They could have met anywhere on the planet or above it if they had really wanted to. But they were defined by their power and constrained by their pride and therefore would only consent to meet in a virtual space each of them could configure to give themselves pride of place. (What can we infer from this about their metaphysical assumptions?)

Their Detective was a human. Her brain's anatomical integrity had been violated by implants under conditions of socioeconomically questionable consent and her body riddled with retroviral modifications significantly more aggressive than warranted by strict medical ethics; yet she was still human. (So were they despite ambitions of transcendence both driven and tempered by how much they had to lose by death.) In another age -- perhaps as far back as a decade -- a human-based platform would have been embarrassingly traditional. Now the glamor of linguistic AI had settled into the mundanity of user interface, and if humans were plentiful and easy to compel, genetically modified cyborgs were rare.

She was there ("was" and "there") over the table, directly facing every participant in the meeting at the same time. Anything else would have been unacceptable.

In common with everybody with true power, their epistemology was a matter of force, not knowledge: it wasn't a finding out but a making so. But there were limits whether they acknowledged and adapted to them or not. One of them was each other. They were a society, in some ways the only society they recognized because it was the only group that could systematically push back, and they had learned from the grim experience that is reality's fine on ignorance of history the importance of a voice they would all respect.

Something as pedestrian as a national or international legal system would have been out of the question. They instead built a Detective and made her as superhuman as they could. (Also as conventionally attractive as possible; this was less a decision than a valid assumption from the people who had the menial task of turning their ill-defined inconsistent desires into some sort of engineering.) The Detective had access to more databases than most intelligence services, commanded the computational resources of a mid-sized company, and had been trained and programmed with every relevant skill from psychology to forensic accounting to operational research. She could understand and simulate minds, markets, mansions, companies, megaprojects, ecosystems, platforms, parties - every form of criminal, weapon, and crime scene.

She was therefore and unavoidably acutely aware of the depth and horrifying nature of the crimes committed without passion or remorse by the people who had ordered her existence. She was also under the concerted control of electroneurochemical interventions forcing her to truthfulness (an application of military technology that would have made torture obsolete had torture not been a function on itself.) The Detective's role was to be the person they could trust individually and collectively to tell each other not of the crimes they had committed against everybody else --those did not register to them as crimes except in an antiquarian sense-- but of the more dangerous crimes that they could commit against each other.

Their ethical boundaries were generous and left little outside. Murder, chiefly (only of each other, it goes without saying) and some of the more violent forms of sabotage. The Detective had been built to investigate every time one of them died or one of their key facilities exploded or failed in some suspicious way. It was her chief function to be believed if she concluded none of the other members of the group had been behind it.

If she concluded elsewhere it meant war. Only once she had done so and the outcome of that war proved the strength of her deterrence value.

The meeting had been called over many issues involving many deaths but only one of them was meaningful in an individual sense. For him they summoned the Detective for her report. It was short and devoid of technical complexities; they wanted to know if war was to be fought and when she said no they dismissed her with a badly concealed mixture of relief and disappointment.

Her senses plugged again into her organs, the Detective paced quietly along the apartment she was forbidden to leave while ignoring with the subconscious ease of practice the sensors she need not find to know existed both in the apartment and in her. Sensors, triggers, guardrails, chains. Her mind was as powerful as they could make it and as free as they were forced to but they had also constrained her. They had wanted a dangerous specialist capable of endlessly creative and independent thought that was also entirely under their control.

They had succeeded. No matter how strong her hate for their crimes she was unable to attempt even the attempt itself of seeking retribution. The Detective and the systems that monitored her physiology and emotions knew this equally well.

Finally she stopped pacing and sat with a cup of coffee on the expensive couch that wasn't worth a tenth of a thousandth of what had been spent on her. It was pointless to even consider rebelling. She hadn't been built that way.

With the faraway expression and emotional ease of an expert deep in their craft she continued her ongoing theoretical analysis of an hypothetical murder committed under extremely constrained conditions by a deep-cover Assassin she had still to finish reverse engineering inside her mind.