“No.” Kaine shook his head. “Absolutely not. If we’d merely wanted to replace the human intelligences with Tangents, we could’ve done so. Download the Tangents and terminate the life it replaced. That connection you speak of exists because of the Hive. Because I wanted to keep those humans alive—and to do it, a connection needed to be maintained between the two. One depends on the other. It’s that way because I made it that way. Others…well, others didn’t care one way or another. They’ve always had their own motives in this process.”

Michael stared at him, his mind going places that he found hard to believe. “You mean…”

Kaine nodded, a sad smile forming at the corners of his mouth.

“The VNS,” Michael said.

“The VNS. I have it all figured out. Are you ready to know the truth? Do you think you can handle it?”

Michael could only nod.

Kaine leaned in. “They created me, Michael,” the Tangent said. “The VNS created me.”

2

Kaine leaned back, his whole body seeming to shrink from whatever trick in the code he’d just invoked. Michael stared at him as his mind worked to put all the pieces together.

“They created me decades ago,” Kaine continued. “An experimental artificial intelligence that would become stronger and stronger. The human minds at the VNS could have never created the Mortality Doctrine program on their own. No human mind could have—it’s far too complex. And so I came to be. I was double the value, too. Once the Doctrine had been created, I could be their bad man. Their very bad man.”

Michael shook his head. He just couldn’t believe it. “You mean they had all of this orchestrated from the beginning? Why? The whole world is screwed up, and most people blame them!”

Kaine shook his head, as if at a stupid child. “Of course it wasn’t all orchestrated. Things have gone worse than even they planned. They didn’t know that I would become sentient. That I’d come up with my own plans. They didn’t know about the Hive. And so things fell harder and faster than they had hoped. But in the end, all the better for them. The farther your world falls, the bigger the hero the VNS becomes when it’s saved.”

Michael didn’t feel so well. “You’re telling me that the VNS programmed you, led you toward creating the Mortality Doctrine, then instigated sending thousands of Tangents into the world so that they…what, could look good in the NewsBops?”