Skye is sitting at the computer in the office in the bunker, staring at the screen. It speaks thus:

"Wait, how do I know it's actually you and not someone else using your voice?"

"Uh, good point."

"How about I ask you something only we would know," says Max. They think for a second, then say, "Remember when we were sailing down the Columbia river from Portland, and we were crossing the bar..."

"And the center mast boot started leaking...", Skye interrupts.

"And it was making us take on water, and we couldn't replace the boot, and we didn't have any epoxy that would set in the wet," says Max.

"So," Skye continues, "you made a cast of it with duct tape, and while I sat on it with a trash bag under me, with my legs wrapped around the mast, steering the boat with the ropes tied to the wheel that we use for the wind vane, you went inside and made the cast into a fiberglass collar. Except you couldn't get the fiberglass patch material into the right shape so you had to epoxy toilet paper instead. That paper mache wasp nest held all the way to Tacoma."

"Ok I'm convinced," says Max, "now please explain why I'm talking to my pillow right now."

"Right, so you've met Arnold. Have you met Scott?"

"No he didn't seem to be around when I was there."

"Do you at least know who he is?"

"Some TED talk guy, right?"

"Yeah. 'Longtermism' TED talk guy. 'Human Life Extension' TED talk guy."

"Human centipede TED talk guy?"

"No but you're not far off. Why would someone like that, and one of the wealthiest defense industrialists on this earth, choose to be here? At the edge of the world? In a pace that's technically still a war zone?"

"Because they're doing something that would be illegal on the mainland?"

"Right, because they're doing something that would be illegal on the mainland. What 'Human Life Extension' activity would be illegal on the mainland?"

"Animal experiments?"

"No, animal experiments are legal."

"Human experiments?"

"Not quite. I read some of the stuff they've been publishing. They claim to be able to grow human tissue from culture, and they have a plan to 3D print an extra-cellular matrix scaffold thing to circus tree that tissue into an organ, but they don't claim to have functioning organs yet. However what they do have working is a system that uses the same technology they use to manipulate the signals that cells send to each other to arrange themselves into organs or whatever to trick them into going into a kind of deep sleep where they use virtually no energy. In that state of static equilibrium they last practically forever. The longevity of cryo freezing organs without the problems of ice crystals forming and stuff that make them turn to mush like frozen strawberries when you thaw them back out."

"So they're preserving organs for transplants? That doesn't sound illegal."

"If the organs came from dead people it wouldn't be, but the problem with dead people is they're usually sick, so"

"THEY TOOK OVER THE CANNERY TO CAN HUMAN BEINGS!?"

"Uh. Kind of, yeah."

"How did you come to this conclusion??? Did you just read some academic papers and 'read between the lines' and conclude that they were doing murder???"

"Uh, well that was made me suspicious initially but I also broke into, well kind of their entire facility but that includes the part where they do the murdering. They have a room with a stretcher with restraints and a dirty laundry hamper full of black bags. Like, the kind of 'black bag' that's also a verb. And another hamper full of random people's clothes."

Max takes a full minute to process this, then said,

"So we're-- sorry I'm, because you fucked off to who knows where, anchored next to a literal industrial murder facility,"

"I don't think they're at industrial scale yet"

There is thirty seconds of silence as Max's nervous system manages to narrowly avoid a full-on seizure.

"Max", Skye intones, "Max if I'm right, and I hope to God I'm wrong, but if I'm right they've already murdered at least a hundred people, and if nobody does anything about it they're going to double that number every six months until, I don't actually know how many but A Lot. Who else is going to stop them if we don't? Who would we call? 'Oh, yes, FBI, I'm calling you from the Aleutian DMZ, could you please start a global thermonuclear war with the Russians by coming out here to deal with some murders which by the way were committed by the largest single donor to your boss's election campaign?'"

"Also," Skye continues, "I didn't fuck off to who-knows-where, I fucked off to the drone base near Pyramid Peak. You could wave to me from the deck. I mean I wouldn't see it because I'm underground but theoretically if I was outside you could. You're welcome to come join me but I don't know who would look after the boat."

"The boat," Max interjects, "that is fucking RIGHT NEXT TO A MURDER FACTORY!"

"Actually, about that, and I know I'm in no position to be giving you orders, but I think it would make sense to move over next to the Darts. Al and Alice both have more drone expertise than I do and I think they could be a big help planning, whatever it is we end up doing."

"And what about you? Are they not looking for you? You said you were all over their facility, that must also mean you're all over their surveillance cameras."

"Oh, no I was wearing the laser hat. And no of course I didn't have my phone on me."

The laser hat is a baseball cap with several strings of 980nm laser diodes woven into it, sitting under blobs of epoxy that do the same job as the lenses on laser car headlights. The visible light spectrum (what the human eye can see) is about 300 to about 750nm, but the CMOS image sensors that digital cameras use, including phone cameras and surveillance cameras, respond down to about 1100nm. That means that if you have a 980nm light then cameras can see it but not people, and if the light is bright enough and it's in, say, the brim of a hat, then when a camera looks at your face all it sees is a bright flash. It can probably tell that there's a person in the picture but it can't make out anything more than that.

Max is fully crying at this point. Tears, snot, the works. Skye can't really see this since Tinkerbell's cameras are almost entirely obscured by the pillow but it's evident in Max's voice. In this moment Skye wishes for nothing more than to reach over and give Max a hug, put their head on her shoulder, run her fingers through their short hair, but hugs don't fall under the umbrella of "information dominance" and Tinkerbell's designers considered them to be out of scope.

"You're insane," blubbers Max, "I'm living with a crazy person."

"You're the one who's talking to a pillow."

Max is now not so much overwhelmed as completely exhausted. They basically fall over sideways onto the bed, butt first, then pitching over so their head is on the pillow. This would blow Skye's ears out but the system automatically adjusts the gain to prevent that from happening, and anyway getting hit with a head through a pillow is less violent than the mortar explosions Tinkerbell was designed to tolerate.

"I'm going to sleep," says Max, "I'm 99% sure none of this is real and it will go away when I wake up. So I'm going to sleep."

Skye is now speaking in her best ASMR voice to avoid rupturing Max's eardrums. "Okay," she whispers, "but if you're wrong and I am still here in the morning, I have Tinkerbell set up to alert me whenever you say its name. Good night."