simple tasks while I focused elsewhere. What I had tried to break down into a simple task this time was the appearance of reading news. News reading is more difficult to fake than book reading, because Iâm not just reading cover to cover. I have to pretend to scan for stories that interest me, then slow down to focus more on certain parts. Itâs a minor distinction, but what if another trained observer like me was looking for something out of place? If Iâm going to pretend to be normal, I might as well commit to it fully. Nothing is more suspicious than something thatâs just a bit off.
So I sat at the café, and while my eyes and hands pretended to read the news, my ears and perception were concentrating on the voices around me. No one was saying much worth spying on, but it was really just practice anyway. In fact, the news did finally get my attention with its repeated references to Zaldia. This included pictures of the carnage and what looked like a crying child among dead bodiesâthough I wasnât familiar enough with the species to say for sure. This sort of thing was horrific to most people.
I briefly considered actually reading one of the stories but decided to just let Dip summarize anything interesting for me later. Instead, I went back to listening and pretending to read. I now heard some people mention Zaldia, and the expectation that the big conference was going to lead to something being done about the occupation. So it wasnât too much of a mystery why the syndicate would be interested in the goings on here; I just didnât know what their intentions were.
I had to stop listening to sip my tea. Pretending to read the news, listening around me, and sipping tea was a bit much for me. With some practice, though, it seemed I could get it down. Appearing to be absorbed in something while actually listening intently to everything around me really was a skilled illusion. But I made one mistake that revealed my abnormality.
When the café exploded and men ran toward us screaming and firing guns into the crowd, I neatly set down the reader on my table instead of dropping it in surprise. I donât think anyone was paying attention to me at that point, though.
CHAPTER 7
Five sentients were firing energy weapons with crazed zeal, screaming something about a mechanized god. People around me fell, dead or wounded. I was right at the center of a terrorist attack. What were the chances?
Not very high is the answer. But that was not my main concern at the moment.
I was familiar with this group. They called themselves the Calabrai. Knowledge of the existence of other sentient species has been a problem for many religions, as most were formed before people even considered the possibility of life on other worlds (or knew that there were other worlds). Thus each religion is mostly confined to the particular species and home world of its origin, and adaptation to the new reality was hard. The Calabrai basically took religions from many different speciesâone âtrueâ religion from eachâand considered them all as having been based on the same true god. This one true god supposedly took form as a gigantic city-leveling robot called Calab. Calab is hidden on some unknown planet (though he is rumored to have been destroyed), and he keeps sending out commands to his followers to kill unbelievers.
There are a lot of obvious problems with giving this kind of robot artificial intelligence, but you can hardly blame people for failing to consider that it might become the basis for a violent new cult. And the Calabrai do follow its commands, though their efforts to kill the unbelievers never seem to amount to much more than huge annoyances to the targeted planets, as they arenât a sophisticated enough force to topple governments. It made sense that theyâd be interested in the expansion of powers of the Galactic Alliance and would attack Nar Valdum now, as one of the
So I sat at the café, and while my eyes and hands pretended to read the news, my ears and perception were concentrating on the voices around me. No one was saying much worth spying on, but it was really just practice anyway. In fact, the news did finally get my attention with its repeated references to Zaldia. This included pictures of the carnage and what looked like a crying child among dead bodiesâthough I wasnât familiar enough with the species to say for sure. This sort of thing was horrific to most people.
I briefly considered actually reading one of the stories but decided to just let Dip summarize anything interesting for me later. Instead, I went back to listening and pretending to read. I now heard some people mention Zaldia, and the expectation that the big conference was going to lead to something being done about the occupation. So it wasnât too much of a mystery why the syndicate would be interested in the goings on here; I just didnât know what their intentions were.
I had to stop listening to sip my tea. Pretending to read the news, listening around me, and sipping tea was a bit much for me. With some practice, though, it seemed I could get it down. Appearing to be absorbed in something while actually listening intently to everything around me really was a skilled illusion. But I made one mistake that revealed my abnormality.
When the café exploded and men ran toward us screaming and firing guns into the crowd, I neatly set down the reader on my table instead of dropping it in surprise. I donât think anyone was paying attention to me at that point, though.
CHAPTER 7
Five sentients were firing energy weapons with crazed zeal, screaming something about a mechanized god. People around me fell, dead or wounded. I was right at the center of a terrorist attack. What were the chances?
Not very high is the answer. But that was not my main concern at the moment.
I was familiar with this group. They called themselves the Calabrai. Knowledge of the existence of other sentient species has been a problem for many religions, as most were formed before people even considered the possibility of life on other worlds (or knew that there were other worlds). Thus each religion is mostly confined to the particular species and home world of its origin, and adaptation to the new reality was hard. The Calabrai basically took religions from many different speciesâone âtrueâ religion from eachâand considered them all as having been based on the same true god. This one true god supposedly took form as a gigantic city-leveling robot called Calab. Calab is hidden on some unknown planet (though he is rumored to have been destroyed), and he keeps sending out commands to his followers to kill unbelievers.
There are a lot of obvious problems with giving this kind of robot artificial intelligence, but you can hardly blame people for failing to consider that it might become the basis for a violent new cult. And the Calabrai do follow its commands, though their efforts to kill the unbelievers never seem to amount to much more than huge annoyances to the targeted planets, as they arenât a sophisticated enough force to topple governments. It made sense that theyâd be interested in the expansion of powers of the Galactic Alliance and would attack Nar Valdum now, as one of the
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