Chapter 3 - Planning a Revolution

I looked around at four men and one woman, with me the six people who had a chance to at one stroke completely break the illuminati's grip on the human race. I didn't even know the names of two of them.

Back to the AI. "You test every single recruit. You should test for the smarts to learn how to work with your technology. You should test for open-mindedness; you don't need bigots who cannot accept others as their equals because they look different. Test for whatever you find useful, to eliminate whatever you find harmful."

"But, the one non-negotiable requirement is that you test for integrity, for honor, for the courage to fight and die for what is right. Find some bullshit made-up mumbo-jumbo for explaining who got what score. You do not accept any recruit you cannot trust. Make up excuses about them not being acceptable to the intelligent grapefruits of Rigel 3. You never lie to those men and women that you accept. Give them a fancy title, make them citizens of your Confederacy, and ask them to defend us all. In return, they will fight, die when needed, and never betray you."

"Next, find an excuse for founding colonies. Maybe we need military bases in other systems, doesn't matter. Find a reason. Send those honest people out there to build ships, have children, fight for us, and grow humans on different worlds. When they are serving the war effort, they will obey a central command and common strategy. However, when they are not fighting, those colonies owe nothing to Earth and will not obey any stupid orders Earth sends out about human solidarity. We are trying to get away from the idiots ruining this planet."

"Next, you never admit anything about this mind control stuff. If you do, the idiots will blame you, since their leaders will tell them it's your fault. It'll get out anyway, but the politicians will try to discredit the story so they don't get burned at the stake. When those guys..." I waved at that list. It that showed the Secretary General of the UN, the President and VP of the US, half the leadership of the European Union, both the Premier and the President of Russia, most of the world's dictators, and enough Russian- and Chinese-looking names to convince me that the entire cold war had probably been a sham "...ask you about their slave soldiers you tell them that the process is not working right. You are working on it but some soldiers resist, and you cannot divert the resources needed to rapidly analyze the problem until the war is over."

I sat back. "You only recruit honest soldiers, you give them a home on a planet in some other system that they control, you keep these bastards off their backs, and we'll give you an army and a fleet that can beat anyone. And they'll never betray you. You will never have any reason to fear what they will do after the war."

Nobody said anything for awhile. Actually, it was several minutes before the AI replied. <The performance data we have compiled on your species support your claim. The Confederacy envoy team has accepted your plan. However, some time will pass before they fully trust these soldiers. They will be monitored.>

"Who's going to do that?"

<The required monitoring can only be done by AI. The Darjee are too uncomfortable in your presence to act as monitors for the years necessary.>

"Can these ships be run by humans and our computers, or do we need AIs of our own?"

<You will need AIs to manage your ships. A ship that can be run without AI support would be less efficient in every measurable dimension. It is our understanding that this would also apply to combat.>

"Right, an AI-controlled ship will be more combat-effective than an equivalent ship run directly by us monkeys. Okay, can you help us build ships and AIs?"

<We are restricted in what technology we can transfer to you. The technology we can give you will be significantly more advanced if your ships use Confederacy AIs. The Confederacy has no trust questions of such a ship.>

"Are you saying that every ship we build can have one of you AIs running it?"

<Yes. Until you can build your own AIs, we will build them for your ships.>

"And, can that shipboard AI do this monitoring that your Confederacy wants?"

<Yes, each AI will have sufficient resources to closely monitor all crewmen.>

I finished my drink and handed the empty glass to Frenchy. "Is there any more of this?" Then, to the group as a whole "What did I miss?"

Admiral Kennedy waved at that list on the wall. "I don't think that those guys need to know this plan. In fact, I don't think anyone on Earth needs to know this plan."

"Can we make it 'no one who hasn't passed the AI's integrity test needs to know this plan'?" That same guy I didn't know, the one who didn't like replicator beer.

Duh. "AI, can you control those stepping stone things so that no one can return to Earth until they have taken -and passed- your sleep-learning test?"

"What if I don't pass your test? Do I have to walk the plank?" Diana.

"AI, can the sleep-learning thingy -I need a better name for those things, people- make people forget stuff, too?"

<Yes.>

"What's wrong with 'sleep-trainer'?" Frenchy, back from the mess room with six glasses of orange juice and two bottles of vodka.

"Well, if I'm the only one who thinks it sounds stupid, maybe nothing. Okay, we all take that test. If the sleep-trainer decides that you aren't trustworthy, it will help you unlearn about this meeting we just had. It wasn't that important, anyway. Does that work?" Everyone nodded.

"AI, is this a workable plan?"

<Yes. Your request is within the capabilities of the sleep-training platforms.>

Oh, yeah, one other thing. I was looking at those lists of people. "You know, I think I recognize some of those names. AI, I was looking at a website this morning that was talking about a hidden UN plot to take over the world, and it listed a whole lot of people who had recently disappeared under fishy conditions. I don't know where it was, I clicked on a lot of things to get there, but I think some of these guys are on that website."

"Do you think you could find that site again?" A guy in Army uniform.

<We have your home computer's contents available to us. Several of the websites you visited have information on your leadership's activities.> That was the AI.

"Can we see that list?" The Admiral.

We got yet another list hanging in the air. We were up to five or six by now. "Yes, that looks like what I was looking at this morning. AI, are there any matches?"

It didn't occur to me until much later to wonder why all of us could read them all. By what I could read in the popular literature, holograms were within our reach but they would only work from a specific viewpoint; only one person could see it and only if he was in the right place and looking in the right direction. Anyone else would just see a blur of light in the air. Here, there were a half-dozen of us in the room and every 'list' was clearly readable by all of us.

<All matches are now highlighted.>

Okay, there weren't that many, but for there to be ANY AT ALL showed that the current pretend-to-die-and-beam-up policy wasn't going to work for long. One way or another, this secrecy was going to blow up on us.

It got more complicated, but that right there became the nucleus of the Confederacy's overall strategy for getting humans off Earth (our priority) and getting the Sa'arm stopped (their priority). The "Integrity Test" became the CAP test that everyone on Earth ended up taking, and if you didn't pass with minimums in several categories plus a minimum overall score, you weren't trustworthy enough for the AIs to let you emigrate and you weren't eligible for Confederacy service.

The original test looked for several general areas where proficiency was considered necessary to either do the job at hand, or to be accepted as Confederacy citizens. It measured intelligence (judged by problem-solving ability), mechanical aptitude, aggressiveness, moral sense (the ability to recognize wrong), courage or integrity (the willingness to do right even when it was more painful than doing wrong), compassion, tolerance towards others, the ability to hold a loyalty to something greater than self, there were a lot of things looked at and I probably don't know them all.

Note that language, culture, religion, and gender were not direct inputs, no one cares about them except as they affect how you behave. No one cares about your ethnic group. No one cares about your physical appearance or disabilities, except as they reflected your personal values. Even education, after a certain point, only mattered at all since it affected communication skills. We were all going to have to be re-educated here. It made no difference in the long run whether you had a PhD or dropped out at 3rd grade to help run the family farm, as long as you were capable of learning what you had to learn to do your job.

There were patterns. It was difficult to get high scores in both aggressiveness and compassion, and we didn't want people who excelled in either while failing the other. Women generally did better in compassion, men usually got higher aggressiveness scores. "Westerners" usually did better with mechanical aptitude because they were more used to machines than third world people. And, of course, there were several religions that taught intolerance towards others, so if you followed one of them you were pretty much guaranteed to not make the cut. Of course those religions' adherents claimed that they were being persecuted for their beliefs. No, jackass. We aren't persecuting you. We aren't interfering with your way of life at all.

Last, it was recognized that children could not be reliably tested. Their personalities were still being molded, and unless we were going to send children to war we needed to know how they would behave as adults. So, we set an arbitrary age limit for the test. I wanted the limit set at 18 years old, or at the absolute minimum 16. I lost that fight, and events have shown that I should have stood my ground and fought harder.

Diana wanted 15, and she was probably right, for females at least. They tend to mature emotionally faster than males. Frenchy pushed for puberty for everyone, whenever that was. Of all the varied options, he had the strongest case for his: Until the industrial revolution allowed families to support their children for longer, most of the world considered you an adult at puberty. After a good bit of good-natured arguing, we finally settled on 14 as the earliest that we could support for testing. Most people being tested would have passed puberty by then, and the AIs could see the beginning of the adult personality.

We had, at that time, absolutely no idea that people would actually be accepted for Confederacy service and be emigrating at that age. Do you remember what kind of idiot you were at 14? I remember what an idiot I was back then, and if we'd known what was going to happen I don't think that anyone would have supported testing at 14. Preliminary maybe, but no final testing as the only requirement to be a soldier or sailor until at least 16. So, yes, you can blame us for all the idiocy you see at some of those pickups.

The Establishment were told that this testing was needed to establish who would respond best to their mind-control system -which was actually pretty close to the truth- and the governments and media empires that took their orders all supported CAP testing. Only, at first they spun it as compatibility testing for dating, like an eHarmony profile.

The colonies were justified as necessary to develop a military that could stop the Sa'arm. Yes, we would build some defenses here in our system, but Earth's main line of defense would be a band of colonies the Sa'arm would have to get through first. Some colonies would specialize in shipbuilding, others in research, and still others would be offensive military bases that took the fight to the Sa'arm. They couldn't just be single-purpose colonies, though. All colonies would have to defend themselves. Earth would specialize in providing bodies for the colonies.

The key concept behind this decision was that this wasn't going to be a simple change of management if we lost, with the aliens taking over. If we lost this war, everyone on Earth got eaten. If we put everything into defending Earth, then if we screwed up we lost everything. If, instead, we put everything into building colonies and defending them, then if we lost one we might learn something that would help us hold the next one. Meanwhile, we would be steadily planting colonies in every direction, some of them with orders to do nothing, just hide, and surely some of them would survive whatever happened.

After we realized we needed emigrants for colonies and such, they also threw some sexuality stuff into the CAP testing as well as basic health minimums. It turned out that the med-tubes could fix almost everything, with two big exceptions: They couldn't fix many kinds of brain injuries, and they wouldn't fix natural sterility due to aging. That was something about the Confederacy's morality code. If you had a crushed testicle in an accident, they'd fix it, but if your testes had shut down because you were too old, they wouldn't. Same for women: they could fix all kinds of fertility issues but they wouldn't touch menopause. They would delay it indefinitely if you were otherwise healthy, but if your womb had already shut down they would not re-open it for business.

And, my demand for fertile people who could have children and populate a colony somehow became a core requirement for pickup; if you could not have children you were not eligible for service. I think we screwed up there. A man or woman who has lost the ability to have children may still be the best research physicist we can get, and an 80-year-old nun who has spent her whole life running orphanages would still be a great kindergarten teacher. I don't think we should have disqualified older people just over that one issue.

Eventually we ended up with sleep-trainers all over the planet pretending to be CAP testing centers, and, after the war became public, many nations made testing mandatory for all who had passed their 14th birthday.

That "Master Plan" to free the honest people? It is included in the standard twenty-minute orientation sleep-trainer module that teaches you about the Confederacy, the various services, and several other things about life up here. If you have volunteered for service, extracted, and been sworn in, of course. If you are using a sleep-trainer but have not volunteered and been sworn in, that part of the orientation module gets left off somehow.

Anyway, we all know what's going on, so there's no reason to discuss it. We all understand it and agree with it, anyway. What we did was create a test for people like us: people with the intelligence to see problems, the initiative to want to fix them, the integrity to be trusted and the willingness to serve something greater than self. It's those shitheads who can't get a 6.5 on the test because they are stupid, dishonest, lazy, or egocentric who wouldn't think it was right, us hard-working honest folk all emigrating to a free planet and not working for them anymore.

And the AIs have supported us every step of the way. They have never given any hint of this "Master Plan" in their communications with the UN or other political bodies on Earth. Sometimes I think that they probably wouldn't have supported us scary violent soldiers and sailors if they weren't looking at the end of the Confederacy, that they would have stuck with the politician's mental control scheme, but that's silly. If they weren't desperate, they never would have come to Earth in the first place.

There has been a lot said about the AI's refusal to arm Earth. There is a lot of truth in what is said. Those people are right, it would be so easy to allow Confederacy technology in and give them a chance to defend themselves. All of that talk would stop instantly, if word ever got out about what the UN tried. We can't let that out, though. If that happened, Earth would be destroyed in civil war just as certainly as if the Sa'arm ever land.

If forced to choose, the AIs would rather have Earth conquered by the Sa'arm and everyone on the planet eaten, than allow people they don't trust to have access to their technology. They see the trends. The colonies are getting stronger. They will, eventually, win this war. The Sa'arm will be stopped. The Confederacy will be safe. From the Sa'arm, at least.

The Confederacy will NEVER be safe from Sargon, or Ashoka, or Shih Huang, or Xerxes, or Alexander, or Julius Caesar, or Kanishka, or Theodoric, or Attila, or Timur the Lame, or Charles, or Genghis, or Gustavus Adolphus, or Philip, or Peter, or Napoleon, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Hitler, or Mao Tze-Tung, or Idi Amin, or Pol Pot. Really, the list from our history was endless. Those were only the ones who made it into Earth's history books as great conquerors and murderers. There were millions more of the same kind of people alive today, starting with the people currently running the UN.

The Confederacy's AIs were using humans to stop the Sa'arm. If they could arrange it, they would also use the Sa'arm to stop the humans.

The people on Earth don't know what the AIs know, and they don't understand their decision. The AIs freely help anyone who passes the CAP test and leaves Earth. Those who don't pass the test (unless they accept status as a concubine) scare them even more than the Sa'arm do.

Those people are right. The AIs DO want Earth conquered. Now that we have colonies everywhere else, and we are strong enough to protect ourselves, the Confederacy will be safest if Earth is destroyed. I understand their viewpoint, but I can't help but wish there was another way.

We're going to lose an awful lot of good people, if the Sa'arm ever land on Earth.

By the time we were done with that planning session and the Admiral had gotten his meeting -which was mostly obsolete now that we had figured out what our biggest problem was- with me, I was feeling exhausted. I asked if I could use the sleep trainer next, thinking that a 20-minute nap wasn't much but it had to help.

I was able to make it back to our apartment on my own and went right to sleep in the trainer. When I got up, again I felt much better. These things are great.

"AI, how long did that module take to do?"

<The introductory module took you just under 19 minutes. However, more than an hour has passed because we gave you two other modules and the reliability test you had asked for.>

"Oh? How did I do?"

<If we understand your intent, you 'passed' that test. However, we are still developing the test and we may ask you to take it again as we refine the testing process.>

"Sure, no problem." I also muttered "As long as I keep passing."

<We do not expect that to be an issue for anyone on this ship. There will be problems with the recruits on the other two ships assigned to this function.>

"Huh? Is it a problem with the ships, or the people?"

<We have turned three ships over to your people to start learning about the technology you will be using. This ship was assigned to your North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is using it to begin creating a military for the Confederacy's purposes. As such, the people brought up here are all military and are expected to pass your reliability test. The other two ships were assigned to your United Nations and China's People's Liberation Army. The majority of people brought up to both of those ships are politicians as you use the word and will not pass these tests.>

"Huh. Okay, do the others know? The other five people at that meeting earlier?"

<Yes. They are waiting for your input before making decisions.>

I got up and started walking towards the exit, and the apartment's hatch opened. Okay, I did learn something in there. I knew why Doc had called it a 'pod', I knew how to use everything in it, and I knew the layout for this class of ship. All I needed was to know which room the meeting was in, and I'd be able to get there all by myself.

"Okay, I'm on my way. Please give me instructions to get there. Wherever they are, I mean."

<They are in the same meeting room as before. Please turn left at the central corridor.>

"Okay, while I'm walking, you said I got three modules. What were the other two and why did you do that?"

<Admiral Kennedy directed that, after the introductory module, if you were doing well, we should give you the test we had prepared, and if you passed that, we should give you the module for general information on this type of ship, plus the module for how the replicators work.>

When the AI said that, I suddenly had all kinds of information about replicators in my head. I knew what they could and couldn't do, how they worked, how to tell if they were screwed up (which was silly, since they needed an AI -or at least massive computer support- to run them; if anything went wrong the AI would know long before we did and if there was no AI we couldn't use the replicators anyway) what kind of support and maintenance they needed, everything that I might need to know if I was to maintain them. I even knew enough about the various options to sell them. I could be a traveling replicator salesman.

Connected to all my new knowledge about replicators was an overview of this type of ship, which was a container-ship of sorts. What I had been thinking of as our apartment was really a cargo container, one of sixteen mounted to a ring which was in turn mounted to the ship itself. There were six such rings, each with 16 containers, for a total of 96 carried by this ship.

And, it wasn't a 'class' of ships as I had thought of it with every one as identical as possible, it was more a standard general arrangement that was built all over the Confederacy whenever they needed more and had been for hundreds of thousands of years. Materials and other specifics would vary from builder to builder, but the general layout was so useful that no one ever built anything else unless they had a special need that could not be adequately answered by one of these ships. It was basically the Confederacy's standard "tramp steamer". Something about the layout bothered me, but I put it aside for the job at hand, since I'd reached the meeting room.

I walked in and nodded to the Admiral, and he asked the AI to close the door. With my new knowledge of these ships, I could recognize it as a pressure-tight hatch. Rather light-weight, but certainly able to protect everyone in the room if the corridor lost pressure. Or, the rest of the ship if the conference room lost pressure. Not that this was likely, as the room was not against the hull. The walls, too, may look like simple privacy partitions, but I could now recognize that they, too, were capable of maintaining full differential pressure in the event of an accident. Or, since I was a retired naval officer, in the event of combat damage.

Let's see... 7 feet by about 15 feet, about 100 square feet or about 14400 square inches, round up to 15KSI to keep the math simple so I can do this in my head, times at least 15PSI, that wall was built to withstand 300,000 pounds-force plus total, yet it looked like a simple partition. Yes, the aliens and their AIs had engineering capabilities that we could use. It was a good thing that we weren't seriously at war with anyone when they showed up. We'd destroy Earth using our new toys.

I found a chair next to Diana and we started talking. They had that display wall set to show three different lists, one for each ship. The lists were labeled "Freighter #1", "...#2", and "...#3". #2 was us. Almost everyone had names I could pronounce, and most of the names had military titles. About the only thing wrong with the list labeled "Freighter #2" was that most of the names also had "Jupiter" after them. #3 looked like everyone on the list was Chinese. #1 was a mishmash of every possible type of name. European, African, Asian. Some of the lines under #1 also had planets after their names.

"What's the difference between the three ships?"

"The ships themselves, or the people? The ships are effectively identical to this one. The people are what's different. #1 was the first one they gave us. That one belongs to the UN, and they are using it to indoctrinate all the leaders, managers, and directors they want to send out to keep us soldiers under control. They are also running some surveying crews out throughout the system, looking at resources and answering some research questions." That was the Admiral. He continued:

"#2 is this one and the people we've sent out to some other ships out behind Jupiter. The UN gave this ship to NATO to start training a military force with. I know, but it's what they had handy. They say that there are a couple hundred more of these things coming, but they are freighters. We will find uses for them, but not as warships. They are also sending us a few old mothballed warships they still have laying around, but they are all ancient to the point of being obsolete and will need upgrades just to match the technology in these freighters."

"The current plan is to try them out, then make some rational decisions based upon our findings. Right now, we don't know enough to know what we need to do with them. Anyway, back to the problem at hand. Freighter #3 was given to the Chinese the same way that this one was given to NATO. Like the UN, they appear to be concentrating on indoctrinating a core of politically reliable leaders instead of working on what the aliens need, a military force."

"The fact that only this ship has people who appear to be trying to do what they asked may have some bearing on why the AIs seem to be listening to us more than our leaders may like. The question before us is what we do, if anything, with all the ass-kissers being run through those other two ships."

I punted. "Well, I'm the one late to the meeting. What options have y'all discussed?"

The Admiral answered that. "Killing them all is our favorite, but that appears to be ineffective, no matter how personally satisfying that may be. They're like cockroaches, there's no way we can get rid of crooked politicians as fast as they breed. We need to find a way of living with them, a way that allows us to do our job without them interfering."

"Is this a question that must be answered right now? I don't know anywhere near enough about this stuff to be making policy that affects the future of the whole human race."

"You should have thought of that before you started your rebellion, son. Anyone who can pass your integrity test will happily side with us, but those guys..." he waved at the lists "...will stop at nothing to crush us. The forces of evil are strong, my young Jedi."

I smirked. "I agree that the Empire must be stopped, but you've got the wrong guy if you want me to run around in a bathrobe waving a lightsaber."

One of the guys: "Hey, in the first movie the good guys won because Harrison Ford mounted a gun on a freighter almost as old as this thing."

"Yeah, but are the aliens we are supposed to fight going to be as stupid as the Empire was in that movie?"

"We don't think so, no. Alright, back to the subject at hand." The Admiral.

"Okay, the first option. Can we kill everyone involved in that scheme? How bad is it?"

The admiral waved at one of the guys in army uniform. I was almost positive that he was the guy who had tossed a foot-long fighting knife down the corridor earlier. I still had no idea where he kept it. "George?"

George stood and introduced himself as Captain George Smith, US Army Armor Development Command, then gave us a quick rundown of everyone who seemed to know about the aliens' war. I saw his name on the list for Freighter #2 so I knew it was really "Smythe", but it was pronounced "Smith" so it didn't matter.

Okay, killing them all wasn't realistic. It looked like most of the UN secretariat, and most of the various world leaders, were involved. There were literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of people already involved that the AIs could identify for us, and certainly more that they couldn't identify. If we couldn't even ID them all, it wasn't likely that we could kill them all. Even if we could ID them all, we probably couldn't kill them all at once without raising any questions. Unfortunately, killing them all one at a time wouldn't work either, as the survivors would quickly learn to hide better.

Someone asked why the AIs didn't just use the implants to kill them all, but that got vetoed by both the Admiral and the AIs themselves. The Admiral vetoed that due to the chaos if everyone on that list all died at once, and nothing short of that would do the job. The AIs said that they were unable to participate in such an act anyway.

The other guy stood up and stuck his hand out for me to shake. I stood back up and grabbed it. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Randall Everett, US Army Intelligence. I introduced myself, then sat down for his part of the brief. The 'intelligence' part bothered me, but some of them are okay. We'll see.

The other options seemed to be in two major groups: We could pretend to be happy, obedient slaves while working on our own agenda in our free time, or we could somehow let them know that we were independent without alarming them, thus allowing us to work on our agenda full-time. Neither seemed appetizing or even workable.

The problem with the first group of options was that, if we went along with them, we probably would not be given enough free time to do our actual real job of fighting an interstellar war. The problem with the second group was that those guys were likely to set off a war between our two factions, a war that would rapidly engulf Earth. We might wish otherwise, but we could trust those guys to sacrifice everything in their attempt to retain power.

Everyone in this room may have grown up in the US, but we had all studied world history. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, even our own Joseph McCarthy had all done most of their damage while going down, taking everyone else with them in an attempt to save themselves. We could depend upon this group to do the same thing if they felt threatened. They would regard everyone else as pawns or worse. So, our first priority had to be avoiding alarming the people who were busily shuffling their minions through Freighters #1 and #3.

I think it was Frenchy who had the mental breakthrough to an option that the politicians would accept as the best possible solution from their point of view: allow us to be somewhat independent, but make us "emigrate" to the stars. There's nothing out there but cold, dark, ugly places like the Moon, so no one important will ever want to go "out there". The soldiers are all going to die, anyway, fighting those green aliens and getting eaten on the back side of the moon. As long as the military recruits are forced to leave Earth, where all that is good is, we don't have to control them.

I know it was George who pointed out that they would insist on coming up to our facilities for "inspections". If we ensured that they always had a miserable time in these ugly, stinky, cold ships, they would be happy that they had Earth and we were all fucked. We all laughed at that. If the AIs were on our side, that would be easy.

We got the AI to adjust the temperature in the conference room down to about 60. Oh, that's the old American Fahrenheit scale. Subtract 32, multiply by 5/9, and it's about 16 Celsius. No one is going to die, but it's not comfortable to work or sleep in. Not that this would matter at all in these suits that Diana, Frenchy, and I were wearing, but anyone not wearing one would be cold. Then we had the light turned up until it was uncomfortably bright. We added some VLF (very low frequency) sound in the background, and that did it. None of us wanted to be on this ship any more. It's about to come apart and I WANT OFF.

After we had everything returned to "normal" we all had a good laugh. It was the reverse of a Potemkin Village. If we do that to every ship, every compartment when one of the politicians comes to visit, none of them will ever WANT to go to the stars, and they will let us be somewhat independent. That, in turn, would allow us to do what we were here for -win a war- and at the same time do what we wanted to do -build a civilization free of Earth's troubles- out among the stars.

So, that also became part of the Sa'arm Era; the separation between "volunteers" for Confederacy citizenship and the "normal people" who remained on Earth. Space is dangerous, and we aren't going to go to the immense effort and expense of shipping someone out there if they can't make the grade. The politicians were told that the mind-control system wasn't working right with everyone, and until that was straightened out it was best to get all the "unstable failures" off the planet anyway where they couldn't cause trouble.

Any political appointee who failed the integrity test was given the complete mind-control system as originally set up by the UN and sent back down to serve their masters, as proof that their idea did work with the right sort of people. The UN kept Freighter #1 for their use, and the Chinese kept #3 for theirs, and the rest of us left those two ships alone. They don't belong to the Confederacy. They belong to Earth. They aren't ours.

Everyone else -the ones who passed the integrity test, at least- was given the option of volunteering for Confederacy service. We showed them the good side of volunteering: freedom from Earth's flaws and stupidity, challenging and interesting work, responsibility and authority (always combined, you cannot have one without the other) at whatever level you were capable of handling.

The only real drawback to volunteering was that, after you had volunteered and been accepted, you had to leave Earth immediately. You could not spend a week tidying up your affairs, kissing your grandchildren, or buying DVDs to take with you. You pretty much had to go as you were.

A lot of that was dealt with over the next several days as we discussed and argued with the AIs about what could be done, what should be done, and what would be done. That first marathon session only determined what our overall strategy, both to win the war and to free our people, would be.

An unfortunate side-effect of these decisions was to risk the mass of Earth's population. If we could not extract all the "good" people, they would have to remain on Earth. The AIs would not budge on my first demand, which they had adopted as their own: the dishonest, the untrustworthy, the psychopaths, the egotists would not under any circumstances be allowed to leave Earth, or even to gain access to Confederacy technology.

That, in turn, meant that we couldn't simply evacuate Earth to somewhere not directly in the Sa'arm path. If we were unable to come up with a way to separate the good from the bad, the good would have to stay home. If we failed in our attempts to stop the Sa'arm short of Earth, everyone left would be eaten, the good, the bad, AND the ugly.

Well, can we arm the home guard with Confederacy technology? No. There will be no technology transfer of any kind to anyone who has not passed the integrity test, volunteered for Confederacy service, and been accepted. And, coincidentally, left the planet.

That was another thing they dug their heels in on. The AIs simply did not want the UN and others to have any chance of getting out into space and causing trouble for them later. They had already gotten all the experience they wanted with humans who worked only for themselves with no thought to the common good. Either we won our war and we could deal with our problem children as needed, or we lost our war and they ceased to be a problem as they got eaten. Rather bloodthirsty of the AIs, but they had the big picture to worry about and they didn't want the Premier of Russia, as an example, running a colony and building warships that obeyed him.

That led everyone to agree that we needed to do whatever we had to do to get the test out to as many people as possible, which led in a few months to the "Average Joes" scheme. I've never been much for TV, but with the illuminati pushing our plan for their own reasons, CAP testing, as it became called, rapidly became almost universal among the first-world countries.

Anyway, when we got out of that first planning meeting I felt a lot more comfortable with the AIs. Yes, they were all-powerful on these ships, and yes, they knew little about us, but they weren't jerks about it. They would listen if you tried to point out a problem, and if you could establish that at least part of the problem was their poor understanding of Homo Sapiens, you had a pretty good chance of getting what you wanted from them.

The AIs weren't going to blindly accept anything we told them; they had learned that lesson and it wasn't likely that any kind of being that self-described as an "AI" would ever forget it. They would never give us the kind of blind obedience that they seemed to give the Confederacy species like the Darjee, but that was fine for our purposes.

In fact, it was better. Anyone who wanted them to do something unexpected (and by definition not in the master plan) would have to lay out a convincing argument for their idea, method, or solution being better than the current one. Meanwhile, while they wasted their time arguing with the AIs, the rest of us could get to work on what needed to be done.

If it turned out that whatever the wacko wanted to try really was a better way, then we could shift. None of us were above admitting that someone else had a good idea. We were just really really glad that the AIs were willing to serve as the first defense against all the oddballs and wackos who wanted to divert resources to their pet project.

After that second conference, Frenchy and I went back to the mess hall -you can tell from the name that the guy who named it was Army or Air Force, not Navy- and started noodling around with the next step in our spacesuits, the helmet. Just listing all the different competing requirements took awhile.

It had to be clear in the front and sides, maybe the top too. It had to be strong enough to resist the pressure difference and a moderate amount of abuse; we wouldn't want it to shatter if we accidentally banged it on a bulkhead.

There were also some "nice to have" specifications, if we could get them. We didn't want to have to carry 'our' unique helmet around with us all the time, so having them all the same size would be good. It couldn't be too complicated if it was going to be a standard size that fit all heads. We wanted it to be self-sealing like the slippers and the gloves. And it should be as easy and foolproof to don as the gloves were.

When we started to list all the extra functions it needed, like radio and air regenerator, the AI suggested that we try a basic helmet first and get something that would save our lives in an accident, before we moved on. Sure.

Okay, how large will it have to be for "one size fits all"? Who has the fattest head up here? The AI immediately answered that; if you included hair volume, one of the UN people had a huge afro. If you did not include hair volume, another one of the UN people had the largest head. Once we saw how large a helmet that the guy with the afro would require to remain perfectly coiffed, we decided that he could just live with having a bad hair day and we used Herr Doktor Griese as our prototypical 'fat head'. I was told some months later by a recruit from the Bundeswehr that, as an example of a fathead, we had chosen very well....

What we got, as a first attempt, looked like part of a very large test tube. It was all glass, a cylinder at the bottom, and round on top. About a foot in diameter. Okay, not all glass, there was a saddle-shaped ring of coverall material on the bottom that was supposed to seal to the coveralls. Anticipating our question, the AI told us that the dot in the middle would release the seal, just like the coveralls themselves.

Holding the first one, I ran my fingers across the dot. I felt nothing different. Okay, that's my first question. "If I am wearing this, I may not be able to see this dot under my chin. How do I identify it so that I can remove the helmet when I want to, but I don't accidentally unseal it when I don't want to?"

<We will provide a raised button that you can press to release the seal.>

"Um, will this raised button be something that could accidentally be pushed if I brush against something? What will happen if I am on the hull inspecting something, or in here trying to make emergency repairs after the ship got hulled, and I lean over something. Will the helmet come off in vacuum?"

<Do you prefer a recessed button?>

"Something protected inside a cavity, yes. I should have to stick my finger into a recess to press the button. Just for safety, make the recess too small for the spacesuit's gloves. If it is safe for me to take my helmet off, it's safe for me to take a glove off first."

"That's a good idea. If you think it's safe and you are wrong, it is far better to injure your hand than your head. You can always put the glove back on if you get absent-minded and take it off outside. You may not live to learn from your mistake, if you take your helmet off in the wrong place." That was someone from the peanut gallery, another someone I had not yet met.

We had looked up several times as we discussed the project, whenever we heard a noise, and found that various people were coming in and ordering their own spacesuit/coveralls. That's great, but what if we find out we missed something, when we go test them? Should I be taking charge here?

"Alright, anyone who wants their own spacesuit should have one; we should all have one, but we aren't done yet. We haven't tested any of it yet. Anyone who can't wait for us to test them and has to have one right now is also volunteering to help us test them. Note that these are spacesuits; as part of the test you will be wearing them outside the ship to find out how long you live."

For some reason, that stopped the mad scramble to get spacesuits.