“Please tell me you have something...” the yazirian director of UPFBI ordered as he strode into the forensic lab to confront the head medical examiner, a dralasite currently in its female phase.

“I do,” the dralasite doctor replied breathily, “but you aren't going to like it.”

“Three major terrorist incidents in the last ten days means I already don't like it,” the director replied. “Talk to me!”

The doctor sighed. “At first I couldn't figure it out” She gestured at several bodies laid out on examination tables under freeze fields. “Initial examination indicated perfectly two normal humans, three healthy yazirians, and an utterly ordinary vrusk. Then I got the tox screens back from the lab. All six of them have really screwed up hormone balances. Dopamine and seratonin levels or their equivalents are nearly 125 percent of weighted norms. Oxytocin is up too, about 120 percent...”

The director struggled to remember his basic biochemistry. “So, they were really happy to be doing what they were doing?”

“That would be understating it,” the doctor replied tiredly. “Levels that high just don't occur naturally. We're talking two to three times the levels expected from a normal pleasure response.”

“Drugs then?” the director asked.

“First thing I looked for,” the doctor replied, pulling up a set of test results on her computer screen. The yazirian leaned over her shoulder to follow along as she explained. “I tested for all the normal stuff: stims, 'joyjuice', et cetera.” The doctor pointed out the appropriate parts of the readout. “Nothing...until I noticed this.” She indicated one result in particular. “Elevated histamine levels.”

“Allergies?”

“Almost. I checked for secondary signs of allergic reactions: sinus irritation, and so forth, and came up empty. So I dug deeper. Eventually, I did find foreign proteins, specifically pheromones.” She paused to look back at her boss. “When I submitted the results to the database for identification, I got red-flagged. I need a higher authorization code to access the files.”

The director nodded and crossed the room to another access terminal. The doctor watched as he submitted to retinal identification, voice-print check, and entered a pincode into the terminal to release the requested information. She turned back to the terminal, and, if it were possible for her to do so, would have turned pale. As it was, she lost partial control over her body configuration and it started to droop.

“What is it?” the director asked as he came back over. The dralasite gestured at the screen without a word.

The yazirian looked where she was indicating and swore softly, “Void...”

The answer sat there on the screen in black and amber: 99.387 PROBABILITY MATCH. SPECIES: SATHAR.

“I want every note you and your labs have compiled and sealed within the hour,” ordered the director. “Tell your people, not one word of this to anyone...”

The dralasite nodded. She had been with the Bureau long enough to know that if the worms were this organized, then they were in trouble...

INTRODUCTION

The Alpha Dawn rules on sathar indicated that they used hypnotism to control their hidden agents, and that anyone could succumb to their will if exposed to their voice and presence. Of course that was in the 80s, when hypnotism was suspected of being much more powerful than it turned out to really be. Coming back to Star Frontiers after a very long absence, it struck me how pat the answer was, and I found it unsatisfying, so I set out to tinker with it.

As I see it, the sathar can “hypnotize” with direct personal contact, but I posit that it's a much more involved process than simply speaking to the victim with the intent of controlling them.

THE PROCESS

Sathar needing to hypnotize someone for a single, simple purpose (“Open this door.” “Forget you saw anything wrong here.”) can rely on their natural “hypnotic” ability, which is a combination of sub-aural harmonics produced by their vocal apparatus and a naturally emitted pheromone that influences the victim so as to be more suggestible in the first place. The victim needs to make a check based on the average of their current Stamina and their Personality score (their physical resistance to the pheromonal effect plus their force of will).

When the sathar need a longer-term agent capable of more complex actions they have to use stronger methods. Someone chosen to to be used as a higher level agent is taken and subjected to extensive conditioning in a controlled environment designed to amplify the natural hypnotizing effect. They will constantly be in the presence of sathar while being bombarded with visual and audio input (think the “conversion” process from the 80s version of “V”) while also being exposed to concentrated doses of sathar pheromones. The subject must make a daily check as described above. For each two days of conditioning, the check is at -5%. If after 3 weeks (about 30 days) the subject is still resistant, they will simply be killed.

If the subject does succumb to the conditioning, the audio and visual inputs are changed from harsher ones designed to break the will of the subject to more “gentle” (read: more insidious) ones designed to build the loyalty of the subject to his/her new “friends”. This process will continue for another week. The end result is an agent who will appear to be/act perfectly normally in all respects, but whose loyalties are to the sathar cause.

Such agents are assigned to a sathar “handler”, who will establish a hidden base of operations to which the agent will be required to report on a regular basis. There are several such bases throughout the Frontier (more than the UPF suspects). This ensures exposure to the pheromones continues, and reinforces the conditioning. For each week the agent remains under sathar control, an additional STA/PER check must be made at a cumulative -2% per week. Failure of this check means that the conditioning has become “set”, and any rehabilitation of the agent will require a regimen of de-programing that will take at least as long as it took to turn the subject in the first place.

IDENTIFYING A SATHAR AGENT

Individuals who have fallen victim to "normal" sathar control sometimes display behavioral cues, such as a distracted, vacant, or overly focused affect while they are carrying out their assigned task.  Such cues are not always present, however.  Upon release from the control, confusion and agitation are common responses.  Given that their exposure to the means of control is short-term, there will be few physiological traces.

A "turned" agent will appear perfectly normal under most circumstances.  He/she will laugh, cry, get angry, etc just as any other person would.  They may show very minor changes in behavior that an observant third party might note, such as a change of handedness, or slight alterations to established habits and interests.  This, along with an unexplained absence lasting more than a few days are the biggest cues that a subject may be turned. The sathar of course work to mitigate that by choosing victims who have no close family to miss them, or for whom they are able to manufacture a convincing excuse such as a vacation, business trip, or similar occurrence.

Their conditioning only becomes evident in in the event of discovery, a discovered agent will become almost psychotically violent, and will either seek to conceal the discovery by killing the discoverer, or (depending on the nature of their mission) will flee and attempt to return to their sathar handler. This extreme reaction means that a captured agent should be treated as a significant threat to both themselves and others.  A suicide watch is suggested for the initial portion of incarceration or attempt at de-programing.

Physiological signs of agent conditioning include severely elevated levels of dopamine, seratonin, and oxytocin in the bloodstream.  Also present in "freshly turned" agents are an irritation of the lungs and elevated histamine levels due to the high dosages of pheromone they have been exposed to.  The lung tissue irritation and allergic response lessen but do not entirely vanish as their bodies become more acclimated.

THE FUTURE

Even more frightening (if the UPF ever finds out) are recent developments in sathar genetic and bio-organic engineering. The worms are on the cusp of developing a means by which specially developed infant sathar can be biologically integrated into human, yazirian, and vrusk hosts (dralasites are immune due to their distributed neurological networks). The infant sathar would have full control over the host, as well as access to their memories. Removing the infant would require extremely sophisticated neurosurgery that at best would have a small chance (5% for every 10 points of STA) of success without killing the host.

A very few sathar scientists are working an even more sinister program to create sathar hybrids, combining sathar dna with that of other races to create physical copies of their forms, but with sathar neurology and personalities. This research is being held back two things: 1) the difficulty of combining vermiform DNA with mammalian, insectoid, and amoeboid, and 2) the distaste for the idea on the part of the majority of sathar, who feel it is demeaning for them to assume the form of lesser species.

If either of those programs ever progresses the the point of full viability, the sathar will become a threat to the UPF the likes of which they have never seen.