The next morning we parked our horses in the nearest fenced field, borrowed the nearest truck and drove south at full speed. Our road approach would take us to the farm first. But just as a precaution I decided to use my old tactic. I stopped the vehicle on the last bend in that rural road and unpacked my binoculars.

We approached the edge of the first field through a thicket of trees and surveyed the familiar scene, our farmlands on a sunny day with the buildings in the distance. There was a tractor at the far end of this field tilling away and a truck slowly moving towards the barn a quarter mile away with bales of hay in the back. There was also the sound of another tractor much nearer but it was on the other side of the clump of trees that concealed us and out of sight.

Then I saw another sight which baffled me, but not for long. Between the barn and the farmhouse there was an unfamiliar structure, newly erected and glimmering in the sunlight. It was a transmission tower, both Sarah and I wondering what it was in whispers before the answer presented itself. The tractor was coming around the bend, not ten feet away from our hiding spot and about to appear. The sight disturbed the both of us. It was one of the Oregon girls, a pretty and vivacious lass whom we both recognized, her name was Ingrid. She was about sixteen now and dressed like a farmhand, even the straw hat, lazily driving the small tractor and tilling the Spring fields. But what shocked us was that she was also wearing the old AI visors.

Sarah quickly whispered: “We’ve got to get her.”

I agreed. An abduction was in order. She had obviously been kidnapped and we were going to steal her back. The mysterious purpose of the tower was now crystal clear. We were in a perfect position. I jumped from the thicket and with a few steps pulled her off her seat, the machine slowly coming to a stop. She fell in the soft dirt and Sarah stifled her scream covering her mouth. We easily pulled her into the bushes and I held her down, my knees upon her arms while Sarah ran for the truck.

Even before Sarah returned I tried to rip the detestable goggles from Ingrid’s eyes. They wouldn’t budge. They were screwed into her skull. A cold shiver ran down my spine as I realized that all the others were also wearing these visors and that they were no longer a part of my tribe, but Dora’s. I was betrayed in the fullest sense and all my efforts to preserve these poor people were shattered. Dora was now my enemy in every sense. My only mission from now on was to destroy her.

Ingrid was squirming beneath me more forcefully and I smacked her hard in the jaw, imagining I had Dora pinned down. This quieted her and with Sarah back we easily dragged her off to the truck and sped fast away, as fast as we had come.

I knew that the transmission tower must have a limited range as it wasn’t very big, probably just enough to tie the goggles in with the computer array in the grove, command central. I also figured that when we drove out of range the visors would go dead, hopefully releasing Ingrid from their spell. She was groggy but still awake. Sarah had buckled her empty gun holster around the girl’s waist and arms as she sat between us while I drove.

Some twenty miles north I stopped in the next town, pulling over in front of a hardware store to collect a packet of hacksaw blades and repeat the same grizzly operation I had performed four years earlier, this time my patient being live. We pulled her out and Sarah held her head just above the side of the back of the pick-up truck while I began sawing away, Ingrid screaming and jerking, making my efforts not so smooth, like performing an amputation on a patient without anaesthetics, my blade sometimes cutting into her skin and hair.

But it had to be done. Once the hateful thing was off her face I had the strongest urge to throw it on the pavement and stomp it into oblivion but I didn’t. I would keep it and use it as I had done before, to use Dora, this time for her destruction.

We still had some daylight left and made it back to Eel River for the night, far out of any WI-Fi range or any possible pursuit. For the last two hours we had switched rolls, Ingrid still sitting between us as I drove. But Sarah was now carefully ministering to Ingrid’s slight wounds, bandaging her temples, caressing her forehead with a wet cloth, comforting her with words and water, commiserating her plight and seducing her to tell us what had happened.

We were immensely relieved when she began to speak. She was still the Ingram we knew, still a human being. She began to talk like she was waking up out of a dream. She recognized our faces and smiled. She didn’t know how long she’d been wearing the glasses or who put them on her. I asked her if it was one of the droids and she couldn’t remember. The obvious answer was that it must have occurred while she was sleeping.

But the fact that her mind seemed intact, just a bit disoriented, was a great sign and I guessed that she’d only been wearing them a week or less and their seductive lies had no time to sink in and erase her own identity. Through a long dinner and more talk, I kept questioning her on exactly what she saw with the goggles. She told us they gave her the most tingling sensation of purity, that she was an angel, clean and holy and on an ascent towards heaven with every chore she performed, that it was present and in the sky even when she was driving the tractor, always before her and ever closer as she drove.

I pointed out that she had been driving the tractor back and forth so it couldn’t be ‘always before her and ever closer’. Then I asked her what she was wearing on this ascent into heaven as an angel. She went off in a rapturous strain on how she was dressed all in white in some sheer fabric robe. I asked her to look at her arms and legs, her corduroy shirt, her patched jeans and the dirty farm boots she was still wearing.

I could see an element of surprise in her looks as she gazed down at her dingy clothes and then glanced back at me with a puzzled expression. She realized she had been duped and I sent her off with Sarah to bed, choosing the single bed in the next room to lie, unable to sleep for many hours, listless and despondent as a few days before, wondering how much time it would take for all my other friends to be entirely duped and unable to even recognize me again.

I woke up with Sarah excitedly shaking my arm, Ingrid standing beside her and smiling. She said she had great news. Ingrid had told her in the night that when the construction of the tower began Ted grew suspicious and then he had fled the colony taking his two children and several others in two trucks before it was complete. She couldn’t tell how long ago this was but she remembered it caused a very great upset when it happened and that her own mother cried and cried a whole day.

I knew exactly where Ted was headed, told the girls to pack up and we set off for the tiny town of Weed within the hour, speeding all the way.

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