When you searched “Mitch Powell; New Eden Ministries; missionary,” a lot of what came up was porn. There seemed to be a whole subgenre involving catching your vN at home with a New Eden person. It was mostly about catching your female vN with a female New Eden representative. They would usually be naked already, by the time you got home, and then you got in the middle of it, and then the New Eden lady felt bad, and you punished her with the back of a hairbrush or something while the vN girl begged you not to.
But Pastor Mitch Powell also showed up. He was younger. He had hair. It was a mug shot. Apparently he had a few priors. He’d been through the system just like Javier. The American version, at least. He had a youth record, too, but it was closed. His adult record had mostly to do with assault. He would lose his temper. It was for this reason that he and his wife divorced. That, and he was caught on an indecent exposure charge at the Tallapoosa Welcome Centre, a rest stop off the I-20. The boy he was caught with was eighteen at the time of his arrest, which was after midnight. Powell had fucked him while he was on his way home from his birthday party, but legally, it wasn’t statutory rape. In later interviews, Powell claimed that strange luck was all he needed to convince him that God was indeed watching out for him. He searched for a variety of churches. He had been raised Baptist, but had burned bridges in local congregations. He also tried some Maranatha and Charismatic traditions. None of them held him for long. All that changed after he got involved with New Eden.
New Eden was a lot newer, then. It was before the game was developed that would put Jonah LeMarque in prison. Back then, LeMarque was just a young guy who refused to iron his shirts and thought raising money online in advance of the apocalypse was a good way to go about things. He was also able to accept Powell’s sexuality. He encouraged Powell to date. And he did date, but it didn’t go well. His relationships with men were just as prone to acts of violence as his relationship with his wife had been. The charges against him were all dropped, but he was under at least one restraining order that kept him out of his Atlanta suburb for two years.
During these two years, his role in the church changed from devout parishioner to corporate headhunter. He started visiting colleges and universities and hacklabs and makerspaces. He went to fairs. In other states, he visited high schools with robotics clubs. He spoke in front of church youth groups. He attended seminars and talked about the relationship between science and religion and optimism and hope. Little by little, he brought in the scientists that developed the vN.
His most notorious “get” for the organization was Derek Smythe.
Derek Smythe was the lead supervisor on the engineering team that developed the failsafe.
Derek Smythe had died at home, shortly after developing it. His obituary and the eulogies delivered by his tiny handful of friends spoke of the combined pressures of brilliance, post-traumatic stress disorder, and overwork. Only one friend mentioned the curious project he was working on, and the robot he lived with. A gynoid. Named Susie.
“Susie looks just like Amy,” Holberton’s daughter said.
“Yes,” Javier said. “She does.” He frowned at the display. “So, Smythe was helping develop the failsafe?”
“Oh, yeah. He was basically the architect of it. He started developing something similar for NASA as part of his dissertation, but the funding fell through.”
“And now he’s dead?”
Holberton’s daughter raised her eyebrows. It pulled the smudges of blue on her eyes that much higher. “Uh… duh? Do you not listen to me at all? Seriously. It’s really annoying.”
“He’s dead,” Holberton said, behind them. He glanced at the avatar. “Go back and have fun with your friends, Rhiannon.”
“OK. See you later!”
She walked back into the frame.
Holberton leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. He wore a dressing gown that looked suspiciously similar to the brocade and velvet pieces that appeared in the Hammer films. “You know, I really thought we had something special there for a minute, Javier.”
Javier stood. He came very close to Holberton. He slid his hand in between the folds of silk. Holberton pulsed in his hand like a polygraph. “We would have something special,” he whispered, “if you weren’t planning the systematic extinction of my entire species.”