Alien Tango

imageers work.
    While Martini brought in tanks and artillery, I slunk over to Christopher’s half of the Sanctum.
    The Imageering side had a similar setup to the Field half—lots of screens, computer terminals, and so forth. There were also a variety of monitors, and every one of them had an A-C in front of it, hands on the screen, expressions in varying stages of concentration.
    Empaths felt emotions but couldn’t manipulate them. They were the ones who spotted superbeing trouble most of the time, because the superbeings were attracted to rage and when they formed, the human host’s brain and emotions went haywire.
    Martini, the most powerful empath on Earth, was able to feel what the other empaths did, almost like shortwave radio, passed from the teams in the Field on back, as needed. He could turn it on and off—apparently they all could—due to drugs and training, but it meant that while he was ordering everyone around, he was also monitoring who was in the most emotional need.
    It was impressive to the extreme and one of the main reasons he was the man in charge of pretty much all A-C operations that weren’t religiously based, but it wasn’t something I was actually able to share or experience myself.
    Imageers, by contrast, couldn’t feel anything unless they were touching an image—any kind of image. Once touched, they knew everything about that person. Christopher said it was because photos and the like captured a copy of the person’s mind and soul as well as their physical image.
    Imageers could also manipulate images, and that’s what they were all doing—altering what the cameras in Paraguay were catching and changing it into something far less terrifying than the Attack of the Intergalactic Dirty Dozen.
    So the screens on the wall showed what was really going on, and the monitors showed what the A-Cs were changing the various camera feeds into. Christopher had tried to explain it to me, and I’d done better with it than learning all the military blah, blah, blah Martini had shared with me. I wasn’t clear on how it all worked, of course, but the bottom line was that the more cameras, cell phones, video cameras, and satellites that were trained on a superbeing incident, the more imageers needed.
    From the number of bodies in the room, there were a lot more cameras in this part of Paraguay than I’d have thought there would be. The area I was looking at on the big screen didn’t seem overly populated.
    Christopher had the biggest monitor, and he was altering footage while barking orders. Unlike Martini, he was barking them at human speeds. And also unlike Martini’s side of the house, I got to see what those orders translated into.
    “I want all the cell phone feeds altered to blurred images,” Christopher snapped. “Video and film footage altered to show native folk dancing and similar. Go for stock footage.”
    The imageers handling the cell phones had it easy, as far as I could tell. The images on their monitors blurred until they looked like nothing so much as someone with serious palsy taking pictures of the inside of an enthusiastic squirrel.
    I was interested to discover that the term “stock footage” was used by the whole galaxy, at least those parts of it present on Earth. There was a wide variety of choices filtering through—some I recognized from a couple of National Geographic specials, some I didn’t. But they all had the canned look of people performing their native dances for the cameras—it was clear these shots weren’t Live at the Scene.
    An A-C ran in from the Field side. “Commander White, Commander Martini says the C.I.A. on the scene are creating problems.”
    “Like always,” Christopher growled. “What do they want?”
    The A-C gulped. “They want to control these superbeings, not kill them.”
    “What?” Christopher exploded. “Are they crazy? This is their stated goal?”
    “No, sir. Commander Martini was able to determine this based on their emotional reactions.” The A-C coughed. “The rest of us were able to determine based on their telling our field teams to go away and let them handle it.”
    “How Aliens of them.” I shrugged at the confused look Christopher shot me. I always forgot—the A-Cs never went in for science fiction movies of any kind, presumably on the belief they were documentaries they lived every day. “It’s a real common theme in the movies. Governmental bad guys want to control the evil, almost unstoppable