“If we knew that, there might be a chance we could stop it. But that isn’t the way this kind of thing works. Whoever it is, they not only appear to have enough money to buy us out, one subsidiary company at a time—they also have enough money to hide the ownership of the companies they are using to do it; to play a shell game a thousand shells deep. Every time we try to figure out who is behind it all, we end up with empty shells—holding companies registered to independent nations declared on the rusty platforms of abandoned oil rigs, names of CEOs that trace back to cemeteries, and more names, and more shell companies, apparently rich on nothing at all. We’ve dug and dug, but they have the money not only to buy us, but to escape our spies’ investigations. And that kind of money is frightening. By the time we know who they are, it will be too late.”

“You must have theories.”

“We think it must be a nation-state. Moscow, Beijing, Berlin. Someone with money dwarfing any corporation’s. That’s our latest theory, anyway. You can forget about it being most of the smaller countries: DIANIMA’s total revenue is more than many of their GDPs. And we’ve got spies in most of the bigger companies we saw as threats to us. It doesn’t seem to be any of them.”

“But how would they even know what we have?” Altantsetseg asked. “We have perfect signal silence here. There has been nothing out, since before even Evrim’s arrival. And no one in but Evrim, months ago, then Dr. Nguyen.”

“It’s a good question,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “But we figured it out, and that means someone else could as well. Anything we can determine, someone else can determine. And there have been killings—several of them—of people evacuated from the island. Someone else is interested in keeping this place a secret.”

“You can’t tell me,” Evrim said, “that someone is executing a massive hostile takeover of DIANIMA—a company the size of several members of the United Nations cobbled together—on the strength of rumors about the Con Dao Sea Monster from a bunch of fishermen and people working in the hospitality industry.”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “Someone is dismantling what I have built, piece by piece. We’ve been losing companies I didn’t even know we owned until they were taken away from us.”

“It’s your company,” Evrim said. “How could you not know what subsidiaries you own?”

Ha thought of the holon, the Tibetan drones—the company operating on its own, a complete system, independent of any control. Or the arms of the octopus, independent systems, too, exploring without a mind to guide them beyond their own neural webs.

And then when the central mind checks back in—it’s too late.