Over the years, Kobak had used his incredible ability to focus to detect underlying patterns in building his empire. His greatest achievement, however, had been in seeing the wisdom of bringing a higher form of nonhuman intelligence into the world – Colossus. It was a form of intelligence he hoped might help mitigate the negative side of his autism. At the time, he had thought silicon based information processing integrated into the human brain to be so far in the future, he would never live to see it happen. But in labs across the country, it was well underway. Bots inserted into the prefrontal cortex were already wirelessly connected to the Internet. But now he had a third form of intelligence to think about, something perhaps more powerful than the other two – a very smart alien general
