Stuck in the Middle

By KA Hopkins

Jake White was your typical middle-aged father, until by sheer bad luck, a sentient artificial intelligence (AI) in a worn-out alien scout ship befriended him and asked for help with a small problem. That small problem made Jake and an old Special Forces buddy, Marc Stack, the two most wanted terrorists on Earth. If that wasn’t enough, Jake had to come to terms with the fact that he was no longer one hundred percent human. In fact, he wasn't human at all.

To compound their problems, humanity was one of many sentient beings in the galaxy that extraterrestrials with a galactic corporate agenda had interfered with for thousands of years. In an effort to rid Earth of extraterrestrial influence Jake, Marc, a handpicked group of Special Forces operators and their companions, head off to the home world of the United League of Interstellar Races (the League) to ask for help in ridding Earth of alien influence.
Much to their surprise, they find out that despite the League being many times larger and thousands of years more technically advanced than Earth, the League’s leaders just might be more afraid of humanity then we are of them.

No matter what Jake does to free Earth from alien influence, he finds that circumstances keep putting him into deeper and deeper holes. Never could he have imagined the grave consequences of his team's actions. All he wanted was a little help dealing with a few extraterrestrials who were trying to subjugate Earth. How hard could that be?

Stuck in the Middle, is the second book of the Undreamt Consequences trilogy. It explores the premise that advanced civilizations will have artificial intelligences and biological beings interacting as equal citizens; so much so that the AIs appear to behave more 'human than humans.' The book continues to offer a refreshingly different take on “extraterrestrials are the good guys and here only to help humanity with our journey to the stars.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: KA Hopkins
• Release date: Nov 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994756961

KA Hopkins

I'm married, have a couple of teenage kids, a bunch of pets including a stray cat that in no way resembles "Boris" other than I have fish that are smarter. Trained as an electrical engineer, currently working as an IT consultant. Have held a number of interesting positions over the years: army officer, air show pilot, teacher, systems engineer, project manager, IT architect, and IT security expert.

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of Caren Von Rooyen who left us far too early.

The path ahead is now a little rougher and harder without your spirit to guide the way. I would have never made it this far without your friendship, advice and passion. You believed in me, when I did not have the faith to believe in myself. There are just not enough ways to thank you for all that you have done. You will be missed.

Acknowledgements

No author writes in isolation. This book is the result of the contributions from many friends and colleagues who generously donated their time. Many people were instrumental in making this book come to life. While I would like to thank everyone personally, I'm sure I will forget to mention someone so here is the one-size-fits- all…thank you everyone.

A special thanks to all the beta readers: Marc, Shane, Terry, Chris, Grant, James, Frikkie, Al, Walter and my family.

Finally, a heartfelt shout out to: Dave for correcting the misapplications of engineering terminology and Adria for her hard work fixing the many ways that I have found to misuse and abuse the English language.

Prologue

It all started nearly a year ago when Jake White showed up at Marc Stack's house, unannounced in the dead of the night, with an unbelievable story of an alien scout ship sentient artificial intelligence (AI) who needed assistance.

Helping an alien AI may have sounded like a noble act but with the benefit of hindsight, Jake should have paid more attention to the sinister portrayal of AIs by Hollywood. In many cases they are little more than poor caricatures created by screenwriters but they did get one thing right - not all AIs are benevolent. Jake could have never imagined that a machine intelligence in real-life would be anything less than truthful. His naivety caused him to miss the obvious; the alien AI who he nicknamed 'Mother,' had manipulated him from the very beginning.

Mother's actions to save Jake the night the alien snatch team attacked his family were not quite as benign as they first appeared to be. As Mother explained it, she needed a small, almost inconsequential favor. Her engines, life support, and navigation systems were so old she was due to be decommissioned on Earth's Moon. If that occurred there was no way she could report her findings: the Dracos and their allies the Grays were pacifying Earth, without formal authorization from the United League of Interstellar Races (the League) Grand council, the body that controlled all colonization of new planets. She needed help and decided that although the odds of success were in the single digits, Jake was the one to provide it.

With Mother’s help and a whole lot of luck, Jake managed to kill her crew. Unfortunately, the last member of the crew, the Captain, killed Jake. Funny enough, Mother had told Jake precisely where the captain was hiding only he was not exactly where she claimed. Mother's instructions on where to find the alien crew, up to the point where Jake got myself killed, had been perfect. Jake had never connected the dots before. Was it possible that Mother had planned Jake's death, so that she could transfer his consciousness into a highly improved alien-designed artificial body? A body so superior to a human one, that it would greatly improve the chances of successfully completing her mission. The fact that his death might not have been anything but an accident never crossed Jake's mind - until much later.

After his consciousness was transferred into a new body, Jake had near superhuman strength, endurance and Omni, an internal cybernetic companion. If his new body was any indication, alien technology was at least several hundred years in advance of Earth's. Advanced as it was, the alien technology was not perfect. It was not as if Jake picked his new body off the rack like a suit. The assimilation between physical body and human consciousness had been anything but fun and involved substantial pain. While Jake could understand a period of adjustment for the changes to take place, he struggled to believe Mother when she told him it only took a couple of hours to grow a new human-looking shell.

What he failed to realize was that aliens had been visiting Earth for thousands of years and were very familiar with the human genome, having created modern Homo sapiens. Bottom line - humanity was an alien science experiment. Any alien race could lay claim to Earth as humans had no formal status within the League.

After years of seemingly random alien sightings, it was the dawn of nuclear weapon proliferation spreading across the planet that caused alien Grays in 1947 to formally approach the world’s leading super power – the US Government. This led to the signing of the Grenada Treaty. Except the aliens were not the League representatives they claimed to be. Decades passed before the truth leaked out. The alien Grays were representing their Draco masters, not the League.

The Grenada Treaty authorized the exchange of human test subjects for alien technology. The government officials who agreed to the treaty at the time did not have much choice, or so they convinced themselves. Nearly sixty million people had died during the six years of World War II. With the memories of the dead still haunting the living, humans were forced to accept the possibility of having to fight an interstellar war against unknown alien enemies with technology vastly superior to anything on Earth.

In an effort to beg, borrow or steal enough time for US scientists to understand and exploit recovered alien technology from several Earth crash sites, it was believed that the 'ends justified the means,' so any deal that stalled the looming threat of war, no matter how bad, was considered acceptable. This sense of panic caused the US government to invite the heads of every US major technology company to help reverse engineer the alien technology.

As usual, when human lives are at risk nothing was as simple as it first appeared. Without a doubt the behavior of those who traded human lives for alien technology while becoming uber-wealthy was horrid. However, in their defense, the deal offered by the aliens was the best of a short list of lousy options. The deal, shitty as it was, only foreshadowed worse things to come. The trading of human lives for technology was only a smoke screen to mask the alien’s true intention of pacifying Earth for the Draco Empire.

Ironically, no matter what one thought about the Global Elite taking advantage of their fellow man, once the Draco Empire strategic planners decided Earth was key to their long-range goals, the human race's fate was a forgone conclusion.

When US firms could not crack the engine technology of the crashed alien ships, only then did US government officials seek help from Russia, France and the United Kingdom. The commercial spinoffs from the alien technology were a gold mine. The wealth created made everyone involved conveniently forget any indignation over how the United States conducted the initial treaty negotiations. Like the US government, foreign governments decided the best keepers of the secret alien technology were the corporations brought in to exploit it.

The Global Elite made trillions on the alien treaties. The fact that thousands of innocent humans died in the alien labs each year was a minor detail, conveniently overlooked. More importantly, Earth's understanding of alien technology grew at an incredible pace and primitive copies of alien spacecraft capable of both intersystem and interstellar travel rolled off the aerospace giants’ drawing boards from Lockheed, Boeing, Airbus and Sukhoi.

Instead of showing him the door, and despite Jake's nutter story full of hostile extraterrestrials and government conspiracy theories, Marc sensed Jake’s desperation and agreed to help on the spot. He became Jake's right hand man in their quest to rid Earth of unwanted extraterrestrial influence.

While many alien races were hostile towards Earth, two stood out in their efforts to subjugate the planet. The Grays and their masters the Draco. If humans put up enough resistance, the Grays would admit defeat and find another ‘easier’ alien race to subjugate.

Getting rid of the Draco was an entirely different matter. They were a race of bad tempered, cold blooded, seven-foot tall bipedal beings that looked a lot like overgrown lizards. The Draco deserved their reputation as 'the most feared race' in League known space. No other race within the League could match the Draco’s unwavering loyalty to their empire.

Humans could willingly join the Draco empire… or not. If humanity chose the not option, things would not end well. Wiping out a race or two or several hundred for their empire caused the Draco no more worry than a human crushing an ant.

The Draco heavily depended upon the Grays. Although considered slaves, the Grays were the most trusted advisors to the Draco. In fact, much of Draco science, engineering, and mathematics came from the Grays. The Draco Empire could not function without its Gray slaves. On Earth, the Grays were the Draco’s muscle, doing all the dirty work necessary to enslave the planet.

Into the middle of this alien nightmare of empire building, Jake put Marc and a group of incredibly brave Special Forces operators who had all agreed to go on what would most likely be a one-way mission to the League home world to fight for Earth's freedom.

Chapter 1 - Conditioning

Timeline - Present day…

Have you ever had one of those days, when you should have stayed in bed? I was having a year of those days. No matter what I did or how I did it, everything I touched turned to crap - and in the end, a whole lot of people died because of my actions. While I thought my actions were just, and believed with my entire being that the path I was on was a righteous one, the facts told a very different story.

As much as my conscience troubled me, it was the least of my problems. Any minute now, the interrogator was due to return for my next conditioning session.

The United League of Interstellar Races, or as it was more commonly called by its nearly half trillion citizens, The League had strict rules on how to treat unknown alien races that it wanted to know more about. Unfortunately, humans were at the top of the information wanted list, so the strict rules were now somewhat flexible.

The League was in a panic to find out as much as possible about the spacefaring capability of humanity. Despite their overwhelming advantages in technology and population, they were quite possibly more scared of us primitive humans than we were of them. Their fear of humanity was not unfounded. In less than one hundred years, Earth had progressed from sailing ships to spaceships. If that pace of progress continued, within a hundred years or so, humanity would take its rightful place amongst the stars. Given our history of going to war over resources, conflict between the League and Earth was not a question of if, but when.

The conditioning protocol encouraged the subject to provide the desired information, through a series of progressive steps that involved exponentially increasingly painful stimulus. The pain guaranteed the subject under questioning would provide answers. Whether or not the subject knew what they were talking about was irrelevant. From painful personal experience it appeared that the interrogator’s goal was to obtain the desired information using any means possible. The only caveat, try not to kill the alien under interrogation. The operative word being 'trying.'

After days of polite questioning, responses like 'bite me' and 'eat shit' were not the answers the interrogator wanted. To encourage an attitude adjustment, a fancy chronometer watch was strapped to my wrist. I was very familiar with the device; on Earth, extraterrestrial aliens used it with great success to corrupt the Global Elite.

Of all the ways extraterrestrial aliens might take over a planet, a fancy watch may not appear particularly effective - but it was. The watch was a marvel of miniaturization. It contained GPS, visual and audio monitoring capability, a locator beacon, and a proximity alert to detect other similar watches. Of all the watch features, the one I had grown to hate was the powerful neural stimulator, used to correct undesirable behavior.

A police Taser felt like the tingling sensation you get when you hit your elbow compared to the neural stimulator. When used on a human nervous system, the neural stimulator caused severe seizures. If the duration was longer than a few seconds, it could break bones and even kill. All in all, an extremely efficient tool for behavior modification. One or two pulses were enough to change someone's behavior for a lifetime. Once the watch was on, the band self-welded closed. There was no way to remove it - short of cutting off your hand.

Being a slow learner or just too stubborn to know better, I was into day fourteen of the conditioning protocol and had suffered well over a hundred pulses from the bloody thing. It was a record I would be happy to let someone else break. Even with my mind's ability to hide deep in my subconscious when in great pain, leaving my cybernetic implant Omni in charge, I was unsure how much more I could endure.

Even though I was in a bad state, my thoughts fixated on my partner - Marc Stack. My frantic demands for any information as to what had happened to him, fell on deaf ears. I sincerely hoped he was not undergoing the same treatment I was. As bad as it was for me, I had ways to deal with enhanced interrogation techniques that he did not. He was a normal human being and not an artificial construct like me.

Superior artificial construct or not, my interrogator knew his stuff. My screams of agony were muffled by the security complex's three-foot thick walls and soundproof doors. Making interrogation rooms soundproof was a different design approach compared to many Earth prisons; hearing the anguish of others and knowing that you are next is a powerful psychological tool for captors during 'enhanced questioning protocols,' better known on Earth as torture.

I was unsure if my tormented screams would have any influence on Marc. As a former Special Forces, Green Beret, he was one of the elite fighters in the world. Even as an unmodified human, regular soldiers viewed the physical and mental abilities of operators with awe. Resistance to enhanced interrogation techniques was something they trained specifically for, but no matter how tough, eventually everyone breaks - even me.

My interrogator was a Tall Gray who had to be at least seven feet in height. He had piercing green, oval shaped eyes, several times larger than human ones. Despite his alien features, he was rather handsome. His body was well proportioned; his one piece skintight unitard uniform could not hide the significant muscular development on his arms, chest and legs. His skin was a very pale grayish white and there was no sign of any body hair. Unlike most tight-lipped short Grays that I had met in the past, he was a regular chatterbox; always carrying on about the weather, how bad the League Grand Council policies were and his favorite sports team. He seemed to be a rather likeable alien despite his chosen profession.

He spoke with a passion for sports that easily rivaled any soccer fan during the World Cup. At length he described his favorite game to me; it was obvious that for him it was not just a sport but a religion. His descriptions were so vivid that I could easy build a mental picture of the play-by-play action.

His favorite game involved two teams, riding on powered anti-gravity disks and using what sounded like polo mallets to hit multiple floating metal spheres across a three-dimensional playing dome several times larger than an indoor soccer pitch. The object of the game was to hit the opponents moving target board with the spheres, in specific combinations to create different colors and musical tones.

The game according to my interrogator was very physically demanding. The mallets weighed fifty pounds each and could be used to hit the floating spheres or knock opponents off their anti-grav disks, and if that didn't work, an opponent could be knocked off their disk by ramming them.

Great athletic and artistic prowess was required, as the anti-grav disks could maneuver at speeds of up to 60 mph. Points were awarded for color, musical harmony and the number of opposing team players injured or killed. To encourage both teams to give it their all on the field, the losing team had to sacrifice their captain to the winning team - in this case, sacrifice did not mean traded.

The life and death drama both on and off the field made it hugely popular throughout the League. I thought it interesting that in a culture far more technically advanced than Earth's, made up of a significant population of AIs, blood sports between live competitors still had a 'reverent' position with the public masses.

Throughout my conditioning my interrogator would not shut up about his favorite sport. After a while it was a toss-up as to what was more painful, his constant ramblings or the physical abuse.

Mr. White, my treatment of you is nothing personal, the interrogator sighed. I'm really a nice being. I’m only doing a job. It's just that I have a talent, I have been told it's an exceptional gift that would be a shame to waste.

How do know you have a gift for torture? I asked, grunting out the words between clenched teeth. Did you go to school and take courses, or is it more a case of on-the-job-training?

My interrogator ignored my less than subtle attempt to distract him and buy myself some respite from his unrelenting torture. Despite his claims that it wasn't personal, given a chance, I was more than willing to kill him…painfully and slowly. As personal as I could make it. I was a firm believer in the fire and brimstone aspects of the Old Testament - turning the other check was not part of my character.

The interrogator said, I must commend you on your ability to resist, it is nothing short of incredible. I have no experience with your species but in our short time together your strength of character has earned my greatest respect. Unfortunately, I have never failed to obtain the answers that the League Grand Council seeks and do not intend to ruin a perfect work record. I will ask you one last time…what are Earth's plans for conquering League worlds?

I gave him my standard answer, 'eat shit.' Frustrated at having achieved nothing in the past two weeks, my interrogator decided to become a bit more imaginative in his questioning methods.

Since pain does not seem to encourage your cooperation, maybe permanent disfigurement or the loss of a limb will work.

He picked up a metallic, silver- handled tool…one that was familiar. The tool was the same type that I had used to test my healing ability when I first discovered that I was no longer human. It was an eblade. He turned it on by pressing a hidden button in the hilt. In place of a metal blade, a foot-long energy field appeared, able to cut through hardened steel. Cutting through flesh and bone would be no more difficult than a hot knife through butter. It had all been fun and games up to this point, now it was about to get seriously painful - I had him exactly where I wanted him.

I relayed my plan to Omni, my cybernetic implant using our internal communication link. His comment was, "This is the best that you can come up with after all this time?" I choose to ignore the cynicism and let him take control of my body, as the shock of what I had in mind just might kill me.

My plan depended upon the interrogator not knowing that Omni's could insolate my nervous system and shield my mind from pain that would kill a normal human being. It was a side effect of Omni being able to control all body-motor functions similar to an aircraft autopilot. It was a useful feature if I was exhausted. My mind could sleep while Omni kept overwatch, essentially allowing my body to function for days or several weeks without rest.

My restraints consisted of the neural stimulator in the oversized chronograph watch and physical shackles that chained my arms to the wall, forcing me to hang in the air like a gymnast performing an Iron Cross on the rings. The watch was the nastier of the two restraints - if I tried to move more than an inch or two, it automatically fired for several seconds, causing complete incapacitation for five to ten minutes. There was no sane way to escape.

That's the trouble with advanced alien races, they always assume primitive races will understand and play by their rules. Being what the League labeled ‘an unpredictable savage,’ faced with extremely poor odds, I did the only thing that I could - I became wildly unpredictable. As the interrogator approached me, I let my body slump and pretended that I was at the end of my rope, broken, and would now answer whatever questions asked of me.

Not a whole lot of acting was required on my part. After two weeks of being chained to the wall, I was not looking or feeling my best. Since I had not had a bath during the entire conditioning period, the interrogator was not keen in getting too close. Even I had to admit, a dead goat smelled better than I did.

For my plan to work, I needed the interrogator to overcome his aversion to my stench and get as close as possible, so I mumbled several nonsensical answers. To hear me better, he put what passed for an ear next to my mouth, which I promptly tried to bite off, and used my legs to push him to one side while kicking him hard, in what passed for his junk.

My sudden movement caused the neural stimulator to fire, incapacitating me. Infuriated at being physical touched by what he considered to be an inferior being, not to mention kicked in what passed for his privates, he reacted instinctively and in a moment of rage stuck my nearest arm with the eblade, which severed the arm six inches below the elbow. The same arm which just happened to have the neural stimulator attached to it. I was still in shock and incapacitated but with the neural stimulator gone, nothing interfered with my muscles.

With Omni in control of my body, I was more of an observer than a participant. I watched with some amusement as Omni forced my muscles to deliver an upper cut with my freed arm to the interrogator's chin. With nothing left but a bloody stump where the eblade severed the forearm and hand, the blow was the equivalent of getting smashed in the jaw with the blunt end of a stick. The force of the blow was enough to cause the interrogator’s teeth to slam together, breaking his jaw. As the interrogator fell to the floor, Omni used my feet to grab the eblade out of his hand. With the eblade between the toes of one foot, Omni forced my body to do a vertical sit up on the wall and sliced through the restraint holding my other arm.

I landed on top of the now unconscious interrogator, who groaned involuntarily as I knocked the wind out of him. Omni used the eblade to cut several strips of fabric from the interrogator's shirt. With my good hand and mouth, Omni managed to tie a tourniquet on my arm. With only a small amount of blood leaking through the tourniquet and the incapacitation effects of the neural pulse wearing off, Omni gave back control. The flood of pain was blinding, it forced me to lean against the wall to try and catch my breath. It hurt like nothing I had experienced before and I had a lot of experience with pain. New and improved body or not, having one's hand cut off hurt like hell!

"Omni, given how much pain I'm still in, I would have been ok with you retaining control for a bit longer."

"Sorry about that, but you only shared your plan with me up to the point where the interrogator cut your hand off and I instructed the nanobots in your blood to stop the bleeding. What's next?"

How should I know? I didn't think my plan would work.

"Why am I surprised - human thinking…so rash, so chaotic, so unique to your species. If I maybe so bold. Why don’t you grab the eblade, change cloths with the guard, call for someone to open the door and then kill them. Unlike your plans this one is simple enough that even you will have difficulty screwing it up. Oh! Given how things have turned out, from now on, why don't you take a page from the United States Marine Corps - be polite, be courteous but plan on killing everyone you meet."

Omni's attitude was nothing new. He was by nature prone to sarcasm but meant well, and more often than not was right. I tended to ignore his advice not because I didn’t trust AIs, far from it. For me it was a form of self control over an annoying companion that I could not get rid of. I also did it for the petty reason - it drove him crazy. This time, I was too tired to play my normal mental games with him, and took the path of least resistance.

"Roger that. Judging by the poor hospitality I received, it's apparent that the League does not have my best interests at heart."

Omni's plan, while simple, did not survive first contact with the enemy. The guards, having watched the surveillance feeds, knew that I had escaped my restraints and rushed into the room only seconds after Omni had shared his plan. Given that I had greatly embarrassed their credibility by withstanding weeks of their questioning, I anticipated that they would shoot first and skip any awkward questions.

When the door slammed open, their initial volley of shots passed harmlessly above me as I threw myself on top of the unconscious interrogator who groaned involuntarily a second time as I once again knocked the wind out of him. I grabbed the only shield possible with my good hand, and rushed them with the interrogator's body, using him as a battering ram. It was a brute force attack, with no subtlety or grace, but it had all the right attributes: speed and violence. All of us went down in a pile by the doorway. Thanks to good planning or luck – I was on top.

In a fight between an opponent with a gun or one with a knife, usually the gun trumps the knife. In a confined space, a knife is the better option because it's quicker. If a knife in close quarter fighting is good, an eblade is better. Not used to physically grappling with inmates, both guards panicked and lost their heads - literally.

With the guards neutralized, I used the eblade to cut off their hands. It was unpleasant but necessary. Alien beam weapons contained a DNA scanner. Without the correct DNA, nasty things happened to any unauthorized person attempting to fire one. Before leaving the room, I grabbed my hand off the floor, slipped the watch off and stuck the cauterized end on the stump of the arm. The nanobots in my blood started the process of reattaching the hand’s nerves, muscles, blood vessels and bones to my arm. Despite the massive trauma, it should only take a day or so to heal - being an alien construct did have a few advantages.

In the corridor, I could see the doors to cells, like the one that I had been held in, stretching out of sight in both directions. I expected to find a master unlock panel at the main entrance of the corridor. After several minutes of unsuccessful searching, it was easier to shoot the locks off, cell-by-cell. I found the entire team, all forty operators and eighty companions, with one exception.

To my surprise, the crew's cells were luxurious, more like high-end hotel suites than prison cells. It lifted my moral to see their treatment had been much better than mine. Having cooperated, the League Grand Council ensured their care was excellent.

After searching nearly all the cells on the prison wing, I finally found Marc's cell at the furthest end. Several blasts from the alien beam weapon knocked the door off its hinges and I burst into his cell with every intention of playing the hero arriving to save the day.

Marc looked great; he was stretched out in a body conforming chair, having what passed for a local beer, watching what looked like the favorite sport described by my former interrogator on a holographic display centered in the middle of the room.

Marc stared at me for a few seconds, his eyes widened slightly at the mangled smoking door lying on the floor and his nose wrinkled as my stench wafted throughout the room.

I take it our lawyer's appeal did not go well. More importantly, what the hell happened to you? You look like something the cat dragged in.

They must have misplaced my room reservation for the presidential suite. My room service sucked, I whined.

"Yep, that tends to happen when you don't agree to cooperate. At our trial just before