by Rob J Meijer
Although Gabriëlla was highly skeptical at first, Ugh did bring novel ideas to the struggle. Forty Wolderian years after the moon landing, the biggest manned space accomplishment of the hybrids was, as Uhm kept reminding her, a space station so close to the surface that on Cirus-7 it would have flown straight into a mountain. Much of the details on the technology used for the original moon landing had conveniently been lost, something you could leave to Ugh. Ugh also introduced the idea of fighting fire with fire. If there were going to be a global hybrid computer network spanning the whole of Woldera, why not introduce hybrids to technologies that would allow sufficient bandwidth for sensors? Uriëlla and Uhm had worked together on what the hybrids would probably refer to as a 'surveillance botnet'. Billions of hybrid-built personal computing devices involuntarily working as Dammon sensors.
Paradoxically, Ugh had helped halt the rapid development of hybrid society by giving hybrids more technology. The plan appeared to be working and the rapid technological development of the hybrids seemed to be grinding to a halt.
The hybrids had a fragile economic system and Ugh had also been working on destabilizing that. There were signs Ugh was succeeding and as soon as the fragile monetary system collapsed, projections were that with technologies becoming conveniently mired in bankruptcies etc., the Archan Council could set hybrid society back two or three generations, technologically-speaking. There was one more major threat left from hybrid society which urgently needed to be dealt with, though.
The Dammons had exposed the hybrids to super string theory, a piece of mathematical tooling that in the hands of any more intelligent species would have been the key to instantly becoming an advanced interstellar civilization. While an average hybrid would no more have a chance at grasping the true implications of super string theory than an average Wolderian horse would have at understanding general relativity, the Dammons had managed before to intervene in hybrid breeding, thus creating the rare hybrid genius. In fact, it was such interventions that had led to the hybrids coming up with theories like general relativity by their own. Super string theory had to be conveniently lost just like the moon-landing technology papers were. The upcoming economic collapse should provide Ugh with the opportunity for that.
Gabriëlla knew they could not hope to turn back the industrial revolution. Those millennia were lost. If only she could make the Dammons believe. After she learned the Senate had upped the stakes, she had released a captured Dammon with all the horrific details in an attempt to make them aware of the dangers. Apparently the Dammons dismissed the information as trickery. Something that was to be expected. It was the type of trick her father could have pulled.
The old reports that Raphaël, a member of the original Council, had filed had finally made it through the bureaucracy of the Republic’s Ministry of Suggestions. The report had been presented to the Senate by a civil servant who understood very little of its content.
The result, unfortunately, was contrary to what Raphaël had originally intended. The quarantine drones were now being replaced with full-sized, fully-armed war drones. War drones that were programmed for escalating retaliation. This meant that any use of force against a war drone was met by that drone or its peers with exactly 4/3 the initially-used force directed at the original source of the force or any of its peers. Hybrid culture was still many, many millennia from being able to develop structural, deescalating retaliation--the Council knew that much.
The Senate, however, apparently judged the hybrid development by their moon-landing ability and mathematical advancements, as normally a society would develop deescalating retaliation long before their first walk on one of their planet’s moons, and most certainly long before working out super string theory. For those civilizations an escalating war fleet would effectively be a call for negotiations. But for a primitive civilization like that of the hybrids, an escalating war-fleet would doubtlessly result in total war. Total war that would have Orus-3 end up like Orus-5.
Then there was the Beluga issue, the aquatic intelligent pre-civ species that the hybrids referred to as ‘Beluga whales’ had successfully petitioned to acquire a representation in the Senate under the repressed civilization clause. The new Beluga senator left no chance unused to argue that hybrid civilization was a marionette civilization of pets used by an alien civilization to wage a secret war against her species. The Beluga senator was highly intelligent, but she had not yet mastered all the subtleties of interstellar diplomacy.
The Beluga situation on Woldera did not escape the attention of the Senate, however. This while the hybrids didn't have a shadow of a clue that they were a threat to the habitat of a superior intelligence. A superior intelligence with a seat in the Interstellar Senate that had been living on the very same planet for as long as they had. No clue that they were just inches away from creating a situation that would give the repeated petitions for a second great flood for Woldera by the Beluga senator a solid chance of succeeding.
All in all the Dammons were creating the tool of their own demise. All the Council could do was try to keep the upper hand in their struggle against the Dammons for as long as they possibly could.
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Endnotes
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