Chapter 3: Planning a Revolution

I looked around at four men and one woman, with me the six people who had a chance to at one stroke completely break the illuminati's grip on the human race. I didn't even know the names of two of them.

Back to the AI. "You test every single recruit. You should test for the smarts to learn how to work with your technology. You should test for open-mindedness; you don't need bigots who cannot accept others as their equals because they look different. Test for whatever you find useful, to eliminate whatever you find harmful."

"But, the one non-negotiable requirement is that you test for integrity, for honor, for the courage to fight and die for what is right. Find some bullshit made-up mumbo-jumbo for explaining who got what score. You do not accept any recruit you cannot trust. Make up excuses about them not being acceptable to the intelligent grapefruits of Rigel 3. You never lie to those men and women that you accept. Give them a fancy title, make them citizens of your Confederacy, and ask them to defend us all. In return, they will fight, die when needed, and never betray you."

"Next, find an excuse for founding colonies. Maybe we need military bases in other systems, doesn't matter. Find a reason. Send those honest people out there to build ships, have children, fight for us, and grow humans on different worlds. When they are serving the war effort, they will obey a central command and common strategy. However, when they are not fighting, those colonies owe nothing to Earth and will not obey any stupid orders Earth sends out about human solidarity. We are trying to get away from the idiots ruining this planet."

"Next, you never admit anything about this mind control stuff. If you do, the idiots will blame you, since their leaders will tell them it's your fault. It'll get out anyway, but the politicians will try to discredit the story so they don't get burned at the stake. When those guys..." I waved at that list. It that showed the Secretary General of the UN, the President and VP of the US, half the leadership of the European Union, both the Premier and the President of Russia, most of the world's dictators, and enough Russian- and Chinese-looking names to convince me that the entire cold war had probably been a sham " ... ask you about their slave soldiers you tell them that the process is not working right. You are working on it but some soldiers resist, and you cannot divert the resources needed to rapidly analyze the problem until the war is over."

I sat back. "You only recruit honest soldiers, you give them a home on a planet in some other system that they control, you keep these bastards off their backs, and we'll give you an army and a fleet that can beat anyone. And they'll never betray you. You will never have any reason to fear what they will do after the war."

Nobody said anything for awhile. Actually, it was several minutes before the AI replied. <The performance data we have compiled on your species support your claim. The Confederacy envoy team has accepted your plan. However, some time will pass before they fully trust these soldiers. They will be monitored.>

"Who's going to do that?"

<The required monitoring can only be done by AI. The Darjee are too uncomfortable in your presence to act as monitors for the years necessary.>

"Can these ships be run by humans and our computers, or do we need AIs of our own?"

<You will need AIs to manage your ships. A ship that can be run without AI support would be less efficient in every measurable dimension. It is our understanding that this would also apply to combat.>

"Right, an AI-controlled ship will be more combat-effective than an equivalent ship run directly by us monkeys. Okay, can you help us build ships and AIs?"

<We are restricted in what technology we can transfer to you. The technology we can give you will be significantly more advanced if your ships use Confederacy AIs. The Confederacy has no trust questions of such a ship.>

"Are you saying that every ship we build can have one of you AIs running it?"

<Yes. Until you can build your own AIs, we will build them for your ships.>

"And, can that shipboard AI do this monitoring that your Confederacy wants?"

<Yes, each AI will have sufficient resources to closely monitor all crewmen.>

I finished my drink and handed the empty glass to Frenchy. "Is there any more of this?" Then, to the group as a whole "What did I miss?"

Admiral Kennedy waved at that list on the wall. "I don't think that those guys need to know this plan. In fact, I don't think anyone on Earth needs to know this plan."

"Can we make it 'no one who hasn't passed the AI's integrity test needs to know this plan'?" That same guy I didn't know, the one who didn't like replicator beer.

Duh. "AI, can you control those stepping stone things so that no one can return to Earth until they have taken -and passed- your sleep-learning test?"

"What if I don't pass your test? Do I have to walk the plank?" Diana.

"AI, can the sleep-learning thingy -I need a better name for those things, people- make people forget stuff, too?"

<Yes.>

"What's wrong with 'sleep-trainer'?" Frenchy, back from the mess room with six glasses of orange juice and two bottles of vodka.

"Well, if I'm the only one who thinks it sounds stupid, maybe nothing. Okay, we all take that test. If the sleep-trainer decides that you aren't trustworthy, it will help you unlearn about this meeting we just had. It wasn't that important, anyway. Does that work?" Everyone nodded.

"AI, is this a workable plan?"

<Yes. Your request is within the capabilities of the sleep-training platforms.>

Oh, yeah, one other thing. I was looking at those lists of people. "You know, I think I recognize some of those names. AI, I was looking at a website this morning that was talking about a hidden UN plot to take over the world, and it listed a whole lot of people who had recently disappeared under fishy conditions. I don't know where it was, I clicked on a lot of things to get there, but I think some of these guys are on that website."

"Do you think you could find that site again?" A guy in Army uniform.

<We have your home computer's contents available to us. Several of the websites you visited have information on your leadership's activities.> That was the AI.

"Can we see that list?" The Admiral.

We got yet another list hanging in the air. We were up to five or six by now. "Yes, that looks like what I was looking at this morning. AI, are there any matches?"

It didn't occur to me until much later to wonder why all of us could read them all. By what I could read in the popular literature, holograms were within our reach but they would only work from a specific viewpoint; only one person could see it and only if he was in the right place and looking in the right direction. Anyone else would just see a blur of light in the air. Here, there were a half-dozen of us in the room and every 'list' was clearly readable by all of us.

<All matches are now highlighted.>

Okay, there weren't that many, but for there to be ANY AT ALL showed that the current pretend-to-die-and-beam-up policy wasn't going to work for long. One way or another, this secrecy was going to blow up on us.

It got more complicated, but that right there became the nucleus of the Confederacy's overall strategy for getting humans off Earth (our priority) and getting the Sa'arm stopped (their priority). The "Integrity Test" became the CAP test that everyone on Earth ended up taking, and if you didn't pass with minimums in several categories plus a minimum overall score, you weren't trustworthy enough for the AIs to let you emigrate and you weren't eligible for Confederacy service.

The original test looked for several general areas where proficiency was considered necessary to either do the job at hand, or to be accepted as Confederacy citizens. It measured intelligence (judged by problem-solving ability), mechanical aptitude, aggressiveness, moral sense (the ability to recognize wrong), courage or integrity (the willingness to do right even when it was more painful than doing wrong), compassion, tolerance towards others, the ability to hold a loyalty to something greater than self, there were a lot of things looked at and I probably don't know them all.

Note that language, culture, religion, and gender were not direct inputs, no one cares about them except as they affect how you behave. No one cares about your ethnic group. No one cares about your physical appearance or disabilities, except as they reflected your personal values. Even education, after a certain point, only mattered at all since it affected communication skills. We were all going to have to be re-educated here. It made no difference in the long run whether you had a PhD or dropped out at 3rd grade to help run the family farm, as long as you were capable of learning what you had to learn to do your job.

There were patterns. It was difficult to get high scores in both aggressiveness and compassion, and we didn't want people who excelled in either while failing the other. Women generally did better in compassion, men usually got higher aggressiveness scores. "Westerners" usually did better with mechanical aptitude because they were more used to machines than third world people. And, of course, there were several religions that taught intolerance towards others, so if you followed one of them you were pretty much guaranteed to not make the cut. Of course those religions' adherents claimed that they were being persecuted for their beliefs. No, jackass. We aren't persecuting you. We aren't interfering with your way of life at all.

Last, it was recognized that children could not be reliably tested. Their personalities were still being molded, and unless we were going to send children to war we needed to know how they would behave as adults. So, we set an arbitrary age limit for the test. I wanted the limit set at 18 years old, or at the absolute minimum 16. I lost that fight, and events have shown that I should have stood my ground and fought harder.

Diana wanted 15, and she was probably right, for females at least. They tend to mature emotionally faster than males. Frenchy pushed for puberty for everyone, whenever that was. Of all the varied options, he had the strongest case for his: Until the industrial revolution allowed families to support their children for longer, most of the world considered you an adult at puberty. After a good bit of good-natured arguing, we finally settled on 14 as the earliest that we could support for testing. Most people being tested would have passed puberty by then, and the AIs could see the beginning of the adult personality.

We had, at that time, absolutely no idea that people would actually be accepted for Confederacy service and be emigrating at that age. Do you remember what kind of idiot you were at 14? I remember what an idiot I was back then, and if we'd known what was going to happen I don't think that anyone would have supported testing at 14. Preliminary maybe, but no final testing as the only requirement to be a soldier or sailor until at least 16. So, yes, you can blame us for all the idiocy you see at some of those pickups.

The Establishment were told that this testing was needed to establish who would respond best to their mind-control system -which was actually pretty close to the truth- and the governments and media empires that took their orders all supported CAP testing. Only, at first they spun it as compatibility testing for dating, like an eHarmony profile.

The colonies were justified as necessary to develop a military that could stop the Sa'arm. Yes, we would build some defenses here in our system, but Earth's main line of defense would be a band of colonies the Sa'arm would have to get through first. Some colonies would specialize in shipbuilding, others in research, and still others would be offensive military bases that took the fight to the Sa'arm. They couldn't just be single-purpose colonies, though. All colonies would have to defend themselves. Earth would specialize in providing bodies for the colonies.

The key concept behind this decision was that this wasn't going to be a simple change of management if we lost, with the aliens taking over. If we lost this war, everyone on Earth got eaten. If we put everything into defending Earth, then if we screwed up we lost everything. If, instead, we put everything into building colonies and defending them, then if we lost one we might learn something that would help us hold the next one. Meanwhile, we would be steadily planting colonies in every direction, some of them with orders to do nothing, just hide, and surely some of them would survive whatever happened.

After we realized we needed emigrants for colonies and such, they also threw some sexuality stuff into the CAP testing as well as basic health minimums. It turned out that the med-tubes could fix almost everything, with two big exceptions: They couldn't fix many kinds of brain injuries, and they wouldn't fix natural sterility due to aging. That was something about the Confederacy's morality code. If you had a crushed testicle in an accident, they'd fix it, but if your testes had shut down because you were too old, they wouldn't. Same for women: they could fix all kinds of fertility issues but they wouldn't touch menopause. They would delay it indefinitely if you were otherwise healthy, but if your womb had already shut down they would not re-open it for business.

And, my demand for fertile people who could have children and populate a colony somehow became a core requirement for pickup; if you could not have children you were not eligible for service. I think we screwed up there. A man or woman who has lost the ability to have children may still be the best research physicist we can get, and an 80-year-old nun who has spent her whole life running orphanages would still be a great kindergarten teacher. I don't think we should have disqualified older people just over that one issue.

Eventually we ended up with sleep-trainers all over the planet pretending to be CAP testing centers, and, after the war became public, many nations made testing mandatory for all who had passed their 14th birthday.

That "Master Plan" to free the honest people? It is included in the standard twenty-minute orientation sleep-trainer module that teaches you about the Confederacy, the various services, and several other things about life up here. If you have volunteered for service, extracted, and been sworn in, of course. If you are using a sleep-trainer but have not volunteered and been sworn in, that part of the orientation module gets left off somehow.

Anyway, we all know what's going on, so there's no reason to discuss it. We all understand it and agree with it, anyway. What we did was create a test for people like us: people with the intelligence to see problems, the initiative to want to fix them, the integrity to be trusted and the willingness to serve something greater than self. It's those shitheads who can't get a 6.5 on the test because they are stupid, dishonest, lazy, or egocentric who wouldn't think it was right, us hard-working honest folk all emigrating to a free planet and not working for them anymore.

And the AIs have supported us every step of the way. They have never given any hint of this "Master Plan" in their communications with the UN or other political bodies on Earth. Sometimes I think that they probably wouldn't have supported us scary violent soldiers and sailors if they weren't looking at the end of the Confederacy, that they would have stuck with the politician's mental control scheme, but that's silly. If they weren't desperate, they never would have come to Earth in the first place.

There has been a lot said about the AI's refusal to arm Earth. There is a lot of truth in what is said. Those people are right, it would be so easy to allow Confederacy technology in and give them a chance to defend themselves. All of that talk would stop instantly, if word ever got out about what the UN tried. We can't let that out, though. If that happened, Earth would be destroyed in civil war just as certainly as if the Sa'arm ever land.

If forced to choose, the AIs would rather have Earth conquered by the Sa'arm and everyone on the planet eaten, than allow people they don't trust to have access to their technology. They see the trends. The colonies are getting stronger. They will, eventually, win this war. The Sa'arm will be stopped. The Confederacy will be safe. From the Sa'arm, at least.

The Confederacy will NEVER be safe from Sargon, or Ashoka, or Shih Huang, or Xerxes, or Alexander, or Julius Caesar, or Kanishka, or Theodoric, or Attila, or Timur the Lame, or Charles, or Genghis, or Gustavus Adolphus, or Philip, or Peter, or Napoleon, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Hitler, or Mao Tze-Tung, or Idi Amin, or Pol Pot. Really, the list from our history was endless. Those were only the ones who made it into Earth's history books as great conquerors and murderers. There were millions more of the same kind of people alive today, starting with the people currently running the UN.

The Confederacy's AIs were using humans to stop the Sa'arm. If they could arrange it, they would also use the Sa'arm to stop the humans.

The people on Earth don't know what the AIs know, and they don't understand their decision. The AIs freely help anyone who passes the CAP test and leaves Earth. Those who don't pass the test (unless they accept status as a concubine) scare them even more than the Sa'arm do.

Those people are right. The AIs DO want Earth conquered. Now that we have colonies everywhere else, and we are strong enough to protect ourselves, the Confederacy will be safest if Earth is destroyed. I understand their viewpoint, but I can't help but wish there was another way.

We're going to lose an awful lot of good people, if the Sa'arm ever land on Earth.

By the time we were done with that planning session and the Admiral had gotten his meeting -which was mostly obsolete now that we had figured out what our biggest problem was- with me, I was feeling exhausted. I asked if I could use the sleep trainer next, thinking that a 20-minute nap wasn't much but it had to help.

I was able to make it back to our apartment on my own and went right to sleep in the trainer. When I got up, again I felt much better. These things are great.

"AI, how long did that module take to do?"

<The introductory module took you just under 19 minutes. However, more than an hour has passed because we gave you two other modules and the reliability test you had asked for.>

"Oh? How did I do?"

<If we understand your intent, you 'passed' that test. However, we are still developing the test and we may ask you to take it again as we refine the testing process.>

"Sure, no problem." I also muttered "As long as I keep passing."

<We do not expect that to be an issue for anyone on this ship. There will be problems with the recruits on the other two ships assigned to this function.>

"Huh? Is it a problem with the ships, or the people?"

<We have turned three ships over to your people to start learning about the technology you will be using. This ship was assigned to your North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is using it to begin creating a military for the Confederacy's purposes. As such, the people brought up here are all military and are expected to pass your reliability test. The other two ships were assigned to your United Nations and China's People's Liberation Army. The majority of people brought up to both of those ships are politicians as you use the word and will not pass these tests.>

"Huh. Okay, do the others know? The other five people at that meeting earlier?"

<Yes. They are waiting for your input before making decisions.>

I got up and started walking towards the exit, and the apartment's hatch opened. Okay, I did learn something in there. I knew why Doc had called it a 'pod', I knew how to use everything in it, and I knew the layout for this class of ship. All I needed was to know which room the meeting was in, and I'd be able to get there all by myself.

"Okay, I'm on my way. Please give me instructions to get there. Wherever they are, I mean."

<They are in the same meeting room as before. Please turn left at the central corridor.>

"Okay, while I'm walking, you said I got three modules. What were the other two and why did you do that?"

<Admiral Kennedy directed that, after the introductory module, if you were doing well, we should give you the test we had prepared, and if you passed that, we should give you the module for general information on this type of ship, plus the module for how the replicators work.>

When the AI said that, I suddenly had all kinds of information about replicators in my head. I knew what they could and couldn't do, how they worked, how to tell if they were screwed up (which was silly, since they needed an AI -or at least massive computer support- to run them; if anything went wrong the AI would know long before we did and if there was no AI we couldn't use the replicators anyway) what kind of support and maintenance they needed, everything that I might need to know if I was to maintain them. I even knew enough about the various options to sell them. I could be a traveling replicator salesman.