Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars, Chapter 36 (Patreon)

A quick look at one of the sections I was thinking about adding to the upcoming chapter, but it turns out I've got enough material that I don't need to add any 6 pages to it. I plan to have the rough draft done today or tomorrow and then edit and post next week.

In the meantime, a little something to whet the appetite. For those of you who've seen the post on the blighted hellscape of social media formerly known as twitter, while I've been working on this chapter, I was struck by the idea that the man below could actually belong to different organization than the one I originally conceived of, and it would fit in perfectly with [FRAGMENT DELETED]. Whether or not I'll do that is yet to be determined.

[ominous music plays]

~

Then:

“Damn,” the man with the false face said as he looked down at the body on the table. Every society, no matter how advanced, had those who slipped between its cracks. Paradise was an ideal to built towards, at least so said the Compact. Nothing could be perfect, but together all the races of the galaxy could build towards better. The man understood. Perfect was the enemy of good, as one of the ancients had said, but that was philosophy. What stared up at him from the table with lifeless blank eyes was reality.

Rally was a monitored world. Cameras on every corner, observation drones in the sky. Its population were watched from the moment they stepped outside – sometimes even before that. While a population of four billion was too large to realistically monitor in real-time, whenever the Compact had a need, it could find almost anything out about any citizen it wanted. As someone whose business put him at odds with the local government, the man with the false face couldn’t let himself or his people be tracked and traced. Their very first order of business had been to compromise planetary security nets, inserting parasitic algorithms into facial recognition and tracking software, a task easier said than done.

Between that and creating taps into law enforcement and intelligence networks, they had almost complete freedom of movement. This couldn’t be pushed too far; Rally’s networks were sensitive to intrusion. Despite the team’s hacking, too much tampering or use of those systems would trigger failsafe protocols that they could not subvert. Not, at least, without direct access to the network hubs and that was a little beyond their abilities. For now.

This was supposed to be one step towards not only extending their network, but accomplishing their secondary mission, an objective just as important as the primary. Their work here was important, perhaps the most important work that their division had ever been assigned.

The man with the false face looked down sadly at the figure laid out before him. One of the lost souls of Kiel Point, a man no one would miss. He’d been the mission’s first local participant. In theory, this should have been easy. The participant, the man and his crew were all human and this technology was tried and true. But as any decent engineer, scientist or physician would tell you, theory had a way of going sideways when put into practice, most often when you least expected or wanted it. Such was the case here.

Many of the normal methods and technology for this procedure couldn’t be used here on Rally, not without being very obvious. Finding the right balance between information gathering and resource development while remaining clandestine was imperative. For security purposes, an indigent had been selected as the first participant. The recruitment had gone perfectly. No trace of them or the participant was left behind. Medical had taken charge next, and that was where things had gone wrong.

Simulations and data projections were all well and good, but nothing was a replacement for actual testing. Nature had its own set of rules, or at least an ongoing disagreement with the concept of inductive logic.

In this case, that discrepancy between theory and practice had cost a man his life. This man had been an indigent, unwilling or unable to accept the help the Compact provided and becoming one of the sapient flotsam of any otherwise orderly world. A test subject that no one would miss. By most metrics, that single life hardly mattered, especially given the stakes of this mission. Nonetheless, it was a life that should not have been lost. A life that could have been better.

“Your sacrifice won’t be in vain,” the man with the false face promised the dead man. Rather, not entirely dead. His heart still beat. His chest still rose and fell as his body’s autonomic functions continued to operate, but all his higher brain functions had been destroyed. There was no chance of recovery or repair. “We’ll do better next time.”