Hours later, it was done. A new account, unlinked to the PLF, was created – ERD_SECRETS. And from that account a set of documents were leaked, documents that provided evidence that over a period of two and a half years between the creation of the ERD and the signing of the Copenhagen Accords that prohibited research into branches of AI, genetics, nanotech, and neurotech around the world, the new US organization assassinated at least fourteen top scientists working in those fields in half a dozen countries. Some of which were already wavering in their commitment to the Accords.

Carolyn Pryce was in her home office, at her secure terminal, reading the State Department’s reports on the counter-Copenhagen summit going on in New Delhi. The parties involved were doing as much as possible via face to face, of course. But that hadn’t stopped the NSA from reading their dispatches and position papers, and the CIA from determining exactly who was there.

It was going to get ugly. State was going to start waving carrots around with one hand, and sticks with another. Trade deals and sanctions. Favored nation status or visa revocations and border searches for every package coming through.

Pryce wasn’t sure it was going to be enough.

Her terminal chimed with a new alert. She narrowed her eyes. Her thresholds were set high.

It scrolled across the screen and her eyes widened again.

She dug into the data, skimmed through it, page after page, and then leaned back.

She’d known about this. Not directly, not the specifics.

But she she’d known there had been an active threat neutralization program, before she was National Security Advisor, before Copenhagen even existed, long since ended.

Killing people. Killing scientists. It was easy to condemn.

Until you remembered what those days had been like.

They’d been terrifying. A small army of Aryan clones, engineered to be immune to a virus, Marburg Red, created to wipe out the rest of humanity. That virus killed thirty one thousand people in four days, the worst terrorist attack on record. And they’d been lucky. If the Aryan Rising’s genetic engineers had perfected it, if the clone children hadn’t risen up and slaughtered their makers and released Marburg Red early, the final version might have killed millions, hundreds of millions.

Billions.

And that hadn’t been the only threat. Eschaton, the self-replicating AI that came within a hair’s breadth of getting free on the net. Arrington, the near-trillionaire who’d managed to upload a digital replica of his brain into a custom data center and then gone insane from it, crashing markets and airplanes and power grids, killing thousands in what they’d told the world was a terrorist cyber-attack. The public didn’t even know about half the things that had really happened in the late Twenties and the early Thirties, or why.

But she did.