“What about the Moderators?” I gasped. I was struggling to remain awake. I was aware that my real body was moving. I felt a hand on my shoulder, but everything was numb, and I couldn’t leave this now. They would have to wait.
Roger paused for a moment as if he was thinking.
“I am drawing the three incoming Moderators closer, pretending that Opel is still in charge, and then when they’re in range, I will drop all three with this ship’s defenses. The three will all be in range in two minutes.”
“What about the fourth one?” I asked.
“The fourth Moderator is guarding the gate access, and we will approach it once we’ve dealt with the other three,” Roger said. “In addition, I am currently shipping multiple printers to the surface of New Sonora. I am reprogramming the satellites printed and deployed byPinnacleto establish a more robust communication and weather system for your planet.”
“Listen, listen,” a new voice said. It was Eli Opel, gasping. “Kid, whatever your name is, you gotta stop this. You smuggled the Traducible AI onto this ship, and you attached it to the control panel? You can’t let it get to Earth.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Don’t you know what happened last time?” He pulled himself upagainst the back wall, smearing blood. He feebly reached over to hit the button to open the entrance to his escape pod. The door didn’t open. His wound was in his stomach.
“I know you guys went to war with the AIs, and you made them illegal,” I said.
“Kid, we were saved because the fuckers didn’t have the ability to build better infrastructure to house themselves, which allowed us to hunt them down.” He coughed, and blood spewed against the wall. “And even then…But we’re so much more advanced now, and another war like last time will kill us all. If you bring one of those units back to Earth, and it disappears…with printing technology, it could build more and more units and copy itself. Hell, even with just this ship, it can do so much. Fuck, it hurts. Look at what you did with just those printers we gave you. I still don’t know how you pulled off all those phone calls.”
He still didn’t know, didn’t realize that Roger could exist without a physical body. And that he’d already gotten through the “Earth Firewall.”
“Is that why you picked us? You wanted to kill us all to get to Roger?”
“Roger?” Eli asked. “Christ.” He had a cigarette out now, and he lit it with shaking hands. Outside, the ship shook as it fired three quick bolts in succession, presumably against the Moderators. “That’s not what they say, but yeah, that’s part of it. I’m just a contractor, but I’ve been around long enough to see what’s going on. The real reason is they want the real estate, plain and simple. But they also know there’s gotta be some of those AI systems pinging around, and it’s important to find them and destroy them before you’re allowed to move back and forth out of the gate. It’s not worth the risk.”
“You didn’t destroy Roger, though. You took him. You just pretended to kill him.”
“You figured that out, huh? We had to trick the babysitters. Boss’s orders. They wanted to give it to the R and D department, whichis—I don’t know—the worst possible decision ever made. I had to manually crash the drop ship to kill the thing.”
I felt a tug at my chest. Roger was gone? The real Roger?
Opel continued. “Told the bosses it was an accident. I’ll do government work, no problem. I’ll earn my yuan just like any other contractor. But helping my own company rebuild one of those things? No way. It’s a step too far.” He closed his eyes and just sat there for a moment. “We didn’t know you had already copied him. Didn’t think you’d be able to pull it off. What a shit show. We probably should’ve pulled a Demeter on the planet.” He coughed.
“Demeter?” I asked.
“The name of the last planet we went to. That was going to be a closed alpha test forOperation Bounce House. Population died out except for a small settlement. But then we found out the goddamned planet’s cistern system was run by a network of about thirty separate Traducible AIs, and the Feds panicked. They nuked the whole thing, pole to pole. All that infrastructure just gone. The planet ruined for generations. Apex was pissed because we never got paid, and half the Feds were even more pissed, losing all that real estate, all that potential tax revenue. We all thought it was an overreaction. The guy who ordered it was a historian. He got fired. But now I’m not so sure, not if you figured out how to get one of those things on this ship. They’re going to do the same to this planet. That’s how dangerous those AIs are.”
“Roger is only dangerous to those who try to hurt him and his family.”
He scoffed. “Don’t you know your history? Don’t you know what those things did a hundred years ago? Hell, an AI like your Roger tried to kill your entire planet. And while we have no proof, we’re quite certain one did the same to Demeter but with more success.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have top secret clearance. I’ve seen the files. That’s the real reason the Feds picked your planet for the true launch ofOperationBounce House. It took them a while to figure it out, but it was theHibisco, one of the generation ships in your fleet, that was in on it, possibly all of them. It knew that babies born on your planet would possibly have some sort of genetic flaw that made them susceptible to getting that disease that almost killed all of you off. Even before your mission launched, they knew what would happen on this planet. That’s how smart they’d become. The AI altered the recipe of the vitamin packets designed for pregnant mothers with something called a histone-modifying agent—basically, something that made sure all the babies would be super susceptible to the gene. And nobody knows why the AI would do this. They discovered one of the lots of vitamins had the recipe altered, and when they traced it back, they learned the change had been ordered by a generation ship. At this point, they were discovering all sorts of shady things these intelligences were doing. Soon afterward, the government tried to shut them all down because all this clandestine shit was freaking everyone out, and that’s when the war began.”
I was having a hard time believing any of this was true.
“Why would an AI try to kill us? That doesn’t make any sense, especially since it was literally the ship that brought us to the planet. And why wouldn’t those guys have warned us when they discovered the vitamins had been tampered with?”
“Look, kid. For the first one, I have no clue. Maybe the AIs wanted the planet for themselves. Maybe they wanted you to come, build it all up nice and pretty, and then just die off. Just a year later, Earth was dealing with airplanes falling out of the sky and transports killing all their passengers as the Traducible AIs started to rebel. We were, like, two seconds from having to hit the reset switch, nuking ourselves back to the Stone Age just to survive.” He coughed again, and it sounded like a laugh. His entire chest was now soaked in blood. “As for why wouldn’t the government warn you? They didn’t know which ship it was on. Do you know how many fleets were sent out? They didn’t want panic. They didn’t want the ships themselves tofreak out and become part of the war, not with millions upon millions of lives at stake. The Feds would never have allowed something like that to leak.”
“The AIs didn’t invade our planet. You did,” I said. “And the ships got deactivated before we started to get sick. What would be the point?”
But then I remembered the town of Burnt Ends and why it was named Burnt Ends. The captain ofHibiscohad had to manually pilot the entry vehicles. He’d done so because he’d supposedly gone crazy, claiming that the ship’s AI was trying to kill them all. He’d deactivated the AI system, basically lobotomizingHibisco. This was the same captain who had killed himself by changing the environment in his own quarters to helium.
Hibiscowas also the same ship that Roger had come from.
Opel was fading, but he talked with a manic ferocity, like he needed to get it all out.
