Lucas was the first to see the thermal heat of two bodies in the distance. Yollie and Wolf investigated and determined first that the bodies were not DPS and then, that the bodies had not been injured. Rather, the two bodies were sitting comfortably by an empty fire pit at the base of what had once been a dam on the Little Bow River but which was now only crumbles of concrete. The water itself had disappeared decades ago.
"Wondered when you'd arrive," Izzy said when Yollie and Wolf shimmered into sight.
"We were thinking of roasting marshmallows for everyone participating in the surprise drill," Will said.
"You'll have to bring the sticks, firewood, and marshmallows," Izzy added. "Surprise!"
"I have lots of wieners from France," Will offered.
"You can eat them with this concrete for all I care,” Yollie exploded.
"That's what French bread actually tastes like," Will replied but only Izzy was there to hear him.
# # # # # # # #
"So you see, the whole surprise drill was my idea," Granny told the family fuming in the galley. "I decided to spring it on you so that you'd have to run an operation without any warning whatsoever and with everyone being scared. I brought Izzy and Will into the plot but not even Doc knew what I was doing."
"I was totally fooled," Doc agreed. "Granny was right to do this. There'll come a time when we'll have to go to battle with no time to plan and with everyone scared. Going through this once will mean that we'll be better prepared to do it when it's real. You shouldn't be angry at Will and Izzy. Or at Granny."
"Were you really scared, Doc?" Reese asked.
"Scared about Will and Izzy, you bet. Not scared about how everyone in the family would react. I knew we'd all do our jobs. And we did."
"Yollie was the best," Yolanda said firmly and the daughter in question looked up sharply at the comment. "She took charge, kept everyone focused on safety first, and ran a smart operation."
"I liked being called a Warrior," Wizard said.
"Everyone liked that, I think," Hank said and again a glance was exchanged between parent and daughter.
"Here's an idea," Izzy stepped in. "We should always debrief after an operation, and from now on that has to include everyone who was involved in the operation, no matter how young. But talking it through with so many Warriors in this tiny galley could take a long time. So how about everyone getting a piece of paper and listing the things that you thought went well. Also, put down anything that you want Will to invent or fix. Will and I weren't able to hear your conversations, so we need you to tell us what would have made this drill go better. Give your paper to either Will or me and then we'll tell you about our trip to Europe. We'll debrief the operation properly tomorrow."
"Yollie, you should name the operation first," Granny said. "Any ideas?"
"It's gotta be Operation Hot Dog."
And that's how it is still known.
Back to the Table of Contents
Chapter 12
The Narrator: June 22, 2082.
The debriefing meeting started at 11 a.m. and involved only the adults, which now included Wizard. The slips of paper that everyone had submitted revealed a lot of concern about safety, not only for the Warriors during battles, but also about the powerful weapons that the children might need to access in their daily lives. For example, Operation Hot Dog revealed that they needed a way to track personnel in case normal communications broke down. This tracking software had to be absolutely secure so that the DPS couldn't use it to ambush them. One option was to add the feature to the braided thumb rings that Will had created. But those rings were already filled to capacity with weaponry. Adding the new software to the braided rings would make the rings bigger, and therefore even more likely to be noticed than they were now.
Will said that he could install an advanced communications software package into a Warrior's brain plug instead. Brain plugs of that era were first generation computer plugs that were inserted into children's skulls early in their lives as a standard practice worldwide. They had been in existence before the oil shock and the practice survived it. Like today's brain plugs, first generation plugs allowed various electronic devices, like a pinky ring or a storage bot, to feed data directly into a human's brain, and from there, to a vision field. While today's third generation brain plugs now extend the connections to other senses, what existed in the 2080s was a primitive way of moving data from machine to human. Brain plugs back then were so common that nobody would expect a standard looking brain plug to be anything but that.
Will said he could create a Wilizy brain plug that looked normal on the outside, but had very sophisticated capabilities inside. In addition to standard machine-to-human electronic transfer, the new brain plug would also allow a Wilizy Warrior to voice-talk or mind-talk to any other Warrior, provided they both were wearing their braided ring computers and were within range of each other, the ship, or one of Will's repeater stations. Nobody could overhear that conversation unless he had a Wilizy brain plug. If any Warrior had his brain plug removed or tampered with, an alarm would sound throughout the entire Wilizy communications network.
Will would also include a Warrior tracking device within the brain plug. Since the brain plug was always on, so too would the tracking system be always on. Even if a Warrior couldn't respond to a voice- or mind-call, any other Warrior could find his location in an emergency.
They had a long discussion about their braided ring and the power of its weaponry. Will had created the thumb ring when Izzy was being held hostage and time was short. He crammed everything he could into a largish ring that was originally intended to be a prototype but became an emergency escape tool instead. Its size and its unique appearance would soon be noticed and, at that point, the Warriors could become easily identified. Will could decrease the weaponry component so that it would fit within what looked like a normal pinky ring computer but nobody wanted him to do that. However they all agreed that the braided ring had to be replaced with something less noticeable. Hank and Yolanda added another request. Could he include a feature in the device that would allow them to limit the powers that their children could access until they were mature enough to handle the responsibility? Will agreed to test out various prototypes.
On the likelihood of anyone falling from the sky, Will couldn't think of any reason why the slings would fail without warning. They had had a situation in Chicago where a gang of young boys used pebbles of some kind to shut down all the energy sources in their vicinity but that couldn't happen when a Warrior was slinging above the clouds. Will was curious how the pebbles worked but studying them would be impossible without a workable energy source to conduct microscopic examinations and no energy source that he knew about would function near the pebbles. At some point, he might pursue that inquiry but not now. He had too much else to do. The meeting was then turned over to Yollie to give her assessment of the technician. I will leave Yollie to report her findings in her own words.
# # # # # # # #
From Yollie's journals: June 22.
I have to admit that Scrawny Butt runs a tight meeting. She had predicted 30-40 minutes for the debriefing discussion, and she was right on. She had also told me privately that Operation Hot Dog had been run well; nobody had made any suggestion for improving it. So with Mother and Dad also throwing some praise my way, I was feeling pretty good about making my report on Clumsy but Brave. Note to self: find out what his name is!
"I have no doubt that he's been planted on us," I started. "I expect everyone here would expect him to be a spy from the suspicious way that he was dangled in front of us. I did myself, and that's why I've been observing him daily, sometimes as an acquaintance just dropping by, sometimes in invisible surveillance mode. He knows that I'm from the Wilizy although we haven't talked about that openly."
Nobody flinched when I said "daily." Scrawny Butt had said to keep visits to a minimum, but that wasn't possible. Now to deal with the two sales-hags and their unauthor
ized readings.
"He is extremely angry. He wants to kill. Those surface emotions jumped right out at me. I'm sure that Mother and Granny would see those emotions too, even though he's not in their age group. Based on only that information, it's natural to consider him a threat to all of us."
There. I told Mother that she was sort of right and restrained myself from saying anything about the meddling. Granny gave me two quick eye blinks. Our private approval signal. Granny and I have always been close. I have a good relationship with my dad, but Granny is the one I run to when something is wrong between me and Mother. Granny understands me because she and Mother had issues of their own. Granny has told me about things that she had done wrong when she was raising my mother. Also there are things in her life that she wished she had done differently. She won't tell me what those were, and I don't pry, but I do know that she really disapproved of my dad when he started dating her daughter. Mother had insisted that he was a good man and Granny had tried to warn her otherwise. They had a big break up about it. Granny told me that they were both right, which is impossible I think, but she won't talk about it.
"There is much more to this man than the surface conclusion that he's a plant out to harm us. I can read this man more clearly than anyone I've ever read before. I can see through all the anger right down to his core. Deep down, he's a good man. It would be far out of character for him to hurt us unless he had no other choice. That's what I have read, and I have seen nothing in the six weeks that I have been observing him to change that judgement. He's a decent man."
"I've learned some things about the man that may help us to understand him better. For example, I can tell you that he is not an Albertan. An IOF man would shy away from incidental contact. IOF citizens have a very low tolerance to people intruding into their private space but he had no reaction whatsoever when I deliberately and repeatedly touched his arms. Doc operated on him, and other than the pain, he had no reaction to someone touching his body so painfully. This man could not have been born or raised in Alberta. This raises the question of how he can look so much like an Albertan, but we can investigate that later."
"I can also tell you that he has never worn a brain-band – at least not one that controls his emotions. He had no trouble controlling whatever emotions he had after removing his brain-band the first night. Nor did he react at all to eating a chocolate covered food bar that I deliberately placed in his supplies that same evening. He ate it just as though he had tasted real chocolate all of his life. I am certain that the brain-band that he wore was there for a reason, but it wasn't to control his emotions."
"There's something on the left side of his head that he doesn't want to touch. He never touches that side of his head with his hand or anything else. He'll smooth his hair on the right side, but not on the left. At times, he raises his left hand to scratch his head, catches himself, and then drops the hand as though it were burned."
Now, to report on the sales-hags. I had known they were coming, of course. Granny had told me. She also said that I could get along better with people if I learned to listen and keep my big fat mouth shut, so why didn't I try that for a change? Her exact words. Granny isn't shy about speaking her mind. So I heard Dad saying some things that sounded right and they fit right in with what I had been seeing. A skeptical person might wonder if Dad had asked Granny to arrange for me to be there so that he could slip me his ideas. I don't think that happened. Granny and Dad are polite to each other, but there's something cold between them. Probably coming from way back when Granny disliked him. Still, I think he's right. I don't know how to give him credit for the ideas without revealing that Granny and Mother disobeyed Izzy's orders. I'll thank him privately.
"The technician had an unusual reaction when two fat old peddler women came through town. The technician looked through all of their wares with interest like everyone else in town did. But he spent a lot of time looking at the clothes for young girls. Why were these items of so much interest that he would actually put them in his hand and almost caress them? Everything about that incident suggests that he has a young daughter. Having such a daughter would require a mother who is not an IOF woman. I suspect that one or both are being used as levers to ensure his continued good behaviour."
"Knowing that the technician has been put into our midst to harm us, it would be easy to just send him back to Zzyk. I suspect that such a decision would go badly for him. I'm reading an internal desperation that is mounting steadily. He asks me almost daily now if the Wilizy has made up its mind about him yet."
"The question for us is: Do we want to find out why Zzyk has a foreigner working for him? One who claims to be a computer expert? One whose Albertan disguise has not failed in six weeks? Do we want to know what he and Zzyk are up to?"
"I believe that the technician might be willing to provide us with some answers. He speaks with no apparent guile to me. If some of us were to meet with him, we'd have to ensure that he is not able to touch the left side of his head, and we should observe some general security steps like a blindfold. The risk to us seems minimal; the gain would be tremendous if he proved to be a foreigner working under coercion and truthfully willing to defect."
# # # # # # # #
The Narrator: June 23, 2082.
Yollie held up a sign in front of the technician: "The Wilizy is prepared to talk with you directly. Right now. Do you have anything on or in your body that will transmit that conversation to the DPS?"
"No," said the technician out loud. "You removed the microphone. There is nothing else."
Yollie and the technician were inside his mostly empty, one-room cabin. Its furniture consisted of a cot, a table, and one chair. There was no kitchen but some plates, glasses, and cutlery were on a shelf. Various print reading materials were also on that shelf, most of them with markings from the New York City library. No bots were present because the Wilizy had taken away his pinky ring computer. The village women took turns bringing him food, providing clean clothes, towels and sheets, and even serving as company if he wanted some. An out-house was behind the cabin; a communal water pump in the middle of the village served as a source of water for washing and for drinking. Personal hygiene needs such as a razor, soap, toothpaste and toothbrush were stored loosely underneath his cot. A sturdy rocking chair with a pad was situated outside the cabin and it was here that the technician spent almost all of his time – reading.
Putting aside some other printed signs, Yollie switched gears. "We will expect you to tell the truth. Any lies or less than full disclosures will end the meeting. I have to tell you that you've been under intense surveillance and we know a lot about you already."
"I will tell the truth."
"Are you willing to be placed under restraints and be blindfolded?"
"Yes."
"I should tell you that the people you are here to harm will not be in this room but will be observing from a distance."
"Will and Izzy. Yes, that's understandable."
"Others will be here in the room but you won't be able to see them. They will not harm you, so if you sense them coming in and moving around, do not be alarmed."
"I am used to being under surveillance. Such things are of no concern to me."
"Please sit at the table. I will tie your hands to the chair legs and put a blindfold over your eyes. Let me know if you become uncomfortable. A man will conduct the interrogation."
# # # # # # # #
"Tell us your name."
"John."
"Where were you born and raised?"
"I was born in a place my people call The Citadel. It's a fortress somewhere in Alaska – I don't know exactly where. When I was very young, my father was transferred to a place called Prudhoe Bay where my people had an oil installation. I grew up there. My mother was given another assignment and I saw her only intermittently. My real name is Ivan, which means John in your language."
"What is your normal skin colour?"
"White."
> "Why did you come to Alberta and work for Zzyk?"
"I had no choice. My people traded me to Zzyk in exchange for something. I do not know what that was. I had technical skills that he wanted. Plus I was of no further use to my people."
"Why were you of no further use?"
"It's a long story."
"We have lots of time."
"Before The Citadel, my ancestors were living in a dictatorship. After the oil shock came to my country and the peasants rose in revolution, the military used that as an excuse to round up all the smartest people in the country and take them to a large, remote, hidden base that was constructed to be impregnable. It is from that military installation that we have taken our name. The military had a list of everyone they wanted to capture so they must have been planning this for some time. The generals ordered the civilians to breed frequently among themselves. Nobody could refuse. They thought that if only geniuses were making babies, then their babies would be geniuses too."
"Those children who were born with average intelligence or less were discarded. Then smart adults educated the smart children who became smarter than their parents. Then the children were required to breed. But the collection of breeders became smaller and smaller as more children were born who were not suitable for retention. Those too were discarded. This experiment now appears to be reaching a natural conclusion. There are now far too many flawed babies from too much inbreeding. No effort is being made to expand the breeding pool. This does not make any sense to me but I an not a geneticist."
"After the earthquake of '48 and the resulting tsunami, our military took advantage of the chaos along the Pacific Rim to relocate all of our operations and our people to Alaska. As I've said, I lived in Prudhoe Bay, which is the terminal for Albertan oil. From there, the oil is shipped to Alberta's customers. The north side of Alaska did not receive much earthquake damage, so it was easy to re-establish the port's functionality. We operate the port and have an effective military force in the area to deter invaders."
"When I grew up, the village of Prudhoe still had its original inhabitants and we were their unwelcome intruders. Villagers who complained about us taking their houses and businesses disappeared. Soon, we were welcome. When I turned 16, I was required to mate with all the women in the breeding pool who were brought to the village for that reason. I didn't like any of them. I chose a villager. She became pregnant. We were eventually discovered. She was executed in front of me and the entire village as a warning of what happens if you disobey. There weren't that many villagers around by then to impress. My wife's execution was intended to keep their tame geniuses in line. I was traded to Zzyk because they didn't want me in the village infecting the others. I am told that my 2-year-old daughter remains in the village. I am told that she will live and I may be allowed to return to the village if I kill Will and Izzy."