In a few months time every member of our tribe, even the children over three, had our bands on our heads, their filaments slowly lengthening and weaving through our minds, connecting to thousands more synapses everyday. It gave each of us a fresh feeling of life, a quickening, a growth of consciousness and an enrichment of our personalities and possibilities. We talked to each other tenfold times more than before, exchanging ideas, because each of us seemed to be growing in our own unique ways and the new ideas that we shared complimented one another wonderfully.

It was as if the frequent insights we had were just as exciting for us to share with everyone else as they were for them to listen and hear, as they seemed to spawn equally exciting thoughts in their own heads.

We all ate together now and held a sort of round table of talk with dessert after dinner, children included. And the conversations were non-stop and rich.

One thought I shared with Ted and Sarah was that now we might have turned the tide and were making real progress in our conflict with Dora, wherever she might be. Not only were we evolving like her and in a much better position to understand her, our own added powers of thought and our uniqueness might lead us to formulate completely new and unexpected ways to defeat her.

You have to know your enemy to beat him. Perhaps you have to become part computer to outmatch another. I told them that with my boldly increased brain power I felt ready to sit down across from Dora at a chessboard with some likelihood of success.

She might reach across the table after a loss and crush my hand completely with her titanium fingers but this one image brought our little group to a whole new mission to dote upon. We had completed all the bands and fitted them on everyone and had spent the last few weeks mostly going about our chores and talking constantly and richly enjoying our cerebral expansions. but now the four of us regrouped in our lab every morning to discuss this disturbing issue.

If we did encounter her and her droids, and we knew we would someday, her physical abilities were still vastly above ours, steel against flesh, and a telepathic army operating as a single unit against a random, various assortment of disorganized humans, mostly women and children.

The first and obvious idea we came up with was to somehow mimic their own robotic composition. We rejected that approach rather quickly. I wasn't going to have some titanium arm grafted onto me, or stumble around in a suit of steel armor like knights of yore.

You don't beat your opponent by becoming exactly like them. You've lost that war by going down that path whoever wins because you've only changed the name of the victor and not defeated the brutality you wished to eradicate.

So we had to retain our humanity and find some human weapon to either destroy or change Dora. It was all our mistake in the first place and our duty, as the few humans left, to correct the problem, all the while remaining human.

The more I secretly pondered this question over many days and weeks, the second option seemed the human step but again a much harder thing to do. Don't kill Dora and all her brood, somehow make peace with them.

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