Like a solar flare, I flew

Despite the clarity of that moment, I still found it very hard to believe everything Switch was telling me. If there was truth in his words then I alone can destroy the Holy Family. As the last human born, my brain is programmed with safeguards designed to disrupt the control that they exercise over the whole world.

Switch's claim regarding Kernel - that he is an older model of the communication drones - is reasonable enough. I'd like to get that from him directly, but at the moment he's ignoring me, quietly working on 5's body. According to Switch he'll be able to repair most of the damage within an hour or two. Trigger thinks that we should escape when dinner arrives, before 90 takes the chance to kill us. Switch argues that if the Holy Family had wanted us dead, we would never have been born.

That sounds true enough to me but it's not the Holy Family I don't trust; it's their son X I fear. That bastard has visited with me every year on my birthday, carefully analysing me for information. He once told me that if it weren't for his mother, he would've had me recycled at birth. Apparently the Holy Mother has some affection for me, for my life anyway. Because of those special visits I probably know more of the Holy Family than any other living person. The irony of that probably doesn't escape X either, who would love to see me destroyed.

He told me once of the history of the world, a basic part of history in school, that three centuries ago, the Holy Father had ruled the entire world. The earth had been inflicted with fire from the sky and the oceans, a war that decimated the entire planet. Outside of the borders of the empire lay ruined nuclear wastelands, populated by posthuman mutants. He carefully controlled every resource of the state, following his promise that never again would the human mind be allowed to create such destruction.

But after fifty years of ruling a stubborn people, he gave up the throne, married a young woman to whom he gave the world as a wedding present, saving only the Holy City as his own. She changed the course of history, extending her husband's methods further, deep inside the human brain. As time passed, she too passed control of the empire onto a family member, her son Xavier, and allowed her mind to be transferred into an immortal set of circuits, her image appearing only at political formalities. Her husband was rumoured to have once done the same, but he now restricts his movements to the Holy City, though no one has seen him in over a century.