So this need to make the Agents more natural, combined with pressure from the halls of power to bake political influence into the invading force, had led them to decide to program the eight operatives of the advanced team with the personalities of actual members of their race, the minds to be nominated and voted upon by the very political entities that were vying for control of the whole enterprise.

The political battle that had followed had rivaled the greatest in any government’s history, only just stopping short of open war. But, after six months of heated debate, short-lived alliances, betrayals, assassination, and unashamed commercialism, eight nominees had finally been agreed upon.

The satellite-based hub supercomputers would remain pure AI, their logic unquestionable, and would be placed in orbit around the prize, in charge of the day-to-day running of the operation, supervising the work of each Agent as they infiltrated the most powerful human militaries.

The supercomputers, however, would ultimately bow to the combined will of the Agents, whenever a virtual meeting of the Agents could be convened, the eight Agents’ personalities, picked with great care and even greater expense, representing to varying degrees all of the main parties politic. They would vote on any decision that either they or the supercomputer chose to put in front of them, and this would allow the advanced team the strategic flexibility it would need to respond to any unforeseen developments once they arrived at Earth.

If a consensus could not be reached on how to react to whatever political or martial situations they found themselves facing, the AI would form the ninth, tie-breaking vote.

Now that Pei Leong-Lam had managed to return to his relay, the first full Council was convened since only a few days after their arrival. From now on, they would meet at least once a week, more often if the need arose.

The conference took place in a virtual meeting space, the personalities of the eight Agents represented by avatars created in their images, seemingly floating in a circle in empty space.

The AI that was creating the image and projecting it into the heads of the eight Agents was also the host of the meeting. It remained invisible, however, represented not by an avatar, but by virtual screens in front of each Agent, where it could place any image or dataset relevant to the conversation.

While this system might be primitive considering the machines’ advanced abilities, the entire meeting would be conducted at phenomenal speed. The esoteric constructs inside each Agent that housed their personality copies were, after all, still computers, just with an animal consciousness overlaid on top of them; and they were still capable of operating at machine speeds.

None of them would ever struggle to recall an event or piece of information, or to calculate an equation; the answers would appear to them with the speed of any computer calculation.