—Sir WILLIAM Osler (1849-1919)
Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
Alexander sat in his impromptu command center within the Ashley Hall of Minds, trying to improve the glacial response time of the Salmagundi government. Even in the face of his coup, and his direct control of every police department, security agency, and militia on the planet, events conspired to move faster than Salmagundi could react.
On the screens before him, he could see the recon team securing the last lifeboat site. Three of the six lifeboats had been unoccupied, and they had secured the occupants of two others. The teams had sterilized the sites, using plasma grenades to reduce the lifeboats themselves to slag.
It was the kind of direct action the Triad spent days debating, worrying over its effect on the general population. As if the presence of offworlders and offworld artifacts would be somehow less disruptive.
At least that concern was moderated by the fact that they had already evacuated the civilian population from the forest east of Ashley in preparation for using their nuclear stores on Flynn Jorgenson’s alien invader. The evacuation was fortunate on many levels. It helped ensure that no civilian agency came across the lifeboats before the militia got there—even with the intolerable delay caused by the Grand Triad’s debate.
Alexander idly wondered if they were still debating.
The preliminary abbreviated debriefing conducted by the on-site commander with the four Eclipse crew members they had retrieved indicated that there were two lifeboat occupants who still remained at large. They were his immediate concern. He needed them in his control or confirmed deceased. His militia scouts had identified the lifeboat the missing two had landed in, and after slagging the wreck, they now engaged in a search pattern, spiraling out from the landing site. It concerned Alexander, because it placed a militia team in uncomfortable proximity to Flynn Jorgenson’s Protean anomaly. He had the nuclear strike on hold, but the other militia teams had already retreated out of the red zone. Alexander did not want one of the militia teams in harm’s way if he had to launch the attack. They weren’t an expendable resource.
One of the militia officers with him solved the problem.
“Sir, we have something on holo five.”
Alexander looked up, and saw a security feed from the camp around the Protean artifact. The camp was abandoned in anticipation of the coming strike, but he saw three figures standing in the middle of a muddy track. One was Flynn Jorgenson, the unfortunate who had discovered the Protean artifact’s impact site. The other two were unquestionably the two missing invaders from the lifeboat. One wasn’t even human. It had striped fur, a tail, and looked as if it stood three meters tall.
They were too close to the Protean site for the militia to retrieve them, even if he wanted to risk contact with something so obviously nonhuman. He would have to be satisfied with the strike.
He ordered the last militia aircraft out of the red zone and resumed the countdown for the nuclear strike.
Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) 650,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534
While the Jizan approached with the troublesome remains of the Eclipse and its crew, Admiral Hussein had the data from the crew interviews piped into the same meeting room where he had been reviewing the transmission from Admiral Bitar.
He watched the debriefing of the Eclipse’s owner, Mosasa, as it was transmitted back to the Voice. He wanted to believe that it was some sort of elaborate misinformation ploy. Even while the human-shaped AI was still talking, he pulled half of the intelligence analysts on the Voice to do what fact-checking they could using the resources on the Voice against what data the Jizan could recover from the dead ship.
By the grace of God, how did all this fall into my lap?
The medical officers who had been doing the analysis of Bitar’s transmission were still with him, observing the android’s statement for much the same reason.
“What do you make of it?” he asked them, still watching the hairless Mosasa’s passion play. The medical officers sat at a square table in the observation room while Hussein paced around the perimeter. In the center of the table was a holo projecting an image of the seated Mosasa and his interrogator on board the Jizan.
Lieutenant Deshem folded his hands, watching the confession, and shaking his head. “I don’t know what value I can provide. The medical team has done everything possible with a noninvasive scan to confirm that this—thing—is exactly what it says it is.”
“And everything else it’s saying?”
“Admiral, sir, this thing is a machine. All I can tell you is how well or poorly it is mimicking human responses. Unlike a human being, we have to assume that every response—voice, body language, pupil dilation—may be engineered for our benefit.”
“I understand your caution,” Admiral Hussein said. “We’re facing something that admits its own design was for the purpose of manipulating human responses. That said, if we take all those cues—voice, body language, pupil dilation—at face value, what is Mosasa telling us?”
“As if this was the interview of a human being?”
“Yes.”
Deshem nodded. “Mosasa shows signs of being dangerously psychopathic and potentially suicidal.”
“What?”
“I see no exhibition of empathy, and he—it—displays a narcissism bordering on megalomania. It is the center of its own universe, and it has rewritten its own personal narrative so that it is not just the hero, but it is God. A human being with those traits would be, at the very least, sociopathic. Combine this with a series of failures aboard the Eclipse and we have a situation where reality contradicts its personal worldview. Its self-image is incompatible with powerlessness, and that conflict is manifesting as signs of depression.”
Hussein stared into the holo and asked, “And you think Mosasa would want us to see that? Make that interpretation of his story?”
“No, I do not—which is precisely why I distrust the conclusion.”
Hussein stared into the holographic Mosasa’s eyes and felt a deep unease.
The Jizan had a fully operational medical unit that had shown him the scans of the creature sitting in this holographic interrogation room. Never mind how human Mosasa looked, or how human he behaved, there wasn’t a single biological component to the thing being interrogated on the Jizan. It didn’t matter if Hussein could recognize the pain and fear in Mosasa’s expression. It didn’t matter if he could see the loss in Mosasa’s holographic eyes. There was nothing behind them, no soul, only an imitation of life. A facade constructed solely for the purpose of deceit and manipulation.
If the Father of Lies was to attempt to create a man, Hussein suspected the result would resemble Mosasa.
The more Hussein stared at Mosasa’s expression, the more he thought Deshem had described a psych profile that perfectly fit an AI, and this AI in particular.
This is why we do not suffer such things to exist.
As the Voice caught up with the Jizan, Admiral Hussein watched the other surviving crew members being debriefed. Between the statements, and the data from the dead ship, he confirmed the Eclipse had been Mosasa’s scientific expedition toward Xi Virginis.