Vlad fell in next to Beryl. Once again, they were near the back of the group. Heming and another of the Columbinians took up the rear of the group, the only people behind them. Vlad was glad to have his younger brother there. He was a bit of a hellfire, but he had no doubt about Heming’s ability and desire to keep them safe.
As they walked, Vlad realized they were following the same path through the ship the Earth AI had followed on that first day, after his father and the others had been killed.
He had watched that video more than he ever would have admitted to anyone. And he knew he would watch it again.
Vlad had no idea what they were walking into, but based on what they had seen so far, he didn’t think they should expect the Earthlings to roll out the welcome wagon.
The trip to the Earthlings’ quarters was quick, and they only ran into two rogue drones on the way, some of the few remaining on the ship that had operated independently of the ship and therefore had not been taken over by Iris. Someone at the front of the group dispatched them with single shots, the task now more of an annoyance than a danger. It seemed the Earth AI had no reason to protect this part of the ship from any intruder, and it was thus lightly protected by the drones.
The group turned a corner and came face to face with a door which looked exactly like the one he and Beryl had found at the entrance to the core.
It seemed the Earth AI really didn’t want anyone to get into the human quarters.
Or, Vlad now grasped, they didn’t want anyone to get out of the human quarters.
“Stand back,” Iris announced. For a moment, Vlad thought she was going to have someone blast the way into the quarters like he and Beryl had done with the core. Instead, now in control of the ship, Iris opened the door through the ship’s computer system.
The front of the group stood with their weapons ready to fire as the door quietly swung open. Everyone behind them was ready to pull their weapons if the need arose.
However, instead of weapon fire, a smell wafted over the Columbinians.
It was like nothing Vlad had ever smelled before.
It was not the smell of Vos, but the smell of decades of human filth and decay, somehow both sweet and putrid, like the smell of rotting flesh and ammonia and waste combined into one. It was so strong it easily permeated the helmet of his body armor.
Almost immediately, the phone communications between the group lit up with the sounds of coughing. The two people in front of Vlad and Beryl bent over, pulling off their helmets and looking like they were about to vomit.
Vlad turned to his left and saw Beryl pull off her own helmet, looking as if she was about to vomit as well.
The look on her face showed that her decision to pull off her helmet had been a bad one. As bad as the smell was within the helmet, it at least seemed to be filtering out some of the odor.
Two people near the front of the group vomited.
Several people commented about the horrible smell, unable to help themselves.
“It’s times like this I am OK with not being human,” Iris said, getting a rousing chorus of boos from the same people who were commenting on the smell. One of the people who had vomited flipped her off for good measure.
Iris rallied everyone again, sending them through the door with guns pointed or at the ready, depending on where people were within the group. Most of those who had taken their helmets off kept them off, apparently willing to take their chances with whatever the Earthlings threw at them rather than putting the uncomfortable things back on. Iris didn’t insist on anything, suggesting she knew whatever danger she expected was over. Next to Vlad, Beryl was among those walking bare-headed, her red hair blazing even in the dim light.
As they entered the darkened hallways of the humans’ living quarters, there was not a soul to be seen, despite the smell suggesting the presence of many people nearby.
Vlad felt himself physically willing his feet to take the necessary steps into the humans’ quarters. Passing through the heavy door, he felt something ominous, like he could be locked in this less-than-habitable location forever if it closed shut behind them.
Stepping through the door, the world around him changed. Even without the smell, there would have been no way not to notice the differences between the part of the ship where the AI had roamed to this part, where the humans lived. There was a measurable level of grime on every surface, like no one had cleaned it in decades. It was the dust and filth of general daily life for humans that they never saw, thanks to Iris’s cleaning drones.
“Has anyone ever seen Demolition Man?” Heming said. Vlad nodded along with everyone else. Now that Heming had suggested it, Vlad could see why. The hallway had the definite feel of the underground world of the sewers in that movie from the early 1990s, except without all the haze which seemed to have been a necessary feature of every action movie ever made taking place in any sort of dystopian or post-apocalyptic location.
“I don’t recommend eating anything, I hear the meat is not cow,” someone else commented from near the front, inspiring all of them to add their comments on a movie that was very popular among the Columbinians.
“Whatever. I’m looking forward to tasting this delicious Taco Bell place I’ve heard so much about in the movies.”
“There weren’t any Taco Bells in the underground part of the city.”
“Whatever. The point is, Taco Bell sounds like it was a delicious place to eat.”
Vlad was about to quote Talladega Nights—another favorite—at the group, when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. It was the quickest of motions, but he knew when he saw it that he was too late to do anything about it.
Beryl’s helmet fell to the ground from her left hand as the gun fell from her right.
By the time Vlad could get his gun aimed, the Earthling who had grabbed Beryl had already put her between himself and the rest of the armed Columbinians. Beryl was now a human shield, with a gun pointed at the back of her head.
Still, even with a bad view of the Earthling, Vlad had seen enough to know who he had seen.
He had seen the man from the video.
Benny.
The human from all the Earth AI videos.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Beryl had been in a lot of bad situations before, but she had never had a gun pointed at her head.
Funny enough, it felt exactly like she thought it would have felt.
After realizing what was happening to her, Beryl’s next thoughts had nothing to do with what seemed like the imminent end of her life. Instead, she was wondering why she was not having one of those moments where her life flashed before her eyes. That had happened to her before, after a couple very close calls with some Vos and one unpleasant encounter with a venomous rodent now known to everyone as a Hamstard.
Instead, Beryl felt oddly peaceful.
An image came to her mind then, and not of any part of her life up until then. It was an image of her father.
Beryl looked closely at his face in her mind and realized that although he looked older, his face had not really aged. She somehow knew that the idea he had aged was more in her head, like she knew he was older, even though he didn’t really look like it. He was walking through a lush forest, with his dog, Poydras, at his heel.
Beryl was shocked back into reality and out of her calmness when an oddly familiar voice boomed out of the person holding the gun to her head.
“If anyone comes any closer, I will shoot her.”
Until then, Beryl hadn’t realized who it was, as she couldn’t see his face. Now, though, she knew it was the voice of Benny.
Benny, the one who stood by while the Earth AI killed her mother.
Benny, who had looked gleeful at the death of her mother and the other Columbinians.
Vlad’s visor was down in front of Beryl, but she knew what he would look like behind the reflective surface. His brown eyes would be entirely focused on the man behind Beryl, the one with the gun to her head.
/> After all, Beryl wasn’t the only one in this group who had a reason to hate the man with the gun to her head.
“Sir, I am sure we can talk through this,” Iris said, “We’re here to help you. We know the Earth AI has been forcing you to live as slaves.”
“Shut up!” Benny forced the gun into Beryl’s head even harder. Beryl felt dumb for having taken the helmet off. She wouldn’t have been in danger of having her head blown off with it on. She would be willing to live through any level of discomfort to have it on right now. “We don’t need your help. The AI are our protectors. They give us food and shelter. They keep us safe from the Earthlings who left Earth. Without them, we all would have died years ago. You Earthlings who left have always wanted to come back and take over. They kept us safe from you.”
Beryl may have had a gun pointed at her head, but she felt at least a little sorry for the man who let her mother get killed and now seemed intent on killing her. Something had gone terribly wrong for Benny to have believed that about those who left Earth and those who had enslaved him.
And then Benny shifted, and Beryl thought that this was it. She was going to die there, on a shithole of a ship, like her mother had done before her.
From further behind her, Beryl heard a single shot ring out.
Beryl clamped her eyes shut, waiting for the pain of her last moments, or to feel a trickle of blood, or anything to indicate she had been shot and was now dying.
Instead, the feel of metal against her head dropped, and she heard and felt the man who had been standing behind her begin to collapse to the ground.
Beryl turned around in time to see Benny’s body crumple to the ground, a pool of blood around his body, gushing from what Beryl guessed was a very well-placed headshot.
Behind him, a doorway was open. It must have been how he got into the hallway, this little offshoot that none of them had noticed. The door opened into a small room, where several people were huddled in a corner. All of the people huddled there looked small and dirty, like children. Beryl wondered how they ended up here, in the middle of this.
And then Beryl saw her, standing in the middle of the room and wondered why she wasn’t the first person she had noticed.
The woman was old—she looked older even than Gamma had been, one of the oldest people Beryl had ever seen. She was dressed in an old-fashioned dress that looked like it hadn’t been washed in months. Before its last washing, it had been repaired many times over. Her pale translucent skin looked like it hadn’t seen the actual sun in many years, and it fell in wrinkles over her face, over her elbows, over her knees. In her hand, she held a gun like something out of a western.
Two of the members of the group rushed toward the old woman, their helmets on and likely fully protected from her weapon should she choose to shoot it.
For a brief moment, Beryl wondered if the woman was going to shoot her, too, but she lowered the weapon even before the other two Columbinians could get to her, then dropped it to the floor.
The old woman took a step toward Beryl, and then another and another. Neither of the two Columbinians who had moved to disarm her stopped her. Beryl didn’t, either; the woman looked like she could fall over dead at any moment. She was not the sort of person you felt any need or desire to stop.
Finally, the slow steps brought the old woman to a position in front of Beryl. The old woman looked up at her; she was shorter than Beryl by at least eight inches.
“Thank you,” Beryl said to her.
The old woman leaned over and hugged her. Beryl wrapped her arms around the woman, whose bones protruded beneath her hands like someone who had not had a full meal in many years.
“No,” she said, “thank you.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Outside the open windows of Gamma’s bar, Vlad heard the familiar tones of one President Thomas Whitmore ring out.
“We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”
The cheer that went up after that last line was far too loud to be solely accounted for by the movie soundtrack. It must have been the Earthlings watching it on the beach outside the bar.
Vlad shook his head. Before he met the Earthlings, he had thought Columbinians were into movies. He hadn’t known what people who truly loved movies were like. As it turned out, if the only movies or television shows you had ever seen in your lifetime were short, commercial-like videos of your captors, movies were pretty much mind-blowing.
Unfortunately, a significant number of the Earthlings, two weeks into their stay on Columbina, were still having some trouble separating reality from what they saw on any sort of screen. After some truly disastrous movie showings—whoever had decided to show some of them the Charlton Heston version of Planet of the Apes was still not admitting to it—they were keeping the movies pretty calm. For the last few days, they had been trying to focus the Earthlings on old sporting events and comedies, with some action and science fiction thrown in when they demanded something else. They particularly loved the science fiction, even though they were now living in their very own science fiction movie.
Vlad was, like most of the Columbinians, hoping to show them the original Star Wars trilogy sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, a significant portion of Columbina’s population was engaged in a rather heated debate as to the proper order in which all the canon movies should be shown, so it seemed they were still a few days from getting to see what Vlad believed would soon be a favorite for many of them.
On the plus side, someone showed the Earthlings Jaws and since then, no additional Earthlings other than the first, unlucky one had discovered what lived in the Columbinian ocean the hard way. Vlad was hoping someone would show them Jurassic Park soon. He didn’t think there were any Vos around, but he would also prefer that the Earthlings didn’t wander into the woods and prove him wrong on that front.
He knew Beryl suspected he also wanted someone new to quote the movie at, and he wasn’t going to deny that.
Vlad, like the rest of the Columbinians, was pretty sure the Earthlings would eventually understand that not everything they saw onscreen actually happened. When that happened, more than a few of them were going to be disappointed to find out Bill Pullman had never been president of the United States.
It had been a difficult two weeks since they had taken out the Earth AI, to say the least. And things weren’t going to get any easier from here. Which was why he and Beryl were sitting in the bar, waiting for Iris to arrive. They may have destroyed the Earth AI who had shown up at Columbina, but they all knew the fight had only just begun.
*
The old woman’s name was Mimi.
Vlad had watched her hug Beryl, worried she would attempt to stab her or otherwise injure her, but the old woman had been nothing but grateful and happy to see them.
As she led them through the Earthlings’ quarters on the Earth ship, they had begun to piece together what had happened through Mimi’s bits of the story. The details would come out over the next weeks, pieced together by Iris and conversations with the Earthlings.
“Follow me,” she had told them, taking Beryl’s hand and leading them through the living quarters of the Earthlings.
“I was a young woman when Hodios left Earth, a few years before we did,” she told them. “I remember it well, these humans who were going to settle the rest of the universe. Even then, almost everyone thought the people who got on that ship were crazy, that they would all die, that their beliefs were such that we were happy to see them go.”
Mimi showed them the squalid kitchens where they prepared what constituted food on the ship, a mash of something that never filled a belly and barely provided the nutrition necessary to survival. Not that they were surviving well. Other than Mimi, everyone on the ship had been born in space, but it had been years since they had borne enough children to sustain their population. They were surviving in the narrowest sense of the word.
&nb
sp; “Have you heard the story of the frog who doesn’t know he is being boiled to death because the water heats up slowly around him? That was how it was with the AI. Little by little, they enslaved us. We didn’t know it had happened until we no longer had enough freedom to save ourselves.”
They saw the medical quarters, where half a dozen people looked to be on the verge of death. Iris said the people were all dying of diseases the Columbinians only knew from history books. She didn’t have to say it would be a priority of hers to get all of the Earthlings healthy.
“They chose a young, healthy group of us to populate this ship and head to the stars, to find and eliminate the humans who they told us had betrayed the AI by leaving Earth.”
Someone asked how people learned on the ship, and Mimi had shaken her head in answer to the question. It was both a statement of fact and an indication of how she felt about that fact.
“There were more of us, but first there was the pox. And then the food crops almost all failed.”
Throughout the ship, the few children looked thin and unhealthy, like they were about to starve.
“The AI were going to use us as labor on your planet. They needed another ship and did not know how to do it without humans for labor. If any of you survived, you were to have joined the workers.”
Mimi continued explaining things, but Vlad had trouble paying attention eventually. He watched the Earthlings instead, seeing them pull back from the Columbinians as if they were scared of them. Vlad didn’t blame them. If a group of combat gear clad humans from another planet walked into his house, he would have been scared, too.
Mimi, though, she had seemed well-respected among the humans. They all seemed to trust that she wouldn’t have brought someone truly horrible into their midst, and some of them seemed to let curiosity get the best of them, sneaking looks at the Columbinians walking among them. As they walked, Mimi told the Earthlings that Joseph—that had been Benny’s actual name—had been killed, and many of them smiled.
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