Chapter 53

Dear Corporal Murphy,

My we've become so formal ... tell me this did your 'prove' prove anything? Or was there nothing there for it to probe? I just reread your letter and see that the storm didn't leave anything dangerous in your lagoon...

Yes I know (and Lily does too) that we really shouldn't have been making the two backed beast in the middle of the road like a couple of dogs. But in our defense we never imagined that we would be in danger in what should have been a routine day. We've had a couple of tremblers, but they have happened while we're at home. They weren't much more than enough to cause the floor to vibrate really so they haven't inspired us to get into the make a baby 'cause we just cheated death mode yet.

I honestly don't know why anyone would want to cook drugs either, or how someone with that sort of problem managed to get by the CAP test. The reason we suspect the sponsor is that we don't think that a replicator would normally provide some of the ingredients without the sponsor ordering them. Unfortunately we found out that the sponsor had ordered that records be held locally (in the memory of the pod AI) rather than stored by the main community AI. The Governor, and all the Civil Service Officers on Atlantis-At had a meeting to try to decide what to do about what we suspect. We have one group going over the man's CAP score and another pulling all the police records we could about him and his concubines.

We also managed to get all the recordings of his pod before it was separated from the ship. We're fairly sure now that he was a sociopath. What we have asked the planetary AI is this: how did he slip by the CAP process? I sincerely doubt that we'll ever get satisfactory answers to that question! I'm probably not very popular with the AI right now but I suggested to the Governor that every CAP score should be suspect and that with that in mind that unless someone seemed to have a profession as a slave as Lily does that we should be considering ways to make them citizens of our world at least.

Rebecca landed and brought the family over to see us. I'm afraid that I had to ask her not to come by again. At least not with Mom and Dad. Maybe I could deal with Dad but having her parade Mom around in Victoria's Secret and imply, no openly state, that she wanted to see me having sex with her was more than I want to deal with. Incest may not be a big taboo in the diaspora, but I'm not at all ready to break it with Mom. You, maybe ... if you were willing and available. But so far as I know that isn't ever going to happen.

I've been watching video of your tank engagements. I also have been thinking about how to get some sort of aerial surveillance of the Sa'arm. The Confederacy has lots of fast moving small drones. They use them in pickups and the like. Anyway I downloaded the information on a couple of the smaller ones and how to program them. I'm going to be sending my new program design and ideas for making them even harder to spot to a research lab. I'm sending you an alpha program and design parameters for the drones. You'll know better than me how they should be painted in order to make them harder to spot. The program should have them moving randomly. I'm hoping that since they're so small that they'll be harder for the Sa'arm to shoot down because of their size as well. If nothing else losing a swarm of these should net you (or someone) some more intelligence on how the Sa'arm managed to shoot down the last surveillance attempt. I say that because I don't think that the Sa'arm will be able to shoot these down in the numbers that you can produce even with a kitchen replicator. This is a case where I suggest that you try launching a few thousand of these whether or not you hear from an authority in your chain of command. I know for one that the research group I sent the idea to will be very interested in any answers that these drones ferret out.

We of course have no satisfactory answers as to how someone with a history of making street drugs slipped through the CAP test system, even if his score was only 6.5. Of course part of the problem is that the people who might be best at interpreting the CAP test and its parameters are those who would probably be the last to be picked up or to have a passing CAP test as most psychologists I know are absolutely committed to the idea that violence is evil.