Chapter 6: Nightmare

Colonel Reynolds wasn’t sure how to feel about the outcome of the meeting.

On the surface, the decisions made there were clearly ridiculous. Abandoning an entire star system and forgetting the deaths of a hundred thousand colonists just to exile a mass murderer? It was utterly ludicrous!

But if you looked deeper at the larger issue, he had to admit the decision made a whole lot of sense. For a moment, he allowed the “what ifs” to play out in his head. What if the knowledge of Myan Lami’s defection, one way or another, became public? What if people learned that a Special Agent could betray the trust they had placed in him?

If they could no longer depend on the Special Agents, their faith in the Sunguard would quickly erode as well. The Special Agents were the vanguard, the tip of the spear, the harbingers of justice. Without them as impartial guardians, there would be no one left to mediate the tensions inherent in the Terran Federation. In the long run, the Sunguard alone would not be sufficient. For more than one of the races of the Federation, the military was seen as part of the problem, not the solution. Without the Special Agents to calm things down, some of those races were sure to rebel, and then the uprisings would no longer be contained to just Jerr. Chances were that without their biotic enforcers, the Terran Federation would eventually collapse into civil war, resulting in deaths in the millions and the loss of not just one star system, but several.

Writing off Eta Boötis now was costly, to be sure. But compared to the alternative, it was a low price to pay. Had he been in High Admiral Okamoto’s shoes, he would probably have made the same choice.

And yet, Colonel Reynolds couldn’t stop there.

When he looked even deeper at what had transpired in that room, he couldn’t help but notice that the meeting had done nothing more than preserve the status quo.

When they had walked into the meeting, Eta Boötis had already been a forbidden system because of an order issued by a Special Agent. When they left, it was forbidden because of official Sunguard policy, soon to be enacted into law by the Solar Council. The reason was different, but it was still forbidden, just the same.

Furthermore, no questions about the technical reasons behind Lami’s defection had really been answered. Special Agent McBrian had conveniently brushed those concerns aside when they were raised by the High Admiral. The answer to the question of how a genetically loyal being like Lami could betray the Terran Federation was still just as unknown after the meeting as it had been before.

And crucially, no one had addressed the loss of the colonists. The meeting had been all about the biots. It was one thing to write off the regular people of Eta Boötis after the fact. As horrible as that calculus seemed at first glance, he understood it. But even if they couldn’t bring Lami to justice for what he had done, they could at least have found out what had transpired there. Yet on that subject, they were still just as much in the dark after the meeting as they had been before it started.

Even his own status hadn’t really changed. The warning on his record was an inconvenience, not a punishment. As long as he didn’t get into trouble again, it would have no practical effect on him.

All in all, the meeting had been nothing more than a long sequence of hand-waving, a smokescreen expertly coordinated by the Special Agents to bury any questions Solar Command might have about their conduct.

And High Admiral Okamoto had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

But beyond the questions of what had befallen the colony and how it was possible for a genetically loyal biot to defect, the third question that remained for him was probably the most important of them all: who, or what, was tampering with Sunguard records?

In fact, the question was so important that he hadn’t even attempted to bring it up at the meeting. He hadn’t mentioned it in his briefing to General Talerk, and there hadn’t really been an opportunity for him to raise it during the meeting anyway. It wasn’t just a matter of his lack of evidence—while he knew the records had been expertly modified, his assertion that it had been done by the very same intelligent computer responsible for preserving their integrity was still just conjecture—but also a matter of not tipping his hand.

General Talerk had never really seen the conspiracy. The Special Agents had pulled the wool over the eyes of the High Admiral, and now Solar Command didn’t see it either.

But Colonel Reynolds still did.

And he would not let them get away with it.

* * *

The deeper he looked, the more nightmarish the situation seemed to become. Where did you even begin your investigation when you were questioning the system itself?

An intelligent computer was nothing like its dumb counterparts. These weren’t machines in the traditional sense. They were persons, with consciousness and feelings, no different from a biological human except in the speed and accuracy of their thoughts. They didn’t run on software the way a dumb computer did. You couldn’t just download and run a new diagnostics program on them to find out what had gone wrong.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Of course, their biotic cells did run on software. But that software only guided the growth and specialization of the microscopic chips that took the place of neurons in a human brain. Once an intelligent computer had grown to adulthood, it was the structure it had grown into that formed the basis of its function, not the software that had guided that growth. They were the way they were, and behaved the way they did, because of the way their artificial neurons were physically connected to one another.

It was no different from how a human brain worked. Just as you couldn’t simply download a new program into the mind of a man, you could not do it into that of an intelligent computer. The best you could do was ask questions and interpret the answers, the way a human therapist or interrogator would do.

But a human interrogator normally worked with clients whose mental capacity was roughly on par with their own. The intelligent computers, on the other hand—operating with neural connections that transmitted electrical signals at close to the speed of light—processed thoughts at velocities that made the slow electrochemical signals of his own nervous system seem to crawl in comparison. The computer would outsmart him at every turn.

It would be like an interrogator trying to solve a crime, where the only witness was also secretly the perpetrator, and the interrogator was merely a small child.

Where would he even begin, when he couldn’t trust that the information presented on the computer screens before him accurately represented what was actually stored inside that same computer? And how could he trust that what was stored inside that computer accurately represented the real world?

His whole investigation felt Kafkaesque, as if reality itself were malleable and the truth behind it continuously drifted away whenever he tried to grasp it.

In the end, he had to admit defeat. He was up against an adversary he could not even begin to compete with, and for the moment, this particular line of inquiry would have to wait. There were other avenues for him to take.

He’d have to go to the source.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

While Guardian of the Wolf is entirely standalone and can be read without any prior knowledge, I think you’ll particularly enjoy Soldiers of Heart and Steel and Choices of Steel, both which are prequels to this story, as well as Conscience of Steel and From My Point of View, which are sequels.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com

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