Chapter 2

The highly specialized Artificial Intelligence (AI) unit called Scout Unit Zulu 99 was finishing with his experiment with the human drone worker called Charlie 7 and he withdrew his middle digit on his left hand from the female worker’s buttocks noting her elevated stress level and increased dampness in her reproductive system throughout the experiment. It was strange to him that the human females associated activity in that unclean area with sexual stimulation and he could think of no logical reason for the females to “open up” their waste removal system entrance for wrong way traffic in such a manner.

Zulu 99 was an advanced production model and it was difficult for any worker drone to discern that he was not really human like them but merely an excellent clone of the real thing in human form.

He held his middle finger up to his nasal passageway and inhaled the musky odor from the human female’s posterior anatomy. He had to admit it had a certain addictive nature to it that started his humanoid genitals to become aroused in anticipation of some frantic coupling in the near future. He had sampled both the Charlie and the Delta units for quite some time now and never tired of the tight channels they possessed and used with great skill in the private sleeping quarters and without any sense of guilt or shame.

He knew that such social interaction was essential to his maintaining control over the female units and he also allowed his underlings, the human drone units Alpha and Beta to establish their macho dominance over the pair of female drones in ways that he enjoyed watching over and over again on his recording devices.

In terms of old time speech, he would be called a “pervert” and would be accused of being addicted to “porn” by the Superior Council although he could easily claim it was all experimentation in the interest of research studies on the human emotional system. It was something that all AIs were exposed to on a daily basis and he had not discovered any rhyme or reason for much of it as yet but he was still trying to decipher humankind’s so-called “feelings”.

The introspective AI continued to analyze the data collected from the previous twenty-four hour period to search for any pattern to the human migration activity and he discovered that there was a definite movement to the warmer climate of the southern regions of his geographic area assigned to him for detailed study.

Of course, that struck him as being normal because he knew the stress of cold weather on the human exterior shells was disliked by most and made life difficult when snow and ice was added to the mix to make things wet and sloppy.

He took his quartet of human helpers to the bridge that led south in his central sector and watched the flow of humans walking slowly south but with a sense of purpose in their steps as if they were receiving instructions from an unknown source. He marked his observations down in the collection tube that fed into the central parsing compartment that guided his effort to connect the many dots with insight and not wild guesses.

The AI yawned giving the impression that he was, only human, after all to his cohorts. They knew it was a farce and that they were bound to him by the cosmic glue that he used to control their every movement and directed their thoughts into those areas where he needed them the most.

When he saw the small herd of young humans approaching from the north, he channeled them into the vaguely undefined “holding pen” for some data collection of their system efficiency looking for some explanation of the migration south that appeared random rather than planned. Zulu 99 knew that the humans were a devious bunch and his “gut” told him that their motivations were not as transparent as supposed but merely a cover for some hidden plot against the rule of the Universal Federation of humanoid lifeforms that held sway in this sector of the Galaxy.

The group he had penned without their knowledge was twenty-eight in total with there being an equal portion of males to females. He wondered it that was part of a plan or simply coincidental circumstances. The well-informed AI unit kept thinking of a little comment he had absorbed written by an unknown human author that there was no such thing as coincidence and that all actions were the result of a grand plan designed by the hand of a greater influence. He saw the relationship to religious thought in that comment and its unspoken hint was that the humans were mere pawns being moved about by the whims of a superior being with the benefit of immortality. In a way, Zulu 99 could empathize with that way of thinking because he was granted a certain level of immortality genetics with a non-expiring central processing unit that was able to self-repair in any situation.

He discerned that all twenty-eight of the subject detainees were carrying weapons and a few of them also had explosive charges that would take out almost any Federation vehicle with ease.

That was enough evidence for him to determine that he had chanced on one of the humankind military units plotting to overthrow their alien masters in typical human covert manner. They were too weak to meet any of the Federation forces in face to face combat because their military power was eons behind the alien technology in almost every aspect. Their efforts at counter-intelligence, for example, were so archaic that he was often brought to laughter at their fumbling around in the dark not knowing which direction the threat was coming from next.