“Hey, Paul, got a minute?” Pat asked as Scarlet came into the Officers’ Lounge. “I’ve got a theory I want to run past you before I take it to the Old Man.”
“All right, just let me get a drink first,” Paul answered, sensing he wanted to be running on all cylinders for this conversation. He made himself a cup of tea, then took a seat opposite Pat at the central table. “What’s it about?” he asked curiously once he’d settled himself.
“I’ve got some ideas about the reason why your sixth sense doesn’t always kick in. It’s about programming and dissonance,” Patrick explained as he shuffled through some pages of handwritten notes and abstract diagrams that he had spread out in front of him.
“You’ve lost me already,” the British officer ruefully admitted. “Start from the very beginning?” he asked, taking a sip of tea and giving Pat his full attention.
Patrick finished rearranging his papers and began his explanation: “Okay, so, the way I understand it, when the Mysterons replicate someone it’s pretty much like copying a computer file, right? It’s how they make sure their agent acts like normal until they’re needed. But when they do it, the Mysterons sneak some instructions of their own in there. When the Mysterons ‘activate’ their replicant to get them to do what they want, my guess is that the Mysterons’ ‘programming’ usually conflicts with the person’s original ‘program’, so they have to force their instructions to activate and then make them stay active.”
“That makes sense to me.” Paul nodded slowly as he pondered it. “So what does that mean? What does that last part look like in real life?” he asked, very curious now about what Magenta had come up with.
“Well, it seems like when someone’s doing something that they would be doing normally, I dunno, like driving a car from A to B, it’s all okay,” Pat explained, becoming animated as he tried to explain the abstract, even esoteric concepts. “The Mysterons can just let the program run as per normal, they don’t have to control anything and there’s not many, if any, active ‘transmissions’ going on. It’s when the Mysterons make their commands switch from dormant to active and make someone do something that’s not what they’d normally want to do – like drive that car into a river – that they have to activate their instructions and keep their power on the replicant to keep them from reverting to their original programming – so that means they’ve got to have an active, constant transmission happening.” Pat took a moment to sip from a glass of water. “That’s the point where you come in. Because you’re set up on similar lines to the replicants you can pick it up when the Mysterons are transmitting – you’ve still got the ‘antenna’ for it – but for whatever reason you’re off their frequency by just enough that instead of activating any programming it sets up some sort of dissonance and your body reacts by making you feel sick.”
“I think I got most of that.” Paul tilted his head to one side and frowned as he processed the information. “What about what happened with the Unitron and Colonel Storm? I didn’t pick up on him at all, but I did pick up Major Brooks,” he pointed out.
“You’ve met the Supreme Commander.” Pat gave him an almost conspiratorial grin. “Haven’t you wanted to shoot the guy? I’m betting the aide didn’t want to hurt anyone, but the Mysterons probably didn’t have to code too much to get Storm to do what they wanted.”
“Good point! The commander is rather insufferable, isn’t he?” Paul remarked, then sobered as a thought occurred to him. “It might explain why I didn’t detect the two agents when I was undercover, they were potentially doing something they had already agreed to. If your theory is correct it could make things harder – if the Mysterons pick the right agent and give them the ability to do something they wished to do anyway, they may not require much ‘signal boosting’ to activate and control them.”
“That’s a good one, I’ll include that.” Magenta grabbed a pen and added to his notes.
“Then how come Paul picked up on the DT-19 but not Flight 104? There weren’t any people they had to control on either aircraft,” Grey asked as he brought a chair over to join the conversation – he’d evidently been listening in.
“The 104 was the original plane,” Blue pointed out as he wandered over to the table, a half finished Times crossword in hand. “And we were distracted by those two reporters and the doctor, any subtle signals could have been missed. But the DT-19 was replicated,” he continued as he drew up a seat at the table.
“That makes sense.” Pat scribbled that down too. “Something the size of the DT-19 would probably have had a lot of residual Mysteron energy or something hanging around it from the retrometabolising and they were flying it too, but since they were just flying 104 it would have been a lot less, maybe enough to drop below whatever threshold it takes to trigger a biological response.”
“Plus I’d only been back on my feet for a short while when the DT-19 happened,” Paul added. “I was probably a lot more…” He paused to hunt for the right word. “More…sensitive? Prone to noticing?” He passed the half-full cup from hand to hand, not quite sure how to phrase what he wanted to say. “I was actively looking for differences and changes at the time, I might have been more attentive or attuned to it,” he finally ventured.
“Maybe that’s something you should start actively cultivating, instead of trusting it to just happen,” Grey suggested. “It’s like how we picked the radar operators at WASP. It wasn’t always the people with the most sensitive ears, the tech makes it a pretty even playing field on that front. It was the people with the most attentive ears that made the best radar ops.”
Paul nodded absently, wrapping his hands around his cup as he pondered. He dealt with a lot of his differences by largely ignoring them. It probably wasn’t the most healthy response going by how Doctor Orchid tutted at him, but it worked for him most of the time. “I’ll have to try that,” he said at last, then paused and looked up at the tannoy in the corner of the room. “Speaking of…”
The speaker crackled into life. “This is the voice of the Mysterons…”