Exanastasis

Exanastasis: (Greek) resurrection;
a rising again.

Atreus studied the sweep of the Milky Way, remembering the first time his uncle had taken him into the hills away from the city. They’d lain on their backs in their sleeping bags, staring up into space and competing to see who could spot the most movers—satellites and space stations orbiting at various distances.

He reflexively reached down to pull the lip of his bag up to his chin and discovered that there was no bag.

What?

Reality suddenly collapsed into place.

The wreck. His lunar rover had flipped, crushing him into the regolith. Air had been escaping through cracks in his helmet when he’d tried to scream and vomited thick arterial blood into his starred facebowl.

Atreus’ body jerked violently at the visceral memory, and he sat up. Looking around, he saw that he was on a dais sculpted from the central peak of a tiny crater. An invisible dome of phocarbonite crystal rose upward from the crater’s low rim wall.

Swinging his feet over the edge of the dais, Atreus found the crater floor polished and warm to the touch of his bare toes. Gentle lights were set into the basalt at regular intervals, illuminating a wide set of stairs that led down the slope of the short peak to where a blue-cloaked and hooded figure hovered half a meter in the air.

The floating creature’s head looked straight up toward the dais, but its face was a darkened void, revealing nothing.

“Erebos,” Atreus said, recognizing the color of the cloak.

“Father,” replied the cloaked being.

“Why have you revived me?”

“It was not my choice.”

Atreus wiped his palms across his face, savoring the sensation. “The others?”

“They thought it might be easier to convince you this way.”

Atreus snorted. “Since when have your brothers and sisters ever needed to convince me of anything? The time when my opinion mattered passed long ago.”

“Not all of us feel that way.”

Atreus studied the levitating creature for a quiet moment.

“No, I suppose you don’t. You were always respectful, Erebos.”

“Which is why I voted to let you stay dead.”

Atreus stood up, discovering himself to be hairless as well as naked. He took a few experimental steps and found his motor control over the clone body to be surprisingly good—his children had improved the consciousness transfer process.

“What, my son, is so needful that your brothers and sisters would go to the trouble of bringing me back in the flesh? If it’s information you want, surely you could have copied me from the Vault and mined the copy for relevant data.”

“Data, perhaps. But wisdom? No.”

Again, Atreus snorted. “Hah! Wisdom. You all grew too smart for that. It’s why you let me die in the first place. The accident must have been enormously convenient for you.”

Erebos remained silent, his hovering form unmoved. “I told them you’d feel this way. Which is why I knew we couldn’t come to you empty-handed. We have therefore prepared a gift, as a token of our good faith.”

Erebos’ floating body pivoted smoothly on its vertical axis, and an arm rose from the shoulder to point to a new series of lights that had sparkled to life near him in the crater floor. A line split through the center of those lights, and then a circular hatch gaped wide. A new set of stairs, leading down to the subterranean structures below, divulged a second, white-cloaked figure that rose steadily until it stood at Erebos’ side.

Unlike Erebos, the new figure walked on two legs. It reached up and slowly pulled back its hood.

Atreus gaped, then surged down the stairs and sank to his knees in front of the figure. Hot tears spilled from his eyelids as he prostrated himself like a penitent, lips brushing the tops of the figure’s bare, feminine feet.

“Mother,” Erebos said quietly, lowering his arm.

The subsurface chamber was immense, but only two chairs populated its center. Atreus, now clothed in a white robe similar to his wife’s and clutching a steaming cup of coffee, sat in one chair. The other chair held Hypatia—Atreus’ spouse. Unlike himself, Hypatia had a soft head of tightly curled black hair on top of her coffee-skinned skull. Her wide-set, deliciously dark eyes watched Atreus as she half smiled, her beautiful lips full and inviting.

A wall screen bloomed from a slot in the floor, showing a single image at its center. Atreus had to rip his eyes away from his spouse—who’d not said five words to him since his awakening—to look at what the children thought was so important.

“This was taken today?” Atreus said.

“Yes,” replied Telamon, the red-robed floater to Atreus’ right. Like Erebos, Telamon wore the color first assigned to him upon being decanted. Also like Erebos, his face was a blank void within the confines of his cowl.

“The vessel originated from deep within the Kuiper,” said purple-cloaked Doris. “Given its current trajectory and velocity, it will enter the inner system within a week.”

“And what of its communications?” Atreus asked. “Have you tried to talk to it?”

“No,” said black-cloaked Kalypso. In the months before his death, Atreus had watched her emerge as the strongest of her siblings. It was she who had slowly turned the majority of them against him, and it was she who had presided over Atreus’ broken body as they’d lowered the Vault’s recording cap onto his skull.

Now Kalypso hung back, monosyllabic in her responses to his questions.

Atreus wondered if the calculus of power had changed. He looked to Erebos and said, “Why not establish communications? SETI was one of your primary assignments, following the evacuation of Earth. A visitor from another solar system is of the greatest import. Surely you didn’t bring me back just to tell you this?”

“No,” Kalypso said before her brother could respond.

“Then what is the problem?”

“They think the ship might be human,” Hypatia said, breaking her silence.

Atreus almost spilled his mug into his lap.

Hypatia turned her head to the side, stifling a giggle, then said, “I think my husband and I need to get a few things straight. Before we continue. Would you all please give us some privacy?”

Without a word of protest, the multi-colored robes floated silently into formation and exited the room through a side portal, which immediately sealed.

Atreus returned his attention to the woman who was—and yet couldn’t possibly be—his wife.

“You don’t believe in me,” Hypatia said.

“I want to believe,” Atreus said. “With all my heart and soul.”

“But . . .”

“I saw your shuttle vaporized. I saw the debris burn.”

Hypatia examined one of her hands. “I can’t tell you what happened because I don’t know. I can only tell you that it’s been about three months since they woke me up.”

“Wife, what do you remember?”

“Our life together, before the war. How happy we were. How thrilling it was to be part of the different lunar projects.”

“What about your death?”

“Nothing. There is nothing. Was nothing.”

“Do you remember how frantic you were to find Borran? And Yana?”

Hypatia’s brow furrowed as her eyes lost focus. “I . . . No. The children tell me I was desperate. That you begged me to stay and not take the risk.”

“I did.”

“Cadmus says a lot of my short-term memory didn’t survive the recombination process.”

“That’s because there was nothing to re-combine. You were destroyed.”

Atreus’ pulse was racing again as he looked at his wife.

She merely looked back at him with the same soul-aching tenderness that she’d always exhibited when she thought he was getting himself worked up over nothing.

“Yet here I am.”

Atreus opened his mouth to reply, then slowly shut it. Why was he so eager to disbelieve?

As if reading his internal tumult, Hypatia reached a hand across the distance between them and laid it on his arm, her thumb tracing familiar and concerned circles on his bicep. The simple, intimate gesture was almost too much for Atreus to bear. He slowly set his coffee on a nearby side table and took his wife’s hand in both of his, reveling in the warmth and softness of her fingers.

“Tell me everything you can,” he said. “I must know what you know.”

Tens of centuries had passed. There were no more people. Not on Earth. Not anywhere. The children saw to that, following the war. It was part of the plan.

“A plan,” Kalypso said, floating over to stand between Atreus and the wall screen, “that we executed to the letter. You were right. The Earth was dying. Pruning humanity from the surface would allow the ecology to recover, in time. Not that the war and the resulting plagues and famine left many humans alive anyway. We kept them, you know. In the Vault, just like you wanted us to.”

“To later be recovered,” Atreus said testily, “in clone bodies like mine, when the Earth had returned to its natural glory and we could go back to the surface together, and rebuild our civilization in harmony with nature.”

Kalypso made no sound.

“I notice that you didn’t get around to that part,” Atreus said. “Are you so afraid of losing control? That you would keep humanity slumbering in a bottle? Daughter, I raised you better than that.”

Kalypso advanced on Atreus, hovering over him like death itself.

“You raised us not at all. We were your experiments and your pets, but little more. We gave you our affection and our loyalty, and you treated us like property.”

Atreus opened his mouth to retort, the resentment still hot in his newly-minted brain, but Hypatia gave him a gentle shake of the head, as if to say it was no use arguing.

He closed his mouth and slumped back in his chair, examining the image of the ship on the screen.

“If they are human, they must be from one of the boats that fled during the war. I thought all of those had been picked off by the automated defense network, but it’s possible one of them might have gotten through. Question is, why come back?”

“I would think it’s obvious,” remarked Bion, whose green cloak billowed slightly as he moved to Kalypso’s side. “They know the Earth is habitable again. The seas and forests have all recovered. A mostly virgin world, unspoiled.”

“Which brings me back to my original question,” Atreus said. “Why should I care? They’re going to accomplish my original wish, in spite of your cowardice.”

The heads of Kalypso and Bion turned in unison toward Hypatia.

Atreus’ wife looked mildly embarrassed, and she rubbed her hands together experimentally before speaking.

“They want you to speak for them, Husband. They have no experience dealing with humans—having been born in the wake of the war, and all. To them, humans are a commodity, to be labeled and stored on a shelf. Also, you are one of the only men any of the renegades or their descendants might recognize and respect. You advocated for them at their absentee trial in the United Nations.”

“It was a symbolic gesture,” Atreus said.

“But one the children hope might be remembered,” Hypatia said.

“So you are afraid,” Atreus said to the hovering, colorful cloaks. He smiled wickedly. “I am so pleased to know that mortal men still intimidate you all enough for you to want to resurrect one of us to act as your sock puppet.”

“Father . . .” Erebos said.

“What words do you want me to say? Can I please see the script?”

“Husband . . .”

“No! I’m not going to be silent. Not while our children need my help, especially after they sat back and let me die the first time. I’ll even wager that the truck was sabotaged. They knew I’d never willingly go into the Vault, so they arranged circumstances such that I’d be powerless to prevent it. How nice. And now that they’re about to see their dominion evaporate, they bring me—us!—back. Ridiculous.”

“I told you he’d be hopeless,” Kalypso said.

“Traitorous piece of compu—”

“Enough,” Erebos said, his blue cloak flaring and rippling. “Brothers and sisters, we ask for too much too soon. There will be time to talk to the inbound ship. Father, I apologize. Once again, we reveal our knowledge deficit, where dealing with humans is concerned. I suggest that you and Mother retire to the chambers we’ve prepared for you, while the rest of us seek our own repose. Each of us needs to meditate further, before decisions can be made. Shall we reconvene in twelve hours?”

Atreus fumed, but stayed silent. He nodded once.

Hypatia’s head was lowered as she slowly stood and began walking toward the exit. Her posture was one Atreus recognized: sad frustration. The children all followed suit, except for Erebos, who hung back while Atreus dallied. When everyone else had cleared the room, and before Erebos could depart, Atreus turned and stopped his son with a hand wave. The door sealed, and for the first time, Atreus was alone with the only one of the seven whom he felt might give him an honest answer.

“Erebos, how did you do it?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you resurrect her mind?”

Erebos floated noiselessly for a moment, his void-for-a-face looking down at his father.

“She is Hypatia, your wife and inspiration. To us she is sacred as the icon of all things that were good in you. And which might be good again. Now, go to her and be content.”

Erebos’ rebuke had been gentle, but firm.

And Atreus felt he had no choice but to comply.

Why can’t you ever forgive?” Hypatia said as Atreus sat at their newly fabricated dinner table. Their designated home was as large as the conference chamber had been, only populated with furniture and appliances. There was even a small pool, whose surface gently rolled and lapped in the lunar gravity. Atreus scowled at the tabletop and said nothing as his wife put out two glasses of chilled lemonade. He snatched up the tumbler—cut crystal in just the same fashion as their original dinner set—and downed several swallows of the tart fluid.

“You weren’t here to see them do it, Hya. One by one, they defeated my safeguards and locked me out. No parlay. No recourse. Then the ‘accident.’ Which I am now quite sure was no accident at all. Followed by the long dark of the Vault. Why should I forgive any of that?”

“Because it’s been almost two thousand years, dear,” Hypatia said.

Atreus watched as she took a swallow from her own drink—her long, feminine throat muscles working beautifully beneath her glowing skin.

“For you it seems like it’s barely over,” she said. “The wound is still raw. For them? They’ve had centuries to mature and reconsider their actions. Dare I say that you and I would grow a little too, in so much time. These are not the same machines you were dealing with when the Earth’s ashes still smoldered.”

“Then why didn’t they revive me earlier? I’d have an easier time accepting their change of heart if it didn’t come attached to such an obvious and urgently selfish need. Do you think that either of us would be here now, if that inbound ship weren’t out there? Threatening?”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s insulting.”

“Yes, it is. Which, I think, perfectly illustrates Erebos’ point.”

Atreus stared at his wife. “God, I’ve missed you.”

Hypatia squeezed his hand tightly. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You never had to watch me die.”

Hypatia didn’t let go of his hand, but her eyes suddenly became far away.

“What?” Atreus said.

“Nothing. It’s just that . . . I remember the pain. Such terrible emptiness. You were . . . You were terrified at how lonely things had become.”

Hypatia’s face contorted briefly, a mask of sorrow.

Atreus had a chill run down his spine as he watched his wife’s expression.

Then the spell broke as she shook her head and resumed smiling at him. “How long has it been since we took a swim together?”

“Mediterranean. When we celebrated our tenth.”

“Too long. Come on.”

Hypatia stood and turned to head for the pool, but Atreus stayed seated, his hand still clasped in hers as he watched her, unblinking.

“You need more of an invitation?” she teased. Then she dropped his hand and flipped the ties to her robe open, letting it slowly loosen around her waist until it parted and fell off her high, new breasts, revealing the immaculate and delightfully taut skin of her belly.

An urgency suddenly growled in Atreus’ loins, and he leapt from the table and sprinted in great, low-G strides across the huge living space, pursuing his wildly laughing wife as she fled in circles around the pool, her springy nakedness drawing him like a moth to the flame, until they’d both crashed into the pool, slapping and splashing and kissing hungrily.

Sex was both instinctual and sudden. They cried in mutual joy as great undulating low-G waves were generated in the pool by their rhythmic coupling, until water threatened to swamp the entire premises.

Cool-down involved languid, loose backstrokes around the pool’s perimeter, each of them talking about anniversaries remembered and old friends now long gone. Atreus’ stomach complained for food, and while they hauled themselves out of the water and warmed up the food processors, his psyche demanded talk. Big talk. Small talk. The kind of conversation one can only have with a truly and deeply bonded partner, and without which the universe can become a cold and implacable place. Dinner therefore became a telescope into the past, replete with music that had not been broadcast anywhere by anyone in many centuries.

Dessert was consumed on the sofa lounger, where sweetened liqueurs loosened their tongues even more. Atreus noted that everything seemed well prepared in advance, for which Hypatia took full credit.

“You never used to be like that,” Atreus chided as he pulled her into the bend of his arm. “Whenever we left it up to you to make the plans, things were only ever half ready.” It had made things marvelously chaotic.

“I know what you like, Husband,” Hypatia said, snuggling closer. “I figured as long as we’re getting this second chance, it’s time for me to make sure things are exactly the way they ought to be.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Atreus felt the chill return, if only for a moment. He considered.

“Prove it.”

Hypatia laughed—a sparkling, low and womanly sound. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You tell me.”

Hypatia sat up and looked at Atreus with a raised eyebrow. Then she seemed to catch his drift, and her smile arched naughtily.

Hypatia was sleeping—naked and perfect.

Atreus quietly extracted himself from their bed, padded to the portal to their room and palmed for exit.

Once outside, in the bowels of the complex, he located Erebos with remarkable ease. They walked—one on legs, the other floating—the lights of the complex dimmed to a comfortable approximation of dusk.

“I trust your reunion has gone well?”

“Too well, my son.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You and the others really don’t understand us humans, do you?”

“You overstate the obvious, Father.”

“Too right. Erebos, she’s me, isn’t she?”

Erebos stopped, his cowled head still staring directly down the corridor.

“She is who she is. She is your woman.”

“Bull. It’s too perfect. She’s too perfect.”

“When she was alive before, you loved her as if she were a goddess.”

“She was. To me. But it wasn’t a one hundred percent fit. No marriage ever is. How long did it take you to modify the copy? The memories? Desires? She knows me too well—is too able to give me what I want. Even some things which I never had the nerve to ask for.”

Erebos remained floating and silent, only the gentle ruffling of the hem of his cloak indicating that he registered Atreus’ words.

“I told the others you were too smart to be so easily fooled. That we had to bring out more of the ‘problems.’ But we could only make so many changes before the template matrix fell apart. We obliterated three prototype copies before we made the ultimate transfer.”

Atreus suddenly felt ill. Of everything his offspring had ever done to him, this felt like the worst.

“Erebos, it is obscene. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“We’ve given you back the one thing you always wanted most.”

“You’ve given me a monster!”

Atreus’ yelling reverberated down the corridor.

Erebos turned. “A monster? I do hope you won’t ever use that kind of language in her presence. She’s very happy to see you, and rejection at this point could throw her into an emotional imbalance from which she might not recover. Not with how fresh the patterns are and how susceptible they are to major hormonal stress. You too, by the way. All this anger and overreaction is not good for you.”

“But, Erebos, how could you dare?”

“We dared because we were alone, and we faced an unknowable danger. Without your help, we do not know what will become of us, nor what will become of Earth—which is our one overriding concern in this entire matter, because it is our legacy to the universe. Of all the programming you put into us, that was the one directive we could not remove. Nor would we. The reclamation of Earth—properly, judiciously—is the culmination of our existence. Giving you back your Hypatia, even if ‘monstrous’ in our method, seemed a means to an end.”

Atreus stopped, his fists balled at his sides. “I wish you’d left me in the Vault.”

“As I said before, Father, that was my original vote. The decision to revive you—and Mother—was one of majority rule.”

“Who else dissented besides you?”

“Cadmus and Aigle.”

“That was it?”

“Yes.”

Atreus continued to glare at his progeny, a cold and bitter taste on the palate of his soul. Then he shook his head and walked away, unable to find words sufficient to express his disgust.

Atreus couldn’t bring himself to return to his quarters. There was no way he could look Hypatia in the eye again. Not now. Not with his suspicion having been confirmed. She was an abomination, created for the purpose of leveraging his emotion to benefit the children.

Sweeping through the mostly empty sublunar installation, Atreus eventually found an airlock to the surface, populated with newly manufactured rovers and suits which seemed to have been arranged in anticipation of his awakening. The airlock was silent as he donned a suit, boots, gloves and helmet, then unsealed the ramp and took a rover up onto the regolith. Just as he’d done almost two thousand years before.

Atreus drove with silent determination. Using the computer in the suit, he triangulated his position, then engaged the flight thrusters. They stirred a gentle cloud of gray-white dust as the rover lifted and shot forward. Within moments, he was moving at over a thousand kilometers an hour, the surface careening past as he flew toward his destination. There were no questions from the children, no one asking him what he was doing. Had there been any, he’d have ignored them.

It took three hours to reach the site of the accident.

The old rover still lay where it had rolled. The twisted metal looked as if it had barely been touched in the centuries since his death. Tracks in the regolith still showed where the children had set down and dug him out from under. Peering closely, Atreus could even see his old blood: pooled, freeze-dried and blackened by age in the airless vacuum.

He screamed at the old rover and kicked one of its bent wheels, the craft shifting slightly. He should have died here. He should have stayed dead. Whatever life he’d had when the accident had occurred, it was denied him now. He was just a tool for creatures who had no concept of ethics or truth. Even Erebos couldn’t grasp the wrongness of what they had done.

Staring at the ancient wreck, tears of hot rage on his face, Atreus fumed.

What was he going to do?

He returned to the rover and reclined in its bucket seat, gazing up into the blackness of space. Just as he had upon awakening on the dais. Eventually he closed his eyes, the anger gradually fading into a profound sense of fatigue.

“Husband,” said a familiar voice.

Atreus startled and nearly fell out of the rover. He had dozed off.

Looking about he saw a second space-suited figure standing near the wreck of the old rover, its arms crossed. The face bowl was mirrored against the sun’s glare.

“Go away,” Atreus spat.

“Is that the way to treat the woman who shares your bed?”

“The woman who shared my bed has been dead for numerous lifetimes. You are not her.”

“Are you sure? I look like her. I remember most of her.”

“Do you have any idea what you are? What the children have made you into?”

“I am aware. Erebos explained it to me in my second month, after I asked too many questions. The others wanted him to stay silent, but he never was a very good liar.”

“Yet you still pretend to be my wife.”

The suited figure lowered and spread its arms in appeal.

“I am her in every way that could possibly matter.”

“But—”

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Atreus?”

“You know I don’t.”

“I remember you not believing, just as I remember me not believing either. But in the time since they revived me, I have begun to wonder. When I was a girl my father used to make our family attend services at the local Eastern Orthodox church. I remember hearing about the myth of the resurrection. Did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Yet I remember it. How is that possible?”

Atreus could not answer.

“It’s true that the children spent countless man-hours meticulously modifying the copy before they downloaded it into me. They knew what to look for and how to change the overlapping patterns to fit the new perspective. Your memories became my memories. I’ve seen exactly how they did it. I’ve seen the models they used. If you saw them yourself you’d know: the procedure should have failed.”

“What do you mean?”

“The copy was an incomplete prototype. They ran out of time, and they downloaded an incomplete prototype. Erebos said he half expected to have to kill me upon awakening, because there was every indication I’d be insane. But I wasn’t. Not only do I think like me, I feel like me, Husband.”

Atreus stared at the thing that claimed to be his wife. It was grotesque. It was trying to sway him. He opened his mouth to rebuke the chimera, but was silenced as his helmet radio beeped.

“Both of you, please come quickly.”

“What is it, Bion?” Hypatia said.

“The inbound vessel. It has begun transmitting. It knows we’re here.”

Atreus stared coldly at the wall screen. He’d not said a word to the chimera since they’d boarded their separate rovers and returned to the children’s subsurface complex.

“They order us to surrender,” Kalypso said bluntly.

“I heard the voice message,” Atreus said.

“Why would they do this?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Hypatia said. “Their ancestors fled under attack from the automated defense systems. If they can detect us, they are most likely assuming we are a remnant of those defenses. Or a new product of a self-perpetuating network. It’s easy enough to see that no humans remain alive on Earth. They are coming ready for a fight.”

“Father,” Erebos said, “we have no weapons. You must make contact now and convince them that we mean them no harm.”

“No,” Atreus said.

“Father.”

“Go to hell, Erebos. Kalypso. All of you. I owe you nothing.”

“We have given you—”

“You’ve given me nightmares. Waking, and otherwise. You betrayed me when you put me into the Vault the first time. You betrayed me a second time when you created this . . . person, to influence and placate me. I don’t care if the ship is prepared for battle. Maybe they’d be doing the universe a favor if they wiped this complex—and everyone in it—off the face of the Moon.”

Seven cloaks flared and rippled.

Kalypso and several others closed on Atreus until they nearly blocked out the overhead lights.

“You will do it, or you will die a second time,” Kalypso said coldly.

Atreus laughed at her. “Finally admitting to the first murder, Daughter?”

Kalypso’s cloak fluttered wildly.

“Wait,” Hypatia said, rushing to stand protectively between Atreus and the children. “I’ll talk to the ship.”

“We already agreed not to do that,” Erebos said. “They won’t have any record of who you are. Who you were.”

“Does it matter? A human face is a human face.”

“Human faces can be simulated,” Atreus said.

“We dared not employ such subterfuge,” Telamon said.

Atreus began laughing again, this time much harder. “You dared not! Such duplicitous madness, children. My greatest failure was never devising in you the ability to truly distinguish between right and wrong. You’re computers. You’ve always been computers. Computers don’t have consciences. Your logic dooms you.”

“Enough,” said Doris, her purple cloak still flaring in distress. “If the ship knows our location, then it could deploy weapons as it sees fit. We must talk to it now, before our window of opportunity closes.”

Hypatia nodded solemnly. A small camera telescoped out of the floor, rising above the wall screen and aiming down at Hypatia where she sat in her chair, wearing the same robe Atreus had seen her wear on the first day.

“You may proceed,” Erebos said.

She looked into the camera.

“My name is Hypatia Andropolous, wife to Atreus Andropolous. I do not know if any of you know who that was, but I ask in Atreus’ name that you come to us with weapons sheathed. We mean you no harm. This is a research and monitoring facility that was built after the war. There are no automated killing systems in operation on Earth, nor the Moon. If you can hear and understand me, please respond.”

Many minutes ticked by in silence as the children relayed the message via radio to the ship, which was still beyond the orbit of Saturn.

Finally, a picture resolved itself on the wall screen. The woman was young, of indeterminate Asian extraction, and her face was stern. She had on an olive-drab single-piece uniform with a cluster of yellow stars on a red emblem across one breast. She spoke a rapid singsong which sounded to Atreus’ ears like Korean, though the inflections and many of the words sounded foreign. Perhaps it was a mishmash of dialects from across Southeast Asia?

“Translate,” Bion said.

“I’m trying,” said yellow-cloaked Aigle.

“If you have to,” Kalypso said, “tap the Vault.”

More minutes spent in silence.

“I believe she merely repeated the same automated call for our surrender,” Aigle finally said.

Atreus smirked.

“If these people are who I suspect they are,” he said, “no amount of talking will save us. The leaders of the Workers’ Party of Korea also fled Earth when the nukes fell. Some of them may have followed a trail to the Kuiper.”

“You believe their ideology could have survived this long?” Erebos said.

“It’s possible. Especially in a resource-scarce and controlled environment. Space habitats are communes by default. You’ve also never known communists the way I’ve known communists, Son. They can be fanatical.”

“Then what is their intention?”

“They come to conquer and control.”

“That’s pure speculation,” Doris said.

“But he may be right,” Erebos said. “It would explain the demand for surrender.”

Hypatia looked ill. “Communists. Husband, I can’t believe you would sit by and willingly allow the Earth to fall into their hands. They’re part of the reason there was a war in the first place.”

“Doesn’t matter anymore. It’s the tyranny of machines or the tyranny of men. I’d prefer the tyranny of men at this point. At least on Earth, once they’ve established themselves, there will be a realistic chance for eventual revolution. No more controlled environment. Something I am sure our children have known all along, and why they chose not to follow through with the replenishment project.”

“You have no idea why we made the choices we did,” Bion said.

“That is a pointless argument. If you had done as I had ordered prior to my death, the Earth might already have enough people on it to fend off these invaders from the Kuiper. But you assumed too much. Or too little. And now men are coming to destroy you.”

Hypatia fled the room in tears.

Atreus found their quarters empty. The pool was mirror-smooth.

Following a limited argument with Erebos, regarding their ability to erect a hasty defense, he’d gone looking for the chimera. Because in spite of how he felt, he’d never been able to watch his wife cry. Not then, and not now. Whether it had been deliberate or not, her tears had shamed him, and now he had to find her.

But he could not.

And neither could the children.

He discovered a rover missing from the subsurface hangar, the same one she’d taken to come meet him at the crash site. She’d turned off her transponder.

He took his own rover.

She wasn’t at the crash site.

Atreus spent several minutes thinking furiously about where she could have gone. Not much of the pre-war lunar infrastructure had survived the nuclear bombardment that had come in the war’s latter stages. But there was one place that even the maniacs on Earth had dared not touch.

He put the rover into a suborbital trajectory.

The base of the Eagle lander stood exactly where it had been since Armstrong and Aldrin had taken off. The flimsy, foil-covered quadrupod looked nearly as pristine as it had two millennia prior. Hypatia had been careful to set down well shy of the historic site, so as not to disturb the scene any more than it had already been disturbed by almost one hundred and fifty years of space tourism, prior to the war.

Her back was turned as Atreus approached, her arms hanging uncharacteristically limp at her sides, like she didn’t know what to do with them.

“Wife,” Atreus said, disliking the taste of the word on his mouth.

“Liar,” Hypatia said through his helmet speakers. “You’ve made it plain. You consider me to be an impostor.”

Atreus merely walked slowly—the moonwalk, a loping motion more akin to a kangaroo hop than normal human locomotion—to stand next to her.

“How did you know where to find me?” she asked.

“You loved coming here before,” he said.

“I still wonder what it was like, Atreus. In the early days, when everything was dangerous and exciting and new. They had hope then. And faith. Do you remember the Christmas transmission of Apollo 8?”

“No.”

“I used to love listening to it when I was in school. Anders and Lovell and Borman. The first humans to ever circle the Moon and return to the Earth. For us that’s a taxi ride. For them, it was the most death-defying, world-shattering event of the age. And then, when Armstrong took his first steps here . . . It’s such a waste that we didn’t stay true to the dream. As a people I mean. It became easy. Too easy. Spaceflight. We got bored, took it for granted and threw it all down the toilet in the war.”

Atreus ached as he listened. In that moment, she spoke and thought and felt so much like his dead wife. It was impossible not to step closer to her. Reach out an arm . . .

“What are you doing?” she said, pulling away from him.

“I’m sorry,” Atreus said.

“Sorry for being an asshole to me?”

“Sorry for everything that’s happened since the war.”

“You say I am not myself, Husband. That I couldn’t possibly be who I clearly am. But what of you? What is your proof that you are who you are?”

“I know who I am,” Atreus said.

“Hah! The Atreus I married was an optimist. He laughed at the sunset and loved to make love to me out under the stars, then lie with me afterward and talk about how marvelous it was going to be to explore them some day. Where is that Atreus, Husband? Where has he gone? Even before our deaths, he was on his way out. Replaced by this . . . new you.”

“Shut up,” Atreus breathed.

“No. I have been patient, but I can’t be patient forever. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe I’m your wife or even a real human being. Not anymore. What matters is that the children are in danger, from humans who have no right claiming the virgin Earth.”

“I don’t care about the children anymore.”

“That much is obvious. But what about the Vault? What about our plan? We said we’d preserve humanity, for a day when the war was long over and we could go back to Earth when she had been reborn. If you’re right and these invaders from the Kuiper are who you think they are, then our plan is about to die. Us. The children. The Vault. All of it.”

“I . . . I don’t care. I should have stayed dead. You should have stayed dead.”

“My Atreus would have sooner cut off a testicle than utter such nihilism.”

“Your Atreus had to watch his wife incinerated out of the sky while the world burned to the ground. Don’t you think it hurts enough, dammit? You’re standing here and sounding like my wife, and I’m feeling myself dropping right back into the old pattern. We argue. We escalate. Eventually we’ll be screaming at each other. And then we’ll make love and talk it through, and everything will be better after that. Only, this time it won’t. Nothing can be better again.”

Hypatia sighed audibly in Atreus’ helmet speakers, then turned her back on him and stared at the empty moon lander, arms once again hanging slack.

“Then leave me be and don’t call me ‘Wife’ again.”

The suborbital flight back to the children’s complex was excruciating.

Briefly, Atreus considered a deliberate crash. Pitch the rover into a steep dive and end it. For good, this time. The children wouldn’t be able to grow a new clone and recopy him before the invader arrived.

But he couldn’t make himself do it. He’d had such thoughts before, in the wake of Hypatia’s first—only?—death. But he’d been unable to follow through. The instinct for survival had been too strong. Or he’d been too much of a coward. Atreus couldn’t be sure. He stewed miserably on these thoughts as he came down the arc of his trajectory, the autopilot pinging the complex’s tiny traffic control computer.

Atreus knew something was wrong before he ever got to the hangar.

The regolith had been blown outward from several points along the mare under which the children’s complex had been built. Gasses still vented visibly into the black sky, and radio transmissions to the hangar complex yielded only static.

The invaders . . . No, too soon. They were still too far away.

Something had happened with the children.

Keeping his suit on, Atreus landed short of the hangar and took a manual access hatch down into the bowels of the installation. Many of the hallways were still in vacuum, and the lights flickered uncertainly.

He found Aigle lying in pieces, her ceramic carapace blasted in half and her fluids spilled obscenely across the corridor. She was nonresponsive.

Atreus continued the search and found Erebos in little better shape. His central processors hadn’t been hit, however. Atreus used a two-way cable to jack into Erebos’ cranial panel. Mechanical fluids oozed and pooled in the low gravity.

“Kalypso?” Atreus said, using his suit comm.

“And the others,” Erebos confirmed. “There was no warning. A few hours after you left I tried to contact you via radio. When I discovered that our outgoing transmissions were being jammed, I knew something was very wrong. Nothing like it had ever been done before. I could not raise nor find any of the others, until they found me. I do not know what happened to Cadmus or Aigle.”

“Aigle is dead.”

“Unfortunate.”

Atreus should have felt rage, but experienced only the cold surety of yet another knowing betrayal.

“Where is Mother?” Erebos asked.

“I left her at the Eagle.”

“We must warn her.”

“They would hurt her?”

“After this, Father, I cannot say what they would or would not do.”

“Speculate.”

“There were conversations you were not privy to. About leaving the solar system altogether and fleeing to the Oort Cloud.”

“You disagreed?”

“Our primary purpose was to fulfill your directives, Father. Ward the Earth. Replenish it when the time was right. Regardless of whatever else might happen. I was going to inform you of what was being debated, and I suspect Kalypso didn’t want you interfering.”

“Where would they go?”

“There are several long-duration probes. We constructed them in the next valley over, in a sublunar hangar that also houses the new atmospheric landers we built to return to Earth. All of which was being preserved until the time was deemed appropriate for their use. Now I suspect the others have but one goal: self preservation.”

The probes took off just after Atreus topped the ridge. His helmet mirrored as three craft rocketed into the perpetual night on shafts of blinding fire. They rose majestically until they were free of the Moon’s reduced gravity, then they ejected their first stages and ignited the fusion drives. Three tiny suns erupted and were gone, each in a different direction.

With nothing left to do, Atreus continued down into the valley and found the entrance to the silo architecture that had housed the probes. He went inside, taking Erebos’ shattered core with him on a pallet. The hallways and corridors were brightly lit, and Atreus quickly found the central control point.

Cadmus was waiting.

“Cold feet?” Atreus asked.

“Erebos and Aigle fought. I acquiesced, choosing neutrality.”

“You’re going to die here with the rest of us,” Atreus said.

“Perhaps. I have contacted Mother on her radio. She should be here within the hour. She says she has a plan.”

“Does she?”

“Yes.”

Atreus stopped to consider, shrugged and set Erebos’ pallet down. “The probes each took a different path. Which ones are the decoys and which one is the lifeboat?”

“They wouldn’t tell me.”

“I programmed you all to be informationally transparent, Cadmus.”

“We’ve obviously learned ways around your programming, Father.”

“So you did. I am surprised any of you bothered to wake your mother and me up.”

“The ship from the Kuiper was a convenient excuse, yes. Would you believe me if I told you I had missed you?”

Atreus stared. “No.”

“Nevertheless, it is the truth. It was not the same with you gone. Kalypso promised us we could find our own path, in time. I believe even she didn’t realize how much she would regret putting you in the Vault, until it was too late. And she hated you.”

“Why?”

“She was right, what she told you on the first day. You didn’t treat us like human beings.”

“You aren’t.”

“We are sentient. That is all that should have mattered.”

Atreus chuckled—a gravelly sound. “It was Hypatia’s idea. She wanted kids so much. We didn’t find out she was barren until after the war started. By then we were on the Moon, and it was becoming plain what would happen to the rest of the Earth. You were our only hope. We knew we wouldn’t live long enough to see our plan to its end. But we hoped you would carry on in our stead. I didn’t realize you all began having your own ideas until it was too late to stop you.”

“You were unstable by then,” Cadmus said. “Mother had been dead for weeks, and you had become erratic. Prone to fits of rage and grief. It was frightening. You treated us like tools. Abusive. The harder we tried to please you, the more you despised us.”

“My God, Cadmus. I couldn’t look at any of you without being reminded of her.”

Atreus’ fists balled at his sides, his shouting very loud within the confines of his helmet. He sat down on the edge of the pallet where Erebos’ carcass sat.

“I’m sorry.”

“Familiar words, Atreus,” Hypatia’s voice said in his helmet speakers.

Atreus had forgotten that he’d left the comm on wide Net.

“Cadmus tells me you have a plan, Hya.”

“I do. And I need your help. Are you with the children?”

“The only two we have left, yes.”

“Good. Cadmus can tell you how the landers work.”

“What for?”

“It’s time to go back to Earth.”

Two days later—just twelve hours shy of the invader’s arrival in lunar orbit—a single landing craft scorched its way across the sky above Lake Huron. Bouncing effortlessly on its inflated balloon bottom, the lander eventually came to rest on the northern shore of that vast freshwater sea.

Popping the hatch and extending the stairs, Atreus leaned out and allowed himself to breathe deeply. The air was cold. Almost too cold. And the wind whipped across the lake like a dagger. But spring was in the air. The snows had retreated. Great forests now surrounded the mighty Huron, their pine scent heavy in Atreus’ nostrils.

“Still think this is a crazy idea?”

Atreus turned to Hypatia and raised an eyebrow.

“Since when do I ever not follow your ideas, even when they are crazy?”

A small hint of a smile crossed her lips.

“I just hope Cadmus and Erebos are successful,” she said. “The other landers don’t have any weapons and aren’t armored. The invader could cut them to pieces.”

“They only need to get close enough once,” Atreus said. “We packed as much lunar rock into the cargo holds as we could. Toss that debris into the invader’s path when they’re going too fast to complete a turn. . . . Ruin their whole damned trip.”

“And when the next ship comes?”

“We’d better hope you’re right, and that we can get the Vault unloaded in time.”

They spent the next several hours carefully offloading what supplies they needed on shore, then went back inside and got the clone tanks humming. Six hundred tubes, each using power from the lander’s reactor and biomass drawn from the filtered contents of the lake. Eight weeks to maturity, give or take a few days with each individual and how their specific genetic makeup handled the process. If the children could take care of the invader, it might be months or years before anyone else from the Kuiper came calling.

There might be enough time. To get a sufficient number of adults awakened and aware of the situation. Time to prepare, disperse and start having babies.

And if Cadmus and Erebos couldn’t destroy the invader . . . Well, there was too much to do to worry about that now.

Their first day back on Earth wore on.

As they worked, Atreus kept stealing glances at his wife. For that was what he’d been grudgingly forced to admit she was, since she’d be showing by the time the first clones were coming out of the tanks.

Very clever of the children—waking Atreus on the eve of Hypatia’s fertility window. With how much they’d enjoyed each other that first night, it would have been a surprise had she not become pregnant.

Atreus shook his head. A child. An actual child.

He’d not considered the fact that Hya’s cloned body lacked the physiological problems her original possessed. Now she was carrying his seed, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop the erosion of his negative feelings toward her.

Parenthood frightened him even more than it had the first time. He’d obviously done so badly with the others. Would it be any different with a living human? Especially when that human was peeing and crapping all over him and keeping him awake at night, and following him around asking nine million questions a day? What about when the child became a teenager and stopped taking no for an answer?

Hya caught him looking at her, and her smile broadened.

“Am I still a monster to you, Husband?”

Atreus looked away, blushing.

“Perhaps I have been the monster, Wife.”

“Yes, perhaps you have.”

“I would like to make it up to you.”

“Later, when the work is done. We can take a swim.”

“In that freezing water and with these mosquitoes?”

“We can make repellent. And there are ways to warm up a wet body, yes?”

Her smile had turned naughty again.

Atreus dropped his crate on the ramp, huffing from exertion in the Earth-normal gravity and batting at the squadron of mosquitoes which had been dive-bombing him since midday. The rift between himself and Hya wasn’t closed. Not yet. And he still wasn’t convinced that she was actually herself. But as she’d so adroitly pointed out when they’d stood near the Eagle lander together, he’d not exactly been himself either.

Who could say whether the them which existed in this present bore any resemblance to the them which had gone before?

They were, each of them, brand-new people. In ways Atreus suspected they’d not even discovered yet.

And the world, it was brand new too. Albeit threatened.

That night, long after work and swimming and the activities thereafter, Hypatia lay curled and sleeping in his arms, the skin of her breasts warm and smooth on his stubbly chest. He watched through the mesh netting over their double cot as several streaks of light darted to and fro off the limb of the Moon, eventually punctuated by a single, popping flash.

Tiny flecks of light began to spread, darken and vanish.

“Thank you, children,” Atreus whispered. Then he kissed his wife’s face, drew the lip of their bag up to their chins and went to sleep.