Nick was unsure how many days he actually trained. All he could go by was that he had slept eight times. Zhengil worked him hard and Nick felt like his skills were getting sharper all the time. Surreptitiously he tried to gather information from Zhengil’s mind but his efforts never were fruitful and he abandoned them altogether for fear of Zhengil catching on to what he was trying to do. They didn’t work on his ability to conceal himself from detection as he had thought; rather Zhengil introduced a new concept whereby Nick could make himself appear to be someone else in the mind of the person looking at him. He found this skill really interesting. Zhengil explained that it was in this way they were going to gain access to the facility and avoid being detected. Zhengil had procured a picture of someone at the plant that had high security and that was who Nick had to study, trying to perfect every nuance of the image. It was after a particularly strenuous practice session that Zhengil told him that he felt that Nick was ready and they would be proceeding shortly. Nick nodded that he had heard him but his head was still swimming from the practice session. Taking a drink and eating some food, he could really sense that Zhengil was excited to put the plan in motion. He was up pacing the ground, not saying anything, but presumably running over things in his mind, a gleam in his eye.
“What about this guy I am going to be pretending to be? You're sure he won’t be there?” Nick asked
“We made sure that he won’t be interfering with our operation if that’s what you mean”
”I still don’t see why you needed me to do this. You guys keep teaching me skills to get around your security. Don’t you have the same skills? Why couldn’t someone here perform this?”
Zhengil joined him at the table “The skills are one thing. It’s the other part of the plan that required a human”
“How so?” asked Nick, intrigued
“It’s the nanobots you carry in your bloodstream. Even though human beings, as you know them, were genetically engineered in the Annunaki image, there is a huge difference in how our brains function and our basic physiology. When you were first injected with the nanobots and they activated the part of your brain that was Annunaki based, but lay dormant, there was a byproduct of that chemical reaction that was created. It’s harmless to humans, but to the Annunaki, it causes the reverse effect and that would be the loss of their powers. Without their powers available, nobody will be able to function and chaos and confusion will follow”
“And the creators never discovered this?”
“It was stumbled upon accidentally when our counterparts back on Earth were researching a way to stop the impending enslavement of your race. It would appear in this capacity human beings are more resilient than the creators intended” It seemed to cost Zhengil something to admit this but he brushed it off and sat silently.
“What are these nanobots supposed to do to the atmospheric controller? Nick asked, shuddering still at the thought of how he was supposed to get them out of his body.
“The machine filters the air of our atmosphere continuously. While it is doing this, it searches out and neutralizes foreign pathogens, but before it destroys them, it takes a sample so that chemists at the labs can try to identify where it originated from to see if there is a cause for larger concern. Was it from this planet, was it of extra-terrestrial origin, that kind of thing. So it is constantly taking in air and putting out fresh pathogen free air. We need to get to the area where the samples are drawn and housed. Once there we introduce the nanobots into the system after the filtering area. They will attack the filter system itself and program it to think that the chemicals that resulted when we enabled your telepathic abilities are harmless, and then release those chemicals into the air that is being exhausted to the planet’s surface. Once it is released it is only a matter of minutes before the effects.”
“And that is when the other ships from Earth come in and take control of governing bodies” Nick interjected.
“That’s exactly right. They won’t even know what hit them. Once their powers are taken away, nobody will know what to do. It should be quick and painless.”
It did sound feasible. Horribly, Nick realized, the whole plan hinged upon his ability to assume the identity of this other person, at least in the eyes of his attackers. With that thought still resonating in his mind he finished his food and then he and Zhengil resumed practice.
Zhengil left Nick alone after practice, only the second time he had done so, but not before pronouncing Nick ready to go and advising him to get as much rest as he could. Nick didn’t need much convincing of this fact. His brain was sore, if that was possible, and sleep overtook him much easier than he thought it would. Next thing he knew Zhengil was over top of him gently shaking him, urging him to wake up. Nick wearily opened his eyes and Zhengil backed off and gestured to the table where breakfast was now waiting for him. As he ate Zhengil told him that he had been in touch with Leskal and that his army was fully mobilized and ready to go and only needed the signal from him to come through the wormhole and attack. Things were really ramping up now. After breakfast Zhengil took Nick to a different part of the building they were in. This was more like a lab and he got Nick to sit in a chair while he attached some electrode looking things to his forehead and then sat down at a control panel and started to work the controls. “What I am doing Nick is reprogramming the nanobots in your system. You may feel a slight tingling sensation as this happens, but you should be otherwise unaffected.”
As he said this, Nick did feel a small sensation in the base of his skull and it radiated out from there to encompass his whole brain. The sensation rose to a slightly painful crescendo and just as if someone flicked a switch, it stopped. Nick looked down at his arms and torso, thinking he might see some sort of change but everything looked the same. Zhengil stared at the control panel screen for a little longer. Nick looked at the screen as well but its output was in a language he didn’t understand so he looked away again. Satisfied with the results, Zhengil tapped the controls a few more times and the screen went dark. He turned around and removed the electrodes from Nick and asked him how he felt.
“I don’t really feel all that different” Nick replied.
“That’s a good sign. If there was a problem it would have manifested itself right after I reprogrammed the nanobots.” Zhengil said.
They left the room and went back to the practice area. Zhengil took a seat at the table and Nick joined him.
“We’re going to be leaving shortly and I just want to go over what you can expect once we get there” he said noting Nick’s surprise at the announcement.
“We are going to take my ship and fly there. Not directly, just in case we are being watched. We will land in the parking area, which is on the roof of the building, and make our way through the building; the key here being we don’t want anything to seem out of the ordinary.”
Nick nodded solemnly.
“Now, the machine we are going to be manipulating is down in the basement, a few floors below ground level. Fortunately for us, this is a slow staffing day so we shouldn’t encounter too many people on our way down there. Regardless I have mapped a route that will take us through the less inhabited areas of the plant.”
“I still don’t understand this machine” Nick said “How is it going to affect the whole planet?”
“The reason that it is below ground level is because there are inlet and output vents all over the planet all tied into substations that get their directives from the main plant. There are several filtering substations, but they get their filtering directives from the main machine. Once the nanobots have changed the filtering parameters, the main filtering area will upload the new parameters to all the substations so that they will not try to filter out the pathogen we will be introducing. They tried in the early days to have several plants running independently for atmosphere control but found that they ran into too many problems with atmosphere being well maintained here and not so well there. So everything is controlled by one main
plant that can monitor and control the entire substation and ultimately the atmosphere of the whole planet. Does that answer your question?”
“It certainly helps me to understand why this plan was adopted. I am used to Earth systems and the thought of a single computer or machine being used to control something on the whole planet just seems, well, incredibly difficult”
“I can understand that. It must be clear to you by now that we are more advanced than humans?” Zhengil said, his body language emphasizing the point.
“It is abundantly clear” Nick replied, noting the feeling of superiority emanating from Zhengil.
Zhengil looked at a device on his wrist and got up. “It’s time for us to leave Nick.” And he headed to the door that led up to the roof area of the building.
Nick took a deep breath and followed him up the stairs, across the roof and into Zhengil’s ship.
They took off and flew towards the main city area for a bit and then veered to the right and continued on. The ground below them flew by and soon any signs of life disappeared and there was only dark Earth below them. Just when it seemed to Nick that they would never see any life, lights appeared on the horizon. The lights grew brighter as they continued on their trajectory, and then a huge building loomed quietly out of the darkness.
The building itself looked like it could hold two or three airplane hangars with ease, probably more. It stretched from side to side for maybe a mile and was almost as tall, out front and around the sides were many holding tanks and a complicated network of piping that made it look like the building was surround by an army of octopi. Once they were above the main building they stopped and hovered for a second and then drifted down and touched down on the building rooftop.
Zhengil turned to Nick “This is where you need to start projecting the image that we have been practicing”
Nick closed his eyes and focused on the picture that Zhengil had given him. He focused and the picture and imagined that it surrounded him in a living and breathing replication. He looked at Zhengil and he was smiling. Patting him on the shoulder he said “very good Nick, your practice has gone extremely well. Let’s go and finish this”
They clambered out of the ship and cautiously, but with purpose, crossed the roof to the building entrance, constantly scanning for any sign of danger. Through the entrance door they went and then down a small spiral staircase that came out onto a large open area with several elevator doors lining each wall. Zhengil seemed to lose his composure for a moment as he looked at all the elevator doors, like he wasn’t expecting this. He looked at them all for a time and then, smiling, found the one he was looking for and made his way to one in the middle of a row of elevators on the bank to their left. The door opened almost as soon as he had depressed the button next to it. It was empty and they got on board. When the doors closed and they were alone he said “Sorry for the confusion. I am working from plans that were drawn up some time ago. They must have added some elevators since then.” He paused before continuing “All these elevators go to somewhere different. There isn’t one that goes all the way down to the floor we need so I had to find the one that went down the farthest. From there we have to do some walking to get to a flight of stairs that will take us to the machine level.” As with the other elevators he had been on, Nick couldn’t feel any movement on this one. As a result he was just as surprised as Zhengil when the doors suddenly opened and someone was standing outside waiting to join them.
Chapter 13