Apparently, Benny/Joseph had become a favorite of the Earth AI through some less-than-appreciated methods on the Earth ship. Vlad was sure more of that story would be told one day as well, but for now, it was enough for them to know his death had helped prove the Columbinians to be good people, on their side. None of them seemed upset to see him gone.
That included his grandmother, Mimi.
For the next three days, Vlad and the other pilots shuttled food to the Earthlings on the ship and slowly began bringing them from the ship to Columbina as fast as temporary shelters could be created for them by their manufacturing printers.
Each time a new set of Earthlings arrived on Columbina, they were all shocked by…well, everything.
Sunlight? Shocking.
Ocean? Shocking.
People freely wandering about? Shocking.
Nature in general? Shocking.
Dogs? More terrifying than shocking.
It turned out, other than Mimi, every single one of the Earthlings seemed to think the dogs were going to attack and eat them. Almost every time a Bird landed with new Earthlings, someone getting off of it would immediately turn around and run, screaming, back on to the ship the moment they saw a dog. Never mind that the dogs they saw were never threatening. Just seeing a dog seemed to be cause for absolute panic for some of the Earthlings.
Vlad didn’t know what was in the videos the Earthlings saw on the ship, but he didn’t think dogs were portrayed very well in them.
Beryl was particularly upset by this reaction to the dogs. The other night, she had told him she would have taken out the Earth AI solely because of the way they had made the Earthlings feel about dogs, never mind what they had done to her mother or her fellow Columbinians. It had been an exaggeration, Vlad knew, but not much of one.
Vlad, for his part, was trying not to think about what might have happened to all the dogs on Earth. When Beryl had launched into a discussion of the evolution of dogs alongside humans long before man and his best friend had gone to space together, he decided it was best not to bring that up.
If Beryl hadn’t thought of what had happened to Earth’s dogs yet, he wasn’t about to.
*
The funerals had been awful.
One day after another, they had held them. One person, each day.
Gamma’s had been first.
Iris had found the bodies somewhere on the Earthlings’ ship, though she never said where and no one, Beryl included, asked where. As Iris had told them they didn’t want to see the bodies, Beryl suspected the story behind what had happened to them was a story she didn’t need or want to know.
They had held the ceremony outside of Gamma’s bar. People toasted her and had as good a time as you could at a funeral, knowing there were days of the same ahead. It was what Gamma would have wanted, right down to the dog treats Iris came up with to hand out in honor of the other casualty of the initial contact with the Earthlings.
Vlad’s father, Cale, had been next. It had been more typical of the memorial services people on Columbina and Hodios held, with glowing tributes and stories about the person who was gone.
Beryl had watched Vlad, stoic, lead his family through the whole thing. Mannie, his shoulder still bandaged from where it had been hit by the drone fire, had read a poem. Heming told a hilarious story about Cale attempting to teach him how to shoot a bow and arrow that had ended very poorly for Iris—a story that no one, including Iris, had heard in its entirety before. His sisters talked lovingly of their father. But mostly, they just got through it and moved on to the next funeral.
And so it had gone, day after day.
Second to last had been the funeral for Reed and Fawn’s two children.
Fawn had wailed at the funeral as if she could somehow scream the pain away.
Beryl tried not to think about that funeral at all.
The last service had been for Rona, but it was not much of a service.
Rona had always said she did not want any memorial service or funeral, and Beryl had insisted, over the protests of many others, that they honor her mother’s last wishes.
And so, Beryl found herself with Iris, holding a bag of her mother’s ashes next to the Columbinian ocean as the sun set. Beryl didn’t ask how Iris—or, more precisely, Iris’s drones and robots—had performed the cremation, but she had accepted the ashes without question.
Beryl opened the small, black bag. Inside, a small, gray pile of ash rested within, both heavier and lighter than Beryl would have expected. She used her fingers to extract a pinch of the ashes, then let them waft out over the beach. Near the edge of the sand, as Beryl watched the ashes dissipate, she saw Vlad standing there, defying her admonition to him not to show up.
Beryl was glad he had. Her mother had said no one but her and Iris, but she figured her mom would have been OK with that one exception.
“Are you going to do the rest of the ashes?” Iris asked as Beryl pulled the bag closed.
“No,” Beryl had replied, tying the bag to her belt. “It just doesn’t feel right, somehow. Like there will be another time or place where it’s more appropriate to do the rest.”
Iris hadn’t argued with that. She walked over to Beryl and put her arm around her shoulder. The two watched the sunset across the Columbinian ocean, Camp lying at Beryl’s feet and Vlad watching from nearby.
As the last of the sun’s edges fell beneath the horizon, Beryl touched the emerald around her neck.
“Goodbye, Mom,” she said. “I love you.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Iris came through the door to the bar as the final, triumphant scenes of the movie blared outside the bar. Without speaking, Vlad and Beryl took their drinks—paid for with Beryl’s not-so-easily earned gambling winnings from their victory over the Earth AI—and walked to a corner table with Camp at their heels, where the group could talk with some privacy.
“Are we really going to do this?” Vlad asked. Beryl knew he was still wary of this plan. He wasn’t alone; most of the Columbinians were as well, but in the end, their common humanity with the Earthlings had swayed most of them.
“We don’t have a choice,” Iris replied. This was not the first time they had gone through this, but at some level, they were still trying to convince themselves it was a good idea. Vlad, more than Beryl or Iris, still doubted. “If we don’t destroy the Earth AI on Earth now, they will come back one day, stronger and more powerful, to destroy us here. It could be tomorrow, it could be ten years from now, it could be ten thousand years in the future. But they will come back. Their arrogance won’t let them live in a universe where they are not the most powerful, reigning beings.”
This second argument that the Earth AI would be back one day, more terrible than before, was what had convinced the holdouts that action was needed.
Not that everyone was willing to help with the task of taking out the Earth AI.
It was this lack of enthusiasm to help with the task they all knew needed to be done that had brought the three of them to the corner of the bar that night. They had a ship—the Earthlings’ ship, which Iris assured them she could retrofit to travel safely and quickly across the universe—and little else. Beyond themselves, they didn’t even know if they would have any other Columbinians join them. Everyone agreed something needed to be done, but no one wanted to volunteer to do that something. They knew the Earth AI was a threat, but it seemed a distant one they didn’t need to think about today. Or tomorrow. Earth was a long way from Columbina, and it would take them years with their technology to get back to Columbina on another ship.
Beryl didn’t blame them. She didn’t want to leave Columbina, either. The only thing she had ever wanted in life was to do her work and enjoy what little time she had to make Columbina a better home for herself and the future.
But, if they didn’t do something, there might not be a future.
And so, she volunteered.
Vlad did, too. Beryl hadn’t been surprised. Even before all of
this had happened, Vlad had wanted to see the rest of the universe, to get on a ship and see what was out there. This was his chance. That he could get some revenge for the death of his father played no small role, either. She felt that same desire, even though she would have denied it if someone asked.
There was, of course, the very real possibility—more likely than not—that they would never return. The universe could kill them in an infinite number of ways, long before they reached Earth and the dangers they knew existed.
Heading off on what was likely to be a futile mission did not appeal to many. Heming had volunteered, which did not surprise Beryl. She suspected he saw it as a way to impress women or, just as likely, gain some edge on a business venture. When Alexis volunteered, Vlad insisted they reject her, in case something went wrong. Their mother had already lived through enough. Losing three children in addition to her husband would kill her, and Vlad had told her risking two of her children was enough. Fawn had, too, but that didn’t surprise Beryl, either. Fighting a potentially futile battle against those who had killed your entire family might seem like a good idea, not a bad one.
“As I see it,” Iris said, “there is no trouble—or virtually no trouble—getting to Earth. I can have the ship modified within six months. It will have all the capabilities of V or Hodios. Our real problems start when we get to Earth.”
“You’re sure on the ship?” Vlad asked, as always, concerned with flying. If Beryl could think of a thousand ways they could die en route to Earth, Vlad could probably think of twice that as a pilot.
“Definitely. I’ve been back through all the modifications I made to Hodios and its sister ships over time. The Earth ship has the same bones. I can proceed directly to modifying it in the best ways possible. But once we get to Earth, in the best case scenario, we’ll have a dozen or two dozen people with a minimal amount of formal training, all of which they got en route to Earth. We’ll be sending them onto a planet where not only is the AI hostile to them, but it’s likely, based on what the Earthlings are telling us, the humans will not be friendly, either.”
“Can’t we use the same trick you used on their ship? The ‘shut them down and reboot’ method?” Beryl asked.
“Nope. At least, I can’t guarantee it. Now that I’m in their system, I may have a better chance than I did before. But I suspect when we get to Earth, they’ll have more redundancies and safety mechanisms built into their system. I suspect the best thing we can do when we get to Earth is to destroy their AI and start over. We won’t have the immediate problems we had here. Earth is habitable; humanity survived there without AI for most of its history. It will last however long it takes me to get myself or some other intelligence system running the planet.”
“So we need to come up with some other sort of advantage,” Vlad said.
“No, we need to come up with more advantages than anyone has ever had before. Better weapons, better communication, better tactics, better reactions, better physicality, better everything.”
“But we’ll be up against AI. We will likely lose to them on every front, especially if they have better weapons on Earth than the ones they brought here.” Vlad took another sip of his beer. “Take tactics. An AI can evaluate every possible outcome in a situation and react in less time than it takes for a human to get off a shot. We have you, Iris, but we’re still subject to the limits of our human physical forms. We barely survived their attack here on Columbina, and that was only because of you. Compared to what we might face on Earth, the attack on Columbina would be nothing.”
The group at the table was silent, but Beryl’s mind blazed with the same thought, over and over. It burned hot there because she didn’t know if she should—didn’t know if she wanted—to say it.
But there’s no harm in saying something, Beryl thought. I can’t get in trouble for words.
“There is an option,” she said after taking a drink to help her get the words out, testing the waters.
Vlad tilted his head down and raised his eyebrows. “An option?”
“What sort of advantage could we have if we equipped ourselves with AI? Or biologically-advanced ourselves?” Saying the words felt wrong to Beryl. She knew she couldn’t get in trouble for words, but there was that worm in her brain. Her family history. Perhaps these words, coming from whom they did, would be enough to get her in trouble.
Vlad and Iris looked at Beryl, but despite them being the two people she knew better than any others, she didn’t know what they were thinking.
“It’s an idea,” Vlad finally said.
“It’s a good idea,” Iris ventured. She immediately covered her mouth, like she had said something she knew she shouldn’t have.
“Is it even possible?” Vlad asked. Each word seemed to Beryl like they were getting closer to a point from which they couldn’t return.
“It’s possible, but I can’t help with it,” Iris leaned into the table. There wasn’t anyone around, but the words didn’t seem like the kind that could be spoken aloud. “I’ve purposely kept any information of that sort out of my memory. I mean, I know the general parameters of what is necessary, because that’s something anyone can know, but any time anyone has ventured beyond that, I ignore it and don’t record anything on it, lest anyone accuse me of attempting to merge the biological with the artificial.”
“So there’s no way of making it happen. If you don’t have the knowledge, it will take years and years to come up with the proper technology and make sure it’s viable. We may not have years,” Beryl finished what was left in her drink, the hope she hadn’t known she had been harboring for this idea fading.
“There might be a way,” Iris leaned in further, now whispering.
“What do you mean, there might be a way?” Vlad asked, both he and Beryl leaning in as well, having to do so to hear Iris’s ever-quieter statements.
Beryl touched her necklace. They were at the threshold, where discussion and thoughts crossed into the realm of reality and action, where people got exiled, and children grew up without fathers.
“There has been someone who explored this idea.”
Beryl knew there was only one person Iris could be talking about.
Her father.
“He’s not going to do us any good. He’s dead. He took whatever knowledge he had to Libertas, and it died there with him.” Beryl looked at Vlad, who had only seemed to realize who they were talking about with the mention of Libertas.
“That’s not entirely true.”
With Iris’s comment, Beryl’s mind raced. How was that not true? Had her father downloaded everything he knew and had researched to some non-networked drive? Was there someone else who was exploring these ideas, whom they didn’t know of, on one of the other planets?
“What about it isn’t true?”
“The part about your dad being dead,” Iris said. “He may have been exiled, and everyone may think he’s dead, but...”
Beryl shook her head. She couldn’t let herself believe what Iris seemed about to say. No one could have survived this long on a desolate planet, without enough food, without other people, without hope.
But then, the words came from Iris, confirming what Beryl had not dared to hope.
“Beryl, your dad is alive.”
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