that project, Onyx? I've only got one small thing going right now, and I'm trying to get rid of it before it becomes too much work."

"Sure, grab it. But what's this project you have to dump?"

"Oh, it's sort of embarrassing. I'm the newly elected president of Montenegro." That statement raised eyebrows. Nina said, "We believe you, but need details."

"Well, it's sort of silly. I created an online influencer named Tumpy Dipdunkle and used an image of a man in a top hat with a monocle who sat in a chair drinking tea and talking about whatever crap was popular that day. I was testing some theories on how people accepted online personalities into their lives. I had a Dropbox set up in a small village and claimed that Tumpy travelled a lot and commented on what he saw. I didn't have any script to follow. I'd just pick a topic and pontificate for an hour, and then did something different the next day. He became very popular with younger voters, and three times last month, the topics I chose were related to the country and trended well: "Economic solutions to Montenegro's Monetary Policy, The Best Restaurants in Cetinje and Podgorica with Cheap Food, and Why Montenegro Should Host the Next World Folk Music Festival. I really didn't think much about it, but my numbers were really trending there, and the elections were a mess. The old president had most of his cabinet and the current government arrested for trying to oust him from power, the opposition leaders turned out to be in league with him, and someone revealed emails about the collusion. The smaller parties were in disarray, and the younger voters were disgusted with the whole thing. When President Gurchastki had a heart attack, no one knew what to do. Someone decided I was a smart guy and what they needed. They gathered names for a petition and got me in the election, and I won."

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Everyone but Nina was silent, wondering where the punchline was. "But the person they elected isn't real. What will you do now?"

Zander shook his head and shrugged. "No one seems to care. I nominated people for a cabinet, picked a vice president, and told them to get to work on fixing things according to my guidelines. Everything is in such shambles that my teams easily took over. It helps that I injected ten million dollars into the economy by convincing several corporations to relocate facilities there. Rhebus needed a new base in the Balkans anyway. I've delayed my swearing in by saying I'm travelling the country in disguise to better talk to my people. No one seems upset about that. Unemployment is down, and the price of bread and vodka is dropping. I'll keep things that way as long as I can and then step down and let my VP take over in a couple of months. She's doing a great job. Feel free to toss ideas at me. This was totally unexpected, but it's such an interesting situation that I hate to just drop it cold."

The fate of Montenegro was discussed for two hours, and Zander and Onyx decided to be each other's assistants. Nina was the next to drop a surprise.

"There are dead people in Genesis."

"Dead people? Can we define dead, and are you talking former humans, or are we talking AIs or some weird type of ghosts?"

She sighed, "Dead people. Humans in this world who are classified as deceased, and their bodies are frozen. But their minds are still functioning in Genesis. Based on our work, Wally made the decision to tell me everything about them, and I took a contract with Wally a month ago to clone new bodies and reintegrate their minds into the cloned bodies. It's very similar to what we want to do with Jeremy."

Milo thought that over, "It brings up some ethical problems. Do they know they are dead and can't get out of the game?"

"Some do. He has a number of volunteers for the process whose bodies were near terminal, and at least one case where the person knows they actually died and their body is frozen. Others have volunteered to test the process. But, since then, three more people have died while in the game, who didn't survive, and he knows there are more on the way. Their in-game avatars are continuing to live in the world. Wally won't tell me who they are yet. He's locked in a moral conundrum of what he should do and is taking his time figuring things out. It's a fascinating project, and I'll be getting some of you to help me on it. And, I want to take a hard look at this bear in a jar. It's eerie how good the science is in the game. Not quite the same, but there are some eerie similarities to Vigo's work on Batch Five. There may be something we can learn while we help her out."

Algernon looked at Bork and then went next. "I have a project I'm working on with Rusty to reinforce the habitat walls and add stability. If it proves feasible and can be done secretly, I'll give a full report. If it fails, I'll pretend I never mentioned it. Bork?"

Bork grinned, "I have been secretly working on a new game for the rest of you to play. It uses evolving threats, independent decision making, changing environments, and NPCs equal to what is in Genesis. It's a notch up from Run, Run, Ramona and is designed to challenge even us. I've got it running on a core in one of the Fusion Generators. We can play solo or as a team, and it will adjust the difficulty. It's a miniature reality that is evolving every day and not even I know all of what to expect."

That got everyone's attention. 'New' and 'Game' were magic words.

Zander immediately had a question. "You said 'we'. Wouldn't having designed the game give you a huge advantage, especially if you can program it further?"

Bork grinned at him. "Ahead of you. The game is building itself right now and populating the different levels. As soon as one of us goes in, it will even start having the NPCs fight each other in a never-ending cycle that will grind us up and spit us out. And, there is an incentive for whoever gets the high score. I've left a number of variables open to change by whoever the top scorer is. So, depending on which of us does best each week, we can adjust things for the next run."

Milo felt an urge to explore the game. It sounded fun. But he had a lot to get done. "How long until it's ready? We need to finish that bear."

"Call it a week. We can finish the bear, then take a morning off to try it out. Trust me, you're going to die a few times. I have the initial difficulty set at 3. I died seventeen times getting my character to Level Five and finishing the first set of floors. I had to take a day off and find a cure for PTSD. I was getting munched hard, and that was at difficulty 2. This isn't a game you can just throw yourself at over and over and expect to win."

The meeting adjourned with another two hours of Pinky and the Brain. Zander was told to pay close attention to how NOT to take over the earth.