~*~
Two weeks later, MO-126 lay on a table in the maintenance bay of Hub Terminal Eleven undergoing a routine checkup. Lights blinked green, yellow, red, and blue on panels nearby, and musical pings and beeps sounded as the table ran diagnostics on his various subsystems. So far, he seemed in reasonably good shape, but then he was only a little over three thousand years old. With proper care, and a bit of luck, he could go ten times that without requiring any major repair.
A signal not associated with the maintenance scans notified him of a message from Field Ops. He opened the file to find an update on the surveillance he requested. Utrek had left the village.
MO-126 jumped from the maintenance table and contacted Field Operations to get additional details. Utrek and another primitive left the village the day before with improvised camping gear and failed to return by nightfall. A surveillance drone in the form of a large owl followed and continued to track them. The mitigation team being organized would be deployed shortly. The android dog sent a request to join it. This type of duty never interested him before, but this time felt different. He felt personally involved, and he wanted to see how the situation played out.
Three hours later, their team assembled near a wooded area about thirty kilometers southeast of the village. The lusterless black flitter that brought them here lifted silently into the night from its landing site in an open field of grass partially obscured by trees and a low hill. They would be walking back.
Their team leader, a trade interface android who, for this mission, went by the designation ‘Indigo One,’ got the primitives’ position from the surveillance drone. MO-126 carried the label ‘Indigo Eight.’ The renaming resulted from some obscure tradition dating back to a time when the predecessors of the civilizations comprising the Galactic Federation physically fought one another over resources and ideology. It was a simpler time then. Now, Federation members achieved their ends and resolved their conflicts through financial finagling, legal manipulation, political influence, and, in rare instances, even rational discussion. They couldn’t just beat their opponents over the head with a heavy object and take what they wanted. They must get them to provide it voluntarily. Some hard-line conservative members of especially aggressive species regarded this as less efficient because one often needed to give something in return. In the long run, it proved less costly than building weapons and war machines, not to mention rebuilding afterward—if they still possessed the ability, so the practice caught on with only a few carryovers from the old days, such as stylishly tailored jackets with epaulets and adopting silly names for mitigation teams.
Most of the team consisted of canine mobile observer androids like MO-126. They would do most of the actual mitigating, with Indigo One coordinating their actions.
“Mitigation Team Indigo,” the team leader broadcast, “the wayward primitives are camped by the stream about three hundred meters south of us. Indigo Four through Seven, circle around south of them. Indigo Eight through Eleven, block them from the east. Stop one hundred meters from the target. Indigo Two and Three are with me.” The latter were the other humanoid team members. “Notify me when you are in position.”
MO-126 scanned the area in infrared but did not see any humans. He requested a position update from the drone, which quickly responded with relative coordinates. It could do little else. Unlike the androids, the simulated owl possessed much less intelligence than the animal it resembled.
The four artificial dogs comprising MO-126’s unit quietly made their way to where Indigo One said they should stop. The reason the android dog did not see the primitives before was because they were lying in a shallow depression sound asleep. He notified the team leader of their status and received updated instructions.
They spread out into a line and began to howl. The noise should wake the two primitives without immediately sending them into a panic. That would come later.
One of the humans woke and shook the other. It appeared to be Utrek. MO-126 could not be sure in the low light. His infrared vision blurred too many details. He assumed the other human was the boy he saw him talking with at the construction site. Somehow, Utrek must have convinced him to join him on his explorations.
Now that the two boys were obviously awake, the second act of the show could begin.
The three humanoid androids began a mournful wailing, which sounded, intentionally, like, “Who dares? Whooooooo darrrrrrrrrrres?”
The boys stood and peered nervously into the night. With their limited night vision, they were unlikely to directly observe any of the members of the mitigation team. If the boys proved uncooperative, they would be allowed to see what they should take for a wild dog pack stalking them. If they did as the androids hoped, the boys would never catch more than a brief glimpse of them.
They began howling louder, adding barks and growls as they slowly approached.
One of the boys turned and ran roughly in the direction of their village. The other, paused just long enough to grab a blanket and some other belongings before following him. They did not scream or even yell at one another, which MO-126 considered quite brave. They did run for all they were worth, occasionally casting nervous glances behind them.
The androids hounded them through the night, not allowing them more than a moment of rest, guiding them from a distance with howls and barks and moans. Their own fears and imaginations are what truly drove them. By the time the first light of dawn dusted the horizon, they were within sight of their village.
The sun peeked over the horizon. The two fleeing boys could not know this resulted from the planet turning. The myths of their village said the land rested on the back of a giant turtle and the sun rose due to the efforts of the Great Cosmic Gond. Some of the villagers even took this seriously. Everyplace MO-126 visited told stories like these, and although all gravely lacked anything resembling technical accuracy, they were amazing for their creative inventiveness. The primitives did not need to know how the sun rose, but they wanted to, and knowing no way to find out, they created stories that made sense to them to explain the phenomenon. At first, he thought the myths were something like scientific hypotheses, but they weren’t. Most of them were cleverly contrived to be unverifiable. They put their gods where they could not find them. The stories could not be tested, which made them solid beliefs that could endure. They certainly supported the health and longevity of the project because they effectively stopped further questioning without providing dangerous answers. In some ways, he found this ingenious, but he could not help feeling that being cleverly wrong simply was not right. The PM encouraged its field operatives to support such beliefs, and he understood why. Whether he liked it or not made no difference. The policy made sense.
“That was fun!” one of the other canine androids said as they stood just inside a tree line watching their retreating quarry. Some of the others agreed. MO-126 did not. He understood that humans could not be allowed to roam freely. There were good reasons for preventing it, and he knew he successfully performed his duty to the corporation. He simply did not enjoy it.
They continued to look on from a distance to make sure the boys returned home. Then the mitigation team left. The surveillance drone would remain until the next step could be implemented.