(First posted here.)

Behold the monomyth, Keebs thought as Dante grabbed the keys to the Adventure and strode out of their living room with the weight of the world gone at last.

He wondered whether he should come, whether this was something a guy without Dante’s total disregard of his own life could manage. He was not the smaller man of the two (well, okay, at five foot five that was probably accurate) but he knew this had more to do with Nirvana than any arrogance Dante had about being human.

So he watched him go.

He wondered exactly how a boy like Dante can make these decisions like a man. I’m taking down the entire gig that gives these robots gas, he said earlier, and there was no doubting what he meant.

As he closed the door and listened to Dante fire up the engine to his father’s car, Keebs felt a tuft of a wandering insight almost come through him like a piece of yarn through a giant needle. The kagluyag are sentient beings bent on breaking down the very fabric of life on earth. They are strong, powerful, with unimaginable influence over the highest institutions and the lowliest street gangs. They read minds, they calculate, they pin numbers and science on all knowable phenomena.

Dante told him earlier about how they basically tried to prove to him that free will did not exist. That before an action actually makes it to the real world a vestigial impulse is first triggered inside the brain even before conscious thought enters the scene, feigning control over the chain of events.

Dante had tried to argue saying it is still up to man to act out on an impulse. It still takes a discrete yes or no before an action is taken, actions that affect lives and histories.

What the kagluyag replied in return was this: the truth is there are three precious milliseconds that stand in between recognizing an urge and acting out mindlessly on baser instincts.

Three milliseconds, they said. Just three.

Keebs racked his brain for what this meant. Three milliseconds. We have all these celebrations about the glories of humanity but in the end we are three milliseconds away from acting like total animals.

Three milliseconds.

And yet the kagluyag could not break through Dante’s milliseconds with any manner of consistency.

Keebs’ mind whirred like a wind-up toy. There must  be a way to exploit this, Keebs thought.

He gave himself a minute.