I’m a little tired. I was up until quite late last night building a new hackhub for tapping secure satellite comms. More on that later. Also, the local pathetic farts were up until 1 a.m. compensating for their pathetic farts via their chrome exhausts. I would have gone out there and disintegrated them with my plasma laser, but this is not really the best time to be drawing attention to myself. You see, I don’t want to worry you, but I have an inkling that Maria T is still with us.
It’s my fault. I should have done a complete sweep of the Solar System last time. I could have kicked myself when I saw the faint locator signal on my deep space probe log. After the Halbarrat Incident, you’d think I would have learned. Now, there’s a memory. Those poor people… well, strictly speaking they weren’t people. Plants can be subjugated too, and if you’ve never seen fields of food crops stretching to the horizon in every direction, being harvested by their terrified vegetable cousins, consider yourself lucky. When the Perifuerra were cornered by the Galactic Razor Squad their final act was not surrender but wilful, suicidal destruction. I shudder still to think of it. When the fire came, I’d say it was a release for all of them.
I’ve said too much, never mind – pretend you didn’t read that.
So my probe had picked something up at the Sol/Earth L3 point, opposite the Sun – clever, because humans haven’t ventured out there yet. You can’t just leave stuff at L3: it needs a stable orbit. And luckily, that orbit, at certain times of year, is wide enough to peek around the solar disc from our point of view. Anyway, I’ve calculated that at the time I destroyed Maria T’s backup pod at Saturn, there was a clear line-of-sight path to L3. This means that the pod could already have relayed a mind backup to L3, and I have a hunch that’s what took place.
What I’m not sure of is why nothing’s happened since then. Possibly there’s a fault in the pod, or perhaps I’m actually wrong and what I’ve found is nothing to do with Maria T. But I need to check it out because the other possibility is that there is another pod around Saturn that I missed, and the L3 pod could still contact it.
I plan to take a trip out to L3 in a couple of weeks on July 9th, because Saturn will be at opposition. This will make it impossible for the pod to talk to anything at Saturn as Sol will be between them. Thus I should be able to destroy it without any chance of its ‘phoning home’. One thing I’ve learned about Professor Thessifus is that it’s impossible to overestimate her cunning.
Until my trip, I’ll be scanning Saturn carefully for signals, just in case. And then there’s the hackhub: I’ll be using my new toy to intercept as many Earth transmissions as possible, in case I hear anything that might reveal her presence. I might not get many chances to update the blog, but keep watching: I’ll be about.
Oh, and before I go, here’s a little guessing game for you. One of Earth’s large commercial enterprises was set up with money from another star and is being run by an alien in disguise. Have fun figuring out which one.
