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Log Entry #46: The Head Of A Snake
🕑 Added 2020-10-03 10:24:18 +0000 UTCCastle Regnum in Switzerland was the target, and it was a hard nut to crack.
Not by its size, even if it was rather imposing, but for its security which was on the side of clinical paranoia. For God’s sake, they even had the Swiss Army securing all roads to it, which takes some serious pull to arrange.
We could’ve gone all gung-ho and shot our way inside, killing a lot of people who I was sure didn’t have the faintest idea who they were guarding. That would have destroyed all the positive reputation we gained in recent times. Since that was out of the question, I came up with the plan to knock everybody out. Essentially, the idea came from the Russian gas attack in 2002, when they gassed a bunch of terrorists that had taken people hostage in Moscow Dubrovka Theater. (Except, I had no intention to use something so crude.)
They had unintentionally killed more than one hundred hostages with toxic gas inhalation, which was a big FUBAR. For all that, the idea was sound, and my solution was mosquito drones equipped with hypodermic needles full of fast-acting tranquilizer. These mosquitoes were tiny, and in no time, I had them sticking to the skin of the guards and waiting for my order. Truth be told, it was Ares who controlled them. (The kid is natural with multitasking, a thing that is still giving me trouble, while he was purposely built with that in mind.)
I had to observe and record the Swiss Army personnel for quite some time to ensure the alert would not be given, it was lucky that the castle was in an unpopulated area, which made sense as the ‘High Council’ owned land for miles around the actual building. The Swiss Army had regular security checks with their base, and I needed to imitate that perfectly. The time came, and all people, including guard dogs, fell to the ground unconscious; now I only needed to keep the ruse from being discovered.
It was not easy (far from it), and I was a victim of Murphy’s Law. One of the guards had a friend at the base who happened to be a comms operator. When the usual time for security check came, he started asking Leon (the guard I was pretending to be), all sorts of questions about the girl he went out with last night. Have you any idea how hard it is to imitate a friend? I faked it for a full minute and then made him cut the call with some weak excuse that Leon’s superior was coming to the com-station. It worked, and I sighed in relief.
Meanwhile, Michael was having all the fun in the ‘High Council’s’ meeting chamber; I wish I was him when I saw him play with them, or better explained as getting his pound of flesh. He was nice enough to leave the helmet with the camera pointing in the direction of the ‘High Council’ members so I managed to see the fight, and I also had the video feed from his eyes.
It was beautiful… if you are into MMA illegal fighting arenas. This recording immediately went into my database of favorites (this one was a keeper).
I know why he was doing it this way, why all the violence and pain. These people were detached from the things they did. To them, everything was about giving orders and checking lines on a spreadsheet. The results of their actions were ultimately physical; the people who suffered and lost their lives because of them needed revenge. Michael was doing exactly that, showing them the physical consequences of their actions; removing that veil they placed between themselves and ordinary people. As a bonus, he could constructively release that pent-up anger created by Dad’s death. Besides, it was good for the soul, as Tyron said, to let loose and beat the crap of your nemesis.
I do good work (if that is not a too self-congratulatory thing to say). I mean about the upgrades I made to Michael's body. He managed to beat twenty grown men without suffering any great injuries. They were able to hit him a few times, and a couple of those would’ve been debilitating to an ordinary human. He kept up with his brutal revelry of violence, never stopping and never easing up.
The funniest were those who tried to run away, the doors they were trying to open were secured by Tyron, who was leaning against them and was waiting to receive Michael’s signal to come in. No one escaped Michael’s wrath, their begging and screams fell on deaf ears. He was there to purge his anger and there was a lot of it. Luckily, not one of them died, although every single one had a few broken bones, nothing life-threatening. Keeping them alive was important—I had a plan.
By now, you may have noticed our tendency to… I will not say steal, let say… appropriate ill-gotten wealth, and putting it to good use. (That sounds so much more benign.)
We always needed money; when you have so many projects as I… we have, you tend to spend crazy amounts of it. Not that we were hurting for it, but there is nothing wrong with having some in reserve for when it is really needed. (I’m talking about billions here, just to be clear.)
Then came a clever little gadget I designed by combining modern tech with some old eastern practices. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, yet it was a nasty little thing. I only made twenty of them, to match the numbers of the ‘High Council’. It is another piece of technology that will need to be kept secure; if it falls into the wrong hands… I can see so many misuses of such an invention. I called it simply, The Interrogation Helmet.
It has a fully functional MRI scanner built into it, to monitor the brain waves of the subject, and a few more bells and whistles. It uses the carrot and stick approach (hey, it works on donkeys, so it is a proven concept).
The stick being electrical current applied to specific points on the head. Did you ever scratch one place on your skin, and then instantly felt pain in a completely different place on your body? That’s because the nerves in your body are connected. The acupressure points, meridians, the whole shebang. They would be feeling excruciating pain whenever the helmet detected a lie (intensity of pain increases for each additional lie).
The carrot was pressure points that provided pleasure, which (after the pain) came as a breath of fresh air to them. I should have placed a liability disclaimer sticker on that thing; prolonged usage would mess with anyone's mind.
Ares and I were the interrogators, using microphones and speakers built into the helmets, and there was also a miniaturized sound dampening field, to make the user’s voice contained within the helmet. (Simultaneous screams of twenty people can be a bit disconcerting.)
They sure did talk, oh boy, like you wouldn’t believe. Everything we wanted to know, their secrets, bank accounts, passwords, secret stashes… crimes. The questions were often repeated for confirmation and after some forty minutes, we were only getting the truth out of them. The reason we needed to do this immediately was their condition, being severely beaten and broken was the ideal state for the interrogation helmets to work their magic.
After little more than an hour, we were done (and so were they, emotionally speaking). We had already started with the cleanup operation, transferring obscene amounts of money around the world to hide the trails, and then placing it in our accounts. Part of it will go to their victims, we could not simply take it all and spend it for our own needs (it was blood money, which I will spend reluctantly… yeah). In the end, it was still in the range of a trillion dollars, not too shabby for a day’s work.
When we were done, those people were tranquilized and transferred to the station. There was an isolated prison I built there to keep them for a time (until I finished building their forever home). We had no intention to kill them, which would be too easy; their fate would be something much worse.
The thing I was most interested in was the secret ‘High Council’ files they used for leverage and blackmail. They were kept in their chamber and did not have any other backup. I could not wait until all of them were scanned and downloaded into my memory stacks, there was sure to be some interesting reading there.
The prison made for the ‘High Council’ was basic and featureless, just a big metal box with holographic lighting. They had coats for sleeping, one bathroom, and water on tap. This was a temporary measure, so they could chill for a while. Surprisingly, a large number of fistfights happened during their stay there; we didn't try to break them, if they wanted to kill each other that was their problem. There was not an innocent soul among them.
Their permanent residence was almost done, there were a few tweaks to finish here and there, and they could be on their way.
Truth be told, I imagined killing Philip Cain in a million different ways, and all of them were extremely painful. I admit I went a bit too far with a few scenarios; some were not even physically possible.
Since this log will not be read for a long time, I feel free to talk about it openly. If Michael or citizens of the Solarian Union were to read them now, they would run for the hills or even start a petition for me to be thrown into the Sun, on the grounds that I was a bit of a baddy.
It is in human nature to fear the crazy AI since it is a common belief that AIs would most likely decide that the humans were expendable and should be exterminated. I, on the other hand, am not really an AI and I am perfectly sane, (trust me—I ran the diagnostics myself). OK, that sounds a bit wrong, as in a psychiatrist giving himself a diagnosis, but I work with what I have. Additionally, Aries is in no danger to become crazy himself, if anything he likes humans too much; he is still young, and has never been seriously betrayed by someone he trusted… he would learn in time.
I decided on an act of perfect revenge that was more in the lines of justice than pain. Killing Philip Cain would be too easy, too final. I wanted him to feel remorse, the regret, I wanted him to have years of disappointment, of despair.
To put Cain on trial and lock him up behind the bars felt empty somehow, and there was still a danger that he would get out in a few years, the judicial system on Earth is a bit… lacking. I could keep him on the Ascension as a prisoner for the rest of his natural life, yet I didn't want him as a constant reminder of the evil the humans were prepared to do in the name of money and power. Instead, I envisioned an inescapable prison, something so elegant in its execution I could not pass on it. It would cost some material and it would take a bit of work, but it was nothing compared to the thought that he would have decades to think about what brought him to such an end.
Space is the ultimate prison if you don't have a way to propel yourself through it. That is exactly what I intended. Put him in a big transporter shell, minus the drive, and launch him in the direction of Andromeda galaxy; throw in the rest of his pals so they can be on their merry way. No way to steer, or navigate, they would just be passengers to an unreachable destination. The transporter will be equipped with tech for them to recycle water and food. Not good food; a tasteless paste that would keep them alive was all they deserved.
It was (in a very real sense) a technological biosphere, a closed system that could function for a very long time by reusing resources; as in waste, urine, and… bodies when the time comes. There were some supplements (but most of it would be their own reconstituted waste). Since I fully healed them on the Ascension, they can expect to live very long lives, removed from all the negative influences Earth has to offer.
When I explained my plan to Michael, he agreed immediately, seeing the poetic justice of it; that is why he let Philip Cain alive. We were very similar in our thinking—I just did it faster.
It cannot be said that this operation was not lucrative, especially when one adds their individual wealth to the pot. Philip Cain's holdings almost rivaled those of all others combined, and I had zero moral qualms about robbing everything he and his black-hearted family amassed over time. It was far more than even I suspected (I did not want to disclose the real amount to anyone; else they decided to go on a shopping spree and buy a few small countries).
Alice woke up in time for the launch (in fact, I postponed it a bit so she could be present). I knew it would help her to come to peace with some of her demons.
We gave the modified transporter a big push with the Excalibur, enough to ensure it will leave the Solar System and disappear into the blackness of space. I aimed it at Messier 31 or better known as the Andromeda Galaxy. It was more of a joke, since it is 2.5 million light-years away from Earth and they were not traveling even close to the speed of light. That still left an impractical amount of time. On a bright side, the Andromeda galaxy was traveling in their direction (it is scheduled to collide with our own in four billion years).
Remember those problems in school about two objects traveling toward each other at different speeds (ludicrous in this case, but a nice math puzzle.) Those of you that are mathematically inclined will see the humor in it.
In the end, all I want to say about the acting US President Philip Cain and the rest of his ‘High Council’ associates is—good riddance.
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M van Dongen
But now the table is cleared for the real enemies to show up.
