He’d been in the Asher administration then, had gone to the FBI immediately, told them everything about his background, about what he knew of the Aryan Rising, told his bosses in the White House, and somehow found himself rewarded, thrust into a policy role, carried forward into the Jameson administration, and then Stockton’s. The emerging technologies hawk. The man who’d convinced President Jameson to euthanize the Aryan Rising clones. The man who’d been put in charge of the program to make sure the US public never faltered in its opposition to transhuman technologies.

Maximilian Barnes was a man who knew the face of evil. And he’d be damned if he ever let the US public soften in its resolve, or ever let a capitulator like Senator Stanley Kim take the White House, and throw open the floodgates to transhumans and AIs and worse.

In a rented room in a roadside motel in Massachusetts, a man named Breece leaned over a table, staring at a slate. He was tall, broad of shoulder, muscular, but not conspicuously so. His hair was sandy this night, the indeterminate color between brown and blonde, long enough to need combing, but not much longer. His eyes were as unremarkable as his hair. He preferred them that way.

Breece played the video again, his hands tense on the oversized slate, the sound coming in through headphones, so no one in this cheap motel would realize just how obsessively he was watching and re-watching this.

“PLF is a lie… you created.”

Breece shook his head in wonder.

He flipped back to the documents that had been released with the video. A memorandum signed by President Miles Jameson. A memorandum creating the Post-human Liberation Front, as a false flag operation, a front group run by a splinter office of what would become Homeland Security’s Emerging Risks Directorate, run specifically by a man named Maximilian Barnes.

Maximilian Barnes had gone on to be Special Policy Advisor to Jameson, and then to President John Stockton after him.

Maximilian Barnes had become Acting Director of Homeland Security’s Emerging Risk’s Directorate four months ago when Breece’s bomb – aimed at Stockton – had killed the last ERD Director.

Goddammit. Breece had gotten this guy promoted.

And all this time…

All this time Maximilian Barnes had also been Zarathustra. The leader of the Post-human Liberation Front.

Breece’s superior in the Cause.

The man who’d given Breece his marching orders, sent him on missions, for all these years.

Breece yanked the headphones from his ears, tossed the slate onto the desk, and pushed back in his chair, his hands coming up to his face.

It all made so much sense. All the missions that made headlines, but where human targets just barely escaped.

Oh god. The miss. The miss on Stockton. The software should have fired that gun perfectly. The bullet just barely missed Stockton’s head!

Zarathustra gave them the software. Of course.