Bobbie Nosick had had her trip from the nursery to the crematorium.  Nobody would have guessed that the trip would end when a prototype of Mr Clear incinerated her.  If you knew Bobbie, she would have demanded a fee from Peregrine and his engineers to use their proto-bot to incinerate her.  The idea of “free” anything always brought Nosick’s blood to a boil. 

Peregrine understood.  So, being a gentleman, he paid a fee for services to her estate without specifying the nature of the services.  Bobbie had accumulated a lot of money over the years.  Aside from the cost of her Lucky Strikes, smoking paraphernalia, and gin, she seldom spent money.  Even for her smokes and gin, she was more than willing to swap a hand job for a pack of Luckys. 

If you visited Bobbie, she would charge you for using her toilet.  If you refused, she’d direct you to the garden.  People she adored got their drink and food at cost.  Peregrine told me that his visits to Bobbie amused him as her house looked like a shrine to Ayn Rand.  Photographs and nude portraits of her were everywhere.  You’d also see photos of Bobbie embracing Murray Rothbard or visiting Milton Friedman’s grave.  Her house of course had a library crammed with the collected works of Hayek and von Mises.  She sometimes played what she viewed as greatest hits.  For example, she listened over and over to Goldwater’s speech proposing to get rid of social security. 

If Peregrine had too much to drink, he would describe his fear that somebody might have murdered Bobbie without paying her for the pleasure.  It hurt Peregrine deeply to imagine that.  Bobbie would not more be killed without pay than consent to sex without a fee.  When she was with Alan Greenspan she always insisted on payment in gold.  What a woman.  A real looked to after you got past the cigarette smoke.

Nobody will ever understand Bobbie’s seminal role in the perfection of Death-bots.  One could say her bot cremation, albeit of a very dilapidated cadaver, was a proof of concept.  Without her stinking corpse, the engineers might have used sick dogs or other mammals.  Bobbie showed the project worked on a human scale, though engineers being engineers would have preferred the bot confronted a battling, scream, wily subject.  As Wolverine’s Mr Cleans showed, they work fine on humans, even when the victim’s being difficult.  The proof in Bobbie’s case study failed to sow the laser would kill anybody in the right way or that the machine could cope with the flow of blood when a body was being right-sized for cremation.

Bobbie’s inspiring writing was among the forces that encourage the sales divisions of Munitions Galore to a complete commodification of killing and death.  Further, one got just what one paid for.  Putin, for example, had no right to insist on special treatment just because he had supported Munitions Galore project in the past.  If he wants a stealth bomb, let him pay the market rate.  He should also pay for silence regarding his role in the Ice-10s development and testing.  Peregrine and Wolverine liked the reference to testing.  It gave no specifics, but they were sure Team Putin’s key members would know the full meaning of “testing.”

Emperor Xi knew nothing of Bobbie, of Peregrine’s schemes, or of Wolverine’s role.  His ignorance made them all laugh.  Instead, the Emperor knew the Russians had some role in the death of Chinese citizens I the country’s northwest.  The Russian he believed had had a hand in the bomber’s work was nowhere to be found.  Hence he assembled a team of experts in Suifenhe in the northeast of China.  The city is less than 4 hour of drive time from Vladivostok, a juicy target.  There is both a major highway and a rail line connecting Suifenhe and Vladivostok.  Harbin and Vladivostok are also connected by rail.  

From his intelligence services, Emperor Xi learnt of Russian efforts to build more Borei-A submarines to replace ageing Typhoon submarines.  At Xi’s direction, the team in Suifenhe with support from Harbin planned to a Borei-A nearing completion.  The team had the job of figuring out how to do the job without implicating China.  Accordingly, a team, calling themselves the Kasparovs worked to make it look that renegade Russians had sabotaged a Borei.  Despite this promising plan, Emperor Xi was sad that he had nothing as devastating as Ice-10 to try on the Russians.  He also wanted to put Putin in the same epistemic position as himself regarding the role of the Chinese in the debacle that was going to occur to a hush-hush project in Vladivostok.  Putin must in a sense know it without being able to show it.