She took his right hand and whispered a few words in his ear. Then, reaching into the pocket of his jacket, she withdrew a small transdermal injector and held it for an instant to a vein in his left hand. "Colonel Slayton," she said, as she set the injector down and spread a small comforter over Malcolm’s legs, "Dr. Wolfe’s going to need to be prepped before we reach Afghanistan. If you’ll take care of it, I’d like to look after my brother for a little while."

Slayton nodded once, grim concern filling his dark, scarred features. "We’ll all need to be sharp when we get there," he said, "which means at least an hour or two of sleep for everybody. But we’ll head down to the armory first, Doctor."

"We ought to be able to satisfy at least some of your curiosity, Gideon," Eli Kuperman said, "while we show you the basic equipment." With that Slayton began to herd Julien Fouché, the Kupermans, Leon Tarbell and me quietly down the stairs to the control level of the ship’s nose and then on into the corridor. From there we descended to the deepest recesses of the vessel, where we entered a compartment loaded with weapons unlike anything I’d ever seen. Over the course of the next hour, I’d learn a great deal about those weapons; yet because of other things, I was told simultaneously–stories of how and why this strangely zealous, yet paradoxically broad-minded, band of adventurous spirits originally came together–such technical information washed over me in something of a wave, leaving only scattered fragments behind.

First to find their way to one another, I discovered from Eli and Jonah Kuperman, as I was being fitted for what appeared to be an ordinary suit of coveralls but was in fact highly advanced body armor, were themselves and Malcolm, who had all been in the same class at Yale. Eli and Jonah–who since childhood had been historically minded opponents of the dominance of information technology over every field of human endeavor including scholarship–sought out the young Tressalian, because they’d heard a rumor that he’d recently been responsible for an infamous prank that made a mockery of the public’s susceptibility to that same technology. Working in secret and on his own, Malcolm had created an imaginary, digitally generated candidate for the U.S. Congress and then actually succeeded in getting his creature elected to office through clever manufacture and manipulation of bogus background information and news footage.

Malcolm was content to have this first of his informationally perverse schemes exposed as a prank (though the law never identified him as its author); however, that was the last time he would allow such a revelation, making sure that his future work was assimilated into the public consciousness as true in order to both gauge the gullibility of the global information society and ensure that when he finally did reveal what he was doing, the effect would be all the more devastating. This pattern began right away at Yale, where, drawing on Eli’s and Jonah’s anthropological and archaeological skills, he devised the appropriately scholarly operation that came to be known as "Alexandra the Great."

Those old enough and with an interest in such matters will no doubt recall the frenzy that swept through the world’s college and university campuses in 2010, when, during excavations for a new office tower in the heart of Alexandria, Egypt, workers stumbled onto the long-sought-after tomb of Alexander the Great. When the sarcophagus was opened, however, it was found to contain the remains not of a man but of a woman. Closer anthropological examination revealed the bones to be appropriate to a female of Alexander’s time, while chemical testing dated them to that era as well. A furor erupted over the historical and sociological implications of the find, and while some slower and more prudent voices did eventually raise the possibility of a hoax, the story–and this was the very crucial point–had already gained so much credence on the Internet and in other information media that those voices went utterly unheard.

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