by Morgan Cole
I thought about what Kiril had said. I had somehow been expecting the Union upgrades to my stats to fix my monkey brain and make me smarter. Even if the tech could theoretically do that, I wouldn't be me afterward. What the Union did instead was the next best thing—they'd made me better. I still had my blind spots and my mistaken assumptions. Only experience could change that. I'd just have to live with the impossibility of upgrading myself into a super genius who could also throw cars.
"I will return to the woods to try to find those wolves you mentioned, Jake. Kiril can answer any more questions you may have. You two have work to do, anyway."
With that, Regar left us, and Kiril and I returned to the outpost, sitting down in the control room.
"Now, tell me about your problem, Jake."
I showed Kiril everything, our plan and our problems, and he soaked up the knowledge like a sponge. He asked good questions to elicit details and quickly got a handle on our situation.
"If your companion Marty is successful in provoking the humans, they will easily breach the fences. The security personnel will then respond with lethal force. This is your problem," Kiril said.
"Well yeah, that's why I'm trying to design non-lethal weapons," I said, frustration leaking into my voice.
"No, you misunderstand me. Your problem is not your solution. You need to keep the people forming your distraction safe, that is the real problem to be solved. That doesn't mean you need to disable the soldiers."
"You're right, that is what it boils down to isn't it?" I mused. "Can we give them all bulletproof clothing? I don't think that'd work. Some of them wouldn't wear it. Plus there are head shots."
"Armor is not a workable solution as you say. We must look elsewhere. These slug throwers the soldiers are using are quite simple things. An explosive reaction generates pressure and propels the slug down the barrel. Primitive but effective. Why not disable them?"
"Sure, that'd be good I guess, but how? There are a lot of them and they're mechanical. It's not like we can just fire off an EMP or something. We'd have to disable each one, and we'd need to make sure we found them all."
"I have a design that can be adapted to this problem. You have seen it. Regar deployed it in the Spike."
"Yes. I was a bit busy but I saw it."
"I will scale it down. When deployed it will use the material of the barrel to generate a solid blockage. This will stop the slug and disable the weapon."
I had never been much of a gun guy, at least not before I found myself stranded on an alien space station, but that set off some alarm bells.
"Hold on, I think that won't work. I'm pretty sure that if we block the barrel the guns will explode when they are fired. I don't want to maim these guys either if we can help it."
"Hmm, yes, that is a possibility," Kiril said. "The baseline materials are weak enough. I am sorry, we will have to come up with another idea."
What Kiril's device did to the Spike was really just generating a blockage. Anywhere in the barrel of one of the guns and it would be bad.
"Wait a minute. We don't need to block the barrel. We just need to stop it from firing the bullet. Can we block the firing pin? Freeze it in place?"
"Oh yes, you mentioned that these weapons are fully mechanical." Kiril said and shifted in his seat.
"A pin exerts force and starts the explosive reaction. Yes, I could alter the device to anchor a mechanical pin in place rather than attempt to block the barrel. I would need some examples to make sure the design works."
"There's still a problem though," I said. "We'll have to get your device down near the firing pin. I'm not fond of the idea of sneaking around that base shoving stuff down the barrel of every gun."
"Yes, there are too many weapons for that to be feasible in any case. I have an idea, but it will involve the help of your... of Brick."
"I am always happy to help, Seeker," Brick replied.
Kiril grimaced, and told us his plan
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Priming the Distraction
"FIRST, I WANT TO SAY that this was a team effort. Metra and Brick helped me a lot and I think it turned out great," Marty said.
Two days had passed, with Kiril and me working furiously on our own part of the heist. We were all assembled in the outpost's control center. It was a bit cramped, but there was enough room for the five of us, if only just. I was lounging in one of the two chairs, pushed back a bit to give Marty space to present. The rest were either standing around or sitting on one of the beds.
"We're all eager to see what you have made, Marty," Regar said, his voice encouraging.
"Right, I'll just stop talking and play it," Marty said.
A large Interface screen appeared in the room, taking up one entire wall. Marty moved out of the way, hugging the wall. All that we could see on the screen was the blackness of the night sky.
The view wobbled slightly, the camera obviously handheld. It panned across the sky, showing the stars in the clear night. The camera pushed down a bit, and I could just see the twinkling lights of a familiar base in the distance, far below. Whoever was shooting this video was up on one of the rocky hills nearby.
"Ted, I'm getting cold," said a female voice.
"Just wait, the lights will come again. They were here last night and the night before. I'm telling you, they're going to be here," Ted replied.
Two more minutes passed, the camera looking all over the sky.
"Seriously, this is dumb and I'm cold. Take me home, Ted," the female voice said again.
The camera shook, and Ted sounded exasperated. "Mary, I told you we were going out to the desert, why couldn't you dress—"
"What the hell is that?" Mary screamed.
The camera moved, focusing on the base. Directly over the airstrip was a flying saucer. There was no other description for it. It was huge, a slowly rotating disk with banks of blindingly bright multicolored lights all around. It was hovering a few hundred feet in the air.
"I told you, Mary! I told you! This is amazing!" Ted yelled.
The shadowy form of a young woman with long blonde hair ran into view, stopping fifteen feet in front of Ted. She was dressed in tight jeans with a light leather jacket.
Mary looked over her shoulder at the camera, her frightened face containing a hint of wonder. "What is that, Ted? Aliens?"
"It has to be. We don't have anything like that."
The camera moved with Ted as he approached the edge Mary was standing at, getting a clearer view of the scene below.
Without any sound two more saucers flashed down out of the sky, stopping instantly in formation with the first. They moved so fast and stopped so suddenly they left an afterimage on the camera. These two were slightly smaller than the first, with different light configurations.
A handful of vehicles drove out from the parking lot near the administration building, following the dirt roads to the airstrip. At first, they were just headlights on the video, but they quickly resolved into a pair of Humvees escorting a black sedan. The vehicles stopped not far away from the largest saucer, and two men got out of the sedan. One of them was carrying a metal briefcase.
"They're coming out to meet the aliens. Could this be first contact?" Ted asked.
The two men walked toward the largest saucer until they got almost underneath it, and stopped. The area underneath the saucer lit up like daylight. The men shielded their eyes from the light. Two long-limbed, thin figures appeared in the lit area. Their heads were oversized with large black eyes just barely visible on the video. Their skin was a silvery grey and they wore no clothing.
"Holy shit, Greys!" Ted whispered.
The two groups met each other after a few steps. The humans handed over the briefcase, and one of the Greys took it. If they were talking, the camera was much too far away to capture it. One of the Greys gestured with his right hand, and five square metal crates appeared on the ground near the two groups.
"Whoa! They're trading?"
"Ted, I want to le
ave. We shouldn't be watching this."
"Are you kidding me? This is proof that aliens exist, Mary! We're going to be so famous! Rich too, I bet."
The two aliens disappeared and the light went out. Soldiers piled out of the Humvees and ran across to the crates. Each pair took a crate and began humping it back to the vehicles.
Seconds later, the three saucers streaked into the night sky and disappeared.
The camera moved to focus on Mary, standing nearby. She looked at him, worry plain on her pretty face.
"You've just been part of history, Mary! How do you feel?"
There was a faint shout audible. "You up there, stop where you are! Military Police, you're under arrest!"
"Oh shit," Ted said, and the camera's view swung wildly as he began frantically manipulating the touch screen.
"I'm Uploading this. Those bastards won't keep this secret," he said.
The video ended, the screen going black and then disappearing.
"What the hell was that?" I asked.
"We're going to support this as much as we can," Marty said as he stepped away from the wall. "Ted and Mary are real people, they're friends of mine. They'll be going into hiding for a week or so to support the story.
"In addition, Brick is going to generate radar contacts to match the saucers at the right times. If there are any clouds over the base, we'll add them in. This needs to be as convincing as possible."
"Wait a minute, where did you get this footage?" I asked.
"It's fake, man!" Marty said, giving me a big grin. "Every bit of it. Brick helped us render it out, but the direction and the lines were all me, plus Ted and Mary. They didn't actually do any of the voices. We gave the persona software their voice samples and emotional profiles, plus the scan of their bodies of course. The tools for this kind of thing are amazing. I tell you, if I get some free time after we save the world, I'm going to remake a bunch of movies that were screwed up by Hollywood."
I had seen deep fakes before, but this was at the next level. "Wow. That's amazing."
"I don't understand. What will this fiction accomplish?” Regar asked. "Surely everyone will see it for what it is."
"They won't though! That's what's brilliant about it. It's so close to perfect that you'd have to look pretty hard to find any flaws at all. If someone finds something that doesn't support the story, they'll be shouted down as a government plant. Especially after the radar data leaks."
"Let me get this right then," Regar said. “The story is that aliens are visiting that base out in the middle of the desert and trading. What are they trading for? Is that a briefcase full of cash?"
"Who cares!" Marty said. "Twenty-four hours after we release this video there will be hundreds of stories to choose from. The Internet will go wild. With Ted and Mary missing, the radar contacts, and the video that was shot on Ted's cellphone, the story will go mega viral. There will be thousands of True Believers camping out in the desert outside that base the next day."
It sounded like a good plan. I did wonder how he'd convinced two of his friends, "True Believers" as he'd called them, to help carry out his hoax. I resolved to trust him on this.
"A well-conceived plan, Marty," Kiril said.
"Thanks!"
"With your part done, I believe it is time for us to demonstrate ours. Let us repair to the hangar. Jake and I have prepared our demonstration there," Kiril said.
We had thought about doing this outside, but even with Brick covering us from overhead surveillance there was always the possibility we had missed a satellite, or a drone. Inside was better.
With Brick having hacked the planet, acquiring guns wasn't difficult. Even in the remote northern reaches of Canada, if you brought enough money to bear on a problem you could do anything, legal or not. Through his many shell corporations and with a nearly limitless amount of money magicked up from the depths of the Internet, Brick had found and then paid the right people to load up several crates full of weapons, smuggle them across the Canadian border and then drop them via helicopter into the parking lot beside our snow-covered F-150. After that it had been simple to get the weapons back to the outpost.
The hangar had more than enough space to accommodate our demonstration, even with all of us and the Redemption there. Scattered across the far side of the hangar was a collection of rifles and pistols—multiple copies of every weapon on the base. M4s, 1911 pistols, 9mm Berettas, and a few of the marksman rifles. We'd done a survey of every weapon on the base and made sure to get at least two of each.
On our side of the hangar, a pillar extruded from the floor was supporting a metal dome about three feet across. It was studded with closely spaced black clusters. The Interface identified it for me when I looked at it, although having been part of the design process I was more than familiar with it.
╠═╦╬╧╪
Microdrone Control Blister, designed by Jake Monde and Kiril
╠═╦╬╧╪
Most of this had been Kiril's idea, although we had both worked on parts of the design. I let him lead the presentation.
"Our part in this deception is in front of you," Kiril said, and gestured to the dome. "With this, we will disable the weapons of the soldiers and keep them from making any grave mistakes, such as harming these innocent sentients."
"Brick, if you would. Please take control of the blister and disable the weapons on the other side of the room."
It had taken some time, but Kiril was able to speak to Brick without gritting his teeth. They would never be friends, but Kiril was at least willing to be civil.
A diffuse black cloud of microdrones lifted off the blister and floated toward the weapons. There were hundreds of them in the cloud, but nowhere near the maximum amount the blister could deploy.
"Whoa, what are those?" Marty asked.
"Microdrones, clearly. They seem unusual, though. What have you done to them? And how are you controlling so many?" Metra asked.
"Microdrones, yes," Kiril replied. "These are in the form of Earth's small, flying insects. Brick is able to control more than sixty-five thousand of the drones with the Control Blister Jake and I have built."
The cloud of insect-like microdrones reached the weapons and began to disperse, landing on the steel, plastic, and wood of the various weapons. They crawled over the weapons until they found either a muzzle or an open breech, and disappeared inside.
"Now the drones will get as close to the firing pin as they can before deploying their payload. This is a miniaturized version of a device I invented. It will use the material of the weapon and a Nanite Cluster to hold the firing pin in place, and disable the weapon."
"Will the soldiers not simply destroy the pests before they can accomplish their mission?" Regar asked.
"That's why we're going to deploy thousands of them," I said. "We'll have far more than we need to disable every weapon."
There weren't any drones left in the air, and a minute later Brick spoke. "All weapons disabled."
"Thanks, Brick. Let's test that," I said.
My friends followed me over to the other side of the hangar. I picked up the first M4 I reached and pulled back the charging handle to chamber a round. Pointing at the far wall, I squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Not even a click.
I dropped the useless rifle and picked up a 9mm pistol. It was the same, not even a click when trying to fire it. The firing pin was locked in place, welded to the surrounding structure with the pistol's own metal. All of the guns were like that.
"A great success," Regar said, examining the bolt action rifle in his hands with curiosity.
"Yes, it looks like we're good to go," I replied.
"We will be," Marty said. "Brick and I will have the provocation ready in a few more hours. We can start tonight."
The ticking clock was always on my mind. If the Connahr field failed completely any time soon, Earth was boned. The sooner we got the Redemption completed and got to Mercury, the better.
"Let's do it."
MARTY'S PLAN WAS A masterpiece. His being so deeply steeped in the culture of the True Believers really paid off when it came time for him to hoax them.
The video was uploaded to Ted's account, and then mirrored everywhere by a carefully chosen group of True Believers, before the "government" could take it down. The Internet was forever.
It went viral instantly, with a few loud voices shouting that it was clearly fake—some kind of viral marketing for a movie. Then the other shoes dropped.
Ted and Mary were missing, not showing up to their jobs the next day. Their families were on camera asking for information about where they'd gone. I wondered how that was working so well, and Marty told me he'd taken some of the cash and the gold out of my bags and given it to Ted and Mary to play along. Cash is king, after all.
About ten hours into the viral shitstorm, the civilian and then military radar recordings leaked onto the net. Each recording showed the first saucer moving impossibly quickly from orbit to disappear directly above the unnamed base, followed by another two in formation following the same path slightly later. The timings and direction of the arrivals backed up the video perfectly.
It wasn't even twelve hours before the first RVs began to arrive on the land outside the base's perimeter. By that time things were going into high gear.
The military had released a statement that declared this was complete fiction. They confirmed the radar contacts, but denied that there were UFOs visiting any of their bases. They also denied that they had Mary and Ted in custody. This was of course derided as the government attempting to suppress the truth.
Just over a day after the video's release, thousands of True Believers were camped out near the base, hoping for a glimpse of the visiting aliens. The news showed the camps to be more like a festival than anything, with plenty of drum circles, drugs, and alcohol. It looked like a good time. Congress announced the formation of an investigative committee into the aliens.