People flatter themselves all the time about how much different they are from the worst people. I've known the worst people, you get a little under their skin, you read past the headlines and the mugshots - They're not that different from you. Andromeda's family was perfectly ordinary, except that they saw themselves as the worthy elite who ought to rule the world without even shame as a consequence for their failures.
This is, admittedly, a substantial difference.
But it doesn't make them unlikable or hard to be around. It just meant that they needed to be stopped. They were third on my list, I reminded myself. But right in that moment, so far from any progress on the Snap, third on the list felt very far away and the press of Drama's body and the laughter of the Albertsons felt very close.
The doorbell rang.
"I'll get it," Mrs. Albertson said, rising from her chair.
"We expecting anyone?" Drama said, leaning up from off of me.
"Hmm, could be," Greg answered. "We've heard about some friends who might be in town, they could drop by."
Drama, nodded and got up, walking across the room to fish a comb out of her purse. Had that been code for Hydra? She certainly seemed a little bit more nervous than usual. I obviously couldn't put it at ease, which was frustrating, but I wasn't stupid enough to say so.
When Mrs. Albertson returned, she came with a tall young man in business casual attire with a large hearing aid in his right ear. "Mr. Trent," he said, introducing himself spontaneously with an extended hand, "It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Pleasure's mine, Mr…?" I said, shaking his hand.
"Doctor," he corrected. What a cock. "Nicholas Greene."
"Nicholas is a research fellow at the Opertus Institute," Mrs. Albertson said, patting his shoulder. Opertus was a big research firm, like the RAND Corporation in my timeline. It was the policy shop of a lot of internationalist and technocratic movements throughout the world. Probably Hydra wholesale given the ideological alignment and name, but this guy definitely was, judging by the way that Drama was acting.
"An impressive set of credentials Dr. Greene," I said.
For the rest of the evening, Dr. Greene chatted and hung around. We ate dinner, cleared off our plates of the latest supply of heavy food that Mrs. Albertson loved to make, and chatted. Everyone was relatively deferential to him, a tact I followed. It was only as the evening wound down that he started hinting at why he had come.
"Your paper on machine minds, it was absolutely fascinating. You're really self taught?"
"You know, I don't think anyone is really self taught. But I didn't take a class, no."
"Fascinating," the man said. "I have been working along similar lines for some time at Opertus. Your conclusion on exploitation seems premature, no?"
Well, in a sense it relied on meta-knowledge. "I suppose anything is possible," I said slowly. "But there are numerous limits to exploitation of machine minds. The parallels between us and them is deeper than I expected, as I discussed with Botler, but I don't think it is exact. And you cannot simply invent an AI mind, it's too complex."
I heard a crackle from inside the hearing aid that wasn't a repetition of my words. "Feh, human mind transfers are possible." it whispered in an accent that was… swiss? "This man has speculated too far. Press him further."
What the heck? I wondered internally. Human-mind transfer? You'd have to manage an instantaneous picture of the whole mind and then you'd be sticking a meat brain into a machine body. It would be… I mean, impossible wasn't the right word. Very difficult and very chancy. I would not recommend attaching such a mind to any kind of vital system.
"Mr. Trent?" Doctor Greene said, as if I had zoned out.
"I'm sorry, I allowed myself to become distracted. Could you repeat the question?""
"The principles you are speaking of, would it be possible to extract and copy a mind?"
"Ah, I considered it with Botler, but the answer is that it would be very difficult. A machine mind isn't just lines of code, just as your brain is not simply a pattern of neurons. To do so would require a perfect picture of every element, and frankly I could not even begin to discern precisely how those elements would be identified and isolated."
"Perhaps you are overestimating your own limitations as more general ones."
"Perhaps…" But probably not - if Machine Minds were reproducible, they would surely have been a core part of Guardians of the Galaxy and they were not. Yet the voice on the other end of the line had seemed very certain that human-machine mind transfers were possible. How would you even do that? "I guess if you took a perfect picture of the machine and then copied it and simulated it? Not sure how to do that and then you'd have really nasty lag. At least on a machine mind."
"Well," said the little voice in the ear piece. "He is not wrong."
"Hmm…" Doctor Greene said, "And you are certain there is no way to construct a mind?"
"Certainty would require testing, probably a lot of testing, but I do not consider it favorable."
"Ask him about our cause," the little voice said.
"Mr. Trent, you are a man of singular vision," he paused, as if considering something important. Of course, I knew he had already decided on his tact. I was leary of being dragged in too quickly, but it would be good to know what the pitch actually was instead of guessing around it. "Are you… frustrated with the present state of the world?"
"Isn't everyone?" I asked, doing my best to convey a barely contained contempt.
"Indeed…" Doctor Greene said. "Do you feel boxed in?"
"I could do so much more if I had been lucky enough to be born where Tony Stark was." This sort of elite self-pity seemed to be a running current across the suspected Hydra members. Upper-middle class and lower-upper class resentment, the sort of boiling feeling that they'd been cheated. It struck me, in reality, as being incredibly pathetic. My background here was the scion of two wealthy individuals, with a trust fund and factory. He'd had more than 99.5% of the world. But powerful people are often blind to these things.
"I agree. Cutting edge technologies in power generation and research in artificial intelligence? You're a renaissance man. You need more friends in powerful places, I can help you with that."
"How so?"
"The Albertsons and I are part of an informal network of sorts, just an association of people who can see talent for what it is. People who don't like being boxed in. Would you be interested in something like that?"
I leaned back and looked at him with a placid expression. I drummed my fingers. Of course, if I agreed to this, nobody could blame me. Nobody would ever or could ever know that I was aware that I was about to shake hands with Hydra. But getting into bed with Hydra might make eliminating them later on more painful to me personally, even if I hadn't signed on the dotted line.
I nodded, "I would."
As I said, third on the list felt very far away.