Friday, August 30, 2013

CHAPTER 34

STEALTH AND INFILTRATION

It’s time to introduce a real pile of crap. If you’re planning on invading the Earth, you have reason to hate this individual. I refer to the Predak of Altar Seven.

Who is this individual is, and why is he worthy of your hate? We’ll get to that. For now, let’s just talk about being sneaky. Now more than ever it’s important for alien visitors on Earth to practice stealth and infiltration. Even if you have no hostile intent, one glance at your green hide is enough to cause a panic. And if you do have hostile intent, you of course want to stay hidden.

Infiltration can be a bitch. I was pretty lucky, myself. It appears my home planet and Earth shared a meteor impact in the distant past. Don’t ask me how that works, I’ve no clue.

Even if your race isn’t a close match to the humans, plenty of you are similar in body type. The bipedal humanoid form has a lot going for it when it comes to developing tools and technology; upright stance, eyes fixed in the front of the head, one or more opposable digits. From a distance, a lot of you could pass for an Earthling if you’re covered with something like a hooded cloak. If you add a robotic human mask, you have a disguise that can fool people at a distance. Though only a small segment of the planet’s population regularly wear hooded cloaks.

Which reminds me; if you’re sending in a scout team before hostilities, there’s a way to move about freely without using a disguise. Repeat after me:

“I AM A COSPLAYER. WHICH WAY TO COMIC-CON?”

Close up disguises are a lot harder. Your best bet is a holographic suit. That’s a suit covered with dozens of small holo projectors that create a three dimensional disguise all around you. The holo projectors can mimic your immediate surroundings so, even though your outline in no way resembles an Earthling, your suit can still make you appear to be a human.

Of course, you can use the same technology to make yourself just disappear entirely. The holographic cloaks can be set to project the surrounding landscape, making it appear like you’re not even there.

With the right adjustments, you can be totally invisible to terran sensors, and even visual scanning. But sight is only one sense you have to fool. There’s sound, which you can mask with white noise. There’s scent. There’s body heat. There’s the nearly imperceptible disturbance in the air as you move through it, which some very sensitive types can feel. If you run into that rare Earthling with ESP abilities, that’s another stumbling block.

The hologram should fool sentries and others at medium to even close range. But right up in front a sentry’s nose? There are just too many factors to successfully pull that off, from a slight lag time refreshing the hologram image to windblown dust and particles swirling around the “invisible” soldier.

Unless you’re like me and can naturally pass for human, you have three options for face-to-face deception, and all of them are tricky. First is to recruit human agents. You need a certain kind of invasion to even consider this; one that somehow benefits the Earthlings – or at least some of them – as much as it does you. The second option is to use sophisticated androids. Getting these androids to resemble humans isn’t that hard. The trick is to come up with an AI sophisticated enough to interact with other Earthlings without drawing suspicion. Finally, you can surgically alter some of your own troops to resemble humans. This is limited by your own physiology, and it’s a really crappy assignment. You need top quality, motivated troops to successfully carry out this maneuver. It’s only marginally easier to train a soldier to pass for a human than it is to create an AI program to do the same. You not only have to learn the spoken language, but you have to understand the shared cultural/regional experiences of a given area. This is the real “language” of the human race, and it varies wildly from country to country, and even from town to town. Just getting an agent to the point where he can truly express herself the way a real human would can take months. Let’s not forget recovery time from the procedures themselves. That’s going to take a while, too. And yes, all of this is going to cost you.

But technology is only good if you use it correctly, and the key to that is not to overuse it.

Which brings me back to the Predak of Altar Seven and why you should hate him. This jerk possessed some of the most advanced stealth technology in the galaxy. What did he use it for? He went to Earth to go hunting.

That’s right. He crossed all those light years just to put some trophies on his wall. And he got himself killed in the process.

And his technology was salvaged by the humans.

So now the humans are in possession of the most sophisticated stealth technology in the galaxy. They’ve certainly figured out how to defeat it. They may have even figured out how to replicate it.

This means any attempt to infiltrate the Earthlings by way of stealth is now fraught with danger. Chances are, your highly trained scouts will be spotted and killed right away. And that’s the best case scenario.

Suppose you are able to sit a scout right in the room with the commanding generals and learn every detail of the terran battle plan. Guess what? It only happened because the humans allowed it. Your scout will be feeding you completely false intel.

But that’s not the worst of it. Thanks to our friend the Predak here, you now have to legitimately fear the humans’ stealth ability. The only reason I’m certain there isn’t an Earthling here in this room right now is they still don’t have Faster Than Light drives.

I’m sure you’d all like to have a few words with this guy now. Lucky for the Predak, he’s already dead.

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