Twelve thousand men, women, and children. The knowledge and experience gathered through twelve thousand lifetimes. Twelve thousand brains that could be harnessed to think about knotty problems, such as predicting the Marauders’ next target. Were they aware that they were being used? Shelly hoped not. The alternative was too horrible to think about.

Shelly had floated the idea of setting up a virtual reality, a “massively-multiplayer” world where all twelve thousand of those people could interact, talk, live something that at least resembled a “normal” life. And maybe something would come of it eventually. But it was estimated that the Marauders still had the computing power of forty to fifty thousand souls at their disposal, and Aegis felt it couldn’t spare that processing power right now.

Nietzsche was right, Shelly often thought gloomily. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.