The Smeet

The Doubt

"I tell you, Ilk would make a wonderful engineer!" she heard uncle Pur's voice. "She's got the brains and wits for it! Heck, she even managed to hack into your data pad when she was a few months old!"

"Perhaps, but I think she'd do even better an Invader," dad said. "You just said it yourself, she has the smarts to successfully and I bet she'll be even better in combat. Who knows, perhaps we could even assign Earth to her."

"Wait a minute, you mean you're actually considering that one?"

"Why not? I mean, they do have tasty snacks."

"I agree on that one." Ilk imagined uncle Pur taking a bit of the trimisu on the table. "And from what I hear, there's even more. We've only tasted a few. Plus, I want to see the talking earth-beasts!"

Dad probably rolled his eyes. "You've seen too many earth-films, Pur."

"Anyway, it really won't be up to us. It's up to the Control Brains."

Not an Invader. Not an Invader. Ilk was chanting in her head.

Her PAK would be put in her spine when she arrived at the Academy; from what she'd heard, birthed-smeets were given PAKs made from scratch by the Control Brains, since there was no point in giving them another personality when they already developed their own. Perhaps that's how PAKs passed to new cloned smeets had been created in the first place.

Ilk had never been in the presence of a Control Brain. The one located in the Massive was strictly off-limits to her until she had a PAK, her father said otherwise or the Brain itself demanded to see her.

She still found it hard to believe dad and uncle had actual 'bosses', she had believed they were at the top of the hierarchy until a few weeks ago when almost going into the Control Brain chamber only to be caught at the last moment by one of the technicians in charge.

So the Control Brains would decide her future? What kind of job she'd have and who she'd be? Hopefully they would put her in the science division, just like uncle Purple said. She wasn't sure she wanted to contribute in bringing down a civilization to its knees.

*IZ*

"Doesn't this count as invading privacy?"

"Not when it's my daughter. Now shut up and let me hear!"

Okay, he promised Ilk he wouldn't eavesdrop on her conversations, but she never said anything about sending a mini-probe through the ventilation system, right?

Lately she had taken to making 'friends' with lesser species on Spacebook; while many Irkens considered such an action to be unacceptable, Red saw no problem with it. In fact, it might even be used to their advantage.

"She's going to get mad at us!" Purple chimed, snacking on some cotton-candy type of snack.

"What she can't see won't hurt her," Red said in a low voice, using his irkpad to see what Ilk was doing with the probe's camera. "Now be quiet!"

He zoomed in enough to see Ilk's irkpad, and noted she was video chatting with a young Screwhead. The mention of those yellow irked him ever since he learned of the massive escape they pulled a few years ago.

"So how are you doing, Smikko?" Ilk asked.

"Well, It's not that bad," the screwhead named Smikko stated. "At least dad let me use the tablet again, though it will be a while before he gets accustomed to me being friends with... well, you."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause you problems with your dad..."

"That's okay. I mean, I can't really blame him; he blames them for losing mom, but surely he'll come around... hopefully. How about you? What about your dad?"