There was always a price for power on Antares. Every Terran trillionaire knew this by heart, for every position of power, every mechanism for any sort of influence within the jurisdiction of the Antares Authority had some sort of string attached.
Sometimes, it was a tax, the government appropriating your wealth if you had an amount deemed decadent. Oligarchs who made the mistake of moving here saw an immediate loss of most of their assets, as their solid gold toilets were repurposed to make sensitive electronic equipment.
Other times, it was a responsibility or obligation, one that you were punished for failing to fulfill. A legislator who voted against their constituents’ interests would be disempowered, ostracized, unemployable, and without friends. Any particularly infamous congressperson would have trouble finding someone willing to so much as sell them food, let alone a shuttle ticket out of the system.
Others still, it was privacy, the privilege of doing things in secret. Law enforcement officers were monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their streams usually had at least ten viewers - more if what they were doing was interesting - waiting for the instant one of them stepped out of line to sound the alarm. After all, on Antares, power was a privilege, and the masses had to make sure that it was wielded correctly.
And yet an entire third of the Antares Authority’s tax revenue was directed to a “black budget,” a gigantic bucket of odds and ends that the masses weren’t allowed to know about. It was a glaring exception to the rule: Accountability when it comes to the black budget was completely impossible. There was no oversight, no tax on the usage of these funds, and no possible method of accountability for the masses. Whoever was in charge of it was one glaring exception to this rule: They had power without a price.
The department in charge of this budget was called the Department of Autonomy. Supposedly, its role was to ensure that the Antares Authority’s autonomy from the Terran Republic was maintained, at all costs. This was done via undisclosed “defensive measures.” But… a third of the entire budget, just to polish some nukes and develop some artillery systems? That didn’t add up, and everyone who gave it any thought knew it. It wasn’t a question of if there was some extra stuff being done, but what it was. Some had speculated that it might have been intelligence spending - infiltrating the Terran Republic to promote Antares Authority interests. Others thought that offensive weapons were being developed too. A few more thought that some of the black budget was being used to fund secret medical experiments in the Department of Health.
The latter group might’ve been onto something; the Department of Health was the most efficient department at spending money, and they seemed to work just fine despite being chronically underfunded. The genetic modification serums that half the population received were just too cheap for them to have been developed without outside help.
Regardless of the nefarious things that might be going on, the population of Antares still trusted the Department of Autonomy. Calls for reducing their budget had largely fallen on deaf ears. They weren’t doing anything obviously negative; it’s not like anything bad was happening that could possibly be because of them. But the main reason nobody wanted to lower the black budget was because of the omnipresent threat of the Terran Republic.
Everybody knew that, if the black budget were to drop too low, if they forced the Department to get too transparent, if they exposed a plot that happened to be for their own good, the Department of Autonomy would be unable to hold back the tides of the Terran Republic’s centralization attempts. And then they’d be toast, living in an apocalyptic, unregulated hellscape, just like the rest of Terran space.
The Department of Autonomy’s chair position was non-partisan, which was strange, as department chairs were political appointees. Most of them came and went by the election cycle; a single department chair rarely lasted longer than ten or twenty years. Yet, in the Department of Autonomy, the appointments were like clockwork. Every fifty years, thirty-one people (a chair and their cabinet) were nominated. Every one of them was always successfully appointed, and they all lasted another fifty years before their successors were appointed in the same fashion.
These weren’t random people. In fact, they were nobodies. They had no identifiable pasts. There was no legal presence, no social media presence, nothing. Nobody knew who they were; they didn’t even have a single acquaintance who could be tracked down. Their prior identities had been concealed, and they’d done a pretty good job at that.
Sometimes, they attended press conferences, but the information they gave was always incredibly vague. Sometimes, something was declassified, but declassified documents were few and far between, and heavily redacted. Sometimes, something was leaked, but it was never of any consequence.
And, like clockwork, a bunch of nobodies were about to be nominated and appointed to the Department of Autonomy. If Nathan’s calculations were correct, it would happen in three months.
Nathan had been into politics his entire life. There was something about it that piqued his interest when he was a kid, something fascinating about drafting policies, formulating them to benefit Antares as much as possible.
It isn’t going to be easy; there was always a price for power on Antares. But it was a price he was willing to pay. After all, only the corrupt politicians who tried to defy the will of the people had anything to fear, and Nathan wasn’t corrupt.
Plus, he was about to get answers. Finally, his curiosity about the Department of Autonomy was going to be satisfied. Well, that was what he’d hoped - he wasn’t quite sure if it was going to lead to real answers, or if it would be yet another bust. There were quite a few attention-seekers, after all - people who had wasted hours of his time. But this lead was more promising.
She had claimed to be an ex-member of the Department of Autonomy, three levels down from the top. And she had proof - the certificate of employment was impossible to forge. Perhaps it was an attempt at misdirection, an attempt to feed him false information, but anything was good; lies would still tell him something interesting.
Finally, the best part was that they were meeting in a public place - a restaurant about a half hour away by train. This meant he could rule out the possibility of her being a kidnapper.
He was going to be fine.
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The café wasn’t very busy - only about a quarter of the tables were filled. Despite that, it looked to be a long wait; not very many of the people there had food in front of them. His contact was right on time and relatively recognizable. She wore an orange coat, as she had indicated, and a pair of simple, gray pants. On Antares, simple clothes like these had two separate meanings. As regular clothes, they were typical, and meant nothing. However, as uniforms, they were symbols of power. She was also wearing a surgical mask, generally something that was worn by those who either were sick or wanted to conceal their identities.
They specifically requested a booth in the corner. Thankfully, the staff were able to accommodate this.
The booths were made of brown synthread. Synthread wasn’t the most comfortable material, but it was easy to produce, tough enough to last a century, and, most importantly, easy to clean. This meant that it was one of the most common fabric materials in the Antares system. The floor was made from hardened synthread - a more tightly wound version of synthread, this material was a popular choice for floors on Antares. It was durable, didn’t wear out, and, most importantly, didn’t hold onto food.
The fabric on the booths was starting to wear out, which meant that these booths were at least fifty years old.
The only thing that wasn’t made of synthread in the room was the ceiling, which used acoustic tiles that were over five hundred years old. Some technology isn’t improved upon, even after hundreds of years.
Nathan had expected someone younger - perhaps in their forties or fifties. The woman he was meeting, however, looked about seventy, fifty whole years into her career. Someone of her caliber should be long gone by now, not fresh out of the Department. Most high-level bureaucratic officials retired around fifty, exiting their high-stress jobs and living out the rest of their years in comfort. They deserved it. If they were particularly dedicated, they might push sixty.
“So, Nathan Benedict, I presume?” she opened.
“Yes, that’s me. What’s your name?” Nathan responded.
“I’d rather not disclose that.”
“I understand.” A name would link her to the Department of Autonomy, which wouldn’t be thrilled that she was disclosing this information.
“So, you want information, right?” she asked, getting right down to business. This conversation would be a relatively short one - perhaps featuring the exchange of a datapad. He didn’t want to waste her time by asking for her to give it verbally, after all.
“Of course!”
“If you’ll allow me to ask, why exactly?”
Nathan paused for a moment, mildly unsure of himself. Why had he wanted to figure this out? He probably couldn’t act on any nefarious plots he were to uncover; this knowledge wouldn’t be very consequential.
“I’m curious. I want to peek behind the curtain, know what’s going on, how the Department works, what it does. It’s the biggest anomaly in our society. Of course I want to know more about it.”
He kept his voice low, making sure that nobody else would be able to hear them.
“So, you think that somebody so high up is just going to compromise national security, risk potential punishment from an enigmatic institution that information never leaks from, to satisfy… what? Your curiosity?”
“I take it I’m not going to get anything out of this, am I?”
“Why’d you even come here, Nathan? Did you not think that this was too good to be true?”
“It was worth a try. And, since you offered to meet in a public place, the risk was miniscule.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t argue with that,” she sighed.
“So, what’re you going to do? Tell me to stop looking?”
“No, Nathan. In fact, if you so desire, I’m going to tell you everything you want to know. You’ll get the peek behind the curtain that you want so much.”
“What’s the catch?”
She took off her mask.
“Join us.”
Nathan knew that face all too well. She was Caroline Baker, the chair of the Department of Autonomy. She was one of the nobodies from fifty years ago, the face of the Antares Authority to the rest of the world, and the woman with the most authority in the entire stellar system.
“You’ll be my successor.”
“But they’re always -”
“Yes, they’re nobodies. You won’t be an exception to that.”
“So, what’ll happen to me, then?”
“You should have no trouble figuring that out yourself.”
Nathan took a bit of time to think over the situation. He’d initially thought that Caroline and her cabinet were lab-grown, but that obviously wasn’t the case; the offer he was just given disproved that - if she was telling the truth, anyway. They were nobodies who used to be like him, who used to have friends and classmates and teachers and acquaintances and families. But how do you create a nobody out of a somebody?
They couldn’t be eliminated easily. Nobody could completely wipe the memory of an entire individual out of existence, such that they went completely unrecognized - not without leaving a gigantic hole, which would be even more suspicious. Memory wiping wasn’t feasible either, especially due to the high number of undocumented acquaintances. You couldn’t be that precise with a memory wipe. The Department of Autonomy could probably make people disappear, that was obvious. But even they had limits - they couldn’t make someone disappear so cleanly that they could subsequently be a public figure.
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But, what if they had just become unrecognizable? Simply been given new names and new bodies? They could use cosmetic surgery, but they wouldn’t even need that. About three hundred years ago, they had perfected a treatment for various conditions, known as clone transplantation. If something were wrong with a body, they could grow a replacement and transplant the brain into it. This could easily be used with a different sort of body in order to conceal an identity.
But it wasn’t just that, was it? The human brain was quite good at detecting resemblances between people, and picking up stray reminders. It wasn’t just the body that had to be altered, but the voice, the cadence, penmanship, mannerisms, everything that could be recognized.
Nathan would have to become a nobody in body and mind. He would have to hide himself in plain sight, playing the part of somebody else permanently. He would be completely unable to see his friends and family again.
Caroline nodded at him, instantly knowing that he figured it out from the look on his face. He swore he could see a tinge of pity in it.
“So, you finally get that peek behind the curtain you’ve been looking for, and you start your career at the top, but -”
“I become a nobody. Got it. But what if I say no?”
“You stop asking questions. But, other than that, you live your life as usual. The Department of Autonomy would have to fall back on its second choice for this role. That would be relatively disappointing.”
At least Nathan knew he was qualified now. He thought about it for a moment, wondering if this could be a ruse. But he concluded that there was no point in them deceiving him. If they wanted him dead, they could just kill him. If they wanted to do something bad to him, they wouldn’t need his consent. There was no point in deceiving him because they didn’t have to give him a choice. The opportunity for refusal was evidence of truth.
“How long do I have to think about this?”
“A half hour.”
Nathan only needed three minutes.
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35 years later…
Natasha was on vacation. An entire week free from her responsibilities - she was kind of glad that she was able to do this every year. Besides, she needed the time to rest and recharge.
According to the tests she had ordered, this amount of relaxation was the sweet spot, the absolute minimum amount of downtime she could give herself while still avoiding burnout.
She’d considered adding a bit more downtime to compensate for the grueling hours, but she’d quickly conclude that that would mean expanding the cabinet - more people like her.
That couldn’t happen.
She turned her attention back to relaxation. It was just her, the beautiful bluish-white sun, the violet sky, and a lukewarm pool - the perfect temperature for her body. She just floated there, half of her body under the water, and the other half basking in the sun.
There was also a faint chlorine smell, because of course there was. The more expensive ones employed ultraviolet radiation to do the same. A bit of a nightmare, energy-wise, but you got a pool with just water. The Department of Autonomy was known by its members for many things, but luxury certainly wasn’t one of them, so they didn’t splurge. So, chlorine smell it was!
Regardless, shelling out cash for the latest amenities wouldn’t help things: In the long term, everything would balance out. If she were to spend more on amenities, it wouldn’t be long before everyone’s expectations caught up to the new normal, and she’d be out billions of dollars of budget money for a net morale impact of zero.
No, she couldn’t focus on work right now! She had to relax and recharge. Perhaps trying to lay in a pool was a bad idea for Natasha; her mind wandered too much. Maybe it was better to distract herself with something fun, like a video game.
Vacations were staggered, so none of her cabinet was on vacation with her. They would be working exceptionally hard to pick up her slack - especially Maxwell. He was the closest to the top, so he had to work the most when she was gone, and vice versa.
No, she would have to find something to do alone. Perhaps something on the holopad, or one of those old virtual reality games. Maybe even something online. She immediately dismissed that possibility; online games required too much attention, made her too frustrated, and she’d have to ensure that she kept her identity and any government business hidden. Perhaps this would be feasible any other time, but she was supposed to be relaxing, not on high alert.
The video game she’d ended up selecting was called DEFCON. It was about nuclear war on Antares B5. The lore was ridiculous - sections of Antares B5 were split up into factions, each of which had access to a roughly equal amount of antimatter weapons and defenses. She knew where the nukes really were - in an undisclosed location, far away from the government and any major population centers, buried about three miles down in the crust. There was one single stockpile, and it packed enough firepower to wipe out about a tenth of the Terran Republic - assuming none of the missiles were intercepted, anyway. She’d have to make Maxwell update their targeting systems; it was about time for that, and she didn’t want the mutually-assured destruction system failing on them.
A single planet, like Antares B5 itself, could be destroyed by about five of those missiles. She always picked the faction that actually had the antimatter weapons, and played against about three AIs. They were slightly primitive, made with dummy algorithms instead of the modern-day machine learning, so they were a tad predictable, but she tried not to exploit the patterns. After all, what was the fun in playing in an unfair way?
She was forced to abandon all DEFCON-related thoughts when she received a high-priority notification. She had been contacted by her cabinet. They were competent. They could handle all but the most dire things.
Responses were color-coded based on their priority. Green was simply information, usually intended to fill her in on important things that had happened while she was away. Yellow notifications, on the other hand, required a quick response from her, usually a text, or a voice call if necessary. Finally, red notifications were the most severe. They indicated that her personal involvement was required back at the base - her vacation would meet an untimely end.
This notification was red.
Her eyes scrolled over the blurb. Unidentified lifeforms… probably extraterrestrials… abducting humans… peace unlikely… She didn’t need to read the rest; it was more boilerplate. They’d need her to determine the right places to focus on.
Just when things were going right, just when they were in expansion mode, something bad had to happen, the other shoe had to drop. And she hadn’t truly even begun to relax; half the time she spent in this blasted resort was spent on work. With a sigh, Natasha mentally entered work mode once again. Headquarters was just a train ride away, and the next train would depart in about eight minutes. This left her enough time to dry off, put on some street clothes, grab her suitcase, and… that was it. Oh, well; street clothes were less conspicuous anyway.
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The war room was relatively cluttered - a repurposed corporate conference room that was intended to seat six fewer people. There was a projector that projected to the front wall, and the two side walls were massive whiteboards, both unusually full of notes. The back wall had the door, the projector equipment, and a few terminals for easy contact with the outside world. There was an elliptical table in the center, made of gray hardened synthread. Various holopapers - simplified tablets, used mainly for writing - were scattered around it.
Natasha, her clothes damp and smelling of chlorine, took her place at the head of the table. She was the last one there.
Nobody cared that she was out of uniform, or at least they didn’t show it. For some, it was due to familiarity and friendship. For others, it was about respect. For the rest of them, it was because of the hierarchy. They knew damn well that she was the leader of this operation, and her decisions were binding.
Elsewhere on Antares, supervisors were regarded either as equals or as glorified servants, depending on the place. Generally, it was their coworkers who they vied for the favor of, as their coworkers decided who got fired and who got raises and promotions. Most Antarean corporations had generalists and specialists, not supervisors and underlings. But the Department of Autonomy was slightly different. Perhaps it was because of their shared experience. Perhaps it was because a traditional hierarchy was necessary for this type of department. In any case, Natasha was given a bit more privilege and authority than most department chairs. She, unlike the rest of the chairs, stood above her cabinet.
The Department was organized into thirty branches, each one dedicated to different projects. Here was where everything converged, where the branches coordinated. The head of the Observation Branch, Branch lead Phoebe Waters, began to read a report containing the branch’s findings.
“Initial reports of the alien vessels were received about five days ago. I’m sorry, Natasha, I should’ve brought this to your attention earlier, but -”
“Yes, I understand.” They weren’t in crisis mode until now. She didn’t want to ruin her vacation over what was probably going to be nothing. The gesture was nice, but too much was at stake for those sorts of things. Phoebe cared about her mental health too much, and not enough about the fate of Antares.
“The initial assumption was that these vessels were uninterested in humanity. The possibility of them viewing us with any interest was regarded as minimal due to apparent technological disparities. Now, however, we have evidence that they’re very interested in us. We’ve collected various reports of disappearances and suspicious deaths, and confirmed that the aliens are responsible via LSDO.”
LSDO stands for Light Speed Delay Observation. It was a relatively simple process. Periodically, the Observation Branch’s feelers would watch for notable events in various locations. Detailed reports would be collected every day and relayed to Antares. If they wanted to look at an event in greater detail, they could use FTL to deploy a probe the exact right distance away from the event’s past location to witness it in more detail.
The desired distance would depend on how long ago the event had been estimated to happen - an event one day ago would be looked at from a bit over one light-day away, and an event one year ago would be looked at from one light-year away. Light took one year to travel a light-year, after all. That was the most interesting thing about FTL travel: the ability to peer into the past while also accessing the present.
Of course, the main limit to this method was that light didn’t have the best resolution, and using sonar or radar was impossible. Therefore, it couldn’t be used for anything that happened on a small scale, only large-scale events - mostly, events involving ships that emitted lots of radiation. The aliens’ ships were subtle, but, luckily, they weren’t subtle enough. They had exhaust that could be tracked.
“Is the TBI aware of the aliens?” Nicole, lead of the Subterfuge Branch, asked.
“As of a few months ago, they haven’t figured out LSDO,” Phoebe replied, “but they do know about the reports. They’re suspicious, and they know that something is happening, but they probably haven’t confirmed that they’re aliens yet.”
Natasha silently wondered why the Terran Republic hadn’t attempted to use LSDO; this tool was a disturbingly simple part of their arsenal, and it was the reason they’d been able to gain so much intelligence on the Republic. Yet they hadn’t even considered the possibility. Perhaps the TBI, the Department’s only true rival, had, but they’d have had to be incredibly subtle about it. She’d personally ordered an exploration into any potential use of this phenomenon, and they’d found absolutely nothing.
Perhaps their sensors didn’t have a high enough resolution for this to do them any good; the Department’s sensor technology hadn’t been released into the public yet. Or perhaps they hadn’t thought of it yet.
“It looks like they have the capability for low-cost FTL data transmission as well. We’ve seen ships do advanced maneuvers which require communication between the two of them, their reaction times didn’t have any light lag, and there were no detected light-speed transmissions. Finally, we sent out a pre-programmed drone to test their defensive and offensive weapons.”
“Are you saying that you fired on these aliens without requesting permission, or even consulting any of the other branches?” Leo, leader of the Diplomacy Branch, asked.
“Nobody knows the test drones are ours,” Phoebe replied, without missing a beat, “The aliens won’t blame us. Also, they’re abducting people, which means that they’re almost definitely not friendly, so there weren’t any prospects of friendship to ruin to begin with.”
Natasha made note of that. Her logic wasn’t something that she could exactly argue with, but consulting her would have definitely been preferable - or, if Phoebe hadn’t wanted to bug her, she always could’ve asked Leo.
She remembered approving the expenditures for a new batch of test drones ten years ago. They’d been an absolute nightmare to create, and even harder to maintain, considering that they were the only military spacecraft on Antares. An entire percent of their budget had gone into these drones, and they necessitated quite a bit of risky cross-talk between the Observation Branch and the Defense Branch, but they were worth their weight in gold.
They were entirely customizable, and nobody below the absolute top knew their true purpose. Each one of them contained a camouflaged signal emitter, custom-built by the Department so that nobody would know they existed - meant for gauging how the test ships were affected by enemies’ weapons - and vice versa.
They traditionally posed as pirate ships, firing on ships with known experimental TBI weapons and defenses to get them to use these experimental devices, which would then give them an estimate of the Republic’s latest capabilities. Data on their usage would, in turn, be reported back to the Defense Branch, to ensure that their defenses would be able to repel even the most experimental weapons, and that the planet side artillery would be able to penetrate the Republic’s latest and greatest shields.
A summary of the data was put up on the projector. The important results had been condensed into one short video.
The drone began to approach the enemy ship, firing various projectiles from different distances: Lasers, railgun projectiles, missiles, shrapnel, plasma - everything.
Once the weapons crossed a threshold (about one hundred thousand kilometers), they unceremoniously winked out of existence. Everything, from bullets to light to plasma to lasers to explosive warheads, just disappeared.
Natasha gasped. The lead of the Defense Branch, Maxwell Walton, was in shock. No singular defense could work against all of their weapons; that was supposed to be physically impossible. Maxwell’s latest artillery system had been on that ship, and its projectiles had been completely neutralized with the rest of them, with little energy expenditure from the enemy ship recorded. It seemed that the aliens hadn’t even noticed. This defense was automated.
The ship crossed the threshold with no issues, which renewed their cautious optimism. Perhaps this meant that they could use close-range ships instead. However, once the ship was inside the threshold, every weapon that tried to fire simply… broke. When the railgun tried to fire, its magazine winked out of existence. When energy finally finished filling the laser’s coil, the coil disappeared. All the weapons were neutralized. They might as well have been scrap metal.
So much for that idea.
The drone was scanned. After the aliens had confirmed there was no life onboard - a strange thing to do, but the most probable function of the radiation used in the scan - the drone was simply vaporized, the signal from the drone disappearing. External reports showed that it had been completely reduced to plasma.
“So… we’re dealing with ships that can wink our weapons out of existence, and instantly vaporize our ships?” Natasha asked, simply confirming what she had just seen. She didn’t want to believe it.
Phoebe nodded, as gasps and murmurs filled the room. Maxwell took a deep breath before letting out a sigh.
The Terran Republic didn’t even stand a chance.
The Antares Authority was in an even worse position.