Alevia Devron, 0800, Shuttle 04.
I sat in the co-pilot’s seat, strapped in, and tapped into the shuttle’s computer. My consciousness left my body as I monitored the ship’s functions, sensors, and performance as if they were my own. I felt the weight of my own body through the pressure sensors in my seat. I saw my body, monitored my vital signs and bodily functions through the shuttle’s cameras and scanners. I watched my brain and my implant ignite on the neural scans even before the action I was thinking of exited my sub-conscious. It’s like I was a puppet being controlled by this catatonic stranger in the co-pilot’s seat.
I turned my attention outward before I got lost trying to read my own mind. The Onward and the child shuttle attached to it became swallowed by infinite depths of darkness and stars swimming through a celestial landscape of energy and signals and fog and static bombarding and swallowing the vessels whole. I feel the pull of planets and the star they surrounded, the ship’s hull absorbing radiation for energy, translating signals. I pushed all but the minimal vehicular senses aside and focused on our mission.
Ready. I signaled the Onward.
Ready. My partner followed.
The docking bond released. We float towards the glaring half orb of the planet. A strange out-of-body experience. The ship was being controlled by the pilot, Aethen, like watching someone possess your body and trusting that person enough to let it happen. I could also feel the shuttle’s AI everywhere, standing ready to take over any task if I failed to take over for the pilot. I could study the planet’s surface from here. My subconscious monitored the ship while I pointed my awareness to a small nomadic group of Piets. They were encamped on dried prairie next to the treeline of a forest. Both the prairie and the forest were broken by a collection of mountains several kilometers down the treeline.
An hour before we broke atmosphere, Aethen activated the cloaking field. The field caused every elementary particle in its sphere of influence to repel photons and force them to travel in the space between atoms and electrons, including our own, creating a slightly distorted chameleon pattern. Ours was the latest model. Only a trained eye would notice the shimmering and warping.
The sensors that gathered particles and energy for information were immunized from the field. They absorbed everything they touched and reflected back color patterns that would keep the sensors camouflaged. The ship was the only way we could see now.
Since Aethen couldn’t pilot in this state, I took back control of the shuttle. We broke atmosphere and settled down in a clearing in an alien forest and activated the olfactory beacon. The trees grew straight up like giant dried out, toothpicks glazed in dark sap, looking almost petrified. Small leaves flowered up and down the spires, dancing around large nuts in the center, the branches never growing very far from the main body.
Soon, a group of the insectoids appeared. They buzzed around the cloaked shuttle, trying to make sense of the scents. They were so close. I could step outside and see them with my own eyes. I could touch them if I wanted.
Finally, the Piet that I named Stalt arrived. One of his hind legs was badly damaged by disease shortly after birth. I screened all the Piets but took only Stalt. He was immediately sedated upon being lured into the shuttle. In Stalt’s place, we put a synthetic corpse scented with a toxic plant this group was familiar with.
Later, the tribe would bury the doppelgänger and move on.
“All objectives nominal. Proceed to next target.” Aethen said.
The surface fell away and the sky swelled around us as I located our next and final target.
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We knew that once our job was done, and word got out about the Piets, people would be just as curious as we were and have questions they would want answered, no matter the cost. People with less concern for these beings than us. So we needed to satisfy that curiosity for them; do it on our terms and do it right so they would have no reason to do it themselves.
The task was not undertaken lightly. Each of us were chosen because we saw the Piets as people, not simply scientific curiosities or inferior creatures. We all fully realized what we were doing. No one was coerced or manipulated into it. We all knew the full implications of what was happening and decided the benefits outweighed the risks. Not all of us agreed with it. But we all understood.
We needed to study and understand the Piets completely. But we didn’t want to interfere with their natural evolution. So we abducted a small and varied sample of Piets, plants, animals, and microbes and took them back to a hidden research station to be subjected to a variety of experiments and research projects.
We took enough not to destabilize any populations. Stalt was taken because no one would mate with him, and he was likely to die alone as he got older; constantly being left behind by the nomadic group, but always catching up because he was young and otherwise strong.
We took the ones that performed no major functions and held no genes that might provide some help or hindrance for the species later down the line. We made sure that all Piets resumed their normal activities practically unaffected by the losses.
We took the abducted populus to a secret space station, simply known as ‘The Site’; built into a nameless rock of a barren asteroid formation that doesn’t show up on any map and too small to show on most long range sensor sweeps.
The Site is invisible to sensors of all kinds. It uses artificial gravity developed after the Quantum Revolution and fields that confine the gravitic affect to the station. The station is effectively a mini planet; completely, sustainable and independent from the outer universe. It was, and still is, very expensive to maintain.
We studied the Piets in every way. We studied their genes, their behaviors, the mechanics of their bodies and brains, group dynamics, relationships. Everything from the most fundamental to most emergent properties of the natives to this planet.
In old science fiction, this would have been accomplished by cutting subjects open in dramatic and cruel surgical fashion, locking them up until we needed them again and throwing them out when they died from abuse or went insane from captivity. But modern methods aren’t nearly so invasive. We can map out everything above the quantum level with a single scan. Nanite treatments can correct any mutations or abnormalities caused by the radiation from our scans. Simulations can take care of the rest, while physical lab experiments in the habitats confirmed the simulation’s findings.
The Site is designed as a controlled environment to run a myriad of sociological, psychological, medical, and behavioral testing. One, to judge their actual potential for reaching human-esque intelligence. And two, prove or disprove any theory we can imagine from all of our research.
I worked at the Site for four years as team and project lead for multiple assignments under the Language Research Department. I was fascinated by their use of chemical communication, and wanted to know if it could ever become as complex as our spoken language. Or if they could learn our language, eventually.
We developed a device that took sounds from our language, which represented ideas or fractions of ideas, and released chemicals that could stimulate the brains of the Piets in such a way to make them comprehend those ideas.
The Piet’s ability to learn proved to be limited. Thier brains simply could not interpret signals past base instincts like food, water, shelter, friend, foe, mate. While they were curious, and knew how to craft tools, they used primarily reactive methods of problem solving, trial and error, rather than proactive methods like imagination, forethought, and planning.
Each had an identifying scent the others could mimic, to essentially call a piet by name or mark property, as well as identifying scents of specific plants and animals. Even their most complex use of their olfactory communication, mating rituals, had limits.
It is known that language and learning can change the structure of our brains. We had hoped to exploit a similar phenomenon in the Piets. Like us, their brains get less plastic, less able to adapt and learn, as they stagnate. They have lived simple lives that required little change. As a result, they are limited to expressing and interpreting only basic ideas and emotions. They are able to learn and explore but ignore things too complicated or otherwise not useful to short-term survival.
After my first four years, I was voted in to Department Administrator. I oversaw all projects and made sure everyone had what they needed. I found myself working with just as many people and projects outside my department as in, and advocating my department in policy-making decisions that impacted the station.
The work my team and I started continued. But the adults obviously showed little promise to learn and grow.