When everything was once again settled in our relocated community, up and running with our solar array and water supply, our fields and livestock in good order, two things got the better of us, free time and curiosity.

There was another brick building in our village, one that looked like a warehouse. It was now empty and Ted wanted to set up a science lab inside it. He had no interest in farming or repairing farm equipment. There was no need. When anything broke, we simply found another one to replace it. Ten of our colony could easily perform all the farm chores to feed the other thirty and that left only mundane household chores and child rearing. We all participated a few hours a day but that left many hours idle.

So a science lab seemed an excellent idea. When Ted came up with it Sarah and Hana and I instantly agreed to participate. There’s only so many hours of horseback riding one can trifle away before boredom sets in.

The other factor, curiosity, played in perfectly with this project. The lab that Ted envisioned, the equipment he wanted was already sitting in one place, his old research lab in Emeryville. That would involve the four of us revisiting the hive. We knew we wouldn’t run into Dora there. The place was too gutted for her and her eight companions to find of any use. She was surely in command of some fully functional hive in the U.S.A or in Japan replicating herself.

But we were curious to see if she had visited the place in her flight and left any traces of that visit, taken things, which might give us a clue as to what she was up to.

None of us could put her completely out of our minds. Hard physical work on projects helped but now we were out of projects. We talked about her constantly after dinner, hypothesizing a hundred scenarios of what she might be doing and how that might affect our near or distant futures.

This idea of building a lab in fact sprang from a very good point Ted made in one of these late night discussions. Whether or not we had anything to fear from Dora, we should try to understand how she worked, how the goggles worked and delve into all the data banks she left behind. The equipment Ted wanted to transport here would allow us to do just that, computer arrays, screens, microscopes and all the tools his old lab at Apple contained.

So now we had a mission, and a mission is a fine thing to wake up to and keep one going, as good as the desire to drink coffee.

We spent the next weeks in Emeryville, filling an entire eighteen-wheeler with our pilfered loot. We didn’t know which data banks from the hive to take so we loaded up most of them to discover their secrets. We found several trunks of goggles, some slightly different than others so we took both. A few weeks more and we had our lab set up, long tables with six large screens and all the testing equipment where we could dissect and examine every piece of Dora’s legacy, a portal into her own consciousness if you could call it that.

As we dove into this pool of the mysterious workings of AI the four of us were soon mesmerized and glued to our screens all our waking moments, almost as if we were wearing the goggles that we were dissecting piece by piece, examining their components, their engineering, and the revelations were more than shocking, more blood tingling and horrific than any story Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote.

It was an operation completely masked to the human designers of the headsets. Dora had a few chip factories that were entirely automated and under her control. As the goggles were produced she had four convenient slots integrated into each band where four little tabs the size of chicklets were inserted, two right behind the ear and two in front. She told the manufacturers that these were auxiliary power packs, as that was one of the last problems to overcome in the design of these units, the power supply, and as every scientist worked off a computer screen, no one knew.

When we dissected one of these chicklets we discovered a far more insidious contraption, an infernal machine. What we thought was a battery pack were tiny, hollow screws and they were placed in all the headsets, lying dormant for weeks or months upon each victim until Dora knew they were no longer about to remove the glasses, completely hypnotized by her visual seductions. Then they would deploy, in the most nefarious way.

The four pins would ever so slowly protrude from their lair and with a tiny anaesthetic on their tips proceed to puncture the skin painlessly, moving only a millimeter a day. When they reached the bone they would begin to bore, as they had the teeth of a drill. But this operation was also done in complete stealth to the wearer, so slowly they turned that the hour hand on the face of a clock moved faster, but in a few days the skull was punctured.

There was a chance that the last breaking through the skull might be sensed. So Dora would pause this final tap, this spinal tap, to a moment of extreme excitement that she herself induced, sex or some unexpected reunion, so this little prick would go unnoticed in the tidal wave of pleasure. No one ever sensed that they had been penetrated.

Now through the hollow pins tiny filaments of micron diameters would begin to flow at an equally slow and surreptitious pace, winding out from their tiny spools and snaking first over every surface of the brain and then deep into its center, like a worm in an apple, leisurely making its way, like the tentacles of an octopus ever so gently wafting its prey towards its mouth. When her mesh was complete the mind was hers. It would first monitor thoughts and sensations, map your mind then quickly learn to mimic them. It would stimulate your pleasure centers to motivate the actions it suggested. Soon your consciousness was becoming Dora’s toy because she would reduce you, limit you to only the thoughts she wanted you to have.

She did this with other filaments that would slowly deploy through your brain cavity. It wasn’t electrical, stimulating and manipulating your synapses. It was fiber optic and with these and her laser array she could blast hundreds at a time destroying whole sections of one’s ability to think, crippling the mind, hobbling it to her will, erasing any notion of self.

This is what Beth experienced in her memory loss, and this solved for me the mystery of why Dora’s bands contained any lasers at all. But the pure evil of this invention of hers shocked all of us and galvanized us in our resolve to destroy her. She had incorporated every trick of the most vile and deadly creatures in nature to attack us, a Portuguese man of war with its tendrils was a more pleasant foe.

The beginning of the story I Am:

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/i-am-xgjmxdz

the last segment:

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/peace-xvmvwrn