"Are you kidding me? This is proof that aliens exist, Mary! We're going to be so famous! Rich too, I bet."
The two aliens disappeared and the light went out. Soldiers piled out of the Humvees and ran across to the crates. Each pair took a crate and began humping it back to the vehicles.
Seconds later, the three saucers streaked into the night sky and disappeared.
The camera moved to focus on Mary, standing nearby. She looked at him, worry plain on her pretty face.
"You've just been part of history, Mary! How do you feel?"
There was a faint shout audible. "You up there, stop where you are! Military Police, you're under arrest!"
"Oh shit," Ted said, and the camera's view swung wildly as he began frantically manipulating the touch screen.
"I'm Uploading this. Those bastards won't keep this secret," he said.
The video ended, the screen going black and then disappearing.
"What the hell was that?" I asked.
"We're going to support this as much as we can," Marty said as he stepped away from the wall. "Ted and Mary are real people, they're friends of mine. They'll be going into hiding for a week or so to support the story.
"In addition, Brick is going to generate radar contacts to match the saucers at the right times. If there are any clouds over the base, we'll add them in. This needs to be as convincing as possible."
"Wait a minute, where did you get this footage?" I asked.
"It's fake, man!" Marty said, giving me a big grin. "Every bit of it. Brick helped us render it out, but the direction and the lines were all me, plus Ted and Mary. They didn't actually do any of the voices. We gave the persona software their voice samples and emotional profiles, plus the scan of their bodies of course. The tools for this kind of thing are amazing. I tell you, if I get some free time after we save the world, I'm going to remake a bunch of movies that were screwed up by Hollywood."
I had seen deep fakes before, but this was at the next level. "Wow. That's amazing."
"I don't understand. What will this fiction accomplish?” Regar asked. "Surely everyone will see it for what it is."
"They won't though! That's what's brilliant about it. It's so close to perfect that you'd have to look pretty hard to find any flaws at all. If someone finds something that doesn't support the story, they'll be shouted down as a government plant. Especially after the radar data leaks."
"Let me get this right then," Regar said. “The story is that aliens are visiting that base out in the middle of the desert and trading. What are they trading for? Is that a briefcase full of cash?"
"Who cares!" Marty said. "Twenty-four hours after we release this video there will be hundreds of stories to choose from. The Internet will go wild. With Ted and Mary missing, the radar contacts, and the video that was shot on Ted's cellphone, the story will go mega viral. There will be thousands of True Believers camping out in the desert outside that base the next day."
It sounded like a good plan. I did wonder how he'd convinced two of his friends, "True Believers" as he'd called them, to help carry out his hoax. I resolved to trust him on this.
"A well-conceived plan, Marty," Kiril said.
"Thanks!"
"With your part done, I believe it is time for us to demonstrate ours. Let us repair to the hangar. Jake and I have prepared our demonstration there," Kiril said.
We had thought about doing this outside, but even with Brick covering us from overhead surveillance there was always the possibility we had missed a satellite, or a drone. Inside was better.
With Brick having hacked the planet, acquiring guns wasn't difficult. Even in the remote northern reaches of Canada, if you brought enough money to bear on a problem you could do anything, legal or not. Through his many shell corporations and with a nearly limitless amount of money magicked up from the depths of the Internet, Brick had found and then paid the right people to load up several crates full of weapons, smuggle them across the Canadian border and then drop them via helicopter into the parking lot beside our snow-covered F-150. After that it had been simple to get the weapons back to the outpost.
The hangar had more than enough space to accommodate our demonstration, even with all of us and the Redemption there. Scattered across the far side of the hangar was a collection of rifles and pistols—multiple copies of every weapon on the base. M4s, 1911 pistols, 9mm Berettas, and a few of the marksman rifles. We'd done a survey of every weapon on the base and made sure to get at least two of each.
On our side of the hangar, a pillar extruded from the floor was supporting a metal dome about three feet across. It was studded with closely spaced black clusters. The Interface identified it for me when I looked at it, although having been part of the design process I was more than familiar with it.
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Microdrone Control Blister, designed by Jake Monde and Kiril
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Most of this had been Kiril's idea, although we had both worked on parts of the design. I let him lead the presentation.
"Our part in this deception is in front of you," Kiril said, and gestured to the dome. "With this, we will disable the weapons of the soldiers and keep them from making any grave mistakes, such as harming these innocent sentients."
"Brick, if you would. Please take control of the blister and disable the weapons on the other side of the room."
It had taken some time, but Kiril was able to speak to Brick without gritting his teeth. They would never be friends, but Kiril was at least willing to be civil.
A diffuse black cloud of microdrones lifted off the blister and floated toward the weapons. There were hundreds of them in the cloud, but nowhere
