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The Great and The Good (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!)
Chapter 15 - Coffins[]
"Are you finished…
…disrupting everything?" Natalie Roberts demanded in horror as Mr. Farrous was carried out of the school building.
"You insisted." Amanda reminded her, "It's good, I'm working through my issues, progress is ay-plus."
"What did you do to Him?!?"
"Less than he did." She said, "He arranged the raid, Mrs. Roberts, he also encouraged Jeffrey to extremism. He is an enemy agent, and I failed to get who he's working for out of him, but maybe the interrogation specialists can get something useful."
She tossed the axe-handle into the back of the truck, "Johnson, fetch the chains, we're done here."
"Aye ma'am." the boy hurried back into the building.
"The raid? Mister Farrous?"
"That's what I said. Eleven of my classmates, friends maybe? People like me, twelve of us, abducted by armed men, Mother. He organized it, targeted us, I found out why."
"Why?"
"We were the ones with a capacity for violence in his eyes." she stated, "they took us, and experimented on us, to make weapons, somehow, I think we were supposed to be made into weapons against the government." she paused, "living weapons. Homegrown terrorists, maybe…and when I woke up in the middle of surgery and destroyed his colleagues, because they actually did a good job? I'm guessing Jeff, and his friends? Were plan 'B'."
"But…why?"
"Because everyone has the capacity for violence, Mother." Amanda stated, "Some of us are just closer to the release than others. He started with a poisoning plot that would be found out, to harden the plotters and give them a fire in the belly, which he could feed until he had his suicide bombers, mass shooters, whatever it was he wanted from them. It's a method as old as time itself. Find someone unsatisfied, and agree with them, start making suggestions.
...support them when it goes awry-distantly, at first, push their grievances to a scale larger than they comprehend in their own mind-it's how to brew a terror cell in the middle of a pacifist religious community…and always just one step to the side."
Johnson came back with the tyre chains and put them back in their compartment.
"Let's go see Dad."
Is it true?
"The methodology is part of my programming, one of the functions of the Desmond systems. Was to sow dissent and create inciting incidents in target populations to destabilize member-state governments when necessary." Desmond answered, "You actually recognized it without my assistance on an instinctual level, I simply provided you the words to explain it to a layman. It does not require an AI to carry out, it is simply one tool that was programmed for a multipurpose operative in the Desmond program of the SAS."
You recognized it.
"Of course, Their operation here had all the hallmarks of an SLIC destabilization operation, including the use of long-term deep-cover operatives, though the tradecraft could use some work. As I noted with the operative's cover identity and travel papers defying logical analysis, but then, the Outworlds Alliance has always been a soft target in terms of SLIC's evaluations. High concentrations of religious atavism and isolated subcultures held together with a weak central government, finding or cultivating the right kind of pawns was considered exceptionally simple, especially in light of a lack of internal security agencies with real power over the common populace."
You mean lack of a secret police.
"Yes. The liberties your people embrace make them spectacularly vulnerable to manipulations by hostile powers. The trade really is as simple as Liberty, or Security-you don't get to have both. The Terran Hegemony and most of the major states chose Security over Liberty. This led whoever owns Mister Farrous to making obvious mistakes because those mistakes would not be questioned in an environment so lacking in oppressive central control."
She frowned, watching out the window of the truck.
I prefer Liberty. she asserted silently, "With all its seeming flaws."
"Then I prefer it as well, Amanda." it seemed like the AI was hesitant, "but does that mean what we did was wrong?"
no. she shook her head, His actions undermine Liberty, Desmond. Such are worthy of opposition.
She felt a rush of satisfaction, of decisiveness.
"Thank you for the clarification"
"Pardon?" her mother asked.
"I was musing over a civics problem." Amanda stated, "You know, the kind we teenagers always angst over- freedom or safety, peacefulness or helplessness." she turned and gave the woman who birthed her, and whom she still didn't remember clearly, a wan smile.
"Safety is better." Natalie asserted.