by Aer-ki Jyr
Both men were silent and staring at each other with a plate full of donuts sitting in the middle of the table.
Nathan looked down at the donuts, then at his fellow Archon. “I think this is more torture on you,” he told Assad.
“I’m managing,” he said, not breaking his staredown.
“You don’t want any?” Nathan asked Agent, but the man didn’t return his gaze. He was staring blankly at Assad with a bored/tired look and didn’t even seem to notice the newcomer.
“Hmmn,” he said, reaching down and snagging one of the glazed ones from the side of the heap without toppling the rest…not a small feat. He bit a huge bite out of it and chewed while adding his stare at the man. “You know…you’re doing this all wrong. If you eat the whole plate it means you’re innocent.”
“Innocent of what?” Agent said, slowly twisting his head to look at Nathan who stood partway down the table next to the donut plate.
Nathan pointed a finger at him. “Good point, there. I could come up with a lot of sarcastic replies, but I can see you’re not in the mood. You’re a member of The Word, an organization that has been doing quite a lot of bad things…more than we were recently aware of. Now, what you personally were a part of we don’t know, but being an Agent means you’ve got operational control.”
“I’ve already admitted I was an Agent,” he pointed out grumpily. “If that is my crime then I have already been determined to be guilty. What then am I to protest my innocence of?”
Nathan took another bite of the donut, chewing thoroughly before answering. “Being a bad guy. Your predecessor regaled us with the wisdom of The Word, explaining how Star Force was misguided and that you were doing us and Humanity a favor by attempting to put us back on the right track.”
“Then again,” he continued, “that was just a stalling tactic while he died. Or maybe he just wanted someone to talk to in his last few minutes.”
“I know who you are, Nathan-937, member of Green Team who has been tasked with locating, infiltrating, and taking down our organization. But unlike the other Agent you encountered, I have no wish to talk to you.”
“Donut then?” Nathan offered, not taking the bait about the ‘infiltrating’ part, for Star Force was doing no such thing…but The Word didn’t know that, so he figured the disinterested Agent was still fishing.
“For someone who protests to live an unlimited lifespan, you certainly have an appetite for unhealthy food.”
“To…tallwee in…correct,” Nathan said before he’d finished his third bite. “Define healthy.”
“That much sugar is bad for you.”
“That’s not a definition.”
“Healthy are those things that are good for the body.”
“And sugar isn’t?”
“Excess isn’t.”
“This isn’t excess,” the Archon said, shoving the last bite into his mouth, then licking the glaze off his fingers before grabbing a sprinkled one off the top of the plate.
“I suppose you’re going to claim a higher rate of metabolism as your defense?”
“Now see…right there is your problem. You have a guilty outlook on life, like you’re defaultly tainted in some way.”
“Star Force has a naïve positivity. I’m not inclined to believe that you actually live as long as you claim, given your ignorance.”
“Enlighten me,” he asked, taking a huge bite out of the second donut.
“Human nature is inherently flawed, none can escape this without accepting the fact and working to correct it. Your positivity will be your undoing.”
“Na…you’re just a sucker for the illusions in life. Take your body, for example. It may crave sugar. You eat a lot of it, get fat, then curse your body for craving it in the first place. Your body isn’t at fault, you are, for not understanding how you’re supposed to operate it. Now that isn’t your fault, per se, given that you were never given an instruction manual, so it’s understandable how people get things messed up. Actually, a lot of the problems in society can be attributed to the fact that we’re all born ignorant, only acting on instincts that we don’t understand.”
“You admit to the flawed nature.”
“No, no,” Nathan said, taking a moment for another, smaller bite, dropping a few sprinkles off his lips and fighting the urge to telekinetically grab them before they hit the floor. “Stay with me. Everyone is inserted into the universe cold, and by cold I mean without foreknowledge or intel. I assume you know what a cold insertion is, from a spy’s point of view?”
Agent nodded.
“Well, we’re all inserted cold and have to figure out how things work as we go, learning on our own or from others. Turns out those sugar cravings aren’t a bad thing, just your subconscious mind telling your ‘pilot,’” Nathan said, making quote marks with his fingers and donut, “that the sugar is a good thing and that you should grab it up when you have the chance. Now, if you do that and hoard it, you could be in for some problems…but only because you’re ignoring the other signals your subconscious mind is feeding you. We call those biofeedback.”
“No…w,” he said, chewing another quick bite. “Your biofeedback monitors how much food you have in your body, kind of like a fuel gage, except that your stomach can stretch out, so ‘full’ doesn’t mean full. That’s where a lot of people go wrong, feeling that they have to be stuffed full of food in order to get a full fuel load. In truth you need to fill up your stomach only part way, multiple times per day…but since that isn’t always an option you can overload and stretch out your stomach to overfill before having a long drought and not taking in any extra.”
Nathan finished the sprinkled donut and pulled a long one with chocolate icing out from the bottom, playing Jenga with the stack.
“Your body tells you that you’re overloading through your biofeedback, but if you’re ignoring that signal and just going on the ‘sugar is great’ target analysis, then you’re going to be overloading when you don’t want to…simply because you’re ignorant of what you’re doing, even though your body is giving you all the telemetry you need, you just don’t understand it.”
He bit off the end of the donut, discovering that it was also crème filled. “Now, sugar is like rocket fuel…very useful for rockets, but overkill for less powerful situations. Someone such as you doesn’t require much, which your biofeedback will tell you. Me, on the other hand, well I burn so many calories a day I need the condensed nature of the fuel just to keep up. Food is fuel, neither good nor bad. What I need and what you need differ based on our fitness levels and our energy expenditure.”
“An ignorant person would say sugar is bad, from someone in your position…but for me, it’s an essential part of life,” he said, taking another bite that encompassed a fourth of the long bar of deliciousness. “There’s nothing to feel guilty about. It’s just fuel, and far more efficient than eating a lot of bland foods until my body pulls enough trace sugars out of them to get the fuel load I need. This way, I don’t have all the filler to process, just the refined sugars that take up less stomach space, which leaves me more mobile.”
“So sugar isn’t bad…instead it’s something very, very valuable. But in the wrong hands, in ignorant hands, you can get fat off of it. So the solution isn’t in avoiding sugar, but learning to read your biofeedback to determine how much sugar and other fuels you need. That takes time, experience, and most importantly an introspective mind. For the dumb masses it’s easier to just say something is evil and not think about it, hence the guilty consciences when people do follow their biofeedback and it conflicts with societal boundaries. They haven’t done anything wrong, but their subconscious and conscious minds are in conflict, which creates your ‘flawed and tainted’ mindset.”
Nathan shoved the rest of the donut in and chewed slowly, given that it filled most of his mouth.
“I’d heard,” Agent said into the silence, “of Archons’ off the wall lectures, but that was truly a masterpiece of disconcordant thought.�
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Nathan picked up a fourth donut and held it halfway out towards Agent. “So you don’t want one?”
“No,” he said simply.
Nathan glanced back at Assad, who hadn’t moved the entire time and was still staring at Agent, though The Word operative was now ignoring him. “Oh that’s right, you probably prefer your own ingredients. We picked up some of them from Tyr, would you like us to make you your own batch? It’s not a problem, we’ve got a legion of cooks for that sort of thing.”
Agent eyed him, his disinterest having disappeared. “Even we have to eat.”
“Why not buy it…or steal it from the local market. You controlled the moon, so I doubt it would have been much trouble. You guys don’t strike me as cooks.”
“What makes you think we didn’t?”
“I meant the finished products,” Nathan said, biting into his fourth donut. “No..the..ing..ents.”
“You prefer your sugar. We have other nutritional requirements.”
“Not all that are available on the market?”
“Indeed.”
“And what, you just add the allergens for taste?” Nathan said, revealing the results of their chemical analysis on a number of the ingredients.
Agent just stared at him.
“Didn’t think we’d catch onto that?”
“I didn’t think you’d acquired samples.”
“We grabbed a few when we hit your factory the first time. Nice cleanup job afterwards. You people work fast.”
“A necessity in our line of work. You never know when uninvited guests will show up.”
“Uninvited? You practically invited us to Tyr.”
“How so?”
“Ha,” he said, biting off another bit of donut. “You have the gall to suggest to the Brazilians that they allow you to retain possession of the moon, and you don’t think that overture would attract our attention?”
Nathan didn’t need to be Ikrid linked to Agent to catch his mental slip. A slight twitch in his facial features gave away his surprise over the Archon’s revelation.
Catch that? Assad asked telepathically.
Yes I did, Nathan said, eating more donut.
“Eavesdropping on allies’ conversations now, are you?”
“Like you don’t?”
“We work alone.”
“That I figured,” Nathan said, tossing the last bit of donut up in the air and catching it in his mouth, chewing, and swallowing. “Well, four’s enough for me. Only ran five miles this morning. If you feel like working out let one of us know, we’ll arrange something. You won’t even have to give us anything in exchange.”
“Generous of you.”
“Not really. The sight of unfit people annoys us, so we don’t want you stagnating any further.”
“I’m healthy enough, thank you.”
“Better than being dead, I’ll grant you that, but the streaks of gray in your hair say otherwise.”
“Merely a sign of aging.”
“Ugh,” Nathan sighed, turning to look at Assad. “I’ll let you explain self-sufficiency to him. There’s only so much ignorance I can take per day.”
Agent smiled coyly. “So, I can expect you back tomorrow then?”
“Don’t know, we like to improvise,” Nathan said, walking out and clapping Assad on the shoulder as he left. When he got outside the room he headed over to another one further down the hall with a Regular guard stationed outside. He nodded and the man pulled open the door, let him walk through, then closed it behind him without locking it.
Inside was a woman with short black hair sitting in the corner in a single plush chair with the footrest up…but there was nothing else in the room.
“About time someone got here,” she said, sitting up a bit. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but I really have to pee first. That blasted guard hasn’t let me out of here in hours.”
Nathan smiled, appreciating her bluntness. Not all of The Word’s operatives shared the Agents’ passive persona, meaning that different interrogation techniques were required for each. Yet one more challenge presenting itself to Green Team in the most important investigation they’d ever been tasked with, and one that was solely theirs now that Red Team had returned to Sol, their mission on Tyr completed.
7
June 11, 2430
Alpha Centauri System
Glasir
“We have a problem,” the medic told Jet as he walked him through the med bay to a diagnostics holographic display detailing one of the patients’ internal organs.
“We have lots of problems,” the Archon replied. “What kind is this one?”
“Remember when you said you didn’t know why The Word had kept the Brazilian soldiers alive?”
“What did you find?” Jet asked, feeling something sinister about to surface.
“Nothing in the corpses, but some of the live ones you recovered from the stasis canisters are being used as carriers…and I think it’s linked to the food supply. It’s just a hunch, we haven’t been able to confirm anything yet.”
“What exactly are they carrying?”
“That we haven’t confirmed either, but it’s some type of designer molecule…not anything Star Force has on record.”
“Explosive?”
The medic shook his head, pointing to a side display on the hologram that showed a cellular analysis. “This isn’t explosive, or rather not of itself. I think it’s a molecular key. One of these people is smuggled into a population…maybe even just released back into the public, meaning they don’t have to be complicit, and the molecule combines with something else in the environment triggering an action. What that action is, is the underlying question.”
“Wait…how is it combined? And is it replicating or a finite amount?”
“It’s not viral, just a molecular substance that has been saturated into their bodies. The saturation means it’ll linger for quite a while until it’s processed out, making for a long lasting trigger…which also means whatever it is the key to requires only a small amount of the molecules to activate.”
Jet crossed his arms over his chest. “Combined inside the body?”
The medic wavered. “Possibly, but trace amounts will also be found in bodily fluids, such as sweat. Meaning that mere touch could transmit the molecules.”
“How would that be connected to the foodstuffs? If it’s external?”
“I honestly don’t know, and I hate to speculate, but I can think of a lot of nasty things they could be up to. With a trigger molecule, which I’m convinced this is, it could be linked to a lot of things. They could activate a latent virus in other people that begins to spread when the trigger is present. It could be, as you implied, the trigger to explosives within certain individuals’ bodies that a handshake could set off…or a kiss. I really don’t want to speculate until we have more data to work with.”
“You think the foodstuffs are delivering one part of a binary mechanism to a broad population and these individuals are the activation triggers?”
“That’s my current line of thought, yes.”
Jet stared at the hologram, which was showing locations of the molecules within nearly all portions of the patient’s body, save for the brain. “Can you flush them out?”
The medic nodded. “They’ll eventually work their way out, for the most part, and we can accelerate the process. Thankfully we can scan for them, with the right settings, but there’s no quick remedy…at least, not that we’ve created yet. This is another job for Earth or Corneria, but we’ll do as much as we can here.”
“Are the molecules harming the carriers?”
“Not at all. I believe that doing so would cause questions to be raised and that’s exactly what The Word wants to avoid. I’d bet they designed them to be totally innocuous.”
“What about the allergens?”
The medic altered the hologram, pulling up a different patient file while minimizing the current one off to the left. “They were d
oing a lot of different things with the foodstuff samples you retrieved. The allergens need no trigger. This is a medical scan from three years ago on Titan. The individual developed symptoms, along with three others, on the same day and was attributed to a bad batch of foodstuffs, but no other contaminated products were discovered. It was supposed that the only bad ones were consumed, but I’ve been able to match up the symptoms with the theoretical ones that our Word allergens created in computer models…and it’s a precise match.”
Jet rubbed his chin. “What kind of damage does it do?”
“Nothing irreversible, unless you get a very weak individual, in which case there’s a small chance of death. It’s basically tailored food poisoning. Very nasty reaction that passes with time.”
“And you’re convinced the trigger molecule is completely unrelated?”
“95% sure, though there are some overlapping possibilities that we need to explore, such as trinary compounds and more complicated interactions.”
“Do you mind?” Jet asked, pointing at the hologram.
“Please,” the medic offered, taking a step back.
Jet accessed the nearby keyboard and went outside Glasir’s medical database and into the master files that got shuffled around from system to system, keeping all Star Force outposts up to date on things they couldn’t get from other locations without considerable delay…such as foodstuff production statistics.
Jet sifted through several databases until his search came in, then he ran it against several other sets of data, compiling a list and bringing it up in holo in the form of a timeline, pointing at the start of a three year spike.
“There’s your contaminated foodstuffs, two months from the first entry. Our facilities are too well run to come up with bad batches other than on freakishly rare occasions. There’s a consistent trend of incidents starting three years ago that’s gradually been escalating, but it’s been occurring in multiple systems at multiple locations. It looks like the largest was 21 people on Orion.”