Dr. Vall was sitting in her office. Out of all the creatures on the Vrul home world beside the council, she was one of the most powerful creatures on the face of the planet. She had access to and control of almost 100% of the young alpha population in the city, and still.... she had what amounted to no power at all. Despite what an outsider might see looking in, she knew exactly where she stood with the council.
She had made the mistake early in her career of questioning some of the methods laid out before her by the higher ups, and it had almost ruined her career, in fact, there had been talk of putting out a termination order for her The council had argued that she was mind sick and experiencing psychological problems during that time. Personally, she had felt fine, so there were two explanations, either on, she was crazy and really good at hiding it or two the council said she was crazy until she started having their opinion.
It was, complicated.
Once upon a time she had coveted this job, thinking that it would be the height of her career, she would learn so much and do so many thing and changed the way the world worked, but I the end she was a glorified administrator and a figurehead at best, She did none of the science, and she made almost none of the decisions. It was her job, to take the decisions of the council and pass them off as her own.
She hated it.
But what else was there for her to do? She saw what happened to others when they attempted to defy the council. They ended estranged from their own species, relying on the kindness and charity of aliens to support them. They lost what it meant to be Vrul, yet, at the same time, she wasn't sure she understood what that meant.
She tried not to think about it. The more she thought, the more likely she was to be punished that's always how it worked, independent thinking led to ideas, and if those ideas slipped out than they tended to lead to losing your job and your life.
Best to keep quiet.
She was in a half state of trance when the door opened, two of her cortical hemispheres shut down for maintenance. In other species that might have been called sleep though she was not fully unconscious. She could have turned off three hemispheres of her brain and still functioned quite well, but like most Vrul she didn't prefer it, thinking was harder, and it was just easy to doze while parts of her brain slept.
When the door opened however, she became alert t, and the hemispheres of her brain began to reboot.
She shifted and turned in her seat.
Turning towards the doorway, she was surprised to see a Vrul that she was sure she had never met before.
How could she be sure?
Well number one she had a photographic memory, and number two ,she would remember a Vrul that looked like this anywhere. It wasn't something that you could have missed or forgotten. Her mottled grey/brown against white skin was quite striking, and something she was sure the council would never have allowed.
She shook her head, wondering if she was just imagining things, but the image didn't go away, in fact, the young Vrul moved closer. And that was clear enough, the Vrul was very young, probably under two cycles old maybe more maybe less give or take a microcycle or two, but she worked with enough young Vrul students to recognize them on site.
Though, there was already soemthing odd in the way this one moved.
Eerie.... Fluid, but somehow jerky as well.
The young Vrul did not seem to rely as heavily on the helium sack as they did on their legs, and the simply way in which they moved was just..... disconcerting.
She knew what it was immediately.
Dr. vall was a scientist after all. She loved the subject, and xenobiology was her guilty pleasure. She would recognize the humanizing phenomena anywhere, and with how integrated it seemed to be into this young Vrul's pattern of behavior, there were only a few options for what remained. Some might have called her deductions clever, she found that they weren't clever so much as obvious once you took the time to discard anything that was impossible or didn't make sense.
She turned where she floated in mid- air.
"I am going to assume you haven't come to hurt me/ As I certainly hope is the case?"
The young Vrul stepped further into the room, and Vall would have been remiss if she didn't admit her surprise when two others followed. Based on relative height the three Vrul were the same age, and, to her surprise, based on their antennae, eye shape and a few other markers, they were also from the same incubation period. No.... it went further than that, not only had they been born at the same time, but she would have bet that these three were from the same batch of eggs inseminated by the same genetic donor.
Siblings, that was the word for it.
Funny that she even had that word in her vocabulary considering that Vruls didn't look at birthing that way, but the existence of the word in their language proved that, at some time there had been a use for it. That word was one of the original reasons that she had almost lost her job so many years ago.
She had been in contact with a nonlinguistics expert at one point in time, and they had discussed the odd coincidence of certain phrases and words in the Vrul vocabular that had no right to exist as they did not pertain to the way life worked on the Vrul homeworld. At the end of the conversation she had suggested that maybe life hadn't always existed the way they thought it had and for whatever the reason those words had been important at one time.
She tried looking into the subject, but before she knew it her linguistics friend had been terminated and her sanity had been called into question by the bord of quality control.
"You are not supposed to be here." She said to the young Vrul who had not yet bothered to ask her question.
The dappled one at the front tilted it's head at her in a distinctly un-Vrul expressions of curiosity, "No we aren't here to kill you, yes we aren't supposed to be here, but I think you will want to hear what we have come to tell you."
She continued to float I the same place. She didn't think that the newcomers were dangerous, but she wasn't interested in finding out too soon. She had a few theories.
"Who are you."
"I am Atropos, this is Clotho and that is Lachesis, we are the intentional offspring of Dr. Krill and Dr. Riss."
She could certainly have guessed their first parent, but the second was a little more surprising. The council had claimed that Dr. Riss died in some sort of accident, or at least that is what they had said to the general population, the part of the population that did not have access to intergalactic news.
She had known better.
"We are proof that the council has been lying to you all along. They are intentionally interrupting the breeding cycle of our species to create Deltas gammas betas and Alphas to control the population and keep them mentally weak. Our parents made s to prove that you could control the cycle to create Aphas with accuracy, which the council claims is impossible."
"I knew that."
Her lack of surprise seemed to surprise the oung Vrul.
"You knew." The one named Atropos said.
"Of course I knew. Those of us in the scientific community have known for a while. I imagine every alpha who knows anything about the system suspects that it is intentionally controlled In that way."
Clotho frowned, "And you are just ok with that?"
Vall's antenna quivered with grim amusement, "I have to be ok with it. It is either that or I accept my own termination order."
The young vrul sat there for a very long time, not sure of how to respond to her response. It was then that the real masterminds of this plan entered the room. They had been waiting outside the door to speak to her, and now they decided to finally show themselves.
The infamous Dr. krill and his supposedly dead colleague Dr. Riss. Behind them walked their pet bodyguard Tesraki, who, while he wouldn't have been much on any other planet, posed a significant threat on this one. To her he looked big and mean with his extra foot and a half of height and the waiting weapon slung across his chest.
"Dr krill, I should have know it would be you." She said idly
"dr Vall, still bowing under the word f your overlords I see."
All eyes turned to look at them, surprised.
Riss shot Krill a look, "You two know each other."
"Yes, we were colleagues I medical school." She said, interrupting before krill could get a word in edgewise, "I am surprised he was not terminated in his first year of schooling, or the several subsequent years after that after each and every forced pushed in scientific knowledge."
"The council needs people like us, don't they? They should understand that we don't just stop doing science when it is convenient." He gave her a very pointed look and she rattled her antennae in agitation.
"I do not need your judgement Dr. Krill, we do what we have to, to survive You think you are the only one who understands what is going on, who put the clues together." Krill waited in silence, so she used the moment to continue, "I am well aware how flawed the hatching system is, and when the Vrul council shot down my every attempt to streamline the system I became well aware that it was an intentionally flawed design. After years and years of my own careful research I am well aware that I was raised to think the way I do. That I am a product of fear and intentional mismanagement that I will likely never rid myself of. I am well aware of all of these things and more, but I am also aware that there is nothing that I can do about it."
"that is where you would be wrong."
She turned to look at Dr. Riss who hovered at the back of the group.
"Excuse me?"
"I said you're wrong."
"I heard what you said, but I am forcing you to repeat it for emphasis because of how stupid you sound right now. The council has all power, if I make a move against them they send a Kappa after me and I die, it is as simple as that." She noted the look of surprise on their faces, "yes I know about the kappas as well. I am part of the team that trains and designs them. As far as our species go they are the panicle of our design accept for one key factor."
"Whatever part of their brain that monitors moral judgement is missing."
She nodded once, "yes, In the lingo of your human companions the Council is manufacturing psychopaths as assassins In order to mitigate the effects of what one might deem to be a conscience."
"You sure know a lot about this."
She laughed, "I have a high position in the government and I have EYES. All of this would be very hard to miss."
"All of that is a moot point of course." Krill said
She vibrated her antenna bitterly, "Oh, and how is that."
Krill looked over his shoulder to where the Tesraki was standing silent at his back, "Well even the most indestructible Kappa is going to be nothing compared to even a Tesraki, and if that doesn't work I can always call down a human friend to do me a favor. I am sure a little bit of humming and some clapping will take out the entire city long enough for us to get rid of the council."
She shook her head slowly, "You understand that would never work. The regular population has been brainwashed to love the council, to look up to them. If you came in and killed them and forced yourselves into power the people would never accept it."
Riss snorted, "We are aware of that fact. I do not have my doctorate in the psychological sciences for nothing."
"Than what are you doing here."
"To instigate a revolution." Lachesis announced
Vall stared at them, "I do not understand this word. It does not exist in the Vrul language.
"Well it does now" Krill announced, "A revolution is the overthrow of an existing government by another body or sometimes the people themselves. Humans have a long and glorious tradition of Revolution. Each human society is created with much the same idea In mind, create a government that will work and keep society running as it should. Sometimes the people who start the new government have good intentions and sometimes they don't . The longer the people are happy or the more powerful the overlord the longer the empire will last, but the more dissatisfied the people get or the weaker the leaders get the easier it is to overthrown the government. Sometimes the people will allow weak laders if they are happy, and sometimes even strong leaderships can be overrun at the height of their power if enough people are mad about it. All we have to do is convince the Vrul population that they should be mad....." he paused, "The road will not be an easy one." He nudged one of his offspring forward, "but I think these little monsters will be the catalyst that sets everything in motion."
She thought it was all absurd, but she listened.
"Tell me how you plan on getting this to work."
"Imagine if I told you that you could have been smarter, more important, happier, but the council intentionally didn't allow it. What if I walked into those scientific labs right now, with all the curiosity and told them that there is more out there to learn but the council doesn't want them to know. What if I intentionally showed them the things that other species have done and can do, but that the council won't allow. What if I prove to them that the council has been alive for centuries, while handing out termination orders to our people at the low end of seventy years or less."
Some of that information was new, and she did her best not to seem too surprised about it.
"The council is.... That old?"
"yes, they have been developing their method for control over thousands of years, I imagine that we could have eradicated the V virus and be living outside these walls if they would allow it, but they won't because e then we will be harder to control."
It made sense, and she didn't like It, but it was undeniable.
"Than why come to me?"
"because out of all the Vrul on this planet the council gives ou the most leeway, you are the least brainwashed and you have the most access to the youngest upcoming minds on the planet. If anyone can unite a people. You can."