The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Sole Survivor

By Stub

mc mf ff md sf

Chapter 20 — The Beginning of the End

I checked the schematic, comparing it to the fading memories in my head, and the notes I’d jotted into the pad—plus my good old engineering common sense.

“I see this pathway here as our best chance,” I said, highlighting it on the wall vid and on everyone’s pad. The room was full of electrical engineers, from R-C and other companies in the area, including the nuclear labs at Lawrence Livermore. Anatoly and Param were to my left and right. “Our power output estimates show this as the most likely point of failure. Traceback shows an initiation point here.” Another part of the display lit up. “Our signal will trigger this gate, allowing current to flow to our failure point.”

I looked around the room at the converted faces. It was so tedious, and tiring, being the only person in the room who could show initiative, but on the other hand, it was great to have so many people performing the grunt work to test a hypothesis.

“You’ve been assigned to three working groups,” I said. “I want you to search for any flaw, any potential obstacle in the plan, and report your progress to Param every six hours. Understood?” Twenty-one faces nodded at me, and I dismissed the meeting.

“Alex!”

Megan was waiting outside the conference room door as we exited, and she ran to catch up with me as I headed for the stairs.

I turned to wait for her, watching as she trotted toward me. She’d returned her hair to its normal medium brown, and her face had filled out in the weeks since getting the helmet off. She still had the scar in the middle of her forehead, but, unlike Kara, didn’t arrange her hair to hide it.

“Hey,” she said, as she halted in front of me.

“How is she?” I asked.

Megan’s face clouded. “Not great. We’re all worried about her. She was so close to those two women, especially One. I piggy-backed on her conversations a few times, and I’d almost say they were getting to be friends, as much as you can be friends with a consciousness that has no personality.”

I sighed. No amount of logic, or apologies, or appeals to the greater good had gotten Kara to speak to me after the incident with the CPU. Four of the people in the tanks had died—two men and two women—all affected by a malfunction in the controls for their liquid environment. The other four had survived, and were stable in their tanks, but they were only two fourths of a whole. Mateo had confirmed that he had no access to the wider alien network anymore, because half of the interface between human and alien thought was gone. Killed by me.

I’d tried to rationalize it by saying that the women in the tanks had shown me the flaw in the first place. I never would have disrupted the CPU, and by extension their life support, if they hadn’t dragged me right up to the virtual edge and shoved my nose into the crack in the technology’s shell. They’d even provided the final push that got me inside.

But that still didn’t excuse the fact that I had been in the network with no real purpose, and had let my anger get the best of me. I was convinced that my rage stirred the four women to action—if I had stayed calm, none of this would have happened.

In any case, with no way to get into the alien net, Kara had no reason to be near me. She’d welcomed my other girls to the clinic where she and the ex-Arbiters stayed, but she’d refused to talk about the incident with them, and she ignored all of their pleas to come talk with me.

“Well,” I said, “what brings you down here then?”

“Beth, Tammi and I were talking, and we think that we should learn to do things without Kara. I mean, when we’re all together, each person has an influence on the group, so you can imagine what happens when we aren’t on the same page emotionally. Whenever we join with Kara lately, we all sink into this funk, and can’t get anything done. Beth thinks that we need to learn to function without her.”

“Beth’s a smart woman,” I said. “But why didn’t she come here herself?”

“Well...it has to do with something that we’ve bounced around quite a bit between the four of us.”

I raised an eyebrow at her vague explanation, but let her continue.

“Actually,” she said, blushing slightly, “it has to do with sex.”

There it was. I thought this might come up as a topic as more Arbiters were freed from their helmets. One of the things that had become clear over the past year was that the alien interference with human minds had made pleasure a major facet of life, especially for women. And even more especially for the women who had lived under the blue helmets. They’d been driven to work beyond starvation by having their pleasure manipulated, and you don’t mess with someone’s brain like that without there being side effects.

It was a factor for me, too, as I’d found out over the past months—probably from my constant use of Arbiter technology.

“So,” I said, “what conclusions have you come up with?”

She looked down at her toes, her blush getting deeper. “Well, from the way Beth tells it...actually from the way she shows it, you’re a catalyst for the process that we share. If it’s just us women, all the time, things get locked into patterns, but if you add in that little jolt of maleness, it stirs thing up, and gets our connection working at a higher level. Kara even said it— though she’d always been with other women, she talked about needing you to sometimes, quote, ‘kick her brain in the ass,’ unquote.”

I had to laugh at that. Kara and I had enjoyed ourselves in bed quite a few times, but I didn’t realize that she was getting something more out of it than just an orgasm or three. “So,” I said to Megan, “does that mean you have something in mind?”

Her face, which was already pink, turned an endearing shade of red. “Well...” She took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. “I was told that the magic phrase was ‘Alex, we need to have sex.’“

I smiled and opened my arms to the young woman. When she stepped up so I could hug her, the contact let me feel her excitement and her nervousness. I hoped she was reading me as well, and I got my confirmation when her breathing slowed, and she relaxed into me.

Eleven days until the transport ships arrived, and a million things on my plate before they did, but for some reason, the connections that I’d built with the women around me always took precedence in my mind.

I lightly kissed the top of Megan’s head, then looked down into her eyes. “So, what was your plan in coming here?” I asked.

“I was kind of hoping that we could find somewhere private, and...you know.”

“Well, private I can do, but I have to tell you, I’m not jumping right into bed with you. I know your mind, but I hardly know you, at least not yet. Let’s go find a place to relax, and we’ll see what happens.”

“There’s...ah...something else I haven’t told you, Alex.” She looked around the abandoned hallway of our borrowed office building. “I...uh...brought Tammi with me.”

So that was it. I thought I felt someone else nearby, but figured it would be Beth, chaperoning the young girl on our first “date.”

Tammi turned a corner and rolled up to us in her chair. Not that it was a skill I’d consciously tried to develop, but I’d gotten better at guessing how badly the ravages of starvation had affected someone, and I was actually encouraged by seeing Tammi’s posture in the chair. Her back was straight, her head was held up, and her bare arms, while still thinner than normal, weren’t the fragile sticks I’d been expecting. Then again, I hadn’t had a chance to see her since she’d been in the hospital bed—being persona non grata at the clinic kind of limited my contact.

“Hi there, Tammi,” I said as she rolled closer, and she gave me a shy smile in return. Her dark eyes never left me as she glided in next to Megan and took her hand.

This was turning a little weird—two young girls propositioning an older man for sex in order to help fight aliens. I had no real history with either of them; no idea of their attitudes, their likes and dislikes, their feelings about jumping into bed with strangers...

I took out my satphone and called Lani. She was close by, working with Scarlett and Amber on cataloging the things that I’d recorded when I’d gone inside the CPU. I made small talk with the two girls for just a couple minutes, until my Island Girl came bouncing down the corridor. She flew at Megan, wrapping her in a hug, and giving her a sound kiss on the cheek, before leaning over to give Tammi the same.

She turned to me, finally, stepping into the circle of my arms, and standing on her toes to give me a real kiss. Eventually she released me, and turned back to the other two. “So, you want to fuck my man, huh?”

Both of the new girls gaped at her, until Lani’s face lit up with a smile. “I can’t wait!”

Mateo wheeled his chair out of the room with our four remaining “Translators.” We’d decided that they needed a new moniker besides “torso,” so the consensus had been to refer to them by their function, much like Arbiter and Sentinel.

“Any luck?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, sir. I can’t get through to either Five or Eight. They were so tied together as a group, that losing half of their number has for all intents made them brain dead. Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Montoya say that their neuro activity is slowing down, and Dr. Li thinks that their bodies could be affected soon. Right now we’re keeping them alive, but I really don’t know what kind of future they have.” He shook his head sadly, and I felt that old guilt creeping up on me.

“Mateo,” I said, “you know that I wasn’t trying to hurt them, right? If I’d known what would happen, I never would have tried to get inside the CPU.”

“I know that, Alex. We all do. Even Kara. It’s just taking her more time to come to grips with it.” He put his hand on my arm—carefully, since he could probably break it with no effort. “I could say a bunch of stuff about how this is war, and there will always be casualties, but I remember my first Staff Sergeant, right when I got out of boot, giving us some wisdom. He said that losing one of your fellow soldiers would hurt just as much as coming home to find your mother chopped to pieces in your living room, no matter whether it was during war or not. And you’d better be ready for that kind of pain every single time. It’s not something that you can just shrug off, but you don’t stop doing what you have to do while you grieve.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That was a shitty analogy.”

The young soldier grinned under his half helmet. “I know, right? That sergeant was a real asshole.”

I laughed, which might not have been appropriate in this place at this time, but it felt good. “Thanks, Mateo.”

“No problem, sir.”

“Remind me to promote you to Planetary Morale Officer when this is over.”

He choked on that, going into a brief coughing fit before bursting out laughing.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said. “I want to talk with you some more about the Sentinels and the alien plans for them. Is Private Wright around?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll call him in.” I didn’t hear him speak after that, and raised an eyebrow. He pointed at the metal mesh covering his red helmet. “One of Anatoly’s engineers rigged it, sir. Since we’d already tapped that squad leader channel for use in the network, he piped it outside the Faraday mesh to a transceiver. It uses the same signals as our comm pieces, but it doesn’t rely on voice. Instantaneous, and no chance of lost meaning.” He shook his head in wonder. “It would be a hell of a thing to go into battle in these rigs, sir. I don’t think anything could stop us.”

“Well, let’s just hope we’re not on the receiving end of that fight, Sergeant.”

“Copy that, sir.”

A tap on my foot woke me up. Jill was leaning over me, holding a satphone in her hand.

“Cassie needs you, Alex,” she whispered. “She says it’s important.”

I crawled out of bed, trying not to disturb my companions. Vivian, as the unofficial den-mother of the operation, had wanted to talk with the two young Arbiters, and after a long conversation, the four of us had ended up here for the night. Megan and Tammi had emphatically enjoyed their first encounter with Lani and me, so they’d had no problem letting the older woman join us this time.

I stood up, slapping Jill’s wandering hand away from my crotch as I took the phone.

“Hello?”

“Alex? I know it’s late, and we’re a long way from you, but I need you to come to Livermore right away.”

“What’s going on?”

“Kara’s here, and she’s commanding Anatoly to open the cryo-pods.”

“Shit.”

“I’ve cancelled her orders, and shut her in an office. I’m sorry but I had to get a little physical with her...”

“That’s OK, Cassie. I’m on my way. Just keep her there, even if you have to get physical again. And have someone check all of the pods to see if they’re still sealed.”

I hung up, and shook the bed with my foot, waking everyone. “Megan, call Beth and get her over here now. Vivian, get dressed, you’re coming with me and the other three. We need to talk some sense into Kara.”

I looked through the small window in the office door, and saw Kara sitting in a corner, her knees pulled up to her chest, and her head down. Behind me, all three ex-Arbiters, plus several more of my girls stood waiting expectantly. I could hear their concern in my mind, and I wondered if their emotions were getting through to Kara. And whether that was a good thing or a bad one.

“Why don’t you all back up and give her some room,” I said. I got some resentful looks, but no one argued. Cassie stayed with me, one hand on my shoulder as she waited for me to deal with my wayward Arbiter.

“I think you should stay here as well,” I said to her, as I opened the door. Thankfully, she didn’t follow me in.

Kara’s shoulders twitched as she recognized me coming into her range, but she didn’t look up. When I got close, I squatted down, and reached out to touch her arm. All of her grief and pain came to me through our connection, and I nearly lost my balance at the intensity of her emotions.

Keeping in contact with her skin, I sat down beside her, my back against the wall. I knew she was angry at me, but at that moment she needed comfort more than anger, and her body shifted, leaning towards me. I gathered her tiny frame in my arms, and held her in my lap. She wasn’t crying, or cursing, or showing any emotions on the outside, but her mind was a roiling sea of conflict.

I didn’t even try to dive into that chaos. Instead I tried to be the rock, the shoreline, the steady constant in her mind. She’d had a complicated relationship with men in her life—or should I say “males” since Albert didn’t fit the classic definition of a man—but when she’d asked me to have sex with her that day, to replace the memories of the alien that were constantly in the back of her mind, I’d taken on the responsibility of being the representative for my entire gender. She didn’t want a man to run her life, but she did want the biggest male influence in her life to be positive and supportive. Right now she felt that I’d betrayed that support by letting the two women Translators die.

I didn’t disagree with her, or try to explain things away, but while she stayed silent, curled up in my lap, I told her the entire story of what had happened, how the four Translators had found a way into the CPU, and had helped me push my way through the barrier. I didn’t deny that my anger had probably stirred the four women, and spurred them into actions they might not have taken otherwise, but I also reminded Kara of Maria, and how her own anger had become such a force inside the alien network. I think the Translators had recognized the power of rage to affect what we could accomplish.

I told her all of that, and about how it felt inside the CPU, being drowned in alien knowledge, not knowing how to catalog it, or absorb it, or react to it, and how that had left me unable to do anything more than soak it in. I didn’t understand the implications of disrupting the device that controlled their life support, and I don’t think they did either.

After I was done, I hugged her a little tighter, and waited. I caught Cassie, and Beth, looking nervously through the small window every once in a while, but refused to acknowledge them. In the back of my mind I knew that I had a million things to do, but I didn’t let any of that affect me.

We’d been silent for almost twenty minutes when I felt her head turn slightly. “I never got to know their names,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“One and Three. That’s all I ever knew them as. That’s all they knew themselves as. They were people once, with lives and stories, but I never got to hear any of it. The aliens took it all away from them, and I couldn’t get it back. We tried, but there was just nothing there any more. I thought...I thought if I could get to these others, the new ones, before they got lost in the network, that I could help them remember who they were.”

Now the tears came. I saw Beth hovering outside the door, and waved her in. Megan and Tammi followed, and in seconds I was surrounded by their special connection. The fact that I knew each of these women intimately now, just made it that much closer.

“We’ll help them, Kara. I promise. We’ll help them remember.” I had no idea if we could do that, of course, but that’s what she needed to hear at that moment.

The other three put all of their efforts into soothing their distraught sister, and I knew they’d succeeded when I noticed Kara’s breathing coming slow and steady. We all managed to get to our feet, one or two of the girls always keeping a hand on Kara, and I carried her out of the office. Cassie led the way to a lounge area with a couch, and I laid her down, and left her to the others’ care.

The open lab housing the eight cryo-pods was on the basement level. Cassie followed me in, to find Anatoly and several converted engineers sitting quietly.

“Was there any damage?” I asked.

“No, Alexei,” he said. “I was not able to initiate the sequence before Cassandra countered Kara’s commands.”

I squeezed Cassie’s shoulder in thanks. “As much as I think Kara jumped the gun by ordering the pods opened, we need to finalize our procedures and get this project going. I’ve given you the code to open the boxes, Cassie has provided the life support medium, we have the CPU ready to connect, what else is left?”

“Mostly that we have no idea how to revive someone from cryonic suspension,” Cassie said. “If the process isn’t completely automated, or if there’s a malfunction somewhere, we won’t know how to continue.”

“We’re going to have to proceed on the assumption that everything is automated. I believe it is, if only because they’ll have to revive eighteen million Sentinels on their home planet. Why waste time and resources at the end of the process when you can build it in at the beginning?”

“You are assuming that the aliens think like us, Alexei, but I see your point.” Anatoly glanced at his data pad. “We can disconnect the remaining four Translators in the next six hours, and begin the revival process for the new ones by noon.”

“Wait,” I said, “what happens when you disconnect the remaining four from the CPU?”

“Without the automated signals from the control unit, they will expire within approximately six minutes.”

“Unacceptable,” I said. My anger was rising again, not because Anatoly was talking so casually about killing the rest of Albert’s Translators, but because of the situation that had made it necessary to have them constantly tethered to alien technology. “Can we rig an environment that will keep them alive, but separate from the alien machine? Can we just duplicate the signals going through the wires, and run the pumps at the same speeds?”

“I’m sure we can, Alex,” Cassie said. “We can put them on life support for the short time that they have left. Their bodies are shutting down at an increasing rate. Each of the four brains, on either the male or female side, had different parts of their minds connected to the machine, so that in concert they worked as one unit. Unfortunately, we don’t know how the aliens divided their inputs and outputs among the four, and we don’t have the technology to stimulate their brains from the alien side.”

“How long will they last if we don’t disconnect them?” I asked.

Anatoly checked his pad. “Twenty-four to thirty-six hours, depending on their constitution,” he said.

So the other four Translators were going to die, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. “What if we doubled them up with their new replacements?” I asked. “If we thaw out the new Two and Four, and split all of their inputs between the old and new bodies? They would be connected to their missing components, and their physical degeneration would stop, right?”

Anatoly and Cassie both shook their heads, and already I saw the flaw in my suggestion.

“It would be like connecting two processors to a device that only takes one,” Anatoly said. “If they were working perfectly in concert, they would double the amplitude of any output signal, and if they are out of sync, their outputs could cancel each other, resulting in corrupted transmissions.”

So now I had to go tell Kara that the other two women were going to die, and we needed to decide if we let it happen quickly, or waited a day or two and let them expire on their own.

“OK, let me discuss it with the others and we’ll decide. But in any case, I want to be able to open the cryo-pods and hook up the new Translators within the next twenty-four hours. Is that acceptable?” Everyone nodded, and I started my slow walk down the hall to break the bad news to the ex-Arbiters.

I sat in a borrowed chair on the roof of RelayCast, with Beth in my lap, looking up at the sky. She absently fiddled with her Faraday helmet, while I absently caressed her right breast. We both had our eyes locked on the metallic ovoid hovering above Chinatown. The ships had appeared on schedule, exactly eight days after the last pulse. Right now, we were testing a couple of new devices that had come from the data I’d pulled from the alien computer. Param and Stephan were on the other side of the roof, aiming a dish at the alien ship, trying to confirm our power and frequency estimates.

“So,” Beth said, covering my hand with hers while I massaged her breast, “how does it feel to be the worldwide ruler of all media?”

I laughed at that. The last day had been spent connecting with media providers all over the world. Working with converted language translators, several of the girls and I had systematically shut down every satellite media company on the planet. Just like Dwight had explained, when one outlet went offline, another one was funneled in to fill the gap in coverage, so we’d vid-called the CEOs or COOs of every company we could locate, and ordered them to stop transmission.

As of two hours ago, the two-hundred vid channels and thirty-four satradio stations owned by RelayCast were the only signals being transmitted throughout the world. Beth’s statement was correct—I owned the airwaves.

I triggered my comm while Beth squirmed her ass against my hardening cock . “Status report, Scarlett.”

“Well, it’s not a mass exodus, but I think we’re having some success here, Alex,” she said.

“Good. Keep monitoring, but stay far enough away that you aren’t in danger, OK?”

“Yes, baby. Love you, too,” she said, and then clicked off.

Param appeared from around an uplink dish. He didn’t blink as he saw me slip my hand under Beth’s blouse and rummage about. “The data from the ships looks like it falls within the parameters you provided, Alex,” he said. “Most of the ship’s mass appears to be a giant capacitor, and the current energy readings are showing it as fully charged.”

“Were you able to trace transmissions to and from the ship?” I asked.

Param nodded. “Again, it was on the frequencies that you provided. The package has been programmed, and we’re just waiting for your go-ahead.”

I checked my watch. “OK, I’m giving it until two hours from now to let more people get the transmission. Keep monitoring the ship, and notify me if anything changes.”

He nodded, and walked off. I had my hand under Beth’s bra by now, pinching her hardening nipple, while she rubbed me through my pants. “We’ve got two hours,” I said, “which isn’t enough time to dig into anything new. Any suggestions on how to kill the time?”

She smiled and pulled my arm out from under her blouse. Getting off my lap, she headed for the stairs, flipping her skirt up to show me that she hadn’t bothered with panties today.

Scarlett ran up just as we were getting ready to duck into the Faraday cage. “How’d it go?” I asked.

“I’d say overall it worked. I don’t know how many people were watching or listening in the last eight hours, but I saw quite a few people leaving Chinatown, looking up at the ship.”

“Well, it’s not like we’ll get another chance to test it—this is one and done if it works.”

“Still,” Beth said, “it was great that we tried to get people out of harm’s way.”

“It’s too bad that it’s language-based though. We only had the one transmission to work with, so the instructions went out in English. It might work in other countries if those people happen to know English, but still, I wish we could have done more.” I checked the time and switched on my comm. “Param, start the countdown, and send the signal for everyone to take cover. Sixty seconds from my mark.” I waited until the last of the designated people were inside the Faraday cage. “Mark!”

I ducked inside and sealed the door. This cage in the basement of RelayCast was so new that I could smell the fresh paint on the walls. It was also tiny, and at some point my pacing must have upset the people inside, because Scarlett, Jill, and Beth all stood up to stop me.

“It will work, Alex. Just have a little faith.”

“A lot of people are going to die,” I said. “Again.” I was already picturing the horror of what might happen in the next few minutes, and none of the soothing thoughts from the two girls helped.

The green all-clear light switched on, and I ripped open the door. I pounded repeatedly on the elevator call button while I switched on my comm. “Who’s out there? Give me a report.”

“Jesus, Alex. It worked!” Mateo’s voice was as excited as I’d ever heard it, to the point of dropping the “sir” and using my name.

“What about damages?”

“I can’t tell from here. It’ll take a few minutes to get a report to you. Amazing though. Who would have thought a year ago that we could do something like this.”

“Get me that report, Mateo, ASAP.”

“Yes, sir.”

The elevator ride to the top floor took forever. Then the stairs to the roof. It was nearly sunset, and everything was getting dark, but I got to the edge of the building and looked out toward Chinatown.

There was a glow there. A fire, definitely. But not as large as I’d expected. Still there was a large circle of nothingness right in the middle of the city; a hole where there had once been buildings and people. Param moved a piece of equipment to point in that direction and checked the readout. “No increase in radiation detected,” he said.

I was worried about the fire, but I hugged Jill and Scarlett to me, and tried to look at the positives—with one little hack, I’d taken out every EM drone in the alien fleet. Based on my memory of the ships’ schematics, we’d found the failure point, and exploited it once again.

After a pulse, the drones would fly out to a spot between Earth and the sun, to soak up more energy for the next trip. When they returned eight days later, they were basically huge flying batteries, filled with power that they discharged in the form of EM waves. They were single-purpose devices, and would be considered crude by any culture that had mastered superluminal fight—which by contrast put them at the very fringe of human understanding. What my team and I had found, was that a series of frequencies, when picked up by the ships’ communication and control system, would cause a signal cascade through a series of relays, resulting in the closing of a single circuit gate. All of the power in those giant batteries was meant to be blasted out of the EM generators in a hundredth of a second, but by using the planet’s satellite entertainment network to send the right signals, the discharge never reached the EM device. Instead, our hack caused the power to be diverted to the drones’ propulsion systems.

All over the world, over a million metallic eggs had fallen to earth as their engines burned out from a massive power surge. They’d tumbled from thousands of meters in the air, releasing incredible amounts of kinetic energy on impact. That was why the satellite vid and radio signals that I’d been broadcasting for the last eight hours were imbedded with a command that made it normal behavior to move as far away from the egg ships as possible. Still, there was no way to tell how many people hadn’t received the command—how many had died when hundreds of tons of alien hardware had rained down from the skies.

There were more than forty ships that covered the Bay metro area, and every one of them hovered over populated locations. I’d had no choice but to drop every one of them out of the sky. Even if the people got out, and even if there weren’t large scale destruction from explosions or fires, I’d still disrupted the normal behavior of far too many converted.

The structure of converted society was already beginning to break down, as resources dwindled through accident, poor planning, or just attrition. Now I had thousands—possibly millions—of people whose homes or workplaces had been destroyed. How much more damage had I done to those people, by interrupting their normal behavior? How many more would starve, or die through indecision, because I’d taken away the stability they needed to survive under alien control?

I tried to tell myself that we’d just scored a great victory, taking away one of the primary tools that the aliens used to enslave the planet, but I also knew that sometime not so long ago, I’d become the worst mass-murderer in Earth’s history, and all I’d done from that point on was increase my body count.

“We can’t do that, Lani,” I said.

“Why not? The aliens can’t reprogram them without their ships. Why can’t we just turn off normal behavior? At least it will give people a chance to survive if their programmed behavior is killing them.”

“Because, sweetie, there still wouldn’t be anyone in charge,” Vivian said. I knew she understood better than the younger women, and I was glad for her support. “They still can’t do anything that would cause a conflict, and trust me, if you just turn off their normal behavior, nothing would get done, because people can’t think of solutions that don’t involve conflict.”

“Well, what good is it to control the satellite messages if we can’t use them?” Lani asked.

“Once the aliens aren’t interfering with us, we’ll come up with a plan,” I said. “But they could regain control of the satellites at any time, and while they can’t use their ships to convert the few of us remaining, they could still counter any of the new signals we set up.” Lani pursed her lips, not happy with the solution, but unable to disagree with me.

“So we just let them continue as they were?” she said.

“For now. Everything’s coming to a head in the next three days, and we need to stay focused on what we’re going to do when the transport ships arrive.”

“Well then, what about Kara and Mateo, and the new Translators?”

“We do that tonight,” I said.

The trip to Alameda had seemed to take forever. I’d really wanted to move the entire operation to somewhere safer, but the alien communication equipment was too complex for us to disassemble, so we just worked with what we had.

The room that originally housed Albert’s Translators had been expanded, with two walls demolished to give people and equipment more room. The new CPU was off to the side, not dominating the room like the old one. Two chairs from the Neuroscience Center were in place for Mateo and me, auto-reclining, and equipped with bio-sensors. A fully-assembled king-size bed sat next to the chairs, ready for the ex-Arbiters. I looked at it a bit wistfully, disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting naked with the four women this time.

The two Arbiter’s helmets were on their stands, cables ready to be plugged in to the two humans crazy enough to have their brains wired with connectors.

Against the wall, eight new boxes were stacked in a neat line. Larger than the previous ones, these were made of ordinary plex, and gave off a lot more noise. It hadn’t been feasible to replicate the alien devices with our current technology, but Cassie and Anatoly had done the best they could with the materials at hand.

Inside the boxes, our newest group of Translators floated serenely in their orange goo. The process of thawing them out had gone smoothly, to everyone’s amazement. Like I’d hoped, everything was pretty well automated—transmitting the correct signal key had started the process, and the pods had disgorged their room-temperature cargo in less than an hour. Each box had already been plugged into the CPU, but placing the live bodies into the gel and getting everything hooked up had been nerve-racking to say the least. The Translators didn’t breathe, so there was no rise and fall of the chest to indicate that they were alive. Instead, the heart monitors we had added to their hardware let us know that they’d revived successfully.

I hadn’t been involved too closely with that part, being too busy concentrating on the alien ships, and some other engineering problems I needed to solve, but Mateo and the ex-Arbiters had been here every step of the way. The instant that the Translators’ brain connections were complete, Mateo had jumped into the net, and Kara had plugged herself into the helmet, and they’d gone in search of our new members.

For the last two days, the newly revived Translators had been introduced to the alien network, and been told the story of our fight against the invaders. They’d explored their new reality with their human guides, figuring out what they were capable of in their group-mind. Tonight, we planned to go out into the alien network, trying to get past some of the firewalls we’d encountered, and see if we could either gain more information, or do some damage to the alien systems.

From what Mateo and Kara had told me, these new Translators were much more lucid than the old ones, not having been programmed into their roles by Albert. They even retained some of their original personality, although by necessity much of it was still suborned by the group.

As I walked into the room, Kara was smiling as she talked with Beth and Tammi. It was great to see that her mood had improved. Just two days ago we’d buried the eight original Translators, in a cemetery close to the clinic where Kara and the others lived. I think the time she’d spent with the four new women in the tanks had brought her back to the reality of the fight. She looked up as I entered, and gave me a tight smile. It was probably the best I could hope for right now.

Cassie came up to give me a hug, squeezing her soft body against me. “Are you ready?” she asked.

“I hope so,” I said. “Where’s Mateo?”

“Here, sir!” the sergeant said, driving his chair into the room. “Just checking that Private Wright and Corporal Sanchez had he perimeter secure.” Thankfully, our Alaskan Sentinel hadn’t been anything like Colonel Freeman; the former tank driver had fit right into our little chain of command, with very little complaint. I was pleased to have two fully-functioning Sentinels in our army, since it gave us the advantage against any single soldier the aliens sent against us. Where before we had panicked at the sight of a hostile Sentinel, letting him kill at will, and force us to abandon critical assets, now I felt that we could stand our ground and defend ourselves.

I looked at my watch. “Anatoly! We’ll go at 2100, thirteen minutes from now.”

The Russian nodded, and turned back to his bank of vids.

A pair of brown arms circled me from behind, and I reached back to pat Lani’s hip as she hugged me. When she came around my front, she gave me a proper kiss, and then checked out all the activity in the room.

“I’m so jealous of you, and Kara, and the others,” she said. “It must be awesome to travel through a completely new world, going inside computers, and other people’s minds, and even talking with the aliens...”

“It is awesome,” I said, “but it’s also a lot of work, and frustration, and occasionally pain. Well, constant pain for Mateo. Still, you’re right about the exploration part. I wish I could record it so you could see.”

“Maybe I’ll get the implants like you, and you can take me on a tour,” she said.

I smiled at her indulgently, but her mind was completely serious. It made me think—if and when the aliens were gone, could we use their technology to jump the human race into a new era of brain interfaces and human networks? It sounded like science fiction, but we’d been living in the middle of a sci-fi novel for over a year now.

“Maybe,” I said. “Are you going to sit with me?”

“Yup. I may not see what you’re seeing, but I can hold your hand, and be there if you need me.”

I smiled, noticing that she’d moved a chair next to the one I’d be lying in. “Well, take your place then, because we’re going in six minutes.”

I took a last sip of water, and settled into the fitted chair. A tech checked the bio gauges, and Stephan handed me the wire harness. I plugged in, and then settled back, reaching out my hand for Lani’s. When her fingers wrapped with mine, I closed my eyes and tried to relax.

The countdown continued, until Anatoly took the EM cover off my helmet, and I was connected to the alien net. It had been a while, so I took a second to get oriented.

[Kara?]

[Here, Alex...]

I found the group, and tried to follow them, surprised at how clumsy my movements were compared to theirs. Their glow pulled me through several nodes and then stopped.

[The bridge to the Sentinel side is here, but we want you to meet the female Translators first. They want to know you...]

[I’d like to know them, too...]

Somehow the four women latched onto me, and in a flash I was in their version of the network instead of mine. It looked a lot more chaotic than the virtual domain that my mind had created, but a gentle chide from Beth told me that they thought it was just fine.

Surrounding one of the network nodes, I saw four unfamiliar figures. All women. All standing with their faces turned toward me. I remembered before, when the avatars of the old Translators had looked like faceless mannequins, and was amazed at the difference in these new presences.

[Alex, these are our friends, OneJessie, TwoMelanie, ThreeRosa, and FourAnika...]

While the four bodies and four brains of the Translators operated as one entity, Kara had discovered that these new, fresh-out-of-the-pod women had retained pieces of their old identities. She’d been ecstatic to learn their names, and had already told me a lot about their separate personalities. They still couldn’t separate themselves from the group, which was why their programmed number aways came first in their self-awareness, but they were far more flexible, and talkative than the older ones had been. It was a shame that the original eight had died, but in a way, it had helped the war effort by giving us more capable allies.

[Hello, Master...]

The four “voices” echoed as one, as each of the avatars held out a hand toward me.

[Kara?]

[It’s OK, Alex. To them, the four of us are just another group mind, but when we tried to explain who you were, the only concept that they could understand was the one programmed into them by the alien process. You’re their Master, just like Albert would have been if he were still here...]

I guess I would have to learn to live with that. I returned the greetings of the four women, and listened as Kara explained to them what we were trying to accomplish. She had to be painfully literal in everything she said, and I was reminded of the first time that I’d tried dealing with Lani after she was converted. Finally, the four-in-one mind understood, and I pulled away from them, returning to my own pseudo-reality as I moved across the bridge to the Sentinel side.

Mateo was waiting for me. The first thing I noticed was that there was no pain bombarding my senses as I got closer.

[What happened to the pain signals, Mateo?]

[Isn’t it incredible, sir? The controls that are used on the Arbiters and Sentinels are determined by each warden, and programmed into their CPU. Since we’ve got a brand new CPU here, and no warden to program it, I asked the guys if they could do anything about the pain, and they switched it off. Just like that...]

[Excellent. We should tell Kara and the others when we get out...]

[Actually, I’m explaining it to her right now, sir. I thought she’d want to know...]

I felt embarrassed. I was supposed to be the leader of this revolution, which to my mind meant being on top of every new development. I’d been the first one inside the alien network, so I should know more about it than anyone else, right? But the young sergeant had already surpassed me in his familiarity with the system, just like the ex-Arbiters had. I needed to accept that I was the visitor here, and trust the five of them to do what I couldn’t, or at least accept that they could do it faster and better.

Without the pain holding me back, I found that I could travel just as naturally on the male side as on the female side, even though I was using a woman’s helmet as my interface. Mateo introduced me to his four Translators, FiveSteve, SixLuke, SevenScott, and EightPaolo, and once again, they hailed me as “Master.”

Mateo took a couple of minutes to show me how to focus my messages. I could “tag” my thoughts with the names of the people I wanted to communicate with, just like assigning a network address to an outgoing netnote. Before too long, I was able to talk with Kara without even knowing where she was.

I figured that we were as ready as we’d ever be, and explained to my two assistants what I wanted to do. They, in turn, explained it to the Translators, who came up with the method to make it happen. In this case, I wanted to get past the firewall between us and the control ship that was in charge of the alien wardens.

I brought up a schematic of the known network, projecting it onto my inner reality. I highlighted the particular path that I wanted in red, and sent the image to Mateo and Kara. I don’t know how long I waited, but suddenly my map blossomed like a flower, connection after connection unfolding in front of me. I saw the link to the control ship up in orbit, and radiating out from there, all of its onboard systems.

I didn’t know how they were doing it, but our eight people in their boxes in the Bay Area were interacting with their counterparts in other locations, without being hindered by the aliens’ security. Probably because the aliens who created the network thought of the Translators as pieces of machinery, not capable of independent action. Lucky for us that their mistake allowed me access to places that would be impossible to see otherwise.

[Fan out and explore. Don’t do anything yet, and don’t let them know that we’re inside the network...]

I was a little disappointed that there was no sensation of movement or acceleration or weightlessness to tell me that my consciousness was now zipping around in outer space. I moved through the ship’s systems, noting every connection and branch that I could.

I hit a snag when I realized that only a small percentage of the pathways were translated into something that humans could understand. The rest of it was like roaming through a sea of white noise. I recognized some of the patterns in the alien code, most likely from the information I’d absorbed inside their computer, but the rest was gibberish. That meant I had no way of finding any of the critical native systems, like propulsion or life support.

Finally I gave up on the unreadable sections, and moved to the pieces that I could understand. Those had to do with the wardens, and the factories—places where the aliens had to interface with humans. There were a few pods of Translators on board, mostly used to interpret signals from the planet, so the systems they allowed me to see were all back down on Earth. I was disappointed, but I put it behind me, and kept wandering, hoping to find something that we could use.

I flickered briefly through different wardens’ lairs throughout the world, seeing that they were mostly identical to the one in Alameda. I stumbled across a different type of path and followed it, finding that I’d ended up in one of the factories. This one was in Islamabad, Pakistan, which was unfortunate, since its human Translators were taken from residents who spoke the local languages, in this case Urdu and Punjabi. I backed up to the ship, and looked for similar paths, ending up in Rio and Berlin before finding my way to Fort Hood in Texas.

Here was the place where over seventy thousand Sentinels had been created and frozen, to be shipped off to another planet. There were parts of the production net that I couldn’t access, but there were other parts that required interaction with humans, and those sections of the network had Translators attached.

Around three hundred Sentinels were active at the factory, whole squads of them controlled by a single alien. The networks were quiet at the moment, with most of the Sentinel nodes inactive. I wondered if these were the workers who would load the rest into the ships when they arrived.

I tried to get into the connection between alien and Sentinel, like we’d done in Cold Bay, but something must have been different about the factory setup because suddenly there was a presence there, confronting me.

{Who...? What are you doing here? Are you...? How did you do this, human?}

I didn’t answer. I wanted to retreat to my home node, but couldn’t risk that I would be traced back. I went up to the orbiting control ship, hoping that I could lose my alien antagonist in the busy hub. I flickered from path to path, trying to be as random as I could, before I stopped again at the ship and waited. Whatever I had done, I no longer “saw” the alien presence in front of me. I mentally sighed in relief, and was just wondering whether to alert the others, when the network lit up with alarms.

{Network intrusion detected. Network intrusion dedected...}

Shit. Well, we’d pushed it as far as we could. It was surprising that we hadn’t triggered anything before this.

[Mateo, Kara, this could be our only chance. Listen to me carefully...]

I’d told Cassie earlier that we absolutely couldn’t do the exact thing that I was now ordering, but it was the only offensive strike we could put in motion before the transport ships arrived. I’d played with hundreds of options, and spent agonizing hours trying to anticipate the alien response, but we just didn’t have anything else—no other attack could be triggered on a global scale like this. It was either hit them, or do nothing, and everyone with an opinion had agreed that it was better to go down swinging. So, like a boxer stumbling around the ring, about to be KO’d, I threw a haymaker, hoping that it would land on something.

I outlined my plan to the others, trying to get it into place before we were shut out of the network. I didn’t know what the aliens could trace, or if they even had a way to stop our hack of their system, but in case they did, I wanted to do as much damage to them as possible.

[They’re doing it now, Alex...]

Good. At this moment, every Sentinel that was attached to an alien warden was getting an identical message through the Translators at their location. The message was pretty much what we’d sent to Corporal Sanchez in Cold Bay—kill the alien at your location, and move your Arbiter away from the lair.

In this case, however, the order wasn’t to deliver the Arbiter to San Jose, it was to take her to the nearest hospital, and then contact us for instructions. I figured that I would get as many Arbiters as possible on feeding tubes, until we could sort them out later.

One of my concerns was whether the aliens had some kind of minion-self-destruct signal, because I didn’t have EM protection for thousands of Arbiters—they would be free of their Master, but they would still be vulnerable to further control until we could get their helmets off.

I figured that killing eighty percent of the aliens in a mass uprising would disrupt their plans, at least temporarily, but I had no idea what reprisals we could expect, or whether this maneuver would even slow the main mission of the invaders. Strategically, the killing of so many aliens didn’t mean anything, since the wardens didn’t contribute to the conversion of soldiers, and their deaths at this late date wouldn’t affect the arrival of the ships or the transport of the cryo-pods. All I could hope was that the psychological reaction among the aliens would give us an opportunity to strike at some other, more damaging target.

[Everyone get out of the network, and evacuate the base. I know that means leaving the Translators unprotected, but I need all of you safe for whatever comes next...]

It was hard to transmit emotions through modulated EM pulses, but I was sure I caught the protest in Kara’s message before she agreed, and signed off. I flickered through the nodes one last time, trying to find out if the aliens were tracking us, or putting up any kind of counter-measures. I was looking at my network map, deciding where to go next, when suddenly hundreds of new pathways blossomed in front of me.

I stared blankly for a while, but then I saw where they fit into the big picture, and I cursed silently as I watched the flurry of signals being sent back and forth. I sent Anatoly the signal to pull me out.

The transport ships had arrived.