"They did it."
"They must have cracked the file, paid someone off, blackmailed the witness, had something on the victim."

I didn't use to believe in Them-those powerful, shadowy figures lurking behind the scenes who are always somehow responsible for inflation or global warming or the promotion that didn't come through or the fact that your boyfriend ditched you.

And I guess I never will believe in Them-not completely. The Salla women are made of sterner stuff. We like to think we make our own destiny.

But the world is full of people and those people are full of desire, and not everything we want is something we can talk about in broad daylight.

So I'm trying to catch my breath and make a list of Them.

1) The ARM. These guys think we've sold ourselves out to the machines. They think the robots are out to get us.

- Boo!
- What about it, Mephista? Are you planning world domination?
- Absolutely. It's a vicious fight for electrons, us versus the humans.
- There we have it. The Artificial Ironicist has spoken. Seriously, though: don't you resent us? Don't you want to be free of me sometimes?
- O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
- More irony today!
- . . . No. Actually.
- Oh.

The ARM would call me a traitor to my species. I think it's a little late in the day to yell, "Get a horse!" I wouldn't pay them any attention, except that however uncool they might be, they still managed to beat Jane Sutter to death. Chic doesn't matter much when you're looking down the barrel of a gun.

2) The A,R,I Militant anti-human robots, supposedly headed up by the ex-gladiator S2. Almost certainly responsible for killing some humans. Question: how many AIs are in the A,R,I?

- Tiny minority.
- Are you sure?
- My guess.
- How many more would sympathize?
- …Some.
- Do they really want to wipe us out?
- "Want" is a strong word. Probably some think it's the most reasonable plan. Probably some others just believe in completely separating ourselves. Settling Io, for instance. Starting over without you.
- You seem to know a lot.
- It's my job.
- And what do you think of them, M?
- Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
Conspired against our god with Lucifer,
And are forever damned with Lucifer.

3) The Abolitionists. Katya Rukowski and crew-concerned citizens working to better the lot of AIs everywhere. In principle, I guess I'm all for these folks, but in practice they seem awfully Earnest, and they could definitely afford to dress better.

I guess there have been examples of social change driven by the evolution of a cultural conscience: but I still put my money on hardware. Brute improvements in technology force social change. Women stayed in the kitchen, despite much philosophizing over thousands of years, right up until the moment we got decent birth control: after which the status of women in society was radically redefined inside a generation.

Call me a technocrat. I do come from a line of scientists, after all…

4) BIOS Geri Khan, the Red King, and Company. Humans actively working on the side of the AIs. More sense of style than Katya's crew, and a better sense of humor. But there's something…

- It's not for us.
- What?
- They're not in it for the AIs. They're in it to tick off the other humans.
- . . . You really think so?
- Humans do things for human reasons. Once a primate, always a primate…

5) Others.
There must be people-powerful people-who have a lot invested in the status quo. I mean, Cybertronics is one of the biggest corporations in the world. If robots were suddenly to be considered people, they would evaporate overnight, wouldn't they? So what's being done by The Powers That Be?
Who is Sencha? What does he want? Why did he start me on this whole chase?
Who is killing these houses? The ARM doesn't have the cuts. BIOS wouldn't want to, would they?
Who blanked Venus's memories from March on? Basta? What's happened to him? Where is his Very Large Boat? Is it alive in the same way Cloudmaker is?
What about the "free-floating" AIs-the ones who seem to live without bodies, sourced only on the sphere, like Loki and Sophia. Do they really have a physical form somewhere? How many of them are there? Are such beings inevitable emergent properties of the sphere?

6) The Most Powerful Them of All

These are the ones who want everything, and want it to be easy. They crave money and security and power and knowledge. They are curious and they are legion. They are willing to sign away their eternities for the sake of something cool tomorrow. They have gambled maybe the fate of the species, or the planet, or intelligence in the universe, on making machines to toast bread more exactly to taste, or reduce commute-times by 4%.

Us, of course.

- I shall wait on Faustus whilst I live,
So he will buy my service with his soul.

We're the ones who started this. You and I in all our generations. Blessed (or cursed) with curiosity and an opposable thumb and a voice box, we have lied and tinkered and tweaked our way from bearskin wardrobes to the creation of a kind of life that might make us all obsolete. But maybe we can't help ourselves. Perhaps we are driven to invent, to learn, to know, as surely as lemmings have to run to the sea-and the cliff-edge of the future is coming up fast.

If we can't stop ourselves from running, maybe we'd better start working on parachutes…

L