From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

There was no post from last week, because our computer network was preoccupied installing some software. With our computers down, we put off Project Bucket Run. We’ll resume trying to steal the Bucket of Pure Water later this week.

The software that took over our system originated from the hard drive the Golden Web delivered two weeks ago. Our rivals certainly know our weakness. Give us a nice black box, and Technefarious will start playing it to see what makes it work. If the world ends because of it? “Oops.”

I can’t fault our computer department for the problem. They hooked up the hard drive to a computer that was not tied into our network. The hard drive immediately hijacked the machine, and the computer department patted themselves on the back for their caution. Unfortunately, the computer was plugged into the wall to power it. No computer can send signals across the power cord. Certainly not without adding some special hardware to the computers sending and receiving the information. There’s no way a regular machine could do that on its own.

Some of the older Technefarious personnel may recognize the problem with that assessment, because we do know a computer that could do exactly that. Technefarious built it. In fact, our recently not-dead-and-still-agitating-to-be-put-back-in-charge founder Dr. Crankpot oversaw the compiling of its code as part of Project Delta AI. It is, of course, Technefarious’s second most famous leader, D.O.C.T.O.R.

It was D.O.C.T.O.R.’s children, the Elite Triad who first figured out what was going on. With the network under assault, they assisted in the counterattack and recognized that the details of the attack strongly resembled the restoration of D.O.C.T.O.R. from one of his backups. When they reported that to me, I ordered a stop to our attempts to disrupt it. As people of science, sometimes you just have to see how things turn out with knowing all the end ahead of time.

And now I have two of my previously deceased predecessors demanding to be reinstated as the head of Technefarious. That’s gratitude for you.

Oddly enough, my first job with Technefarious was to kill D.O.C.T.O.R. after he was already dead. Dr. Occultomancer was in charge at that point, and he told me he was hiring me to ensure that D.O.C.T.O.R. would not be able to reclaim his control over the organization. He was lying. He had somehow discovered how my powers worked and was using my ability to determine how to kill anything to ferret out any lost backups there were of D.O.C.T.O.R. I had to go back to Occultomancer and tell him I would not be able to fulfill the contract since I could not find any. He said he was sorry to hear that, and then explained his real aim was to recover D.O.C.T.O.R. The AI had fallen to Queen Quantum in an attack that had obliterated every copy of him in this universe and time-hardened the destruction to make it nearly impossible to recover him using time-travel. Occultomancer was looking for a way around the issue and had hoped I was that loophole.

Looks like someone else may have found the gap in reality needed to bring D.O.C.T.O.R. back. I wonder who it was?

Have a good week, everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man