It had been quite a day. Adjusting to his new bedroom - which seemed more like a prison cell, considering its camera and locks - was difficult. Figuring out whether to trust Caroline was harder.
He’d had the chance to back out and didn’t take it. He knew too much; there was no way he could get back. It was impossible to argue with her logic, as morbid as it seemed. No counterargument he tried survived much of his own scrutiny. Regardless of how wrong it felt, she was right. As hard as it was to accept, she was right.
There was nothing he could do but suck it up and continue. His old life was already gone, but he had a new one ahead of him. He’d have to be a moron to refuse it at this point.
That was what he had concluded, before going to sleep. The Department of Autonomy hadn’t invested in luxury anything for his bed. Everything was made of synthread, as was common in most places he had seen. Well, there was one exception - the walls were metallic instead. This was probably required due to the exceptionally low level that they were on. Every wall had to support over a hundred stories above it, and synthread wasn’t quite up to the task.
Synthread would probably be all over the Republic if they’d figured out how to make it. But for now, at least, it was unique to Antares. Centuries ago, terraforming scientists had decided on, rather than importing a biosphere from Terra or Antares A3, creating their own - a biosphere where every species, instead of serving their own ends, served Terrans.
The engineered ants stayed away from humans and their buildings, instead preferring to do their consumption out of sight. The engineered decomposers never broke down any food outside specified garbage zones. The engineered plants were made of extraordinarily durable building materials, and produced fruit not in an attempt to create offspring, but simply so that Terrans would eat them. And they all used an extraordinarily simple hormonal language, which would allow anyone with a computer and a hormone dispenser to bend the wildlife to their will.
The versatile material that the plants were made of was called synthread - a complicated chemical polymer that was far easier to synthesize in a cell than in a lab.
He still couldn’t believe how scientists had managed to create a tree that was made of material as versatile as synthread, much less fill an entire biosphere with it. Perhaps it made the buildings and objects on Antares B5 incredibly boring, but it also made them incredibly cheap. All it took was a computer and a sapling (or a miniature vine) to fabricate anything you wanted - provided that it was made of synthread, of course, and you could wait around a few minutes or hours for it to be grown. You could also make any fruit you wanted, as well as a surprising variety of chemicals, provided you could wait about a week for its development to finish.
They’d given him his own sapling, connected to a computer via a CBI (Chemical-Binary Interface). It was much like the one he had at home - except he had limited access to this computer. They would pass any designs he requested through a safety filter, which would ensure that no weapons could be fabricated, and no chemical formulae for poisons would be synthesized by the sapling. The latter filter was almost ubiquitous on Antarean computers, but it seemed like it had been strengthened for this instance in particular. It was obvious that someone had tried something a century or two ago.
In a dresser were about ten copies of his new uniform - a solid gray shirt, symbolizing that he was in the Department of Autonomy, with a single black stripe, signifying that he was its Chair, and black pants, symbolizing that he was still in training - a full department head would wear gray pants instead of black ones.
Most synthread items were dead, and thus unable to be altered, though buildings were usually still alive (in case someone wanted to do remodeling), and could thus still be changed. The dresser, Nathan noted, was an example of the latter - able to be altered to his heart’s desire if he had the hormones. He could tell based on the dark green color of the top of the dresser, which greedily absorbed most of the light present. The other thing that gave it away was the nutrient slurry that was being pumped into one of its “roots”.
Nathan began to wonder why the dresser was alive. Perhaps it was a regular target for people’s anger, and they felt that giving it a healing factor was important. Perhaps they wanted to give the occupants of the room something else to toy with. Perhaps they wanted to use the dresser to toy with the occupants of the room in their sleep - which, right now, included him.
He tried not to think about it. He’d been in this room for an hour. It had been a long enough day, and he was getting tired. There was no point in delaying it any longer - it was time to go to bed. He wondered what the serum would do to him during the night; it hadn’t done anything significant to him during the past hour, but he knew he wouldn’t be that lucky for long.
The bed was completely normal. It was a little rough, as it was made of synthread, but he had never known anything different. To him and his family, money wasn’t to be spent on luxuries - it was a security blanket meant to avoid hardship. After all, in the long term, everything would balance out. If you bought a luxury, it wouldn’t be long before you got used to it, and you’d be no better off than when you started.
—
Whatever changes had happened were completely painless. The cell pulses, or whatever they were, were completely unnoticeable. If he had to guess, a lot of engineering went into this; they had to silence the pain receptors before disintegrating the tissue and converting it into loose cells.
There was hair in his eyes, a whole mop of it. This was probably a side effect of the whole process - stimulating the body and forcing its cells to divide extremely rapidly would indeed cause rapid hair growth. That made perfect sense. His fingernails would also be incredibly long.
Brushing the hair out of his eyes, he looked over himself, and then he coughed. There was so much dust; it was as if he had been sitting for months. Of course; dust was dead skin cells, so that made sense.
His fingernails had grown about an inch as well. If that was what only ten hours of this could do, he was going to have to clip them incredibly often to keep his fingers usable. His toenails would be even worse. But this was temporary - only about a month of this before his metamorphosis ended.
Sitting up, he began to feel extremely itchy. A quick glance down his nightshirt made him realize the cause - his chest hair had fallen out. A closer inspection revealed that this had happened everywhere, from his armpits to his legs to his pubic region. Perhaps this was good. Otherwise, the hair would be a nightmare to maintain, considering its extraordinarily rapid growth this month.
Trying to ignore the itch, he searched for some nail clippers. Luckily, he found one on his nightstand. He got his fingernails and toenails down to more manageable levels.
This was great, wasn’t it?
Then, it was time to get the hair and dust off his skin. After a quick shower, that wasn’t an issue.
He wasn’t that different from the day before, except he was hairless below the eyelashes. After getting the dead, flaky skin off, his new skin was quite soft and smooth. He wasn’t sure what to think about that; it did feel nice, but it was unfamiliar. It wasn’t his skin anymore.
He could see where the old hair ended and the new hair began. Everything above the last few inches was an ordinary chestnut brown. The black part, which was previously his natural color, now looked like a weird dye job, extending his hair all the way down to meet his shoulders.
He’d need a haircut every single day to keep it short.
—
Caroline and Nathan were sitting at a featureless meal table, various different types of fruits available for the two of them. Rather than drink coffee, as was normal on Terra and most of the other colonies, the residents of Antares B5 usually ate fruits infused with caffeine (stimufruits); they were far cheaper and easier for the engineered wildlife to make.
“So, how was the first night, Nathan?” Caroline asked, before taking a bite of a stimufruit.
“Weird and terrible,” was his reply.
“Well, if it’s anything, it only goes up from here. The first night’s always the hardest to deal with.”
“Does the hair come back, by the way?”
“That’ll be your choice. We can grow it back at the end, but most of us just leave the body hair off. It saves time with shaving.”
“Why would I need to…”
“You’ll see.”
Why couldn’t he just… let the body hair grow normally, like literally every other guy on this planet? It made absolutely no sense. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, in fact, he’d probably miss it quite a bit. No, there must have been something he was missing. Only women shaved their body hair.
Maybe it was some sort of weird dress code. Or, maybe…
No, he couldn’t be turning into a woman. That was preposterous. They couldn’t change his gender identity, so making his body female would induce Gender Variant Disorder. Plus, causing that level of suffering for no reason was as horrible as it was inefficient. Nobody could do a job like this well while experiencing something that severe.
“So… is the entire department staffed like this?” he asked, “people given an offer and altered beyond recognition?”
“No, that’s just the cabinet,” was Caroline’s response, “there are only 31 of us. Did you think we could just do this to millions of people?”
“Well, it’s just a serum…”
“Creating that single dose of that serum costs billions of dollars, Nathan.”
“Why not use clone transplantation, then?”
“The brain’s DNA isn’t altered during clone implantation, so it’s too low-security. It works for disease victims’ purposes, but not for ours.”
“But couldn’t you alter the brain’s DNA?”
Caroline let out a sigh. “We’d also have to conform its structures to the new DNA, which would require that exact same serum. Nathan, I’ve been through this. I asked the exact same questions when I was your age. There’s no other way. Let me get to the point.”
Nathan finished his stimufruit and grabbed another.
“So, how’s the rest of the department staffed, then?”
“Well, it depends. There are really two groups. The first one is civilians, or as we usually call them, civvies.”
“Let me guess… civilians who do menial work and produce things, but don’t know the true purpose of their work?”
“Exactly. So, if they leak something, it doesn’t matter as much, because they genuinely don’t know anything that we’re doing. They’re the muscles and senses of the department, pushing and pulling and reporting without having any idea what their true purpose is. And if they get cut off and need to be replaced, it’s fine.”
“And the second group?”
“Lab-grown people, or labbies, for short. They were born here, they were raised by their predecessors, and they’re unwaveringly loyal to the cause. They’re hyper intelligent, but their social functioning has been a little… gutted, because it’s unnecessary down here. They’re the bones and nerves of the department, relaying information and providing structure.”
“And where do you fit here?”
“We, Nathan, are the brain and face of the organization. We tie all the branches of the department together, coordinate actions, make decisions, and act as intermediaries between the department and the outside world.”
“Why not just use lab-grown people for those roles?”
“That would turn us into a stagnant, corrupt monarchy, and make us completely ineffective. Plus, the legislators wouldn’t be very fond of that.”
“But they never reject anyone. Why do you care about their opinion?”
“That’s because they don't have the slightest idea what makes us qualified. But they don’t want lab-grown people at the head of the department. The legislators won’t try to confirm that you’re qualified for the role - that’s my job. Instead, they’ll focus on confirming that you’ve lived an ordinary life in Antares, and that you were unaffiliated with me until recently.”
There were a few moments of silence. Nathan and Caroline continued to share breakfast - stimufruit, regular fruit, water, and, in Nathan’s case, quite a few hyper-dense nutrient bars. He needed them to fuel the extraordinarily rapid growth that his body was experiencing.
“Caroline?”
“Yes?”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
She looked down, trying to formulate a response. She took quite a long time to respond, giving each sentence a lot of thought. “Well, based on what happened to me, it’s going to get worse as the changes compound on each other. But then it’s going to get better. You’re going to get used to it. You’re going to start a new life here. And the Antares Authority will continue.”
“No, what’s going to happen to my body?”
“Telling you early will only make it feel worse. But very little of your body is going to stay the same, Nathan.”
----------------------------------------
Harold Food was an idiot, a moron, and quite possibly a dunce. Phoebe had been able to play him like a fiddle. She’d even been able to do the manipulation herself - he didn’t recognize even the most prominent Antarean officials. Sure, it would’ve been trivial to go through an intermediary, but she’d wanted to have some fun.
The Terran Republic had already sent him in, so he was going to die anyway. Of course she could refit his fighter with monitoring equipment; there was nothing wrong with that. That was all she was doing anyway. Natasha wouldn’t be mad at her once she understood what was going on.
And she’d bugged him, too. If he was going to die anyway, there was no reason not to get a visual feed of what was going on.
The monitoring system that she had rigged the ship with had been more subtle than usual. It pointed to a relay buoy, rigged to self-destruct the second anything unusual happened to the ship. About thirty relay buoys later, the information would finally be directed to Antares. With no way to reliably make the monitoring equipment self-destruct, Phoebe had to compromise, using some of their more outdated technology to avoid tipping their hand. She only hoped the aliens wouldn’t be able to follow the trail before it destroyed itself.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
—
Harold Food was better than all the other peasants in the Terran Space Force. He had pilot blood - he was the son of Roland Food, the CEO of Standard Food, and a legendary fleet admiral. And he was an ace pilot. He was untouchable; he could fly anywhere he wanted without ever getting shot at (except for rival corporation territory, of course). The Space Force was lucky to have him.
He’d been wired up with cool, advanced mechanical parts that the admiral had promised would enhance his strength and intelligence! Of course, as a proud member of the Food dynasty, with his superior genes, Harold didn’t need any enhancing, but every little bit would help if he was fighting against aliens! He was a fucking space marine, and he’d mow them down!
Now, he was flying his fighter, robotic servants and all. They would tend to his every need so he could focus on the important fight. He plugged the coordinates in and watched the computer do half the work while he began to work the throttle. He was superb at working the throttle, working in tandem with the computer to ensure that the coordinates were exactly right.
He had weapons ready, the latest and greatest lasers and warheads and railguns. The alien ship was approaching. He was closing in. It was time to fire! PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW! He squeezed the triggers, smiling as he unloaded his ammunition into the ship… Wait, what was happening? Why were his weapons gone? They’d just disappeared into thin air! His memory did kind of suck, but he was pretty sure the weapons had worked. He hadn’t checked in a while, but they’d worked. He was kind of sure of that.
Maybe he’d been sabotaged. The evil commies in the Antares Authority might have somehow set him up for failure! After all, it wasn’t like these space aliens could stand a chance against the latest and greatest experimental weapons from the TBI, and the best ship AIs money could buy! Plus, the refit the naval station had provided made his ship into a top-of-the-line masterpiece! At least, that was what she had said…
The alien scanned his top-of-the-line ship and moved in to intercept. That was fine; he’d charge them head-on, and they’d feel the wrath of the entire Food dynasty!
The alien looked humanoid, but strangely… leafy. Maybe it was an alien? Of course it was an alien, though Harold took disturbingly long to arrive at that conclusion.
Five seconds later, he was completely tied up in vines, helpless against the evil green monster. Whatever vines weren’t busy tying him up formed into a humanoid shape. It was about his height, and it was a rather crude imitation of him.
“You are being rescued. Please do not resist; that would be inconvenient.”
What was the alien even doing? Why did it think that him struggling would be nothing but an inconvenience? How could it even speak English? Well, the latter question wasn’t one Harold Food had; he believed that English was the only language.
“Unhand me, alien scum! I shall destroy you!”
The alien ignored that, instead letting him struggle in the vines for a few seconds before he would hopefully realize that it was futile. And then he continued to struggle. The alien gave him credit - at least he had some spirit in him.
“Well, that’s rather disrespectful,” the alien replied, staring into Harold’s eyes with its own ones.
One look was all it took for Harold to become entranced. The struggling slowed down to a crawl and then stopped as his muscles fell limp. There was no need to focus on anything else; the alien’s eyes were so pretty - like diamonds, but somehow even more brilliant. They were a perfect brilliant green hue, tinged with a tiny bit of red in the center.
And then she spoke melodic, powerful, angelic words - words that he felt compelled to obey.
“You will not struggle or attempt to resist, and you will respect us.”
That was right. He was going to be respectful to the aliens. That voice was perfect, beautiful, and always correct. If it told him to jump off a bridge, he would do it without hesitation. Respecting others felt so… right. He was going to respect the alien too.
And then the hypnosis wore off. He got his wits about him, awareness slipping into his brain. He had been manipulated, toyed with, his mind altered in a way that was completely beyond his comprehension. Yet, it felt… right. This was him now, and, try as he might, he couldn’t find a reason not to respect the aliens. In fact, now that he thought about it, he realized that the peasants deserved respect too. He did have superior genes, but that didn’t make him any more of a person than the rest of humanity.
“Would you please tell me your name?” the alien asked, using its vines to control the ship, telling it to dock with the Verwandt ship.
“My name is Harold,” he stammered.
“And, what about your last name?”
How dare she not know? He was a member of the Food dynasty. However, he’d still be respectful - it seemed like there was no way for him to be insolent, no matter how much he wanted to.
“It’s Food. I’m Harold Food”
“Well, congratulations, Harold Food! I can’t wait to get you to your new home!”
What had Harold gotten himself into?
----------------------------------------
It was time for a press conference. This was the best part of Natasha’s job - one of the few things she could say were in her wheelhouse. Some crackpot media network had wised up to one of their conspiracies, and it was time for her to defend the Department of Autonomy, and make herself look good.
She went over a few talking points in her head. She was going to do this from memory - it made it look more authentic and candid if she didn’t have notes.
Going up to the surface was her least favorite part, though. There were so many people, and she was very recognizable. All it would take was a failure on the part of her security combined with a radical conspiracy theorist, and she’d be dead.
Neither of these things was going to happen; there hadn’t been an attempt on the life of a Department member in over a century. But she was still anxious as she boarded the subway to head to the public government building.
The press was already there, patiently waiting for her. Luckily, she wasn’t late, or she’d be given hell for it. She’d left her usual subtle makeup off, to give off the appearance that she was busy and sick. That would probably help.
One outlet in particular was onto them - PEL news. She’d give them time to ask questions - all the time they wanted.
“Thank you all for coming,” she started, “Of course, I do have a couple of announcements to make, but, as is customary, I’m going to start with taking questions.”
The floodgates were opened, each journalist frantically trying to get their word in. About half of them had their hands raised, their prepared questions ready to escape their lips at a moment’s notice.
But there was a conspiracy theorist in the mix - a conspiracy theorist that was disturbingly close to the truth. She pointed to PEL news.
“What is your response to the cloning allegations?”
Of course, it was the cloning. They always zeroed in on the growing-clones-in-a-lab conspiracy - it was the most plausible one, and cloning people was quite taboo. She could always simply ignore it; that was what her predecessors had done. But they’d grown too widespread to ignore, and conspiracy theorists were notoriously self-destructive. She just had to keep them talking.
“Could you fill me in on exactly what these allegations are? What would we be using the cloning for?”
“To staff your department! You grow and exploit a race of disposable people to work in your bureaucracy! They never know of the outside world, never think of themselves as anything but workers! They live and die in your walls! You’re an inhuman monster!”
“And why exactly would we do that when there are plenty of ordinary people to employ?”
“Clones are easier to control!”
His argument had already been sunk.
“So, to sum it up… we have a gigantic cloning facility that produces a bunch of slaves to staff our department. We have a bunch of secret education facilities to educate these people and raise them from birth to be competent employees. This would probably cost a fortune. And this is all so that they’re slightly less likely to rebel against us. I don’t think that would even be a good financial decision.”
He was getting more distraught. He didn’t know how ridiculous he was about to sound.
“We have reports! There are too many similar-looking people for it to be a coincidence! We have testimony, and some leaked reports!”
“So, none of these facilities have been found, you can’t find a single person who was confirmed to be a clone, and all your evidence is hearsay.”
He was done. They let anyone be a journalist these days; he was uniquely incompetent. She left herself a mental note to thank the media team for pointing him out; he’d made her job so much easier.
“And then there’s the simple explanation that we hire people normally, just like everyone else,” she continued, “I think that one makes far more sense. Look, we humans were calibrated by evolution to recognize patterns. You see, we didn’t evolve on Antares. We evolved on ancient Terra. And ancient Terra had a hostile biosphere - one that wasn’t engineered by us. The animals and plants there were selfish, all in fierce competition with each other. They would poison each other, steal each other’s food, anything so that they could get ahead of each other. We are no exception.”
She paused, letting her words sink in. Old Terra was barely mentioned anymore - a dusty artifact of history. But it still shaped the kinds of people Antareans are today.
“We were shaped by that world, which meant we evolved to be better at perceiving these natural threats. Now, the interesting thing is, our eyes aren’t perfect at perceiving things. They often miss details. So, our brains are good at filling in the gaps. So, even when something doesn’t have a perfect resemblance to a threat, we still see it as one. Because, if you see a threat that isn’t there, you get inconvenienced. But, if you don’t see a threat that is there, you end up dead.”
She gave it another pause, letting people draw their own conclusions.
“Sadly, this also leads to people seeing things that aren’t there. It’s easy to cobble together evidence for massive conspiracies like clone armies. Our brains just see the picture that’s been painted. And it’s easy for them to miss tiny little gaps, but all it takes is one little wrong detail,” she pauses for effect, “and the whole theory falls apart. It stops making sense.”
“Now, does everyone remember what happened three years ago? I believe that the staff of the Department of Health are especially familiar with this.”
She had manufactured that conspiracy theory herself, and now was the perfect time to throw it in the media’s face.
“A collection of suspicious reports led to the widespread belief that the Department of Health’s transplant organs were harvested from a slave race of clones. This belief led people to protest and create picket lines, causing disruptions that interfered with many peoples’ important doctor visits and prescriptions, inconveniencing most, and hurting too many in the crossfire. Of course, it turned out to be a false alarm - not only was there no real evidence for this, but it didn’t even make sense - it’s cheaper and easier to grow organs with no bodies attached. And the misinformation that replacement bodies were grown with functional brains almost led to the practice of clone transplantation being outlawed!”
She didn’t need to state the importance of clone transplantation - about a third of the population of Antares knew someone who had been saved by the procedure, one way or another. The idea of outlawing clone transplantation was enough to scare the public.
“You won’t get away with this, scum!” he yelled. That sealed the deal; he looked ridiculous. She let out a sigh, for effect.
“Are there any other questions?” she asked, before calling on a random journalist.
“What’s the next Pilot Program going to be?”
Finally, something good. The Pilot Program was her brainchild; she had introduced it to save money and make the Department more transparent. Every year, she took some of the more benign research or programs that were in the budget, and did them in public, rather than in secret. The funding was provided herself, but, generally, if it was successful and thought of as “worth it” in the eyes of the public, the legislators would usually implement it as part of the regular budget, leaving her with more money to work with.
The first one she did was an anti-alcohol education program, which she was quite proud of - an anti-drug program that produced real results. The psychologists had put a lot of work into the details. Then, there were a couple of bio-infrastructure improvements that otherwise would have remained top-secret. She didn’t see any reason not to release them to the public - her team had managed to make synthread far more customizable, allowing the production of more comfortable seats and blankets, more durable floors, cheap, biodegradable shopping bags, and even butter knives in some cases.
Last year’s Pilot Program was even more synthread research, although lots of it was privatized this year. There were some rather promising results. The one she was focusing on was aerospace-grade synthread, which was airtight and could survive atmosphere re-entry. There was also a robotics laboratory that was researching programming animal-like features into syntrees, which would allow syntrees to develop muscles and joints. This could potentially allow them to move in seconds, rather than hours, and allow moving parts to be made out of synthread. If this panned out, they’d be able to, among other things, control syntrees with buttons that were grown by the syntree, rather than sophisticated hormone dispensers.
This year’s Pilot Program had been difficult to decide. They were gearing up against hyper-advanced aliens, so she wanted the program to be something they could use against the aliens. However, she didn’t want the Terran Republic to know about any of their new technologies. Anything that was made public could be used against them, which was why most programs were either things that applied only to Antares - economic initiatives, mainly - or infrastructure initiatives that everyone knew how to do, but just had to be done.
There were three main military-related fields of research she could release information for - long-term hyperdrive tethering, DNA alteration and conforming, and hyperspace information transmission. The first one was the obvious answer; it only had uses against the aliens, and there was nothing that tethering could do to them. However, pitching it wouldn’t go over well; the Pilot Program was supposed to be an obvious good.
Making their cheap method of DNA conforming public would probably be a bad idea. The Republic would catch wind of it, and who knows what they’d do? Then again, they didn’t like biotech very much, so it probably wouldn’t be that bad - though it would probably make the TBI’s research easier. Maybe that will work well next year.
The final one was their experimental hyperspace information transmission system. Inspired by the aliens, R&D was going to try to figure out how to send light into hyperspace while keeping the hyperdrive in the same place. But, again, even more so, she wanted that edge.
She’d decided a few hours before the conference.
“Our pilot program is going to be a research project on lowering the energy costs of hyperjumps, with a strong emphasis on long-term tethering and short, frequent jumps. We have a budget of 83 trillion, which will be allotted to the most promising researchers and groups.”
“When will the funds be distributed?”
“In about two weeks. Note that about half of this research will be done in-house, leaving 41.5 trillion up for grabs.”
Cheaper transportation - who could argue with that? Nobody would have to know that the research was about blocking alien defenses.
There were a few more questions, none of which were about conspiracy theories, thankfully. Nobody wanted to end up like the PEL news reporter. Thank the stars for that.
----------------------------------------
Phoebe looked inside the cell. She had finally managed to rescue a single GVD patient from the hell known as the Terran Republic. Of course, she wouldn’t appreciate her help for quite a while, and she wouldn’t appreciate Phoebe considering her to be a woman either. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a woman, even if she didn’t see it herself.
She had pulled all the stops, too. Blaine Forester was going to turn into the type of woman she envied the most, instead of the utilitarian form that she had been given. That was the least she could do for someone like her.
And that left one question - what would Blaine’s new name be? She was too conspicuous and unique to just do a female version like Elaine. Lily would be far too stereotypical. She’d make a good Caroline, but it was a little too soon to re-use that name; Natasha would probably throw a fit. So, the obvious answer was Lisa.
Perhaps letting Lisa choose her name would be wise, but Phoebe had been named by someone else too. She deserved to pick somebody’s name at some point.
The last name had to go too, so Phoebe got to pick that one - though Forester was a great last name. It was quite cool, and it screamed “Leader of the Offense Branch”. Perhaps something mildly similar in meaning would do.
Sawyer. That was the result of a few minutes of searching, but it was well worth it; the right name didn’t exactly make or break careers, but having a fitting one would certainly improve perceived performance. And Lisa Sawyer was almost as cool as Blaine Forester.
Phoebe was operating in uncharted waters now. She’d looked through the handbook her predecessors had made for taking successors, but all the techniques for breaking someone in were based on loyalty to the Antares Authority. They were all about convincing the successor that what they were doing was good for Antares.
Lisa, however, didn’t care about Antares in the slightest; in fact, she probably wanted the Department of Autonomy to fail, and, if she were to be released right then, she’d do everything in her power to deliver a gift-wrapped Antares directly into Terran hands.
The only tools mentioned in the handbook were The Snip and The Knife. The handbook promised that either of them would work out all the kinks in a successor - from thoughts of rebellion, to general depression, to Gender Variant Disorder. However, snipping would make Natasha throw a fit. She considered it to be murder, after all. Knifing, from its description, was even worse. So, there had to be another way.
Perhaps she could demonstrate the value of Antares to Lisa - mainly get leverage and rapport from the fact that they were fixing her defective body. They could show her what a utopia they’d managed to build here, talk about how the Republic’s propaganda wasn’t true. Well, most of it was indeed true. For example, they did indeed use human babies as lab rats - tens of thousands of them per year. Their department was indeed staffed with clones who would live a life knowing nothing but work. But there were plenty of good parts that the Republic had left out.