Prophets

one of the militia teams in harm’s way if he had to launch the attack. They weren’t an expendable resource.

One of the militia officers with him solved the problem.

“Sir, we have something on holo five.”

Alexander looked up, and saw a security feed from the camp around the Protean artifact. The camp was abandoned in anticipation of the coming strike, but he saw three figures standing in the middle of a muddy track. One was Flynn Jorgenson, the unfortunate who had discovered the Protean artifact’s impact site. The other two were unquestionably the two missing invaders from the lifeboat. One wasn’t even human. It had striped fur, a tail, and looked as if it stood three meters tall.

They were too close to the Protean site for the militia to retrieve them, even if he wanted to risk contact with something so obviously nonhuman. He would have to be satisfied with the strike.

He ordered the last militia aircraft out of the red zone and resumed the countdown for the nuclear strike.

Date: 2526.6.4 (Standard) 650,000 km from Salmagundi-HD 101534

While the Jizan approached with the troublesome remains of the Eclipse and its crew, Admiral Hussein had the data from the crew interviews piped into the same meeting room where he had been reviewing the transmission from Admiral Bitar.

He watched the debriefing of the Eclipse’s owner, Mosasa, as it was transmitted back to the Voice. He wanted to believe that it was some sort of elaborate misinformation ploy. Even while the human-shaped AI was still talking, he pulled half of the intelligence analysts on the Voice to do what fact-checking they could using the resources on the Voice against what data the Jizan could recover from the dead ship.

By the grace of God, how did all this fall into my lap?

The medical officers who had been doing the analysis of Bitar’s transmission were still with him, observing the android’s statement for much the same reason.

“What do you make of it?” he asked them, still watching the hairless Mosasa’s passion play. The medical officers sat at a square table in the observation room while Hussein paced around the perimeter. In the center of the table was a holo projecting an image of the seated Mosasa and his interrogator on board the Jizan.

Lieutenant Deshem folded his hands, watching the confession, and shaking his head. “I don’t know what value I can provide. The medical team has done everything possible with a noninvasive scan to confirm that this— thing—is exactly what it says it is.”

“And everything else it’s saying?”

“Admiral, sir, this thing is a machine. All I can tell you is how well or poorly it is mimicking human responses. Unlike a human being, we have to assume that every response—voice, body language, pupil dilation—may be engineered for our benefit.”

“I understand your caution,” Admiral Hussein said. “We’re facing something that admits its own design was for the purpose of manipulating human responses. That said, if we take all those cues—voice, body language, pupil dilation—at face value, what is Mosasa telling us?”

“As if this was the interview of a human being?”

“Yes.”

Deshem nodded. “Mosasa shows signs of being dangerously psychopathic and potentially suicidal.”

“What?”

“I see no exhibition of empathy, and he—it—displays a narcissism bordering on megalomania. It is the center of its own universe, and it has rewritten its own personal narrative so that it is not just the hero, but it is God. A human being with those traits would be, at the very least, sociopathic. Combine this with a series of failures aboard the Eclipse and we have a situation where reality contradicts its personal worldview. Its self-image is incompatible with powerlessness, and that conflict is manifesting as signs of depression.”

Hussein stared into the holo and asked, “And you think Mosasa would want us to see that? Make that interpretation of his story?”

“No, I do not—which is precisely why I distrust the conclusion.”