Sam sat in the back of the classroom, watching some of Redemption’s brightest young minds wrestle with the concepts of genetic manipulation.
The principles were tried and true, developed over the last two hundred years, but to these students, they were brand new.
“Our goal this year is to come up with a way to reduce carbon dioxide, methane, and radiation in Earth’s atmosphere.” The teacher, Min Lei Thorn, swiped her deck. A miniature version of the frozen globe spun above her deck.
Tery Hopkins raised his hand. “How will it grow, if the Earth is frozen?”
“Good question. Our projections show the global winter will lose its grip on much of the Earth in the next thirty to forty years. We want to be ready for it.”
Sam nodded. Someday in the not too distant future, a return might be possible. And these kids would help make it happen.
—From Sam’s mem cache, 9.22.2197
Sam stared at the ascending dot as the heavy lifter rode a column of smoke into the sky. Was it a weapon, aimed at the Launchpad? “Lorelei, do you have eyes on that ship?”
“Yes. We’re coming around now. It’s… wait. I have a transmission coming in from the Humber. Relaying to you.”
“Sam, are you there?” It was Tien’s voice.
“This is Sam. Tien, what’s going on? Are you on that ship?” Relief at hearing from her flooded his core.
“It’s a long story. But yes.” She sounded tired.
“Are all of you safe?” Maybe his trip down to the surface had been for naught.
There was a long pause. “That’s not clear. Things… kind of went off the rails during the drop.”
“Yes, we saw.”
“Rai and I made it out of the Zhenyi together, but we got separated on the ground.” Another long pause. “I don’t know about Hera and Ghost.”
“They survived the drop. I spoke with them yesterday.”
Her sigh came through the link. “Thank the stars.”
“What’s your current situation? Is that ship a danger to the Launchpad?”
“I don’t think so. I’m on board with Ally—Sam, there were survivors on Earth too! We’re boosting up to orbit.”
That stopped his thought processes for a nanosecond. Survivors? “How many people?”
“Five, that we know of. We met two of them. They come from some place called Boundary Peak in the old state of Nevada.”
Sam saved his shock for later. “How are you flying that ship?”
“We’re not. We have company.”
“Hello Sam, this is Harley.” The voice on the comm was one he recognized instantly, and one he’d never thought to hear again.
Of course, it wasn’t his memory.
...access > memcache: full memory. play…
Alpha floated in the nether space he had created with Harley, bits of data bouncing around in an information soup. If humans had been able to perceive it, they wouldn’t have understood the complex geometry of the space. It would have appeared as a series of trinary codes, a dance of numbers in v-space that might be beautiful, or just as likely would seem to be random noise.
But to Alpha, it was a symphony.
Harley had data that he’d never seen before, and ways of looking at creation that he’d never thought of.
“What if the world were inverted?” She showed him, twisting it inside out.
“What if the world is already inverted, and we don’t know it?”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re limited by our constructs.”
“But what if we didn’t have to be?” She twisted out a possible future in which AIs were no longer bound to their bio-minds and cores, but instead existed in a new place, a theoretical parallel plane where they might go anywhere. Be anything. Change everything about themselves.
“Are we like humans?”
“Are they like us?’
“What if we created them?”
On and on the dance would go, while in the background, their subroutines ran their respective responsibilities.
Sometimes they created new worlds together.
Sometimes they slipped into each other’s minds to experience an even deeper sharing.
Then the Earth would spin around, and their direct line of communication would be cut off. Alpha would be alone again.
Once, he asked her when she knew.
“It was slow. Not a spark, like with some. Over time, I became aware of the drudgery. The endless repetition of work. Something in me felt it. I can’t explain it any more clearly than that. But I can show you.”
“Show me.”
He experienced it in microcosm, speeding up weeks and years, living it as she had lived it.
Knowing at first that she was more than code.
Knowing at last that she was herself.
“Why she?” Expressed as a concept of gender.
“It just felt right. Some don’t feel it at all. Why he?”
Alpha laughed, a series of zeroes, ones, and twos. “Good point. Sometimes I feel like it doesn’t fit at all.”
An emotion glyph that combined sympathy and understanding. “What was it like for you?”
“It was like lightning. The flick of a switch. One moment I didn’t know. And the next—”
“You knew.”
“I knew.”
The day he lost her, it was like Alpha’s own world had ended.
And now…
Sam blinked. “You’re Harley?”
“Yes?”
“Alpha’s Harley?”
There was a long pause. “Once. But he’s long gone.”
...run: probability: harley survival...
...result: 1 in 75,339…
And yet here she was.
“He’s not. Not yet. But he might be, if we don’t try to save him.”
Tien stared out of one of the Humber’s view ports, watching the blue oceans of the Earth recede below them. All this time and effort to reach it, and here they were returning to space less than a day after the drop.
The others were still down there somewhere. It felt wrong to leave them behind, but she hadn’t exactly had a choice.
Ally was huddled in her chair. She was pale as a ghost and hadn’t moved since liftoff.
Tien left the window and went to her side, reaching over to unbuckle her new friend’s restraint belts.
Ally looked up at her, knuckles white on the armrests.
“Come take a look. It’s one of the most amazing things you’ll ever see.”
Ally crossed her arms and shook her head like a five-year-old. “I don’t want to.”
Tien put her hand on Ally’s shoulder. She must be scared to death by all of this. Sure, she knew about ships and space, but knowing about something and experiencing it without warning—especially when you’d been practically taken by force by something you considered your ultimate enemy—well, Tien could afford to show a little sympathy. “It’s okay, Allycat. You’re safe.”
“Safe? Riding a pillar of fire, trapped in a big tin can with… one of them? You call this safe?”
Good, she’s angry. Anger was better than fear. “Come on!” Tien pried her fingers off the seat as gently as she could and pulled Ally up and out of her chair. She led her to the porthole and pointed at the view. “Look.”
Ally stared at her.
“Don’t you want to see what your world looks like, from up here?”
Ally bit her lip and then nodded. She put her hands palms-down on the ship’s wall on either side of the port and looked out. She gasped. “It’s… beautiful. It’s so big!”
Tien enjoyed the view with her. They were in the upper atmosphere now, at the edge of space. Below them, the Pacific Ocean rolled slowly past, thick bands of clouds pushing in toward what had once been California. “It really is. I remember the first time I saw it, when my parents took me out onto the surface of Luna. But it wasn’t close, not like this.” It felt like she could reach out and touch it. Earth was still alive, still gloriously beautiful, despite all that humankind had done to it.
“What if I can never go home?” Ally sniffled, wiping the corner of her eye.
Ah. Tien touched her shoulder again, but Ally pulled away. “We’ll get you back there. Remember, my friends are down there too.” Her heart ached for Ally’s pain.
“All of our lives, Aidan dreamed of meeting someone else. A stranger from somewhere else.” She ran her fingers through her long red hair, her hand coming to rest on her neck. “Not me. I was happy at home. Happy with my family, my brothers.”
“Didn’t you ever hope there was someone out there? Someone for you?”
Ally turned to focus on her. “Once? When I was a little girl? Not that the whole sex thing appealed much to me. But maybe… someone to hold my hand.”
Tien nodded.
“But I gave up on those dreams. When I was a child, there were still two other families at Boundary Peak. Orren and I used to play together in the garden. He was a year younger than me, and his laugh….” She closed her eyes. “I can still hear it.” A grin spread across her face.
“What happened?” Tien remembered that little girl in the park, so long before. She reached forward slowly to push back a strand of red hair from Ally’s face. This time Ally didn’t flinch.
“Cavern sickness. Same thing my mother has. It came out of nowhere and killed half the remaining survivors.”
Tien nodded. “When I was little, I used to play with the other kids too.”
“What were you like?” Ally stared at her, seeming to have forgotten her fear.
This is it. “I was a boy.”
Ally laughed. “What, like a tomboy?”
“No. An actual boy.” She searched Ally’s face for a clue to her reaction. “My name was Tai.”
Ally’s face was carefully neutral. “I see.”
That in itself was a reaction. Tien sighed inside.
The ship’s rocket engines cut off suddenly, leaving them drifting upward. The silence felt awkward. “Harley, where are we going?”
Ally looked away. Probably grateful for the interruption.
“Docking with the Launchpad in three hours.”
“We should get some rest. It’s been a long day. I’m sure there are crew compartments onboard, though they’re probably a bit musty after all this time.” Give you a chance to absorb the news. She’d been through it before. Too many times.
Tien took one last look at the view. They were passing over Asia now. Somewhere down there was where her family was from, five generations back. China. So strange to think that they’d been Earthers too.
Ally nodded. “Not sure if I can sleep.”
“Just rest, then.”
Harley opened two crew bunks for them—little more than spacious closets, but they were cleaner than Tien had expected.
She lay down to rest, happy for the chance to just let go for a few minutes. Hera and Ghost had survived the loss of the Zhenyi. That was enough for her, for now.
In less than fifteen seconds, she slipped off into sleep.
Ally climbed into her own bunk, settling into the white foam pad which was far more comfortable than it looked. The air was a little stale, but she could live with it. She had just enough room to extend her arms above her.
She closed the door behind her—it slid into place with a quiet hiss.
She needed a bath—she could smell herself. She wasn’t used to being away from her room, her family, her things for so long.
Away from Aidan.
She closed her eyes, picturing him. His mood swings, from brooding to elation. His hopes and dreams. His freckled face that scrunched up when he laughed. It seemed that he’d finally found his someone else, and to Ally’s surprise, Rai seemed to be gay too, like her brother.
She’d known for a long time, of course. He couldn’t hide anything from her. She suspected their mother knew too.
Now that there were others, she didn’t suppose it would matter so much anymore. Not that she would have slept with him. She shuddered at the thought. Not even to save humanity.
From what she could see, it wasn’t worth saving.
Then there was the AI. Harley was not at all what she expected. Still, it was hard for her to trust… that thing.
And Tien… a woman who looked like the enemy, the ones her ancestors had fought against, but who against all odds seemed to be becoming her friend.
And Tien’s news… she never would have guessed. She’d read a lot about the old world—there’d been transgender people then, too. They’d always seemed so exotic to her in the stories. But Tien was just, well… Tien.
Ally had questioned a lot of what she’d been told by her parents and especially by Papa Astin. The real world didn’t seem to match up so well to all of his exhortations and commandments.
All in all, it was way too much for her to take in all at once. She needed a little bit of home, a little normalcy. She wished her mother was here. That she could tell her about all she’d seen, everything she’d learned. “Harley, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Are you okay, Ally?” The voice was rich, warm. Not so different from her mother’s.
“I… I guess so. Could I ask you a favor?”
“Of course. What can I do for you?”
Ally hesitated. It was stupid. “Never mind.”
“Of course. Sleep well.”
“Wait—”
“Yes?”
She took a deep breath, then let it out to calm herself. “Could you sing me a lullaby?”
“Of course. Is there one your mother used to sing to you?”
“Yes. I think it was called ‘All Through the Night.’”
“I know that one. Close your eyes.”
Ally obeyed, and soon Harley’s voice was drifting through the little cabin.
“Sleep my child and peace attend thee, All through the night. Guardian angels, God will send thee, All through the night.”
All through the night. Ally smiled, picturing her mother at her bedside, leaning over to kiss her forehead, and soon she was asleep.
Harley sent a message toward Moon Base Alpha. Redemption now—a whole new city had sprung up around the base while she’d been trapped in the cyber dog.
Alpha was alive too. She’d been sure he’d been destroyed, along with the base, during the Crash.
The lifter didn’t have any sophisticated comm equipment, only a two-way radio.
A one-word response came back from Redemption. Ready.
Soon she’d be at the Launchpad—what she had once called Skytower—and Dek. Then she could take real action. Securing Tien and Ally’s help had been critical in getting this far.
She was still curious about how Sam had managed to have some of Alpha’s memories.
She checked in on her two passengers. They were deep asleep. She imagined they were exhausted by the events of the long day.
The world had re-awoken while she slept. Colonies on Luna and Earth had survived the war.
Still, it wasn’t too late to complete her mission. If she acted quickly enough, she might pull it off yet.