POV: Svatken, Znosian Dominion State Security (Position: Director)

  Svatken was in a good mood.

  As good as it could be, given the circumstances.

  The Navy had suffered loss after loss against the predators in battle. The enemy’s fleet destroyed facilities on vital worlds of the Dominion as it wished. Znos itself was attacked, with the Dominion Navy’s command moon thrown into its system star. The external threat was the most dire it had been since the emergence of the Znosian people from the underground burrows of Znos-4 many centuries ago.

  Things weren’t great, no, but she could breathe a sigh of relief now that the predators had agreed to a cessation in the fighting. And, as a side bonus, they’d agreed to take some of the most bothersome headaches she had off her paws. For some reason, the Great Predators had insisted on the handover of several high-ranking Navy officers, people they saw responsible for the attacks against their nest system. Some primitive drive for vengeance, probably — surely they couldn’t be that hungry.

  Svatken didn’t have a problem with it.

  Navy officers were replaceable. Easily. In fact, they had an excess of those now that they had all those spacers who evacuated their ship during the “battle” over Znos. And many of those officers the predators demanded — like Eleven Whiskers Sprabr — had been downright annoying. She hemmed and hawed during the extended negotiations, and readily gave them up when negotiations came down to the wire… but not before adding her own suggestions to the list. In one single move, she managed to move both the pesky external and internal threats to the Dominion out of the way.

  Now, she had a few long months to decide what to do about the predator coalition in the long term, given the new restrictions the Dominion had supposedly agreed to. She’d figure something out. There was no shortage of resources or talent in the Dominion. Time was on her side. The longer this war lasted, the more time she had to leverage the gargantuan industrial and population base of the Znosian people. In the long view of centuries, the Dominion would prevail. It always did.

  For once, things were looking up.

  But she knew from the expression she saw on her prodigy Operative Khesol’s face that her day was about to be ruined.

  Svatken sighed. “What is the problem this time, Khesol?”

  Khesol did a little bow, which just looked odd on her still-hatchling frame. “I have been looking into the various discrepancies that have been flagged by our Digital Guides. They were… highly elusive, but I believe I have begun to understand the scope of our problem.”

  “Problem? What problem?” Svatken asked sharply.

  “A few months ago, when you first pulled me out of my hatchling instruction and put me on the case investigating the—”

  “Okay, here’s a quick tip, Khesol,” she suggested, not unkindly, to her subordinate. “I run Dominion State Security, and that makes me a pretty busy person. So when I ask you what the problem is, try to summarize the important portions of it, in as few words and sentences as you can.”

  “Yes, Director.” Khesol took a deep breath. “The predators have covertly hacked some of our machines. And for the past year, they have been laying the groundwork for a massive schism. If we don’t do anything, they will destroy the Dominion from the inside out within the next twelve to sixteen months.”

  Svatken took the report in silence, neither speaking for a moment. She gaped at her prodigy, closing her mouth with conscious effort, and swallowed. Then, she pushed her datapad aside as she focused her full attention. “Okay, forget what I just told you about being concise. Your intuition was correct. Start from the very beginning. And be as detailed as possible.”

  “Yes, Director. When I began my investigations into the mysterious deaths of some of our agents in a far-off rural sector on Znos-4, I initially hypothesized that it was what we expected at first: accidents. Coincidences happen. And rare coincidences — in the grand scheme of our massive civilization, they are a certainty. But, as I’ve been trained, I began to look into these unrelated deaths with an open mind.”

  Svatken recalled the assignment with some effort. “This was one of the first projects I gave you months ago, to investigate that accident— what was the name?”

  “Agent Saminki was the name, Director. District 2905 of Znos-4. It was reported by the local office that he died of a ground vehicle accident on his way to the district spaceport.”

  “Ah, right. And I asked you to investigate it. What did he really die of?”

  “A ground vehicle accident.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Both occupants of the vehicle were killed at the scene of the accident. I got into the responsibility assignment loop of the local office, and they sent me the pictures. To be certain, I visited the district and inspected the aftermath and its physical artifacts myself. Based on black box responsibility data, his attendant was operating the vehicle at three times the speed limit for that road, and the velocity of the vehicle was consistent with the details of the crash. By all available evidence, that event happened exactly as the initial report indicated,” Khesol said. “But, to be thorough, I opened my own investigation into this case.”

  “What was wrong with the original investigation?”

  “I checked the dead agent’s itinerary. He was headed to the spaceport, for a flight that would not leave for another six hours. There was no reason for him to be going that fast.”

  “Maybe he was simply impatient?” Svatken speculated. Some poorly bred specimen of the Znosian species had that defect. Even some in the ranks of State Security. Perhaps one day smart Dominion scientists could be breed the trait out of the species entirely, but Svatken had her doubts. Impatience was sometimes a useful trait for certain jobs, and there were additional risks to narrowing the gene pool too much.

  “That impatience was somewhat consistent with his service record. Two years ago, Agent Saminki was reprimanded for prematurely assigning responsibility… That was probably why the case was dismissed as an accident in the first place. Anyway, something about the case just felt wrong to me. That was why I continued to investigate.”

  “It… felt wrong to you,” the director repeated skeptically.

  “Yes. Something about it seemed vaguely off. Admittedly, I hadn’t investigated many accidents up to that point, so I might have been seduced by the messiness of real life that contrasted with the clean theoreticals I had been instructed on,” Khesol confessed. She tilted her head. “But as soon as I began to dig into his accident, more and more red flags popped up. I had our Digital Guides pull the traffic record for the entire district for the past five years. I found that Agent Saminki’s attendant has never gone above the speed limit in any of our well-kept records.”

  “Never?”

  “Indeed. Tens of thousands of kilometers of driving data. Not one recorded incident until this accident.”

  “So why were they in such a hurry…” Svatken mused.

  “Perhaps he wasn’t. I thought perhaps the vehicle malfunctioned. His ground vehicle model has a fairly reliable record with an acceptably low accident and fatality rate. I examined its record for recent accidents, and to my surprise, four other State Security officers had died in the same vehicle model in suspiciously similar accidents on Znos-4, in the last week alone. Three of them while going several times the recommended speed, and one of them was a brake failure that has not yet been replicated.”

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  “Unusual. But like you said…”

  “Yes, rare coincidences happen. Of the tens of billions of people who live on Znos-4… anyway, in our vast dominion, such coincidences are a certainty,” Khesol admitted. “Which is why I scrutinized this case further. I found that thousands of officers over the Dominion had died in similar vehicles. Many thousands. I collected and analyzed the similarities. In all but a handful of the cases, the officers were either actively looking into or were assigned to cases relating to machines that control the operation of hatchling pools.”

  “Hatchling pools?” Svatken asked uneasily.

  “Yes. So I began the next phase of my investigation there. I examined other cases with similar characteristics. On Znos-4, I’ve discovered at least two dozen State Security officers who had died in the past year while looking into hatchling pool machines, and I was just getting started. When I broadened my search to the entire Dominion, there must have been tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. This is an anomalous amount of unplanned deaths that required more explanation.”

  “Hundreds of thousands? How?!”

  “All in circumstances that would not warrant further investigations. Many died in vehicular accidents. Some, in industrial accidents. Others succumbed to unexplained but common malaises relating to their respiratory or cardiac systems. A few were killed in border systems during the predator raids into our systems. But this is not out of the ordinary. Every day, hundreds of millions of people die in the Dominion, from an uncountable number of causes, some of which are mysterious and unexplained. A number of them are bound to be State Security officers and operatives. Despite our instincts, we can’t actually chase threats down every suspicious burrow; instead, we rely on statistics.”

  Svatken nodded after a while. “Right. Our reporting and computer systems are designed to tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty so we aren’t wasteful with resources. That is why we have operatives and agents, like you and me, who can go and chase down the mysteries, beyond the numbers on a screen.”

  “That… was when I discovered our problem. I was wondering why the number of additional deaths did not trip a response from someone, and then I realized something: the total number of accidental deaths among our people had not gone up. In fact, if there was any anomaly, it was in the positive direction: fewer State Security officers have died in the last two years than the two years prior.”

  “What?!”

  “Yes, that was extremely odd. From the surface, the numbers seemed… unexplainably regular. But with the context I had, I could finally see why. I broke it down by specific causes: the number of our officers who have died to disease have significantly decreased. Our overall accident rates have also lowered, and those who were in less serious accidents— their survival rates have actually gone up in the same period. All our metrics are up, except… when only considering officers who worked in or around hatchlings. The sharp disparity in the data reminds me of…”

  “Apostates deliberately cooking statistics to evade detection in our pacification camps,” Svatken hissed. It was rare, but it happened. Sometimes, outlier death camp administrators would go rogue. And given the position they were in, they knew they were being monitored, so they would mess with the statistics to seem less suspicious. Accidental deaths reported as executions. Buried predator corpses being dug up and re-counted. Resources being shifted from one project to another, or guards being re-routed for menial tasks. The deception never worked for long, but that didn’t stop those pesky administrators with a conscience from trying. “But wait, these statistics are about our people. Our agents. So the fact that we didn’t see anything off about them…”

  “Yes, Director. It means that the numbers are likely genuine, not direct forgeries. And unless we have suddenly become a lot safer as a species in the last two years, whoever killed our people… they also made sure to… somehow lower the number of deaths on the other end by decreasing our regular accident rates, healing our officers who were ill…”

  “What— what was it all for?”

  “I didn’t understand. That’s why I went back to the first case I found, to Agent Saminki, and I looked over all the work he’d been conducting on the hatchling pool machines. Luckily, the records at his office were very thorough, and I was able to find the last person he talked to: an agent in a neighboring district by the name of… Agent Kvinkt.”

  Svatken narrowed her eyes. “Is she— is she still alive?”

  “No. She died of an apparent cardiac condition relating to a rare genetic condition just last month, right as I was traveling to interview her.”

  “Pity.”

  “And suspicious,” Khesol added.

  “Yes, that was obviously what I meant,” Svatken waved impatiently for her to move on. “You know I would never actually express such a primitive and unproductive emotion as pity.”

  “Yes— yes, Director,” the chastised Khesol said as she bowed. She recovered quickly. “I— uh— I interrogated her attendant, who was also listening in on that conversation. Her memory of the conversation was hazy, but she took careful notes in hard-copy, as she was trained to do. According to her notes — and I’ll admit they were taken by a dimwit so I had to extrapolate a bit — it appears Agent Saminki was concerned about certain settings on these hatchling pool machines. Certain special configuration values that are never supposed to be modified without State Security approval and that have not changed for a long time.”

  “No configuration value is supposed to be modified without our approval anyway.” Svatken waved a paw lazily. “It could be any one of—”

  “Director approval. Your approval.”

  The director didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats. Her voice became low. “You said… this configuration hasn’t been changed for a long time?”

  “It has been so long we do not have reliable records.” Khesol bowed again. “From all indications in the historical records we have, this was from the very original documentation left to us from the founding of our Office itself.”

  Svatken felt a chill run up her spine. “How certain was this attendant? You know them: some of them aren’t… the most well-bred. We do cut corners on some of these bloodlines. Interrogate her again. Maybe she isn’t—”

  “She was thoroughly interrogated. She is no longer available for service to the Prophecy.” Khesol put a dark emphasis on the word.

  “Ah.”

  “I did not take her word for it. I followed through on the investigation myself. At first, the Digital Guides were insistent that the values were correct, but my suspicions remained. Every step of the way. Every stage of my investigation was hindered or in some way tampered with by forces I couldn’t see. Then, I was… inspired by something Zero Whiskers Sprabr did to me.”

  Svatken’s eyes narrowed at the mention of his name. “Inspired. How?”

  “When Sprabr took over on 4-C, he relied not on people to follow his orders over ours. He relied on simply being faster at giving orders than I was. For those who were in a position to do something to stop him, he ordered them to hand over their weapons and to disable their radios. It did not matter that I had superior authority to his; by the time I tried to contact our loyal troops, they were already suborned. And from that experience, I realized the problem here is not that our adversary has more ultimate control over the Dominion. It is that our adversary has a faster decision and action loop than us. When people notice things, they are sidetracked or killed before they can report it. Even when they do report suspicious events, the chain of reporting can be broken at any step. To beat them and to discover the truth, I had to be faster. Using your authority, I ordered a rapid purge and reorganization of all our hatchling pool offices on Znos-4, and I ordered an accompanying audit at every one of our facilities.”

  Svatken blinked in surprise. It was… unconventional and disproportionate for a mere suspicion, but unconventional was why she chose Khesol. After a few moments, she nodded in approval. “Chaos as a strategy. That is… not without precedent in times of emergency. What did you find?”

  “We created so much chaos that the issues finally surfaced. So many reports that went unread. So many deaths that were dismissed. When everyone was forced to look into everything, it finally became impossible for the problems to hide… Agent Saminki was right. The configuration of the hatchling pool machines was in error. And it wasn’t just the machine in his district. I applied the same measure off-world and throughout the Dominion. That specific value had been changed in most of the machines, from here to the most remote settled systems of the Dominion. And there has been a systematic and thorough attempt to cover up that change, including a failed attempt on my life just three days ago. Even today, when I interrogated our Digital Guides here about the error, their programs repeatedly malfunctioned. They still insist that the value is correct even when I can see them being incorrect on my screen. Our technicians have taken responsibility, but they are still unsure how—”

  “Which one? What settings value is this?” Svatken asked, voice dry as her throat. Even if she did not possess the special critical thinking skills necessary for basic deduction… this problem wasn’t a very hard one. She already knew what the answer was going to be before Khesol answered.

  “The ratio of outliers in our hatchling population.”

  Svatken whispered with a hoarse voice, “No… No, no, no…”

  “The original value was one in twelve hundred. It had been set with the benefit of centuries of experience and social research, to be high enough for a steady pace of innovation while being low enough to allow for monitoring by a central authority — us — to avoid schism and internal conflict.”

  As a former agent tasked with hunting down rogue outliers not that long ago, Svatken didn’t need to be reminded of the paramount importance of keeping a steady control on the number of outliers to the security of the Dominion state, but she allowed her prodigy to ramble. Her head swirled with fear and uncertainty.

  “And what— what is that ratio now?” Svatken finally asked, swallowing hard as she did.

  “One… in twelve.”