“Great. So. Can you please tell me what the hell we’ve gotten ourselves into? Aegis…Marauders…car robots that…absorb people?”

Lisa sighed. “It’s like this. A few years ago, someone finally cracked the AI problem. Not by making one from scratch, but by figuring out how to copy a human mind into one. And then, well…here we are.” She waved a hand at the garage. “Aegis is a top-secret UN task force. The Marauders…well, they’re the ones who cracked the tech in the first place. Lucky thing we were able to reverse-engineer it pretty quickly. But we’re trying to keep a lid on it so we two are the only ones who have it.”

“Like nukes,” James said slowly. “The USA made them, then Russia got them, then everybody had them.”

Lisa nodded. “Right. We’re trying to avoid that.”

“But how did sis end up a car?”

Lisa looked embarrassed. “Well…it’s the same tech they’ve used to make gas out of farm wastes since the oil fields went dry. Automech turbines run on hydrocarbons. They don’t care where the hydrocarbons come from.”