I usually find at least one in every group of immigrants. I’m talking about those infernal pests, a.k.a.—the spies. They are like a plague of locusts, unrelenting in achieving their objective. From almost every nation across the globe, even a few from those so small, that one could have trouble locating their origin country on a map. They want to infiltrate the Solarian Union at any cost, and to steal our secrets. Using every trick in the book, and in a few cases—inventing new ones.

OK, so far they have played the game under certain rules of engagement and no lives were lost, but if they cross that line… I will show them why the Solarian Union is not something they want to mess with. We are simply not going to play by well-established rules.

Our recruitment policy is still going strong, despite very loudly voiced objections from certain groups. For example, for many televangelists’ we are defying God because we’ve decided to live in his realm of the heavens (FYI, I looked for those pearly gates, and for the life of me—couldn’t find them. Maybe they had bad altitude stabilizers and burned up on re-entry. At least, that is a position I took on some of their forums when I wanted to stir a bit of discussion.)

Seriously, those people are so easy to mess with, and their single-mindedness is no better than that of their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts who expect virgins in heaven. And let’s not even mention Scientologists and their objections that we are somehow treading on their beliefs. Allegedly, we are not being good humans as we are not waiting for the good aliens to come and save us all. (My opinion is that L. Ron Hubbard was a pure genius that put even P. T. Barnum to shame. The man could write science fiction with the best of them.)

Why can't all those people mind their own business and leave the rest of us alone? I don’t care what they believe in, and would never try to convince them of my own convictions. God forbid they ever found out about my existence, I would be named Satan’s bastard brother. The intelligence that is not made of flesh and blood… oh, the horror. In any case, they can talk all they want as long as that is all they do. (If they want to fight it out, I have a few Hammers to send their way… just saying.)

I’m getting off the topic; as I said, almost every single nation sent a few of their spies to us, and they employed almost every possible way to do it. From mixing identities to analyzing whom we are going to recruit next, and then working on them first. (It is stupefying what people will do for a bit of money, thinking ‘what’s the harm’ if they report to their handlers what is going on here.)

Well, I do mind, and I simply wouldn’t stand for it. I even went so far and sent a warning memo to all the world’s intelligence agencies, telling them to cease and desist with what in the S.U. is considered illegal activities. (It is technically illegal everywhere else too, but I wanted to point it out.)

It was polite and straightforward, so there was no possibility of misunderstanding it in any way. In the memo, I even explained a situation where if one walks onto private property and the owner asks him to leave, nobody should be surprised if he shoots the offender’s sorry ass if his wishes were not honored. OK, I’ll admit that it was somewhat passive-aggressive, but you cannot be too candid with these people, their minds were conditioned to disregard common sense and to search for a loophole in every aspect of their lives. (Still, the warning has been issued, and the fact that some idiot didn’t believe there would be consequences, is his own damn fault.)

In any case, all arriving immigrants are thoroughly scrutinized, and I mean up the wazoo. I don’t use those interrogation helmets ‘High Council’ had to endure, but extensive (yet noninvasive) scans, which are almost as good. Add to that a complete deep dive into the individual’s digital past, and all data his respective government (and a myriad of private companies) managed to collect during his life. One simply cannot fake that stuff to the level which would fool an AI. Regular humans, oh yes, but an AI—forget about it.

The interviewee is required to answer dozens of very personal questions (using that collected data as source material), while all his functions are closely monitored. And let me tell you, humans are very bad at lying. Our brains are simply not wired in a way where they could rationalize an intentional lie as a truth (special psychopathic cases excluded).

It takes me ten minutes tops to spot a mole, and that is out of a twenty-minute standard interview. Then I have my fun (depending on the circumstances).

If the infiltrator is just the run-of-the-mill civilian sucker, misled by our adversaries (and can be redeemed), I have a conversation and give him or her a monitoring bracelet which makes sure everything from then on would be on up-and-up. Alice and Elizabeth even recruited a good percentage of them to be double agents and to feed false information to those that made them into their assets.

About 95% are fine with that, seeing the error of their ways, and are willing to walk the path to redemption. The rest are sent home with the permanent ban to ever come back to the Solarian Union. When I apprehend a full, honest to god spy… I did warn them.

It is still early in the game so I don’t do anything too drastic which could escalate things, but I do employ naked and afraid tactics. (As in—leaving them naked in some remote location that is so far from civilization—they need to rely on their survival skills.)

Now, spies are generally well-trained individuals that had to have some sort of survival training. After all, it is in their job description that they need to adapt to various and often unforeseen situations. But that is not always the case. Especially if the spies in question were just unassuming analysts, of the cubical office variety. (And there is a surprisingly large number of those.)

If they are lucky enough and have watched Bear Grylls reruns on TV, they can rescue themselves quite easily, if not… I pick them up when I see they are at the end of their rope. Apparently, most humans don’t do all too well in virgin Jungle environments, various deserts, and don’t even get me started on subarctic climates.

How do I know? Simply, multiple camouflaged camera drones follow them everywhere. Besides, I am not doing that out of the kindness of my heart, I’m doing it for the ratings.

It is simply too good of a setting for a TV show. It is one thing to volunteer for such a thing, doing it as a part of survival training or simply to test oneself against extreme environments. It is very different when you are doing it against your will.

The show has high ratings on the Ascension and I am right now in the middle of negotiations with several TV-networks about selling them the first few seasons. That’s right, I have so much material (which implies how many spies were caught in my web), several seasons were not yet aired on the S.U. entertainment video streams.

And I truly get that sending spies (even to your allied countries) is the modus operandi that all governments on Earth had practiced for thousands of years, but it does not sit well with me. If any one of them somehow manages to steal the secret of the nanites, my prediction algorithms tell me that the world itself could be destroyed if that tech fell into the wrong hands. It could be so easily weaponized and turned into an Armageddon causing event. That’s why I don’t dare to loosen our excruciatingly invasive immigration policies, even if they cause a considerable slowdown in increasing our population base. Constant vigilance is the only solution, and making a joke out of people’s privacy rights. 99% of them may not be aware of it, but everything they do is monitored; every conversation, every email, or Internet post.

I turned myself into the Big Brother, but at least I do it covertly, so all our citizens can still live normally, believing that they do have some privacy. Oh, well, the things they don’t know... yeah.

Truth be told, I don’t see infiltration attempts stopping any time soon, but they are probably starting to experience a serious shortage of qualified personnel. I’m slowly making the top operatives famous in my survival shows, and being quasi-celebrities is not what one would call a prime situation for inconspicuous spies.

The things I have to do simply to make people happy.