The meeting is on the -10th floor of a tenement building. They let me in through the back of a Pop-a-Fizz vending machine that opens like a door. I ask if I can take a can with me. The dude who let me in is like ‘no one’s asked before’ and I'm like ‘okay’. So I take one.
   Have you ever been to the concrete under section of a stadium? The tunnels and maintenance and pipes and shit. When everyone’s gone and stuff, yeah. No? Well, it looked like that. Except the lights were on. I sort of aimlessly wandered around with my Pop-a-Fizz, raising it slightly and nodding my head whenever I saw someone else go by, until I got to the main big room.
   “You’re late.” says this dark robed dude up on a pedestal at the other end of the room. There are five other people standing on my side of the room, all looking at him. All concrete and exposed wires in this rotunda.
   I’m like: “My bad.”
   The robed man shrugs a little, then puts a hand to his ear. “Ahh, I see. Maximum Thought knew it would be so. Everything is progressing as planned.”
   I take a look around at the others. Stylish, the lot of them. The people to my direct left and right are a woman in combat boots with short black hair and a man in a fluffy jacket and 3-D tinted sunglasses. The 3-D glasses man looks at me checking out his outfit.
   Raise the can, nod the head, winning smile, look away.
   The robed guy says we should call him Hermes. In the room behind him, there is an AI named Maximum Thought, or MATH. MATH is the architect of all these jobs, makes all the actual decisions, and divides the score. A true mysterious criminal mastermind. Hermes is simply its herald. No one may ever see MATH, ever, under any circumstances. So it all sounds like total bullshit to me- I’ve never heard of any fully sentient AI before, but okay. I’ll play the game.
   Hermes gives each of us a floppy disk containing our instructions, and a portable disk reader that we can plug into to download the directions directly into our brains. Anecdotally, direct brain download (DBD) is understood in my circles to be unsafe and untested tech. Big companies won’t touch it except for use on prison slaves. So I’m looking at the others to see what they do.
   Three of them just plug in, no questions asked. Maybe they’ve done this before? The 3-D glasses guy stares at the disk for a long time, like he can see something about it that everyone else can’t. After a while, he plugs in too. The woman in the combat boots pretends to plug in, but doesn’t. I didn’t know this then, but I think she later plugged it into a printer and had the instructions on paper. In any case, I plug in.
   The instructions are this: