by Andrew Beery
“Surprise,” I whispered.
2100.1208.0129 Galactic Normalized Time
The clone known as Merab Q’Tar was conflicted. She supported the Galactic Order of Planets and yet she found herself compelled to take action against them. It seemed at some point in her past she had been compromised by the entity she now remembered was an AI called Eshbaal. The name was strikingly similar to the name of a failed King from a human book she had recently read called the Bible. She could only hope the same fate awaited this Eshbaal… although it seemed, for the moment at least, she was compelled to serve this king.
Chapter 10: Dog House
“Put those two in immediate stasis,” I pointed to the twins that had accompanied Merab to the arboretum. Two security types placed restraining cuffs on the unconscious women and lifted them on to gravity sleds for their trip to the medical isolation wing. I was concerned that they would have the same intracranial suicide devices embedded in their brains that we had repeatedly found in others that we had captured.
“I want those camo suits and anything else they are wearing removed and sent to the labs for analysis,” I added. The security team nodded. It was probably an unnecessary order. The security folks knew their business. They were the best of the best, or they wouldn’t have been on the Gilboa, to begin with.
Merab was similarly restrained even though she, like the others, remained unconscious. I knew our Merab was a clone of the original and would not have a suicide device. This would present us with a unique opportunity to obtain valuable intel. An opportunity I planned to fully exploit.
Lori stood next to me and supervised the med-techs that were attaching equipment to the Saulite doctor and her two companions. The equipment induced Theta waves in the brain and suppressed Alpha and Beta waves. This would help keep the three of them in a sleep state.
My wife was professional but curt. I’m not sure if she was madder that I had put myself at risk, even holographically, or if it was because I hadn’t shared my plan with her in advance. In either case, I was in the proverbial ‘Dog House’ for the foreseeable future.
Dog House or not, I needed her help now that we had Merab in custody.
“What are our options for interrogation?” I asked.
Lori shook her head silently as she considered the possibilities. After a moment she responded thoughtfully, “For the two with Merab, probably nothing at all. My guess is their intracranial devices are designed to prevent that from happening. Once I verify Merab has not been re-implanted, we can try. It's hard to say if we will be able to get past her secondary ego. There may be some options we can try using the Da’Tellen transfer device in the med-bay. I’ll need to check some things out with Mitty and Shella first.”
“Do what you need to. I’ll be on the bridge.” I said and kissed Lori lightly on the cheek. She didn’t respond. I suspected my dog house was going to both lonely and cold for quite a while. Such be the ravages of command.
***
It turned out Merab was still free of any Defiler implants… that was the good news. The bad news was that the secondary personality was in firm control… and that secondary personally was not talking.
In the end, my wife, a neurosurgeon and the ship’s psychologist attempted a delicate procedure with one of the few pieces of Ancestor technology used by the Galactic Order that had not been sourced and supplied by the Tas. It was the Da’Tellen unit. Its normal modes of operation including teaching and complete mind transfer. It was the device that had transferred my original memory engrams from the real Jeremy David Riker, who was still serving Earth’s Federate Fleet to the cloned body that was… me. It stilled seemed odd to realize my wife and I were essentially photocopies of our original selves.
The idea with the Da’Tellen unit was to use the memory transfer device to augment and enhance the strength of Doctor Merab’s original host memories. The thought was that if that persona could be made dominate, the Saulite doctor might be able to selectively and safely access the repressed personalities memories.
I and several of the medical staff that were not involved in the procedure watched through glass windows from seats just above the surgical theatre. A 3D hologram of the Saulite doctor’s brain floated above her body. Ultra-thin electrodes, barely more than a few atoms thick, were carefully guided into her brain. The holographic map was used to direct the positioning of the nanoscale wires.
As my wife had explained the procedure, the electrodes would provide a mild electrical stimulation that would tend to suppress her current cognitive processes. Once that was accomplished, the Da’Tellen memory transfer device would be used to transfer and enhance early childhood and young adult memories.
I had asked how far back in time the surgical team was planning to go to enhance her older memories. Lori sighed and confessed that the best they could do was guess. The team had discussed the issue at length and decided a reasonable cutoff would probably be up to and through medical school. Anything beyond that was suspect as no one knew for sure when the Doctor had been co-opted and implanted with the Defiler obedience device.
Of course, there was the real possibility that the Saulite doctor had been compromised for a lot longer. The argument against that was the very nature of the Saulite people. They were warriors. Their society was very regimented. The frequent psychological assessments used to determine a person’s proper placement within their society would likely have turned up the Defiler tampering. It was only after a person had chosen a career path within the warrior society that such assessments would have been scaled back and or eliminated. It also explained why a doctor would be targeted for co-opting. Presumably a medical professional could bury any aberrant readings on themselves and potentially others.
As I took in the procedure, I could not help but be fascinated. What I was watching on that surgical table below me was mind-blowingly complex, and yet my wife was conducting the surgical robots like a maestro would conduct an orchestra.
Thanks to the Galactic Order humanity had advanced in the sciences hundreds of years virtually overnight. The idea of a mind transfer device had been pure fiction. Now we were inventing new ways to utilize this established technology… pushing the bounds of what even the Galactic Order doctors had been able to do. Mitty, who was sitting next to me had remarked about how fast humanity had assimilated and then begun to extend Galactic Order technology.
Less than ten minutes into the procedure, Lori used a swipe of her hands to kill the holographic projection. The robotic actuators that had been controlling the nano-wire electrodes began the delicate task of removing them. Based on how short the procedure ran, I assumed that somehow the team had run into a roadblock. Lori aborted the attempt to literally reprogram Merab’s mind so that the team could brainstorm a new approach. I should have known better. My wife was the best at what she does… even before the enhancements, we had received. She turned to give me a thumbs-up.
I don’t know whether I should be thrilled or scared that it only takes ten minutes or so to permanently mess with somebody’s noggin. It kind of made me wonder if I was still the guy I thought I was. I looked over at Mitty. How do I know he put all the marbles back in the right places when he decided to play dropsies with my marbles? The fact that he was doing the nose-wrinkling thing again… did not fill me with an abundance of confidence.
***
It was another day before Lori would allow the alpha and beta suppressors to be turned off. By this time Merab’s new neural shaping should have been firmly established. About forty minutes later the Saulite doctor began to stir. She remained restrained and in an isolated room within the med-bay.
I watched as she began to open her eyes. A number of minute and virtually undetectable wireless sensor patches were attached to her skull. These sensors would provide the Gilboa’s AI with high-resolution brainwave data. It should be possible to detect deception and verify that Merab’s primary personality was once again in control. Because of their size, it was essentially impos
sible that the Saulite doctor would even be aware that she was being monitored.
“How are you feeling?” Lori asked.
Merab looked at my wife and started to open her mouth. She closed it before saying a word and turned her head slightly in my direction.
“Admiral, I…” She paused. Her eyes watered a little as she attempted to continue. “I cannot begin to apologize for attacking you …and for what I have put your ship and crew through.”
I nodded. “Can you tell me why you turned on us?” I prompted.
She struggled to sit up. It was then that she realized that her arms were restrained. She looked confused for a moment and then settled back.
“A wise precaution. I am not to be trusted. As far as why I attacked you specifically Admiral as well as the Gilboa in general… You were becoming a nuisance to the intelligence that was controlling me.”
Again, I nodded. “What can you tell me about these people that you work for?”
Merab struggled to sit up once again.
I motioned to one of the security guards. “Release her restraints but keep your stunners ready.”
As the guard moved to undo the restraints, Merab smiled and nodded her thanks.
“I was forcibly recruited by an ancient artificial intelligence called Eshbaal, Admiral. Eshbaal is a part of a massive AI network known as the Ish-Boshet. This AI network is the real power behind the Defilers.”
Merab paused for a moment. “Sir, the Defilers are attempting to resurrect their creators… the Mahanaim.”
***
“Who in the hell are the Mahanaim?” Whiskers asked.
My senior team and I were sitting in my Ready room. The only ones not in attendance were the Tas who were monitoring the conversation from their quarters. They disliked leaving them and so rarely graced us with their presence.
Mike turned to look at me as well. “What he said, Admiral. Who in the hell are the Mahanaim? And more to the point… what are we going to do about these toys they left on?”
I scratched my beard. One of the problems with being the Admiral was that people expected you to have the answers.
“Mitty, do you want to answer the first question?”
“No Admiral,” the Archon cyborg said simply.
It took me a moment for his comment to register.
“No Admiral?”
Mitty wrinkled his nose but said nothing.
Shella came to Mitty’s rescue. “Admiral, my husband does not know who the Mahanaim are. The name, if we ever knew it has been lost to antiquity. Even Doctor Q’tar knew nothing about them beyond the name. I can offer a guess if you would like.”
“If your guess is the Mahanaim are the Ancestors… I’m way ahead of you,” I said.
“Admiral…” the Tas interjected via the comm system. “There is a dynamic at play here that you are only just beginning to understand. The Tas know of the Mahanaim. They are indeed a faction of the Ancestors. A fringe faction to be sure but a faction none the less. Should Ish-Boshet and his distributed AI network succeed in resurrecting the Mahanaim, the galaxy and even the entire local cluster of galaxies would be in great peril. It is more essential than ever that they are stopped.”
Wonderful, I thought. Have you ever had friends that were full of advice but woefully short of help… especially the step-in and get-your-hands-dirty type of help? Yeah, me too. The Tas were that type of friend. In fairness, I wasn’t sure the Tas had hands, but given the vagaries of alien quadruped slug-like race physiology, the general concept remains the same.
2100.1207.0130 Galactic Normalized Time
Merab moved silently. She and her companions, the only two who had survived the destruction of the doomed Mahanaim ship N8614, had made their way onto the Gilboa using advanced stealth suit technology. It was the same technology that had allowed the three to remain undetected while the Gilboa marines had searched for them. Merab’s goal was a simple one. Disable the Gilboa and capture her crew.
Chapter 11: Dog Pack
Over the next several days we learned quite a lot from Doctor Merab. I still didn’t completely trust her. The secondary personality was still present, but for the moment under control. She was released from medical confinement but kept under strict supervision. We embedded four different tracking and monitoring devices within her body… and told her there were six. I was still leery after her little trick of disappearing on the Defiler ship.
She explained that the two other Saulites that we had in the freezer where clones of her older sister. These two were true members of the warrior caste. It was a crèche-mate of one of these that had originally captured Merab. It seemed the Ish-Boshet used clones in two ways. First, they used them as templates for mass producing slaves. These slaves were implanted with basic skills and motivations to serve the master AI. Nothing of the host personality or memories were ever given to such clones. In point of fact, they communicated in a non-Saulite language more akin to the language of the long-extinct Mahanaim than anything in use by the Galactic Order.
The second type of clone were ones like Merab. They were infiltrators. They had a complete set of the host’s memories as well as a secondary personality that was empowered to assume control should certain trigger conditions occur.
This last presented us with a unique problem. The Saulite doctor shared how to disable these triggers. She claimed to have been working on the problem since she discovered her true nature almost ten years ago. Unfortunately for her, knowledge versus ability were not one in the same. Her secondary persona would not allow her to implement said modifications.
She claimed that the procedure used by my wife to strengthen her primary identity was the first step to freeing her but by no means enough to eliminate the threat.
My dilemma was a simple one. Do I trust the good doctor enough to follow her suggestions? If she was feeding it to us straight, I gained a more trustworthy, and ultimately more valuable, asset. If she was scamming us, I risked unleashing a wolf among the sheep.
In the end, I decided the devil we knew was better than the devil we didn’t. I ordered that the procedure, to restore the doctor, be kept in reserve. We had her monitored six-ways-from-Sunday and had restricted her access to sensitive systems. The only highly sensitive portion of the ship she was to have access to was the bridge itself and then only under closely supervised conditions.
The doctor did not have access to the Ish-Boshet homeworld as that knowledge was apparently shared only when necessary for the clone’s area of operation. Apparently, organics as the ancestor AI referred to its biological minions… were inherently unreliable. An AI could purge its memories and shut itself down at a moment’s notice. An organic required an embedded failsafe that would terminate the clone should it become compromised.
Merab confirmed both of her cloned sisters would have the homeworld information we would require. Unfortunately, to gain access to it, we would need to wake them up which would immediately trigger their suicide failsafe. We had seen this little gem in action before with the Neanderthal fighter pilots we had captured.
While this news was unfortunate, Merab was able to supply us with a lovely consolation prize – the Defiler facility where she had been cloned. The planetary system was orbiting a star on the farthest fringe of the Beehive cluster.
55 Cancri was just under forty-one lightyears from Earth. It was a binary star system with a massive orange G-type star as well as a much smaller red dwarf companion star. The binary star system was so far out that it was debatable whether it was even a member of the Beehive Cluster or just a lone star in the Milky Way’s galactic arm. The gravitational influences of the cluster were just strong enough to have captured 55 Cancri. The Ish-Boshet cloning facility was on a planet orbiting this smaller star.
If Merab’s intel could be trusted, this would be the first time we could take the offensive by attacking the Defilers rather than simply responding to their incursions. To ask if this was a tempting target would be like asking a kid if they l
iked ice cream. On the other hand, if Merab was playing us, we could be walking ourselves straight into a trap.
Call me a skeptic. I had a bad feeling about things that looked too good. Don’t get me wrong. I like ice cream as much as the next guy, but the hairs on the back of my neck were twitching something awful.
Maybe it was a character flaw, but I had learned over the years that a healthy amount of faith in the perverse nature of adversaries was a good thing. That faith in the perverse had served me well. It seemed the bad guys always wanted to win… this despite the fact that they were the bad guys.
Now to be sure… I was fond of winning as well. I considered it a moral obligation consistent with my position as Admiral of the Fleet. To that end, I enjoyed the setting and springing of traps that poked my enemies in their metaphorical eyes. I was good at it. I suspected, based on the increasing number of times ships under my command were being ambushed that I might have gotten the Defiler’s attention. What can I say? I have a gift when it comes to being an irritant.
This gets me to the point at hand. I had absolutely no evidence that 55 Cancri was a trap. All I had was a gut feeling that it was my turn to be on the receiving end of bad news. 55 Cancri looked like honey, and I was the hungry bear. That realization should have been enough to warn me off.
Ever since I had learned that our adversaries were not flesh and blood, I had begun to replay in my mind the various encounters and battles we had fought. They began to make more sense. The real question was… could I use this new knowledge to gain a competitive advantage?
In the Internet world, there is a thing called a honeypot trap. Bad guys, intent on creating havoc with computer viruses would be lured into attacking a juicy, high-value ‘honeypot’ target only to discover it was a collection point designed to identify the nature and threat-level of the malicious software… in essence a trap. We didn’t know it at the time, but the Ish-Boshet had their own version of a honeypot trap.