So sweet is Lesley’s face that even her frown feels rosy. “¿Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“¿So, the order may not come?” she suggested.

“It may not, but it may. Before it does, I want votes from all five of you on whether or not we should obey it if it does.”

Five? Correct me if I err, Mycroft, but by my reckoning there are nine members of this bash’, not five. There are, reader, but nine members is not nine votes. Cato gets no vote—his abject terror has led to so many consecutive abstentions that no one bothers to ask him anymore. Only the attending Typer votes, and the set-sets share one vote between them, since they think so identically, as two rats in a lab respond to the same shocks and treats, that a council convened to poll diverse thinking does not give two votes to one opinion. Lesley votes, Thisbe, Sniper, one twin and one set-set, a good odd number to prevent a draw. Ockham does not vote; Ockham decides.

“¿You think we shouldn’t obey?” Lesley asked first.

Ockham steps forward into your view now, his back to Mukta’s windshield, as if he dares not speak such words while facing the Saneer birthright. “I think we must weigh this carefully. Making a hit now would greatly increase the danger of exposure. I am the twelfth O.S. I do not intend to be the last.”

“Before we weigh the sides, Ockham,” Kat or Robin Typer interrupted, “one of us should say what we’re all thinking. ¿Isn’t this sort of thing exactly why we killed our ba’pas?”

Thisbe nodded emphatically.

“I mean,” the twin continued, “it’s us on the couches this time and no kids yet to eavesdrop, but this is the same scene as five years ago. We all agreed back then that our ba’pas deciding to choose for themselves when to use O.S. instead of taking Presidential orders was reason enough to… ensure they wouldn’t be around to follow through on that decision.”

“What they intended was treason,” Ockham supplied at once, the word as heavy from him as from any Masonic Judge.

“Yeah,” Kat or Robin nodded, “and this is too.” One must say Kat or Robin since those present had no more way than you do, reader, to tell the twins apart.

You have not yet met the Typers, have you? Not surprising—if one is home on duty then the other has inevitably stormed out after their daily row. Their sameness goes beyond matching clothes and hair to matching body language, matching scars, and they switch trackers frequently, despite police complaints, for what can the police do when the twins have singed off those offending fingerprints that dared make them differentiable? Each twin watches through the other’s tracker at all times, so one cannot test them by mentioning some earlier encounter; both know all. Once at their birthday party I saw one get drenched with punch, and in a wordless second both ripped off their differentiating shirts. What are the differences between these intentionally identical archenemies who refuse to move to separate bedrooms after thirty years of constant war? Kat Typer I know is fascinated by the pseudoscientific spiritualism of the Nineteenth Century: meters to quantify ghostly presences, meticulously catalogued séances, ESP research, but it is not in the supernatural where Kat finds wonder. It is the late Nineteenth-Century mind that fascinates, these scientists who were simultaneously so rigorous and so poetic, so critical and so credulous, so expert and so wrong. It was a unique mind-state, Kat thinks, fleeting, a psychological mayfly possible only in the moment when science was rising quickly in respect and use, but lagging behind in power. Medicine was not yet competent, workweeks not yet humane, so these minds, trying to be modern, still faced premodern trauma levels, and channeled that into the most sophisticated double-think we have ever achieved. That is Kat’s current theory anyway. Robin Typer likes bikes. Each of these interests may extend to the other twin as well, but I have only once had a conversation with each twin when I was certain which it was, so that is all I know: Kat, spiritualist double-think; Robin, bikes.