Faction

2027 July 30
Test Year 1, Day 14

Andy Chao might not have been trained by the Examiners, but he had the full share of Techer intelligence. After receiving his first hate mail (not from anyone in authority, of course), he stopped posting political opinions using his Athena account, no matter how obfuscated. He started to use the accounts of his associates, had people at Caltech send emails in his place, and worked by old-style handwriting and word-of-mouth. As his movement for Failure gained support, he wrote less himself and relied on others to say things for him. But the most disruptive speeches usually were by Chao himself, although he spoke more extremely than he believed at the beginning.

“Why would the Examiners have given a gun and a hundred bullets to a man who was going to be willing to poison people? They claimed to know our entire brains. They could have predicted he’d do something like this. Either they lied or Stansted wasn’t simply crazy. He had to have been driven mad. And what would do that to him? Will Chamer, that’s who.” Chao was not believed by the bulk of the populace since everyone followed the news from Caltech and knew about Stansted’s confession, and how he had been unable to recover from the loss of Xena. And it was obvious to most of them that Chao was using Will’s notoriety as a way to promote his ideas.

But some started to doubt Will, Townsend, Dorman, and Thye, and more importantly the leaders of MIT. And the back channels of rumor and small talk and handed-off media started to carry the news that there had been a martyr to the cause of saving the world.

Only perhaps five percent of the population became willing to take risks for Chao and his people and even fewer would conceal things from the Revere Company and the officials of the student councils. But that was enough.

It happened some weeks later. Kathryn had some warning – one night the DnD game didn’t mention anything threatening. Ramping up the gain, she heard a few papers being moved back and forth, but that was all. And the next morning, neither Chao nor his four erstwhile players showed up to work.

2027 September 11 15:28 UT
Test Year 1, Day 57, 16:00 MST
Tau, MIT

A car had disappeared from one of the parking ramps and gone north, directly opposite the main areas of off-campus construction. When the chopper got there, the crew found the car crashed and burned out, filled with the remnants of chemical explosives. There were bone fragments and teeth, and burned flesh. But the bones didn’t have marrow channels and when Zijun checked the tissue samples for tissue rejections, it registered as human and goat and zard. The human cells were only blood, hair, and skin and the contents of intestines. There was no muscle or nerve tissue. It was a plant.

There were no tracks, no human-sized infrared traces on the chopper’s scanners, even no scent trails over the dispersed material from the burned car. While they presumably had not continued to flee into the wilderness, there was no lead on where Chao or his core lieutenants had gone. MIT was small, but not that small: seven thousand people were quite capable of hiding six when they had a couple of hundred friends who were keeping their views quiet. Odds were that the fugitives were hiding among the more isolated segments of the population, where any attempts to find them would be quickly noticed.

And so the Star Chamber of the oligarchs and the official authorities met again. Townsend spoke his analysis of the situation.

“We can profile Chao’s supporters, for what good it will do us. They are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.” He was interrupted by rough laughter. “They are largely male, with no secure romantic attachments. Very few people get married or have a kid and then suddenly want to blow everything to hell. The higher-level members in particular all have close ties to people back on Earth, emotional wounds on a level that external psychology can’t cure. This motivates them to follow Andy’s apparent idealism: end us here so that Earth is saved from hell fire and destruction. Keep the knowledge away from those at home because ‘they can’t handle the truth’.

“This gives us our most powerful weapon against them: they will seek to destroy Laura’s lab and Will’s antennas, but unless they can do so utterly and suddenly, we can break silence and transmit before they can block. The Four approve this plan, since trusting each other seems essential to our passing. Chao and his people won’t take that chance: they’ll try to hold a number of people at MIT hostage against our transmitting, and then find a way to kill us when we don’t see it coming.”

“What good does all of your analysis do us? Unless we can find and hold him now …” Delbert was more afraid of the possibilities of terrorism than he would have admitted.

Kathryn spoke confidently and matter-of-factly. “If we do that, he’ll probably set off a bomb somewhere. I wouldn’t have gone into hiding if I didn’t have a first strike set up.”

There could be a chemical charge somewhere inside the newly completed fission pile – detonate it, meltdown the reactor despite the zinc oxide and the breeder protection, and spread fallout across campus. A few vials of tailored influenza viruses scattered in out-of-the-way corners of ventilation ducts, waiting to jump on slightly less-than-immune hosts. Scattered nerve gas grenades to kill a little more quickly. It was not possible to covertly search all of MIT, especially the inhabited areas. Chao couldn’t be followed.

“It’s worse than that, isn’t it? If we start to obviously disperse people or search obviously, off goes the charge. It’s too great of a risk.” So Kathryn and Delbert’s people kept watch and slowly wormed their way into the closed societies that spoke only Chinese or Korean or Gamer, and subtly searched much of campus and the surrounding areas for tracks, but they did not find any definite leads.