Quatrain 41, Century 4. ""At the inception of the millennium / machines of the new age deliver devastation in war. / From a throne under 13 faceless warriors / the invader king wields power.""

""Inception OS"" is an operating system used by almost every computer in the country — ""the machines of the new age."" Max Stareman is president of the software empire who planned to release the program to a massive media and consumer blitz. If Inception software was the weapon that ""delivered devastation"" then we had to stop it.

And first we had to get to Max Stareman.

Eddie figured tapping into Stareman's home base computer qualified him as nuts and who was I to argue — Eddie'd always called himself ""crazy,"" my plan helped validate the name. Way I saw it, the world's top computer programmers worked for Stareman, and any one of them could've been Gua — even the billionaire himself.

Wondered what the Gua wanted with an operating system anyway? Eddie figured the answer was easy: control. Most of the wo