So they all had to get used to the pseudonyms.

These replacement titles came in the form of little name-tags dispensed to their workstations via the Compresso-courier Delivery Tube. Capsules popped into their offices with a little "*ding* and a howdy. Inside they found aluminum alloy plates with a SnazzCo Quantum Levitation Pin on the back that allowed them to stick the thing to the front of their labcoat without it flopping down or sliding off. In fact, the SnazzCorp Quantium Levitation Pin allowed them to sport their new names in such a magnificently scientific manner that their developer, SnazzCorp, had advertised that it would guarantee a 27% increase in grant money solely through impressing the tie clips off of potential Big MT investors. Wealthy industrialists, military brass and big-buzz journalists; how their eyes would glaze over in wonder just seeing the names of the top researchers of Big MT float suspended in the air before their labcoats! They would indeed soon be passing their fingers between the chrome backing and the hypercooled "Human Introductions Expediency Device" and gape in awe at the wonders of quantum locking. No crude bobby pin or magnet held these researchers' names aloft, oh no. It was a cantrip of science. Most importantly, it was a visually impressive one.

After all, with the world balancing like grandmother's precious teakettle on the lip of the politically-charged coffee table of the world over the unswept hardwood floors of war, visually impressive discoveries were what America desperately wanted. It was what Big MT used to distinguish itself from RobCo's high-publicity parade of fully-voiced automatons. If it spun, whirred, exploded, violently transmogrified, produced a stream of sparkles or sparks, shot colourful beams or bolts or produced really anything more or less spherical and glowing then it was considered worth funding. If it buzzed, beeped, rattled with rhythm, made zapping sounds, spoke in a loud voice declaring its intentions or warned its environs of just how dangerous it was in a voice both proud and menacing then the newspapers would feature it on at least page two or three. If it blew things up, tore things down, blasted things apart and then blasted them back together again, and had indicators that counted the number of blowings up and tearings down and showed in multicoloured LED display at what efficiency it was radioglowifying organic matter before repurposing it into a nutritious protien paste, the president wanted it at half the size with a brief instruction manual and in the hands of every red-blooded American soldier. Visually impressive was the bread and butter of Big MT and thus, as indicated by the note included with each Quantum Levitation Pin, the head research team's new name tags were going to be the floaty kind.

And as mentioned before these floating nametags bore the new pseudonyms of the head research team. They were a security measure. The sanctity of the interior of Big MT had always been top-priority. However, as any computer scientist could tell you, no system is one-hundred-percent secure. Accidents were happening. As of October 20th 2077 there had been no fewer than fifteen uninentionally fatal accidents within the shell of Big MT over the span of two months. All data indicated a probability of 384% that Chinese spies were responsible for every single one of them. Big MT had imposed a series of security measures to ensure the safety of its most important staff. One of these was to blank the records of every single staff member. In place of their real names they were given other names. Scientific names. Utterly respectably impressive names. Names that would not only confuse any Chinese spy by defying their stiff and Confucianist notions of naming but also impress the shareholder review by sounding many times more scientific than something like "Robert House."

In the womb of the Central Dome there was an impressive room known as the Think Tank. Down a hallway, fourth automatic door on the left, was a much smaller and rectangular known as the Think Tank Annex. off to the side of the Think Tank Annex, through a hinged door with a twist handle, was the Think Tank Annex Break Room. Inside, seated around a deluxe H&H Heracleum-alloy Folding Picnic Table, the six head researchers loomed over Bit MT's success with their single most important project of the century: obtaining verifiable plundered copies of Vault-Tec's single most important project of the century.

"Remarkable. Utterly remarkable. So remarkable I can't even remark upon it. It's just unspeakably and remarkably . . . them."

"I'll be honest. I'm a bit jealous."

"Back up, BACK UP. It's impossible for us all to leer and gossip at the diagrams when the two of you are hogging all of the gossip and leering."

"Everybody, take five folders. No more."

"But there's twenty-nine folders and five of us!"

"Doctor Merriw- eh, I mean, ONE OF US is absent. Put his folders in front of his chair. That chair, over there, with the monogrammed stitching ripped out."

"Is everyone wearing their nametag?"

"Of course we are. Security regulations."

"I'm not! I'm not wearing mine. Can't trust Quantum Locking that close to my chest without an insulated undershirt. What if I stand too close to the microwave? I don't want to wind up defrosting my nipples with a toaster coil in the Sink while you pick apart this juicy contraband information."

"We were explicitly forbidden from not wearing our nametags. By breaking the rules the only thing you're pinning to your chest right now is a red star. You only get four folders. And fetch your nametag or we won't be calling you by any name but Mao Zee Dong."

When he returned, the rest of them were adjusting their glasses leaning across the table to examine each others' tags.

"Doctor . . . Klein then, is it?"

"Yes. Apparently. Fortunately. Very scientific, isn't it? I believe, if a cursory glance around doesn't decieve me, that my name is de-facto the most scientific. Not bragging of course. It would only be natural. I've always been good with bottles, in any case."

"We haven't seen them all yet."

"Dala. Doctor Dala."

"Doctor Eight."

"Doctor Borous."

"My name is still coming up trumps. Why am I not surprised," Klein muttered, "And what's this? Doctor . . . 0."

Doctor 0 adjusted his tag.

"That's, ah, Zero. Doctor Zero."

"Nonsense. That is CLEARLY an 0."

"Nope. Zero. I'm . . . Doctor Zero. It's oblong. Oval-shaped. That's a Zero."

"Did you get a letter with your tag?" asked Dala.

"Well, yes, didn't you?"

"And what did it say? Is it 0 or Zero?"

Doctor 0 or Zero or whatever he was called rubbed his chin, "Well, yeah. Of course I did. Didn't you? Was I the only one who got a letter? Don't tell me I was the only one with a special note scolding me to wear the damn thing, I-I-I mean it's not like this is the bathroom sink here with that interoffice "waste-not water" campaign. That one got plopped right square in my lap just because ONE night I left the faucet on with a drip. That's not pattern forgetfulness. That's entropy at work. I can prove it. I wrote up a paper to prove it. I can prove, with mathematical precision, that entropy was responsible for making me look bad. Therefore, entropy is the one who looks bad. Entropy leaves all sorts of things dripping in the night that shouldn't drip. I should really issue that report once I find the right typeset and clip-art for the header, fonts, et-cetera. But I digress: my name is definitely Doctor Zero. It is a zero, not an O. Do I have to schedule you all in for a class on the basic differential geometrics of the circular and pseudocircular?"

"I still say it's an O," said Klein, "Borous, take a closer look at it. You're good with round-ish things."

Borous leaned his body across the entire table squinting until his face was a forearm's length away from the suspended nametag,

"If that's a zero . . . then where is the conspicuous SLASH that distingishes the letter from the number?"

Schroedinger's Name plucked the tag out of the quantum lock and put it down on the table. The five of them quickly rushed to loom over it. Doctor 8 activated the blue light on his datapad to illuminate it.

"THAT Is a letter," Borous declared, "All who declare this to be a letter, let your hand be ELEVATED."

Everyone but the researcher in question did so and his name was decided. through the acutely un-scientific process of democracy, to be O. As they took their seats he took out a small tube and began attempting to laser etch a slash through the roundish thing. All that he managed to do was produce sparks. The tag was Saturnite alloy. A Wattz 2000 Laz-o-sketch wouldn't cut it. So he turned to the pilfered Vault-Tec printouts the rest were mugging over.

"Ha! Ha!" Klein burst out, "And Vault-Tec consider themselves innovaters. Laughable. Utterly derisively laughable. I haven't felt so much like laughing with verifiably mirthful humour since those poorly sealed barrels of concentrated endorphins leaked into the cistern plumbing."

"It's, well . . ." Doctor 8 adjusted his reading glasses, "Not to be that guy but, ah, these vault experiments. They're very comprehensive."

"Bah! Comprehensive. Com-pre-hensive. What do we do here that isn't comprehensive? The robo-scorpion project alone required every single one of the research stations tasked to full to complete. We even had to consult that beta AI in X-3. If consulting a Beta on how to run something through an Alpha isn't 'being comprehensive' I'm clearly in the wrong line of work. I should be teaching grammar school chemistry. In England. According to Meri- to, well, to THAT missing researcher . . . what is his name now?"

"No idea. Hasn't shown up yet."

"Where is he?"

"Showing around some guest. No clue who. Must not be important if one of you still hasn't claimed to have been in the same class as he was."

"Fascinating," Dala said, "Absolutely fascinting. Now, how do you think that would turn out: enclosed vault population of one-thousand with nine-hundred and ninety nine women and one man."

"Where are you getting this?"

"Vault 69."

"How appropriate."

"The same, but in reverse here at vault 68," Doctor Zero added, "But with one woman and the same number of men."

Dala cleaned her glasses, "Sounds like . . . exhausting research."

"Psychology," Klein growled, "Absolute crackpottery. The only thing psychology ever did for us was taking psychologists out of the field of real sciences. If I wanted my dreams analyzed I'd consult the Hypnagogic Sigmundian Spectrometer. At least I can fit that in my closet without it complaining about the implicatons of me storing it there."

"THAT thing? It told me that my dream, you know, the . . . the high-school one?" Borus paused to chew on his words, "It told me that my dream was, and I quote, 'Only 5% unrefined imagination.' It actually said that! To ME!"

Doctor 8 looked up from his paper to ask, "Then what would the remainder be?"

"Vintage-year repression."

They all sucked air in through their teeth.

"And to think! We nearly had that repressionectomy algorithm for the auto-doc you were working on, Dala. why was that shelved, again?"

"Not feasable. Too dangerous."

"Bah. Plenty of things are dangerous. Breathing is dangerous. There's at least seventy-thousand things that could kill you if you breathed them in. That holotape, is it on a high shelf? Could I reach it without having to resort to using a stepladder or chair of some sort?"

"I've lost the holotape. For the best really. Someone could have accidentally excised their own Raison d'être."

"And here I was assuming that you were a dedicated minerologist."

"I'm still accruing doctorates."

Doctor Klein scoffed, "VAULT Puppets? I mean, really now. One man. A vault. Puppets. It's like watching the those four-fingered hand-drawn livestock on saturday morning Tee-Vee prance about in lab coats." He tossed the folder across the table where it skidded into Doctor O's lap trailing sheafs of paper.

"Hardly an experiment," O said, "I mean, what are they hoping to PROVE with this thing? This whole experiment?"

"That they have no legitimacy and never have? It's nonsense. Really quite rubbish, if you ask me," Klein said, "Where's the SCIENCE in gathering together samplings of the American populace and putting them through stress-tests in sealed vaults in order to log the behavioural changes in each sample group and matched against a series of control groups, also sealed into their own vaults, under the duress of what is likely going to be the greatest worldwide conflict in known history?"

"None whatosever."

"Absolutely."

"One-hundred percent ridiculousness."

"Not a shred of ingenuity."

"Pathetic."

There was a silence.

"Oh to hell with it," Doctor O spat out throwing his hands to the sky, "It's brilliant. They're brilliant. I've never even dreamed of having this kind of opportunity."

"Government licensed!"

"Fully-funded!"

"And the VARIETY!" Borous said, "The sheer scale of it! One-hundred and twenty-two test villages! Little Yangze looks like a waiting line at an outhose compared to this. Oh hell, tear my heart out and replace it with a . . . a fish tank pump why don't they."

"Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing?" Klein exploded, "MY research team blubbering like homo sapien larvae at the sight of some human storage cabinet manufacturing company? What about our projects, you dunces?"

"No they've really outdone us Klein," sighed 8, "This is the biggest thing I've seen a private contractor ever manage to pull off. Ever. Bigger than Merriweather's X-42. Bigger even than that mutagenic goo thing West Tek has going on at Mariposa. We're . . . well, suffice to say this makes us look pretty stick-in-the-mud."

"Nonsense. Absolute moron's sense. We're practically swimming in contracts! Aren't we? Dala, what about that . . . that thing you were working on? The thing you were messing with yesterday?"

She looked at him in confusion. Klein sighed.

"That anatomically correct metal man you've got crowding the storage room of Y-2?"

"My Saturnite Adonis?" Dala asked, "Oh, that's a work in progress. Hardly have the nose right yet. And that wasn't a, erm, contracted project. Personal interest. I add a little this or that on breaks. He overheats easily under a laser beam."

"Is he functional yet?"

"Functional? Well, no, I haven't even gotten to his belly-button yet. He'll never be, well, TRULY functional. Could be dangerous."

"No plans to make him articulate?"

"I don't think it would . . . impress much . . . on Shareholder's Day. We could put him out front of the Dome, I suppose. If we made him some pants. Might draw in tourists, loathsome as the thought is."

"TOURISTS," bellowed Klein hammring his fists down on the table, "The last thing we need is to resort to tourism. We are building the future here. At least one of us has to have a meaningful contract at the moment. Doctor O? Pfah, don't even speak. The last thing I saw on your slate was reverse-engineering spare RobCo tech into prosthetic limbs for . . . for wounded children was it?"

"Hey, it worked," said O adding a pinch of sugarless mentat to his coffee, "Betsy loved her new Securotron arm. Couldn't play the violin anymore, of course, but she's helping her dad hunt wild geese on the farm with 400% improved efficiency."

"Doctor 8? What about that voice-o change-o-tronic . . . thing you were doing. Voiceulator? Voiceaholic parambula . . . something? Don't blame me. As head of logistical operations I can't possibly be expected to keep track of all of your failures."

"Had to be repurposed. Everyone's voice came out sounding like Dean Domino, no matter what I did to tweak the cloud personality matrices. Sold great for Christmas though. I'll have you know that 8% of our 2070 budget came from 'Dean Machine' holiday sales. Statistics showed them to be very popular with husbands who had been married for four years or more."

"So we're a TOY company now? Is that it? Should Dala start producing Saturnite ventriloquism dunces? Why don't I just defenestrate myself now and be done with it?"

The door swung open.

"Good afternoon, colleagues! I, Doctor Mobius, have returned from lunch!"

Their heavily-bearded associate entered the room with a booming voice, a smile and an unknown scientist in a beige labcoat.

"Doctor . . . what?" Klein adjusted his glasses and squinted at the suspended name tag, "Did you spike your mentats, Merriweather?"

He was immediately shushed as the two newcomers took seats. The unknown scientist took his place beside Mobius, produced a small notepad and immediately began to sketch something on it.

"Silence! Do NOT utter that name out loud, nor any name like it, nor any other name formerly known to this think tank as associated with any member OF this think tank! Security is of grave importance at the moment; the details of which I'll inform you of as soon as I've had a peek at these juicy Vault-Tec reports. Yum. Nothing tastier than insider information."

After skimming the reports he declared them to be "A hideous display of brilliance."

"Vault-Tec," Moebius mused, "Always rejecting the ever-important glow-y aesthetics of science in lieu of groups, groups, groups. I cannot fathom what they even do with all of their group test results. Sometimes I think they might just stuff them into a vault to see how the documents will handle being locked away in there. If the data were to leap off of the pages and start battling for supremacy over ink and pens then they'd throw an office party. As far as I can tell Vault-Tec has never once done anything with any of the data they've ever accumulated over the years about vaults and human psychology except to better design vaults for doing human psychological testing."

"Psychology," repeated Klein, "Mobius, you must agree with me or you'd be wrong: there is nothing in this world more deplorable than a psychologist. Prove otherwise. You can't."

"I couldn't disagree with you more, Klein. Without psychology we wouldn't understand why we despise psychologists so much, and if we didn't understand why we hated psychologists so much we wouldn't be able to justify our hate towards anything at all. And if we couldn't justify our hate towards anything at all then we couldn't well justify the creation of the Hateological Psycho-stim Injection Vector and our soldiers on the front-lines would be handing daisies to the reds in hopes of killing them with kindness."

"Oh don't get me started," Doctor 8 butted in, "The infamous X-22 project, 'Codename: Wifflebeam?' Please."

"Weaponizing kindness: bottomless money pit," nodded O.

"Regardless," continued Klein, "They're, at best, a tangental resource. For laughter, that is! Endocrinology; by contrast, a priceless field! Without endochronological studies we'd all still have 'nominally-functioning' medulla and just think of where we'd be then. Morally culpable, that's where! Feeling things," Klein shuddered, "About our test subjects, even!"

"Speaking of," Dala added, "I'm concerned about my own medullar tweaking. I've been feeling guilty lately. About some things."

"Oh really? We'll have see to that at once," Mobius said as he stroked his beard.

"Nothing important, I hope?" asked Klein with an eyebrow raised.

"No. Not really. Just . . . well. No. Nothing that important."

"Guilt?" said O, "Oh, shoo. It's probably something like 'Oh dear oh my, I'm Doctor Dala, important head researcher at the biggest technological institute in the greatest country in the world. I shouldn't be sleeping in like this after a hard night of saving the planet from the dark specter of the mundane. My bed is just soooooo comfortable.' Right?"

"Not exactly."

"It's not about Little Yangze, is it?" 8 asked, "Because THAT is something we have discussed before in depth. We've plunged the depths of that discussion before and there's nothing down there in the anti-humanist gloom but amazing discovery."

"Really Dala, with the present condition of your brain there's no reason to feel guilty unless the auto-doc slipped up somehow. Drive might need defragmenting."

"Could be my chem use. I don't know. Lets change the subject."

"What caused this so-called 'guilt' in the first place? You walk by Little Yanzte there every day on the way to the Saturnite Alloy Research Facility and I've never once heard you complain about those alleged 'humans' we've wrangled out of the legions of the red menace."

"Well, I think it was a hallucination that caused it. I saw one of them. In the dome. Scavenging Cram from the break room like a . . . a lost animal."

The entire table gasped.

"IMPOSSIBLE," Borous roared, "Absolutely not-thinkable. The collars! Even I don't know how to remove their collars. I don't think there's a living person in the facility who does. We even melted all of those interns to make sure of it. There is nothing that could allow a Yangze subject out of their filthy little nest without all of their sedition-filled brains being smeared halfway across the crater."

"Like I said: it may have been a hallucination."

"And yet, if it wasn't!" bellowed Mobius loud enough to interrupt the unknown scientist from his sketching, "What if he WAS loose in the facility! This brings me to the root topic of discussion of this meeting: our precious sciences are at a terrible risk. The war is escalating and we have a reponsibility to end it with a victory for all that is hypothetically in the favour of Democracy. If not, we're all going to wind up being scientists for the reds. You don't want to know what THEY do to their scientists."

"What DO they do to them?"

Doctor Mobius' voice sank low,

"Limited budget. 25% taxation on income. And worst of all: they have to share housing and facilities with . . . manual laborers."

Everyone leaned back steeping in shocked silence.

"Like . . . who, ditch diggers?

Mobius nodded.

"Vacuum-tube technicians?"

He nodded again.

"PLUMBERS?"

The unknown stopped sketching again, stared woefully at the ceiling, shivered, and then continued.

Klein wiped sweat from his brow, "I see. I see. Well, it's not like we didn't all didn't assume that. It's just a shock to hear spoken out loud. So, Merriwea- MOBIUS. Mobius. What does THIs have to do with US? We don't live with laborers. We don't even KNOW any laborers."

"Well I'm getting to that, Klein. You've all read the recent accident reports-"

"Accidents? You're worried about some accidents? What else is new here?" Doctor O chimed in, "Ding-dong, is Doctor Mobius home? We live on accidents. Why, just the other day Doctor Klein told me to close my eyes and slam my hand against some console he'd been working on in order to replicate a proper input fumble."

"I couldn't well replicate it myself or it wouldn't be a fumble."

Mobius frowned, "If any of you had actually READ my reports, which I'm sure only 8 may have skimmed, you'd know that these were accidental accidents. Not the normal kind. We account for the normal kind. My first college thesis was on productively factoring the likelihood of violently explosive mishap into a successful project. Won me an award. I shook the president's hand and everything, or at least one of his more talented look-alikes. The Sink's Ident-o-matic SmartEye said that there was a 97.8% likelihood that it was the real Dick Richardson."

"Oh why don't you just marry that photograph," grumbled Klein.

"Digression aside, these accidents are truly accidental and worrysome in extremis. The latest one is the blaringly loud icing on our cake of alarm: do you all remember the 3D Surround Sound Propagandoplex?"

A pause.

"Yes?"

"No."

"Vaguely."

"I provided something for that project," Dala said, "I think it was the seat frames for the theatre."

"You ALL built it!" shouted Mobius, "It was part of the experiments for the Sierra Madre contract! Z-38! The hologram project!"

"Oh," said O, "Well, if you'd just said 'The holo-thingy' I would have recognized it immediately. Yes, yes, quite a remarkable success. Wait a moment, did you say Z-38? That didn't explode. Y-0 did. Klein saw to that."

Klein's cheeks darkened a shade of red and he stopped breathing.

"What? You did!"

"I did NOT," Klein jabbed his finger at Mobius, "I came up with the idea! HE handed me the diagrams! HE was the one who drew them up! He put them in metric! WHY would you draft schematics for an isotope converter in metric? Were you educated in BELGIUM, MONSIEUR MERRIWEATHÈUR?"

"That name AGAIN!" Mobius stood up in his chair knocking it backwards, "Do NOT call me by that name! I am MOBIUS. I have ALWAYS been Doctor Mobius as far as you are concerned, from the beginning of recorded history to the heat death of the universe! You are putting all of our lives in the hands of THE ENEMY. AS WE SPEAK."

The table shut up a bit as Mobius put his chair back on its feet and resumed his composure.

"Abhorrent misbehaviour on your part. Ignorant and selfish," he growled, "And I didn't do it on purpose. There was a sorting code error and I hadn't taken my daily dose that day. Instead I got children's Choco-Drops for mentats. I thought they were a new flavour. I repeat again: GENTLEMEN . . . and DALA! We are in DANGER! The enemy is not at our doorstep: he has crawled under the house, drilled in through the crawlspace and is putting drops of commie poison in our mouthwash!"

"Explain," said 8.

"In due course. Now, yes it's true: the 3D Surround Sound Propagandoplex was NOT housed at Z-38 where we developed the rest of the hologram technology for that glorified bellhop Sinclair. There wasn't enough room in it for even a half-size movie theater. It was housed at Y-0 in the basement. I can even show you the blueprints, yes, IN IMPERIAL UNITS," he shot a glance at Klein, "Proving that it was housed there. Having been constructed in the basement with Saturnite soundproofing it was partially shielded from the blast and most of its important subsystems were salvageable. They were hauled out relatively intact. Doctor O, I believe you were tasked with repairing the majority of them."

"Oh? Was I? Were those the things you left in my office? I had to get the construction crew to haul them out onto the grass because I had no room to work on them. I think, uh, that's still on my to-do list. Organizing that."

"Sloppy sloppy," Mobius frowned again, "Several of the core components have gone missing. Most notably the reverse-engineered Mesmetron, now dubbed the 'Cinematrix Lens," the Audiographical Thoughtsculpter and the Subliminal Suggestion Box. All missing, all unaccounted for. Probably due to O and his inability to organize, well, anything."

"You should have left them in my lab! You know, where I work?"

"Your lab is the crater's junkyard. I couldn't even find the door to open it and check inside for available space."

"Okay! Okay! So I screeeewed up! Big honking deal! At least I didn't blow up an entire lab by having a morning case of Europeanitis!"

Everyone took five for coffee refills before returning to the discussion.

"So Moebius, these parts are gone: why the panic? I misplace things all of the time. We don't even know where the initial prototype of the Y-17 is anymore. For all we know it's gambling away some stolen 0.01% of our budget in Las Vegas and finding out it can't get drunk because it's filled with . . . dead guy."

"Yes, of course, things go missing. Pencils. Pencil sharpeners. Wallets. Prototypes. Military-grade bioanathama gel. The list goes on. However, these Propagandoplex parts are conspicuously absent. Their immediate use, unlike wallets or skin-melting goo, is not commonly known to anyone but those who might have the means to abuse them. They're not even labeled. Nor do they come with an instruction manual in five, maybe six languages."

"Yeah, hence my confusion," added O, "I thought they were all refrigeration units or elaborate paperweights or something. So, I put them outside with all of our other fancy paperweights. Newton knows we've got a lot of those."

"Yes, well, the capacity to make malicious use of their functions I would rate 'terminally high.' On a rating scale from zero to three these things are an irrational number of some sort. Possibly e."

Dala looked skeptical, "Why so dangerous? What thread are they as paperweights? Is the enemy trying to make off withour superior-grade printing paper? So smooth, you know. Quality stationery."

Mobius sighed, "Well, on their own they essentially ARE big paperweights. In the context of the 3D Surround Sound Propagandoplex they were crucial to its core functions. The Cinematrix Lens focused the holotech light waves into acute hypnotic patterns that transformed the silver screen into a thought-radiation refractoplane for dynamic suggestion transference. The Audiographical Thoughtsculpter, 8's work, scrubbed sound waves to emulate the exact pitch and frequency of both a scolding mother and a coercive father speaking at exactly the same time while offering the audience the aural impression of a gigantic three-flavour ice-cream sundae reward. WITH CHERRY. And, as the name implies, The Subliminal Suggestion Box processed whatever message we wanted to send from a modifiable punch-card into data that could be dissimenated by the other two devices. A genius work of thought control technology in the form of an entertaining three-dimensional film. Brings a tear to my eye."

Borous cringed, "And this so-called Propagandoplex exploded? I hope we at least sold a license or two before the fateful, ah, kablooie."

Mobius shook his head sadly, "Not one. Although we were planning to build a replacement before the parts went missing, as it was a beautiful piece of work that Hollywood would not have been able to ignore. Now, as I said, on their own these components are useless. They're not even interesting to look at. No centrifuges, pressure gauges, knobs, buttons, meters, or readouts. Not even an on/off light. But it has come to my attention that two other very important pieces of technology have been misplaced as well: a Sierra Madre Vending Machine and the Mk29 Universal Munitions Distributer."

Doctor Borous tightened his brow, "Isn't that a . . . gun?"

"Yes."

"That fires . . . little chunks of metal?"

"Elongated three-dimensional dome/cone-shaped prisms of metal, to be precise."

"Let me get this straight," Klein leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, "You're concerned that we're going to be introduced to high velocity pieces of dense mineral, as in, stuck in our bodies. Like common footsoldiers! I'M concerned you're going senile. The pacification field prevents anyone from so much as thinking about firing a, how do you say it, 'gun' in the Dome. We're safe as kittens. Kittens with opposable thumbs."

"I must admit Mobius, it's absurd to be worried about this. If the violent distribution of ammunition were a threat to us we'd all be living in vaults like these plebians," Borous gestured at the Vault-Tec documents on the table.

"If I may be allowed to continue? Forceful lead poisoning trauma isn't what's at stake here. As I said: the mind-control technologies are the key. They could easily be used to modify the Mk29 UMD into something completely different, something I've dubbed the 'MK29 Unmidigated Mind Deconfrabulator.' They could turn the Mk29 UMD into the impossibly more threatening Mk29 UMD! With such a device they could rewrite, for their own socialist purposes, the brains of any non-lobotomized sentient residing in Big MT!"

There was a moment of silence to consider this.

"I, for one, just plain don't see the reason behind this whole Mk29 business," Doctor Borous said, "We've got Mesmetrons just lying around in X-8. I tripped over one the other day while I was taking Gabe to the splicing chamber. Why doesn't this communist swineherder just use one of those to scramble our impossibly brilliant minds?"

The smile of a man possessed by the understanding of something brilliant and terrible stole underneath Mobius' beard,

"Because, gentlemen . . . and Dala, the Mesmetrons we possess are the commerical-use model, not the unlicensed promotional model. They're pieces of ill-designed Washington DC-region technotwaddle. In order to use one of ours you're forced to read, and confirm understanding of via multiple-choice test, a licensing agreement projected onto its Mesmoscreen. Part of that agreement is the knowledge that using the Mesmetron on any living creature brings with it, and I quote, 'The chance of irreversable frenzy, irreperable damage to the cerebral cortex, and explosive cranial distruption.' In other words using it requires the pre-disposed knowledge that it is a violent and dangerous weapon. Hence, it is impossible to use under the effect of the pacification field."

"So we're doubly-safe!" shouted Klein, "Either they're using a gun on us or they're using a gun on us!"

"Far from it! You understand nothing! You understand negative anything about the gravity of this crisis! A Mk29 UMD repurposed into an insidious experimental Mk29 UMD removes all violent intent from the Mk29 UMD! The Mk29 UMD is completely safe to anyone who might use it against another due to the gentle nature of the brain altering components it contains! Those components were designed to be softly suggestive! Its use would no more be suppressed by the pacification field as would a salesman coming in here and trying to convince you to buy a 2nd hand Protectron!"

Doctor O sat up straight in his chair and screamed, "You're telling me the pacification field HASN'T been calibrated against RobCo spokespersons? They could just, just dance in here and tell us all why House's robo-rejects are 'The safest name in mobile home appliance?' Am I the ONLY SANE MAN IN THIS ENTIRE CRATER?"

"Relax," assured 8, "It's taken care of. We've got their personality and appearance profiles logged into the turret grid. First entry. Top priority. Shoot on sight. Shoot to kill."

Doctor O let loose a sigh of relief.

"For once," he said collapsing into his chair, "I can finally say I am proud to be part of Big MT."

Everyone broke for more coffee and more mentats. By this point none of them could sit still in their chairs. O kept having visuals of Robert House's mustache flittering around the room which he would swat at occasionally with a rolled up report on a certain "Vault 13." Borous' voice was steadily rising to a rolling boom when he spoke and showing no signs of stopping. Klein had out a mirror and a pair of manucurist's scissors trying to make his facial hair perfectly symmetrical.

"As I said, gentlemen and Dala: the matter at hand is severe. Right now any one of us could be under the command of the enemy. The persuasions fired from the Mk29 UMD sound like a distant out-of-tune radio broadcast to the victim and they would plant themselves so reasonably into their mind that they would seem like part of the victim's daily routine. They wouldn't even notice that they were doing something seditious and traitorous. All of our various projects are at risk. Just imagine, Dala, your glorious Saturnite Adonis on display . . . in a gift shop! At 1/29th scale! In the Forbidden City! Sold for peanuts!"

Dala clapped a hand over her trembling mouth and whispered, "Never. They could never replicate his form properly."

"He would be sold as a cheap trinket to Pei-jing weekenders, his extruding member nothing more than a crude aphrodesiac for encouraging the production of more communist wretches. Such stakes are what we have to deal with, gentlemen. And Dala. We have much to lose. And that is why I have enforced the use of these pseudonyms. If they don't know our real names then how can they know our projects? How can you assassinate a 'Doctor Klein?' when you're looking for an, oh, say, Doctor Nathaniel Blofeld? Vastly more difficult, especially to the Chinese way of thinking as far as I know. So foreswear your real names until the traitor has been dealt with and the Mk29 UMD has been recovered."

He paused to clean the fog of his monologue off of his glasses,

"And remember: any one of us could already have been indoctrinated. All of us are at risk of being the traitor. Dala has already spotted a Chinaman in the complex. He is surely to blame for any and all sabotage. We'll get security on full alert searching for him. In the meanwhile, we must all be extremely careful about what we confide in who. In fact, nothing should be confided in anyone except for what has been spoken during this meeting. Get all of your confiding done now before the lot of us are turned into the mindless zombo-collective of Mao."

The table exchanged worried glances.

"What should WE be doing about it?" Klein asked, "I've got a mountain of things on my plate right now and none of them involve telling you a single detail about any of it. Get our Barney Gumbel squad to go do it. We train and pay them to handle such banal matters as escaped Chinamen and misplaced brain deconfrabulation cannons."

"Unfortunately," 8 produced and unfolded a datapad, "Our security team is a bit understaffed at the moment. We needed a lot of them to assist with various projects around the crater. Secret projects. Which they're, uh, still busy with. A good portion of the rest are on vacation seeing their families."

"How long can it possibly take these primates to grunt 'Hi Mom, bye Mom?' No more than the weekend."

"Well, their families are currently being crowded into these vaults here in anticipation of nuclear catastrophe, so, they'll be on leave for a few good weeks . . . or a couple hundred years. Kind of like a rain-check for the political climate, I guess."

"So many people do we have available at the moment?"

"No members of the core team. I've got five names here. Oh, nevermind. Four names. Three."

8 paused to scratch his head.

"That's funny. This is supposed to be kept in real-time. Give it a second to refresh. Nope, that's right, three members of the security team. Wait, two. No, no, wait for it . . . one. Yes, definitely one."

"One?"

8 held up his index finger.

Klein buried his face in his hands, "In the name of all that is theoretical . . . we only have ONE security guard for the entire crater? What happened to our standing team?"

"Security station logs would tell you. Reports are submitted to a database as to their wherabouts and physical condition by their SmartBadge. Unfortunately I don't think we can access it for reasons of security."

"New protocols. I implimented that yesterday. Always one step ahead," Mobius added.

"So, TELL US: who CAN access them?" asked Borous, impatient.

"The security team know the access codes."

"And where is the security team?"

"Like I said: we don't know."

"And the codes?

"Also unknown. You'd have to ask the security team."

Klein rubbed his temples.

"But we have one confirmed security guard left, you say?"

"Eh, yes! One. One security guard. He's a veteran, though. Thirty-five years of service. Very loyal. Very obedient. Also not human."

"I . . . what species is he?"

"Canine. Half canine. To be honest, only 28.8% canine. The rest is machine. He's much sturdier than your average overweight watchblob. I don't think his cognative faculties are quite as acute as a human. He can't read, write or speak and he lacks opposable thumbs. 25% more olfactory receptors than a human, though. Actually 26% now thanks to Borous. He can even see at night without a Darklight Cowl. He's really, well, in many aspects he outperforms any other member of our security team, living or unaccounted for."

"He's a dog."

"Not only that, he's Borous' dog!" Mobius declared, "Gabe is head of security now, Borous. We're promoting him."

"I always believed in Gabe," Borous smiled, "I KNEW he had the GUTS to excel. And the daily breakfasts of CHEMS? I suppose they couldn't have hurt his chances."

"And I declare this informal circle of gossip to be officially adjourned!" bellowed Mobius as he rose from his chair, "Someone mark it down on our schedule of impromptu get-togethers. You all have very important buttons to press and so on! Oh shoo, I almost forgot: I ran the numbers and there's a 99.8% likelihood that come Saturday the Chinese will have aimed and fired at least three nuclear warheads directly at this facility with the intent of annihilating everything living inside of and within a six to seven mile radius of the Dome. So if one of you could get some sort of automated laser cannon or proximity-triggered plasma matrix or something, I don't really care which, up on the roof by the end of the workday day then, well, I would really appreciate the gesture."