With some prying, Cora talked him into going through the rigmarole of leaving his lair, out of Building 112 and into Building 127, and into the conference room, flanked by military entourage. Try as they might to stay cool and professional, the people working here, military and civilian alike, couldn’t help but stare on the rare occasion that Ampersand came out, their eyes darting between the girl and the giant monster that walked behind her like he floated through water. She entered the conference room in front of him, but stopped dead when she saw who had already arrived. Luciana, Dr. Sev, and Stevie she had expected. Other amygdalines she had not.

Esperas never, ever came out, but there he was on the other side of the giant white room, likewise flanked by military entourage, a few of his underlings, the two propagandists, Stelo and Krias (or as Cora had nicknamed them, Woodward and Bernstein), and bringing up the rear, the Similar, Brako.

Oh no.

She felt something clawing against the metaphysical wall between her and Ampersand, like being pricked by emotional briars. Cora glared at Sol, which he duly ignored, instead calmly addressing his human coworkers. Did he not understand what a breach of trust this was? That by doing this, he was pretty much guaranteeing that Ampersand would never agree to meet with them in person again?

Those briars pricking her from the other side of the wall dug in harder, and she looked at Ampersand as some army private nervously closed the conference room door behind him. She felt the air change around him, grow thicker, his invisible defenses rising like spikes.

“I was not told they would be here.”

She turned to him and mouthed, “I didn’t know,” hoping Esperas didn’t catch that. There had been a time when Ampersand had been the only one of the Fremda group with an algorithm to decode human language, but that was no longer the case. She wasn’t sure if the rest of the underlings had it, but at the very least, Esperas and Brako had it, so she could no longer speak to Ampersand in confidence in front of them.

“Okay,” said Sol, taking a seat at the head of the table in front of the flat-screen while everyone else sat along the length of the table. Cora was the only human in the room who stayed standing. “Everyone at State, everyone in Intelligence, and everyone in DHHS agrees that any legislation surrounding ETI personhood directly affects you, and therefore you need to be a part of these discussions. First and foremost, our two group leaders— Esperas, Scio— do you understand what is being discussed in the upcoming hearings?”

Esperas took a moment, then responded in Pequod-phonemic, a translation appearing on the flat-screen behind Sol:

[The debate is between two political ideologies, one of which seeks to grant exoterran intelligent individual beings rights equivalent to a human, one which seeks to grant exoterran intelligent individual beings a restricted set of rights.]