“Defend humanity?” I asked. “Defend humanity from what?”
As the image pulled out, a second printer appeared next to the first. Then a third. Soon, we were in a massive factory filled with dozens, then hundreds of printers. All had mechs in different sizes and various states of manufacture.
Then the image pulled out farther, and we saw we weren’t in a factory, but in the hull of a massive spaceship. The word “APEX” was etched on the side, and under that was “Pinnacle,” the name of the ship. Behind me, my neighbor Mr.Xalos whistled. The ship was huge, bigger than any of the original generation ships. Bigger than any of the long-haulers. We zoomed out even farther to see the giant ship was in orbit, floating directly over our planet. The blue ocean of Cortez sparkled.
“The location of the eviction action is the newly connected colony planet of New Sonora, a hotbed of terrorist activity!” A second screen appeared and disappeared, presumably filled with stats on our planet. A spinning globe showing the different communities appeared. Little X’s with skulls appeared over all the population centers, all except the capital city of Fat Landing. The globe turned, showing the peninsula, with a big X over the town of Burnt Ends. Behind me, several people gasped.
“Special preview members are deploying now! It’s not too late to get in on the action! Financing available! The insurgents won’t last long! We only have five days to cleanse the planet! Don’t miss out on your chance to make a difference in the galaxy! The future of true humanity is in your hands!”
“Five days?” someone asked. “Then what? They just go away? So we have to hold out for five days?”
“Where are we supposed to go?” Mrs.Rodriguez asked, wringing her hands worriedly. The ancient woman had to be pushing ninety.
“That kid’s mom said we’re supposed to get to Fat Landing,” I said.
“How? How would we do that? It’d take a month to get there. Not five days.”
Nobody answered.
More people were showing up by the minute, just walking right into our front door.There’re too many people here. I don’t like this many people in the house.
Lulu furiously typed at her keyboard. She now had some sort of text-only message forum up on her screen.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m getting the word out,” Lulu said. “They’re about to murder a bunch of farmers.”
I leaned over and watched the messages scroll by. People were calling her a liar, saying that she really wasn’t on the planet. Or they were just ignoring her. Her messages were falling off the screen as fast as she was typing them.
“You need to tell your friends. Not these people,” I said. I leaned in closer. “And by friends, I mean yourfriends.”
“Already did,” Lulu said. She switched windows and started typing there.
Mrs.Xalos, who had apparently left the room, popped her head back in and asked if we had a second bathroom. We didn’t.
Lulu pulled up a news screen, but they weren’t talking about us at all. She moved the screen off the main display, and it was projected on her wall.
“I just don’t understand. Why are they doing this?” Mrs.Rodriguez asked after a moment of us watching the newscast, which had now switched to covering an interplanetary cricket championship.
A new voice answered. “They don’t consider us human.”
My heart did a little skip. Rosita. I turned and met my girlfriend’s eyes. My ex-girlfriend. Her eyes went huge, and she rushed up and put her hand against the bandage around my head. She touched my forehead right in the wrong place, and it stung.
Mrs.Rodriguez just shook her head. “We didn’t have a choice. Everyone was dying. Don’t they know that?”
Lulu looked at her wrist and turned to me. “Roger and Priscilla are approaching. Also, Ollie, it says your bracelet is repaired. You better go grab it.”
I paused. Rosita was still examining the bandage on my head. She had her ever-present camera drone out. It hovered by her head, taking all this in.
“Rosita,” I began, “about last night—”
“Go,” she said. “Get your bracelet. We’ll talk later.”
“Okay,” I said, standing. I wanted to say more, but she was right. Now was not the time. “Give me your bracelet, though.”
“Why?” she asked as she pulled it off her wrist. “You’re not planning on puking on it, are you?”
A very slight smile played across her lips, and an overwhelming sense of relief filled me as I grabbed it. It wasn’t much, but I would take it. Until that moment, I hadn’t really processed that we’d officially broken up the night before. Everyone was saying it was the fight over me being ignorant of the wholeOperation Bounce Housething, but that wasn’t really it at all. That’d just been the public fight after the private one we’d had just an hour before that.
