Cover image from Unsplash

Again, I need to thank Malady for his help and ideas as I write this.

Your help is much appreciated!

Chapter 4.1

“Well, you son of a...”

We had returned upstairs, and when we arrived, we had a surprise! Sitting in Marc’s desk chair, talking to Amy, was Rachel. Her wings were carefully folded behind her, and her pixie dress appeared out of place inside a building.

“Rachel?” I asked at the sound of her incomplete expletive.

She spun toward the office door and nodded. “Good, you're back,” she said simply.

“What’s going on?” Marc asked.

Rachel turned a glare onto Amy and said, “You wanna tell ‘em, or shall I?”

“I'm not certain what conclusion you've jumped to,” Amy said, and it seemed to me there was more acid dripping in the voice than I'd ever imagine a machine could manufacture.

“I'm not surprised,” Rachel said. She turned to Marc and said, “There are some locked memories in Amos’s head and we need to get to them.”

“You mean his crystals?” Marc said, expecting an affirmative, but she surprised us all.

“I don't think so. These have to be in his head.”

Amy immediately shook hers. “There are no memories inside his brain. They've all been kept in his crystals.”

“I don't believe it.”

“I don't have any reason to lie to you,” Amy assured Rachel.”

“I didn't say you were lying to me,” Rachel told her. “I think Amos is lying to you.”

“That is impossible,” Amy said. “I exist inside his body. Inside his mind. He can't lie to me.”

“One would think so, yes.”

Somehow, my husband had managed to realize what Rachel meant, or maybe he'd come to the conclusion earlier. In any case, he asked, “Then why’d you believe we weren't people?”⁷

“Because Amos said you weren’t.”

Seeing the bot construct realize what she'd just said was fascinating. Her reactions were completely in line with those of a human who'd just realized the same thing. “He lied.”

“Yes, he did. And you bought it hook, line, and sinker. Even now, when you're working to help us, you didn't realize it.”

“But I don't understand. How could he lie to us? To me?”

“Something people have wondered all throughout time,” John said.

“I understand your humor, but I don't mean it in an emotional way. How is it possible?”

“Its not hard when you have access to memories,” John told her as he pulled out a chair from the table dominating the room. He motioned for me to sit, and pulled out another for himself.

“I doubt he's just blocking your memories off, though.”

“If he was, I don't think you'd be able to acknowledge the deception even now,” I said, realizing where John was going.

“For us, remembering the link between the crystals and the computer was hidden,” Marc supplied. “Once we remembered it, though, it was like an elephant in the room. How had we missed it?”

Doctor Sylvia entered the room and joined us at the table. She told the computer to produce a hologram, and a moment later, we were looking inside a brain.

Amy looked up, and immediately recognized it. “Amos,” she said quietly.

“I've been listening in, and I think I've found something significant,” Sylvia said.

We watched as parts of the brain flashed by. Everywhere we looked, we saw active brain. Finally, Marc asked, “How much is active?”

“I haven't found any that's not,” Sylvia said.

I gazed around, thinking how different this looked from this side rather than...

Suddenly, I understood.

“This is how he hid his memories,” I said.

“Huh?”

“You know what I mean, John.”

“Well, we're talking about certain memories right now, but I suspect you're meaning something different.”

I nodded. “These are the memories I didn't find when I entered his crystals the first time. This is what he didn't want me to find.”

“Not exactly,” Amy said. “We built an environment inside the crystals. It had to appear to be the complete Amos because we didn't know where your thoughts might lead, and what questions you might ask. We had to be prepared for anything.”

“So it was you, not Amos?”

“I'm very sorry,” Amy said in affirmation.

I was shocked but, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been. Considering what we knew of Amos, how could he possibly fake feelings like he apparently had? There was simply no way. What shocked me, however, was the fact that the bots had been able to.

I felt like a fool. So much had happened, and I guess I’d been overwhelmed by it all.

-=#=-

It had taken much time,, but most of the people on board had been returned to a likeness of their original selves. Most, because some found that they were happy with what they were. Some of the men turned she-males chose to remain that way. Amos had intended for the change to be humiliating. I suppose he never thought that a biological male might consider the situation more pleasant.

Another group that chose to stay were a couple of the women who had been made to resemble and act as dogs, although full control was still returned to them.

Kari considered returning to her guise as a dragon, but when Freddi decided to return to her original self, Fred, Kari decided to remain as a human. Needless to say, she and Fred quickly bonded.

Things were going well, and we had essentially beaten Amos, but we were returning to our home and were destined to face more struggles he had prepared for us.

-=#=-

It took a long time to arrive back to Earth, but one morning, many, many years after we had essentially beaten Amos, John and I were called to the bridge of our giant ship. We knew why Daddy had summoned us, but the sight that awaited us was not something we wanted to see.

Fred had taken the job as our navigator, although we hardly needed one. The course Amos had set for us was accurate. Fred had double checked the course we were on, however, by launching some probes. One was sent into the star, and one was sent to where each of our planets should be. Provided the system was ours.

Programming the course for each probe was a delicate operation, and Fred had spent a large number of days, double checking the course each would take. He had to adjust for the speed we had made our trip at, and while it had been several millennia, our time, it was several times that on Earth.

We were still a few years away from the star system, but one by one, Fred showed us the planets in the system. Starting with the dwarf planet, Pluto, we observed each one. Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. He didn’t show us Earth at first, but each of the others, with its familiar visage, proved that it was indeed, our star system. The only difference that I saw, was the absence of any great red storm on Jupiter, but even the moons of the great planet were where Fred had predicted they would be.

Then, Fred brought up the pictures returned from the probe circling our home, or what had once been our home, for the planet we had lived on and loved, was no more. Certainly, there was a sphere in the right place, and since it was there, it was obvious that the mass was what was predicted, but it was too small! And the surface seemed to be moving.

It was as if a pseudo-pod sized for the planet was extending toward the probe, which was keeping its distance. Out of the planet’s reach.

“We can’t return there,” Paula said, very quietly. “Where’s the moon? Has it been affected?”

My brotherinlaw nodded. “Yes, it has. It appears as though it’s been absorbed by the planet.”

“But that would change the mass.”

“Of the planet,” John said, “But the mass of the planetary system would remain the same.”

I stared at John for a moment, then said, “Can you explain that?”

“Earth and the moon were always orbiting each other. Granted, it didn’t seem that way, but they were. The mass of each is basically one object when projecting so far into the future,” John explained. “They’re going to move the same way whether they’re one body or two.”

“I see,” I said. “No, I don’t,” I quickly amended, “but I’ll take your word for it.”

“That being the case,” Marc said, “the probe must be quite a ways from the planet.”

“Yeah,” Fred confirmed. “I doubt it lasted very long, though. It wasn’t made for evasion. It’s likely been consumed.”

As we watched, the view of the planet seemed to be getting hazy. “There we go,” Daddy commented. “I believe you’re right.”

A moment later, the picture was gone. “What happened,” Kari asked.

“I suppose the probe has been converted to bots,” I said, understanding that at least.

“If we try to land there, we’ll be consumed too,” Mamma said flatly.

“I’m afraid so,” Amy answered. “I thought this might be the case, so I have been working on a solution.”

“And what’s that?” Daddy asked her.

“For a long time, people considered building a shell around the planet Saturn. It has a mass very similar to Earth’s and a shell could have approximately ninety times the surface area of Earth.”

“What about talking to the bots on Earth?” I asked. “Get them to release the planet?”

“The planet is not hosting bots, Rose,” Amy said. “The planet is bots. There is no Earth as it was.”

“But I thought they were programmed simply to...” My voice trailed off as I realized the source of my knowledge. “Another lie,” I said.

Amy didn’t respond. Instead, she gazed at me, her face reflecting the frustration I felt.

“Do we know what made Hal immune to the bots?” John asked. “We might use that.”

Mamma sat down heavily. “Yes, we do,” she said. “It’s not what you think, John.”

Rather than say anything, John just waited. Mamma sighed. “Okay. I’ll explain what we’ve been able to figure out.”

I sensed that this was liable to be a long story, so I took John’s hand and gently pulled him to a couch to sit down.

“I’m listening,” John said. I recognized the tone in John’s voice, and I could see that Mamma did as well. He rarely used it, and almost never with my parents, but I think he sensed that he wasn’t going to like the explanation, and he was preparing to deal with it.

“Hal’s genetic makeup is the only one we found in the computers downstairs,” Mamma said.

“That makes sense,” John said. “I’ll bet the little bastard wanted to figure out why his bots couldn’t hurt him.”

“He knew why,” Mamma said, very gently.

I could feel John tense beside me, and I knew he was quickly reaching his limit in this strange situation.

“There is a specific gene that Hal had. Sylvia and I have run it through our databases of everyone on the ship, and we’ve only found two more cases of the gene.”

“And who else has it?”

Mamma ignored the question. “That particular gene somehow strengthens the cell walls so that the bots can’t get through it.”

John tried again. “So you’re saying two other people on board are immune?”

“No,” Mamma said. “Nobody on board is immune.”

“But you just said,” Marc started.

“Amos knew about the gene.”

“How did he know...” John stopped as he realized. “He had it himself, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did.”

“So the other two are me and Fred.”

“Apparently it was in his family.”

“So he figured out a way to work around the gene,” Fred nodded.

“So Hal was a relative too?” I said. “But you said there’s only two others with the gene. There’s three, including Amos.”

“Hal wasn’t a real person,” Amy told us. “He was an experiment.”

Mamma nodded. “From what Amy and I have been able to retrieve from Amos’s mind, he wanted to make more hell for John. Hal was designed as someone who was immune to the bots, but unable to fight them.”

“His personality was mostly created from the template used to fool Rose in the crystals,” Amy explained. “There were gaps, certainly, but he was designed to ignore them. His name was short for Heuristic Algorithm."

“So his personality was from Amos?!” I asked, astonished.

“In a manner of speaking,” Amy confirmed.

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--Rosemary