Lord Banshee- Fairy Dust

by Russell O Redman

  I finished reading both reports, but still had not received anything from Borodin. To fill the time while I was waiting, I checked recent messages in my embargoed queues. My heart sank when I found the missing report from Borodin, embargoed because ESK StaSec had tagged it with numerous emojis, as well as several messages with increasingly irate subject lines from Molongo. That puzzled me until I realized that the urgency of the message was signified with emojis as well. They did not appear in the body of the message, but were embedded in the subject line.

  I fired off an immediate message, explaining the problem with emojis, and almost immediately got a copy of his previous message stripped of its urgency emojis. Aside from being mad as hell that I had harassed him offensively last night, he and Morris wanted to meet Sergei and I, ASAP. I checked the time and realized that everyone would probably have to get up soon anyways if they were to fit the morning exercise in before lunch. We agreed to meet in half an hour, to give me time to get home, wake Sergei, and wash up. I requested permission from Wang to leave the MI office to meet with Molongo. He gave permission immediately, because he was to be at the meeting himself, and asked that we bring Agents Pinter and Tipu as well.

  I ran a quick scan of the report from ESK StaSec to see if I could recognize what emojis it carried. They were bad, really bad. With the alchemy of emotions, I could recognize combinations of emojis for murderous rage, paranoid suspicion, greedy entitlement, and abusive rape. If these were being added to every message passing through ESK StaSec, it was no wonder the station was burning with anger. I wondered to myself who would even want such a set of emojis, but realized the answer immediately. These were not intended for office memos or birthday invitations, they were weapons aimed at everyone using the MI-supplied comm system. I made one last change to the message filters, allowing the common range of urgency emojis to appear in the subject line, then slipped out of the office and asked our marines to carry Raul and I back to our rooms.

  As we were carried back, I thanked Raul for our earlier discussion of the emojis, mentioning the growing chaos on the ESK and the hostile emojis that had come from ESK StaSec. He shook his head and wondered what else we were taking for granted that could be weaponized.

  2357-03-05 02:00

  Factional Debate

  As I had anticipated, the doctors had woken everyone up already and were ushering them over to the exercise room. Valentino and Tran excused themselves to tend to the ministers.

  Katerina came over, smiling sweetly. “Brian, I was too tired early this morning to express myself properly.” Then she slammed me in the face with her fist. “Never, never try to mess with my life again.”

  My nose might have been broken, except she was not used to fighting in zero-G and had not braced herself properly. She rotated as she swung, missing my nose. Even when her fist connected, we both bounced backwards, lessening the force of the impact. I was going to have a bruise, maybe even a black eye, but nothing was broken. Still, she made a valid point that I was not about to deny.

  “Katerina, I am so sorry. Please forgive me because I was sleeping when I sent those messages. I will not say it was just the dream speaking because there was some level of cunning in what I did. It suggests to me that some part of my mind was awake and functioning, but not a part I am proud of or willing to defend. If anyone else would like to take a swing, please do it now. Sergei, Leilani, Doctor Toyami, we really need to discuss what is happening to me privately, but not here and now. I have had a request from General Molongo and Captain Wang to meet with Sergei, Leilani, Katerina and myself, in fifteen minutes. We need to get cleaned up and go immediately.

  “I wish I had longer to explain, but do not embed any emojis in messages you send through the comm system. I have set the local MI system to embargo any messages with emojis. I have discovered that they are being used as weapons. The comm system on the ESK is supported by MI and a short while ago started attaching hateful emojis to messages passing through. Imagine last night, but with contempt, hatred, and murder as the content. Raul can perhaps fill in some of the details.”

  “Crap!” Katerina did not look mollified, but now added uncertainty to her anger. “I just read a message that came through the Council system. It was short, and now that I think about it contained nothing important, but afterwards my anger came to a boil. Can it contain an emoji if the MI system filters them out?”

  Raul replied for me, bless him. “Yes, because the streams are encrypted as they pass through the MI system and only decoded into Council format on delivery. An embedded emoji would not be detected. Try forwarding it to me. If I fly into a rage, it is something different. If I do not get it, your message probably has an emoji.”

  “I just sent it. Twice.” she said.

  “Nothing. Probably embargoed. Dear God, if the Council system has been infiltrated, every key leader on the planet may now be receiving hate mail. We better get to that meeting and try to fix the mail system.”

  “Raul, Katerina, it is probably too late. The centuries of peace that the Terrestrial Council has provided may be over. The hate-filled messages are already being sent. We need to warn our own ministers, but after that we may be on our own. Raul, anyone, can we set our personal comm units to filter messages containing emojis?”

  We all stared at each other. Leilani finally spoke up, “Obviously, no one knows how. But we have just seen a work around. Before we open any message, try sending it to someone else. If it does not get through, it has an emoji. In a pinch, we need to turn off our comm units long enough to settle down. We need to warn the ministers, now, before we go to the meeting.”

  “Done,” said Sergei, “but Morris is spitting with rage. I have never heard him so angry. His reply was one long series of obscenities. We better get washed up and go.”

  The four of us headed into the washroom to clean up. Katerina looked paler than usual, and finally burst out, “Shit, I am sorry, shit! They will want me to mediate in a room full of ministers driven by hate and rage over trifles. I cannot do that. No one could.”

  “Katerina,” I said, finishing a very quick wash and reaching for my new, boringly white pajama. I already missed the costume from last night. “Do you still hate me? I do not mean are you still angry. I am wondering how long the emoji lasts without anything to sustain it. How long did the lust last after I sent a sexual emoji last night?”

  The answer came back in scattered voices. The lust dissipated in minutes, the rising anger lasted all night. So that was the answer. A real cause created a lasting emotion, while the emoji gave a quick shot that vanished without anything to sustain it. They all stopped talking after that. I wondered a bit, because they seemed embarrassed and would not look at each other. We remained silent as our marines picked us up and ran through the corridors to the Captain’s meeting room.

  We could hear the argument out in the hallway. The marines on guard looked nervous, and one of them said quietly, “Be very careful, Sirs. I have never seen anything like this.”

  The marine pushed the buzzer to announce our arrival. Wang finally opened the door and shouted out, “WHAT! You four! Get in here!”

  I sidled into the room, awestruck by the rage. Wang, Morris and Molongo were alternating livid and flushed, shouting at each other and at the walls. Wang and Morris both had black eyes, Molongo had a bruised fist, and there were blood stains on the wall.

  I stood there simpering, sliding into a panicked state of terror.

  Sergei called out “Sirs, did you get my warning about the emojis coming through encrypted streams?” But the three men continued shouting, swinging fists in wild punches, and whirling around insanely.

  Katerina rushed into the middle, “SIRS, STOP READING MESSAGES. BLOCK THEM. WE KNOW WHAT IS WRONG!”

  Leilani went to Wang, Sergei to Morris, and Katerina to Molongo, grabbing them by the shoulders and staring them in the face, each repeating the instruction, “Block the messages. Stop reading them.”

  Leilani was trained in ze
ro-G combat, and Sergei was strong enough and young enough to hold Morris, but Molongo threw off Katerina and tried to strike her down. The threat to a teammate broke my terror. I grabbed his fist, crying “Agent Marcus, you are hitting an innocent woman and a friend.”

  That would not have stopped any of the marines, nor a spacer caught in a brawl, who all knew that a well-trained woman could hit as hard as any man, but Molongo would have spent enough time in terrestrial and lunar society to feel the disgrace of hitting a woman, and caught himself long enough to hear what we were saying. I could see the effort in his face as he turned off the comm unit and began to regain personal control.

  Oh God, I hated the Martians. I was not surprised by the huge fleet of stealth weapons, had been half expecting them for years. I was surprised by the novelty of the glue bugs, which were distressingly effective, but recognized them as non-lethal ordinance. However, in all my campaigns, I had never seen insanity used as a weapon like this, had never even imagined it to be possible. I was grateful there were no more nuclear weapons on the Earth, but felt worms crawling through my stomach as I considered the firepower of the TDF under the command of rage-demented captains.

  Wang, and finally Morris, slowly followed suit. The three men acted dazed, and refused to look at each other.

  Katerina finally moved into the middle of the room and called out, “Gentlemen, you have just experienced the power of a new weapon being used against us. I, too, have felt its touch. You can see where I punched Agent Douglas in the face. Agent Douglas, I am humbled and must apologize for my action. Please forgive me. We must talk about what happened later, but I now recognize the restraint you used. Gentlemen, please, this was not your fault, nor your intention. It is important that you apologize to each other for what you have done under the influence of this attack, but also to recognize that the enemy was responsible, not yourselves. I beg you to consider what this weapon is doing to the Earth.”

  Morris broke into tortured sobs, and Wang abased himself, kowtowing to Morris and Molongo. It was a strange and difficult position to adopt in zero-G, floating in the middle of the room, and because of that even more affecting. Molongo struggled and gasped as he tried to speak, finally choking out, “Forgive me, forgive me old friends. What have we done?”

  Captain Wang tried to explain, “They called me a traitor, a scum who would fire on his own ships, a murderer killing his own crew, over and over. A never-ending string of messages from the Ministry of the Military, from the Admiral, echoing from every ship in the fleet.”

  Molongo nodded, “A liar, a Martian turncoat, an enemy of the entire Earth.”

  Morris nodded, but would not elaborate. All he could get out was, “Forgive me, I beg you. I do not deserve your mercy.”

  “Honoured Sirs,” I said, “I have already blocked all messages with emojis from passing through the MI system on this ship. That action was inspired by my indiscretions last night while I was asleep. I discovered a short time ago that ESK StaSec has started broadcasting hate-filled emojis as part of every message, and Agent Tipu discovered the hard way that an enciphered emoji in the stream from the Terrestrial Council can slip past the filter I put into the comm system.

  “I fear that everyone in a command position is now being driven mad by hatred in the streams of messages they are receiving. Please Captain Wang, let me return to the MI office and turn off all messages from outside until we bring the ship properly back under control.”

  Wang nodded. As I headed for the door, Sergei suggested that we could really use some of the agreeability wine from the previous night. I agreed wholeheartedly and passed the suggestion on to Marin, asking her to send bulbs of it to the Captain’s meeting room and to the ministers, urgently. She replied that Valentino and Tran had been beaten and driven from the minister’s room. The guards were tending to them, but were afraid to move into the room. They were too few in numbers and could not use lethal force against Council ministers. She said we would need more than bulbs of wine to bring the ministers under control.

  I passed the message to Wang, and told my marine to run me to the MI office at top speed. It only took a moment to shut off all incoming messages, and I set up a repeating broadcast to anyone outside the Mao who was still listening, warning about dangerous emojis and the risk of emojis embedded in what seemed like secure, encrypted message streams. I could only hope that someone would hear the message and turn off their own comm inputs until people returned to sanity.

  Halfway back to the Captain’s meeting room, I felt a low vibration that I interpreted as weapons fire. I debated returning to the MI office, but received no call and so continued to the meeting room. Wang was gone, headed for the bridge. One of the other TDF warships in orbit had fired a missile at the Mao. We waited nervously, wondering whether the missile had been destroyed. Everyone startled when a second round of weapons fire shook the ship.

  Wang finally returned, looked completely haggard. He explained that the first shots had been rail guns firing on the missile. They had disabled the missile itself, but not the warhead, which was close enough that a nuclear explosion could damage the Mao badly. Fortunately, the warhead passed without detonating. He speculated that the weapons officer who ought to have detonated the warhead was being distracted by the same emojis that had prompted him to fire the missile in the first place. When the warhead had passed us, and was far enough away, a second round from the Mao’s rail guns smashed it to pieces. Fragments of the bomb would fall on the Earth, but at least not a live weapon. He concluded in despair, “Sirs, I fear that outside of the Mao, that may have been the only missile that the TDF was still capable of firing from any ship in Earth orbit. We are alone, and the Earth is defenceless.”

  I asked whether the ship that fired had been the Excalibur, the one frigate that we knew had been making significant progress against the glue bugs. Wang paused to think for a moment, then brightened noticeably. The Excalibur had been well off to the side and could not have fired the missile. He had been passing all our suggestions to the local TDF ships, but only the captain and crew of the Excalibur had taken them sufficiently seriously to be making real progress against the glue bugs. Since the Excalibur had not fired, there was at least one other ship in the TDF that may have escaped both the madness and the bugs. And then he brightened further, explaining that his Com had just received a message from the Excalibur, sent using a laser channel and a low-bandwidth, ship-to-ship, naval protocol that was text only, trivially simple, and slow as molasses in January, but almost impossible to corrupt because of that. The Excalibur reported success in cleaning half their systems from glue bugs, and had shut off all external comms following the previous warnings. They were requesting our status after the apparent attack. Wang told the Com to reply that we had taken no damage and could send help to clean the remaining glue bugs if required.

  Then we started getting reports from the minister’s quarters. Reinforcements for the marines had arrived, along with non-lethal combat gear. One by one, belligerent ministers had been extracted from the room, sometimes in shackles, sometimes in medical restraints. Ship’s surgeons had also arrived, assisting Valentino and Tran in treating the wounded. Since I had shut off the flow of incoming messages, sanity was slowly returning. Morris declared that he had to return to the rest of the ministers to try to bring them back to order.

  Molongo looked at me apologetically. “I first called you when this started. In my anger, I thought that you were responsible, considering your antics last night. Then, all the ministers started getting angry, and I realized that I was getting hate messages through my Council feed, not from you. The three of us withdrew here as the ministers started to get violent, but... well, you saw what happened.”

  I warned them, “The marines outside the door need to be reassured that their leadership is still sane. Tales will be spread and will only grow worse in the telling. The concern must be even worse outside the minister’s room. Captain Wang, when you can, I recommend you address the enti
re ship to explain this new threat. Very Senior Minister Morris, could you do the same for all the ministerial personnel? People need to watch each other for the symptoms of a new attack.”

  Morris blanched again. “Allah defend us, what is happening to our delegations on the ESK? How can we even find out?”

  We stared at each other for a few moments, then Morris grimly declared, “We cannot help them now, but we must get back to our people here. That we can do. Dapeng, perhaps you should call your marines in here. Agent Tipu, could you assist the Captain as he works to develop an address for the crew? Could the rest of you follow Marcus and me? We have some serious trouble, and very few stable minds that we can trust. I am sorry, Agent Douglas, but half the ministers believed that you were attacking us, and I will need you there to convince them that you were in fact leading the defence. Imagine for the purpose that you are in the Chair of Pain. That image may help dispel some of the hostility.”

  Morris had apologized to me for a second time, and in truth I was probably the least stable mind on the whole ship. Nevertheless, I nodded and prepared myself mentally for the coming ordeal.

  When we arrived, the hallway outside the ministers’ rooms looked like a war zone. I recalled similar scenes on Mars, after the rebels or the Governor had detonated a bomb within a city and the streets and halls filled with the dead and wounded. The doctors and surgeons barely looked up as we approached, although I was cursed weakly by several of the injured as I passed. Molongo stopped beside each of the injured who had cursed and tried to explain that I was not the source of the problems, but few were willing to listen.

  A phalanx of marines and sailors formed around us. I puzzled at that, because marines and sailors had rarely shared such duties since the Incursion. During the war, marines had been recruited from the ground battalions of the TDF, but the sailors were former spacer crews trained to peaceful debate and mutual affection. The marines had often forced the sailors into battle at gun point. Since then, neither service had trusted the other, and their command chains were completely separate.