Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

This week has been nuts. If I were trying to hold all of this in my biological brain, I would have been lost a long time ago. Fortunately, my database and index are working their magic even better for this than they did for my schoolwork. Every day is a test run for new features of my electronic brain that I implemented the night before. I’m building out an infrastructure to let me cross-reference every bit of text that I’ve ever glanced at with everything else I’ve read. The wet parts of my brain are working seamlessly with the nanobot interface. I may not have a working human memory anymore, but I’m a more effective data processing machine than the best AI ever was. On the downside, between the nighttime coding and my new day job in Father’s office, I’ve barely had a minute to breathe.

Father waves from the door of my office next to his and thanks me for my good work today, then leaves to go back to the Residence for the night. I consider heading out too, but the cafeteria is serving their gross stroganoff and I’d just as soon skip dinner. I pull up the enhanced news feed on one of the office computers instead to get an early start on tomorrow’s work.

One of the nice things about being Father’s new right-hand man is the access to a crazy amount of information. Learning as much as I can is half the job. The news feed Father’s IT crew provided for me isn’t just geysers of info about SynTech, nanotechnology, and the campus like I had expected. It’s also got data feeds from intelligence services, the military, and corporate espionage coming in, all the secret stuff in the world that could possibly have anything to do with our tech or operations.

As I absorb the full text of the articles into my electronic half, I skim through the headlines and notice a report on the mysterious disappearance of the Fist of Peace terrorist group. That name seems vaguely familiar, but it isn’t until my index pops up a window with the relevant entries from my log that I recall where I’d read it before. Right. Those were the guys that Father killed in Somalia. I had forgotten about them. Who were they anyway? This article from the feed is light on details, so I look them up in the Institute’s knowledge base.

The file on them says they’re a small group of radical terrorists, mostly former child soldiers from a civil war twenty years back. Taken from their families at young ages, hooked on drugs, given guns, it’s not hard to see how they became killing machines. When the war ended, they were dumped on the streets with nothing. I almost feel bad for them. It’s hard enough for child soldiers to reintegrate and become functional human beings in the best of circumstances, but these guys didn’t have anything close to that.

What they had instead was a nasty piece of work named Hirad Galaal. He recruited them, cleaned them up, fed and sheltered them, then converted them into his personal hit squad. He became their father, priest, and boss, and taught them all the ways that they could leverage their youth and marksmanship to advance his agenda—bombings, shootings, kidnappings, extorsion. You name it, they were into it. They especially liked targeting Americans, and weren’t picky about hitting either civilians or military.

Galaal named them the Fist of Peace, a reference to his faith being the religion of peace. Guess he missed the irony on that one. They worked for him until he was murdered a couple of years back, his body found in Mogadishu with a dozen bullets in it. The report doesn’t know who killed him, but the list of people that wanted him dead was so long that it didn’t really matter.

The Fist tried to work with Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab for a while after that. They’re not great groups, but apparently they have some standards because they both refused to work with the Fist after seeing them in action. Too violent and uncontrollable, according to the intel. They’d been sustaining themselves since then by roaming around eastern Africa and kidnapping anyone who didn’t look local. According to the statements from survivors and the bodies found by local authorities, they would typically ransom the men, but every woman they’d taken had been gang-raped and killed.

I think of Louise and Andrea and shudder. Good job, Father. I would have done the same or worse.

I hope they suffered.