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1-of-Antonia

Monalisa Foster

The question of how virtual reality can fit into human society is an open question. Some people seek escape in their work, some in recreation and nature, still others in literature (now who might they be?). And all too many seek escape from life’s troubles in alcohol or substance abuse. But what about an escape that doesn’t seem all that negative, one that allows the subject to live a long full life virtually? But sometimes reality can make demands of those who have escaped into a reality of their own creation. And of course, the gentle reader might wonder how all of this fits into the Ross 248 Project.

Monalisa Foster won life’s lottery when she escaped communism and became an unhyphenated American citizen. Her works tend to explore themes of freedom, liberty, and personal responsibility. Despite her degree in physics, she’s worked in several fields including engineering and medicine. She and her husband (who is a writer-once-removed via their marriage) are living their “happily ever after” in Texas. Her current project is Ravages of Honor, an epic space opera featuring genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and swords. Find her and more about her works at monalisafoster.com.


The man in front of Suri was neither sick nor old. Despite the tubes and wires, the monitoring equipment around him, and the fact that they were in Pluto’s premiere clinic for the dying, he was very much a man in his prime. According to his file, Aidan Samuels was forty-two. It was an imprecise measurement—his real age was forty-two years, six months, three days, and sixteen-point-thirty-six hours—one that grated on Suri’s “nerves,” such as they were. Tolerating such things without comment was one of the many adjustments that she had had to make.

She may not have liked it, but humans trusted those who looked and acted like them more than those who did not, especially when it came to their health. That’s why she was wearing a humanoid body rather than an arachnid one, even though having extra arms would have come in handy for most situations.

“I don’t understand,” she said, glancing at the virtual reality clinic supervisor.

Dr. Benedict Lammens was tall for a human, one-point-nine-eight meters. Suri knew that he had let his hair go gray because he believed it gave him credibility and she could tell that the glasses he wore were just for the smart-glass lenses. Appearances were important to humans. They went to great lengths to project not just credibility, but trustworthiness, intelligence—an entire list of positive traits—and mitigate an even longer list of negative ones. Would a four- or eight-armed surgeon with telescoping eyes convey competence and skill? Probably not. More likely to give them nightmares.

She filed the idea away, a side project for later, and connected to the clinic’s network. Samuels’ file said that he had gone into a very private and highly customized virtual reality in order to be with his dying wife. When her human body had failed, her corpse had been preserved for a later time in the hope that a cure for her neurological disease would be found. Her corpse had been placed in the family’s vault. There were thousands of such family vaults here on Pluto. It was known for its cryo facilities.

While Samuels and his wife had been in the VR, thirty years had passed for them. They had essentially enjoyed their “golden years” while only a year had passed in the real world.

“Mr. Samuels here is refusing to come out of the VR,” Lammens said.

“As is his right,” Suri noted, scrolling through the agreements between SAIN and Samuels. “According to this, the Host agreed to keep him in VR for as long as he wanted.”

“Unfortunately, the board of 3D-Printed-Homes wants him back in the boardroom,” Lammens said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat. “Some dispute or other. They need his vote to break a tie. Something about a takeover that might destroy the company he inherited from his father. Apparently the Cerite cartels are involved and frankly it sounds rather messy.”

“And he knows this?” she asked as she looked Samuels over.

“The Host told him. He doesn’t care.”

“Thirty years have passed for him,” Suri said, scanning through the VR’s logs. It had been just him and his wife for most of that time. There had been other constructs in there, but only artificial ones. No other real person had plugged in and interacted with them except for the Host. “And he’s just lost his wife. Of course he doesn’t care.”

“We need some time to sort things out with his board.” Lammens shrugged. “They’ve threatened to pull his credit, force our hand. Sue us. It could get ugly and undermine the trust in both SAIN and our facilities here.”

Suri had worked with terminal patients and their families before. She didn’t understand grief herself, but she did have to work with and around it. It was as much a part of working with humans as fixing their bodies was.

She took hold of Samuels’ left hand. It was cool to the touch, with fading calluses and a simple gold band for a wedding ring. Tiny scars peppered three of his fingers and the backs of both hands. A man whose family had their own vault here, who could afford nonsubjective years in VR, hadn’t had those tiny scars removed. Often such things were indicative of sentiment or a lack of vanity.

She reviewed his public appearances. Not a vain man, but one who definitely understood the importance of appearance enough to opt into standard enhancements—teeth, hair, eyes. A man who liked to work with his hands too by the look of it—there were lots of images of him doing physical labor, building things, making things.

Humans had such strange affectations. She ran her fingers along the pale scars. Nicks really, tiny little things. What had made them? She wanted to know. It would help her understand humans, which would help her help them, keep them alive, keep them healthy, give her purpose.

There was a hum in the back of her mind, like a warm caress. She smiled. Antonia, her AI-mother, approved. A human would have said that she was giving her blessing.

The decision to help Samuels was processed at AI speeds. She let go of Samuels’ hand and sat down in the chair next to his bed.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Lammens asked.

“My job.”

In the time it took her to answer, she ported the specs for her VR avatar to the Host. Suri liked to keep things simple. She liked to manifest as the statistically likely progeny of the two humans who had raised her.

After all, she was Catrina and Ian Hinman’s daughter as much as she was Antonia’s. So, she’d adopted her foster father’s dark hair and mismatched eyes (one blue, one brown), as well as her foster mother’s oval face and sun-kissed skin.

The last time she’d been in VR, her avatar had worn an eclectic mix of calf-length skirt with a bustle, combat boots, corset-top, and short bolero jacket with epaulets, all in blues and greens. She discarded the idea of aging her avatar, since most humans, especially older ones, presented as younger, healthier versions of themselves. VR was seductive because one could be anything, or anyone, and things weren’t always what they seemed.

Lammens had stepped back, a skeptical look on his face. But he didn’t say anything. She took it as assent.

Suri closed her eyes. She and Samuels’ Host came to an agreement at AI-speeds: unless Samuels’ real-world body was in danger, no one was to intervene or interfere. Once inside, she’d be stuck in the VR with Samuels until he agreed to leave or Lammens forced the VR termination for whatever reason.

She felt herself move as if through a tunnel of light, riding effortlessly through corridors that didn’t exist in physical space.

The final bit of it, entering Aidan Samuels’ VR, was like fighting her way through a wall of fire. If she’d had any sense of self-preservation, she’d have turned back.

Samuels didn’t want her there. That much was clear. Painfully so.

* * *

Suri’s internal chronometer said that only a few nanoseconds had passed.

Still, she felt like she’d been battered and bruised, an odd sensation given what she was and that her AI body was sitting at Samuels’ bedside. Everything was dark, like she was in bed, at night, eyes closed. It was hot. Unbearably so. So hot that sweat was pooling at the small of her back. AI bodies were so much better—no discomfort, no effects from such things as temperature. VR bodies, on the other hand, were as close to being human as an AI could get. She didn’t have to be human to appreciate that irony.

Something fell on her forehead, like a drop of rain, except body-warm. No, warmer.

A soft whoosh, a change in pressure really, made its way past her face. It was followed by something moist and wet swiping its way across her face.

Oh. Her eyes. Yes, she had closed them. Closed them to push through the wall of fire, to avoid the scorching flames put up by a strong mind determined not to let her through.

Time to switch mindsets. She opened her avatar’s preference file and initiated all those wasteful human bodily functions like blinking and breathing.

She opened her eyes. A long, pink tongue came at her, unrolling from the mouth of the black Labrador sitting by her head. She scrambled up to her knees, right into a German shepherd, a big, black one. He nuzzled into her with a whine. The Labrador, sitting opposite the shepherd, echoed the whine and the nuzzling motion.

She reached out to pet them, one hand on each head, as she looked around. The sky above was dark red, a deep crimson like blood, with roiling black clouds. The landscape was barren, like a great fire had raged across it and turned everything to ash. A castle, dark and Gothic, stabbed into that sky, its spires reaching into the clouds like greedy arms trying to claw their way upward. The only thing missing was a moat; it should have been filled with lava.

She was in the right place, she was sure. The Host didn’t make mistakes.

Which meant that Samuels was making this place as inhospitable as possible. There were rules, after all. If he took her air, he’d also be taking his own. If he froze her out, he’d freeze too.

“I don’t suppose either of you can explain this to me,” she said to the dogs.

Their ears perked up, not quite in unison, but like a rippling echo. Even their smiles echoed each other as they panted.

She kept petting them, scratching at their ears and necks. It’s what a frightened human would have done. And a human would have been frightened to find herself in such a hellish place. If not of the place itself, at the mindset of the person who’d created it.

“Is anybody here?” she shouted.

A gust of wind answered her, sending flurries of ash swirling.

Her hand found a collar. She looked down at the Labrador, still panting happily at her. She scratched under the collar, earning herself a grateful look and a glimpse at the name plate attached to it.

“Cerr, is it?” she asked. Silly, yes, but talking to a dog as if it could answer her was what a human would have done.

“And yours?” she said to the shepherd as she reached for his collar. “Bear. Nice. Fits you.”

It really did. He was big.

Their heads pivoted to the left at almost the same time and they were off before she got a chance to say, “Wait!”

Under their paws, the ground changed. It was covered in soft, green grass. It was like they were wrapped in a bubble of comfort. And now that they were gone, the heat was like a blast from an oven.

It was going to take more than heat and wind and ash to deter her. She hiked up the skirt. The fringe on it was singed, like it had gotten too close to a flame.

Curious. Even with this being Samuels’ VR, he shouldn’t have been able to affect her avatar. There were rules, after all. And not just rules like gravity that mimicked the real world. The Host could not allow a human being to come to harm. The rules on allowing AIs to be hurt were fuzzier. And she had told the Host not to intervene.

She pinged the Host to test it. There was no response. She was alone, truly alone for the first time in her life. A human would’ve gotten chills. Her avatar’s skin pebbled in response. Something shook in her chest: fear.

Oh, interesting. She was betting that a human couldn’t shut it down as she just did. She’d have to be careful to maintain just enough affect to pass for human.

Determined, she made her way to the castle. As she approached, it thrust upward like a volcano rising from a fresh fissure in the earth, reaching up to the sky and having the sky reach back down with bolts of lightning.

Ozone filled the air around her, making the hairs on her neck and arms stand up.

* * *

By the time Suri made it to the castle doors, she was drenched in sweat and the combat boots felt like swamps around her feet. She’d worked up a good amount of irritation—not all of it for the sake of appearing human—and raised her fist to bang it against the heavy wood door.

But she wasn’t to have the satisfaction of physically retaliating against the heat and general nastiness of the place. The door swung in on its own, creaking on heavy hinges, making a groaning sound as it did.

Despite herself, she went inside and sighed in relief as the doors closed behind. The oppressive heat was gone. A fountain bubbled in a corner, the only decor besides the torches ensconced on the walls.

Thirst, as real as she’d ever experienced, clawed at the back of her throat.

She rushed forward, dipped her fingers into the fountain to test it, and then brought a handful of water to her mouth. It was no less refreshing for being warm. She gulped down another handful and then rinsed off her face.

A shadow skirted along the edges of her vision. She made a startled sound.

Another dog. A poodle this time, black and long-legged. It made its way down a stone-wrapped hallway, glancing back at her every few steps, like it wanted to be followed.

Suri drank another handful of water and followed the poodle into a banquet hall. The tables were in disarray, the chairs and plates broken, the food turned to ash. Candelabras sported candles that still burned, though.

Someone sat on a throne atop a dais braced on either side by doorways filled with fire. That someone—it had to be Samuels—wore a cowled cape. His right hand was wrapped around a staff. The left rested on the throne’s armrest, fingers curled around a finial shaped like a human skull.

“You!” Suri said. “Why have you brought me here?”

Fingers tightened around the skull, the staff. Good. She’d caught him off guard.

“I asked you a question,” she said, moving closer.

“Who are you?” The voice wasn’t human. It was low, distorted, the kind of thing used to frighten.

“I am Surisaday Onido,” she said, preening. “The Surisaday Onido,” she added in a tone that said that of course he should know who she was. She’d heard the tone used by a celebrity, someone whom humans seemed to not just adore, but worship.

He seemed to be considering her for a moment. It was hard to tell, with him all in shadow. The poodle was a darker mass on his left side. He lifted his hand, placed it atop the poodle’s head, and used a finger to twirl the soft curls there.

“Reset VR,” he said.

The world around them flickered and Suri felt a tug from the network, gentle at first, then more insistent. She ignored it. The Host had agreed not to yank her out, no matter what happened. But it needed to show that it was still trying to respond to commands.

“I already tried that,” she said in that annoyed tone her foster mother used when she was tired and frustrated. “It was the first thing I tried. Are you the psycho responsible for this awful place?”

He took a breath. A deep one. It made his shoulders rise and for a moment she thought he might move out of that shadow, make himself visible, but he didn’t.

And then, he moved. It was wraithlike, as if he flowed.

She stepped back, genuinely surprised.

He poked her with his forefinger, hard in the shoulder. The finger wasn’t wraithlike at all. It was downright stabby.

“Ouch,” she said, covering the spot with her hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Making sure you’re real,” he said. This time the voice was human. Somewhere between a tenor and a baritone.

“Of course I’m real. Now answer my question. Why have you brought me here?”

“I didn’t,” he said.

She crossed her arms. “Well, somebody did.”

He moved around her, sweeping a widening circle, staff in hand, cloak billowing.

“Can you just let me out please? I’m done with this place.”

“I’m not the one holding you here,” he said, retaking his throne.

“Well, someone is. I was supposed to get my own VR. And I didn’t request a…a…What are you supposed to be anyway?”

He was silent, fingers tapping on the armrest’s skull.

She made an annoyed face and rolled her eyes. Time to invoke the culmination of every annoying person she’d ever come across. “Fine. Don’t tell me who you are. You’re probably just a glitch in the Host. I knew I shouldn’t have believed those AIs. Can’t trust those things. How about you, dog, do you have a name?”

The poodle tilted its head and looked at Samuels.

“Russ,” Samuels said. “His name is Russ.”

“Okay, well, now that we’ve all been introduced, I—”

“What’s a Surisaday?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” She made it incredulous and arched her brow.

“Are you deaf?” he asked, bristling. “Should I say it louder?” He made his voice echo and reverberate, like it was coming from all directions, raining down on her, pummeling her senses. It was worse than having someone get in your face and yell.

She let her arms fall to her sides and made fists. “I am most certainly not deaf.” It came out with an appropriate level of screech, like someone frightened and intimidated and pissed about the whole thing.

“Then answer the question.”

“Fine. I am the most famous science educator in the solar system. Surely you’ve heard of me.”

He laughed. It was dark and without humor.

If she’d been human, she’d have smiled. One didn’t mock someone they didn’t think was real. Now as long as the Host stayed out of it, as long as it didn’t interfere, she had a chance. Samuels might have refused to come out of VR as long as he could bend it to his will, but he might have second thoughts if he thought he could no longer control it.

This might have been his own personal hell, but he seemed content to dwell in it, to the detriment of everything he’d left behind in the real world.

What was that expression? Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Yes, that was it.

Time to test that premise.

“Are you done laughing?” she asked.

“For the time being.”

“Look. I don’t want to be here. And I can’t leave. And you claim that you had nothing to—”

“It’s not a claim. It’s the truth. Besides, who’d want a prima donna celebrity like you mucking up their world?”

She glared daggers—metaphorical ones—at him. They bounced off without effect, just as she’d expected. She put on the most dignified look a spurned prima donna celebrity could in the face of a heathen.

“Fine. I will stick to my side of this world. You stick to yours.”

Your side?” He lowered the cowl.

She’d expected a demon face, something designed to scare and intimidate, something to go along with the hellish setting. Instead, it was very much the face of Aidan Samuels, with his straight nose, dark eyes, and equally dark hair. He’d idealized himself a bit, like all humans. His avatar had more hair than the man she’d seen on the bed. He was leaner and more muscular too. The mustache and beard were well-trimmed and thick. The lines in his face were deeper, though, fitting a man who’d known grief.

My side. I’m not going to hang out here in your scary place.”

“I don’t recall inviting you.”

* * *

Suri stormed out of the banquet hall, stomped through the foyer with the fountain, and passed through the castle doors—they were wide open. While she’d been inside, a moat had manifested. It was filled, appropriately, with lava. Hard to say if the Host had changed it because she’d thought of it, or Samuels had. She hoped it was the former, that way he’d worry that he was losing control.

Waves of heat swirled around her legs and crawled up her body as she crossed the drawbridge. Had her hair not been sticking to her scalp from sweat, it might have billowed upward.

Well, it was going to take a bit more than heat to defeat her, although she did admit that there was something not just suffocating, but oppressive about it. The heat sapped your energy, made you want to just lie there and not move. Another reason to appreciate her real body, her AI body.

Nevertheless, she made it to the spot where she’d entered the VR and decided that this was going to be the place to make her stand. Some VR enthusiasts preferred dramatic gestures reminiscent of witches casting spells. Others went so far as to use music and dance to accomplish the same thing. Some were pragmatic and used voice commands or called forth an interface like a screen full of icons. Would a celebrity be pragmatic or dramatic?

She wasn’t just a celebrity scientist, though. She was a pissed-off celebrity scientist. And she didn’t have any presets to port over for making the Host understand what a song, dance, or dramatic gesture were meant to convey.

Pragmatic it is.

She held out her hands, palms up. “VR interface tablet.”

A thin sheet of smart-glass appeared in her open palms.

“Wait until my agent hears about this,” she muttered, keeping up the act of pissed-off celebrity.

She created a new object in the VR program’s code and inserted it into the appearance preferences.

“A refund won’t make up for this. Not even close.”

Sweat dripped off her face and landed on the tablet.

“There has to be some review board, some venue for filing of complaints.”

She kept tapping away, filling in a multitude of details, slowing herself down to an appropriate human speed in case Samuels was watching.

“No one is going to buy into this scam after I’m done with them.”

One hour and sixteen-point-thirty-nine minutes later, she had created the program for her own little oasis.

“Execute.”

The cracked ground underneath her booted feet trembled as it, and the surrounding area, sank. The VR world flickered as the boundaries of the oasis expanded like the waves made by a pebble dropped at the center of a calm pond. Except that she was the epicenter, and the calm pond was made of cracked desert floor that resembled that of Death Valley.

In the distance, there was a sound like thunder. It came from Samuels’ castle. It sent the world flickering again but it settled in with the changes she’d made.

A fountain came into being next, bubbling up from the ground like someone had struck oil. She took a step back and raised her face to the sky, letting the mist cool her. Up above, the clouds remained black, the sky red.

She backed away as the water rose around her feet. Palm trees and grasses sprouted along the edges of the pond. They flickered against the background, as if Samuels was fighting back on a smaller scale. According to her calculations, it was going to take three VR days for everything she had set up to propagate through the program’s settings. Longer if Samuels fought back.

It didn’t really matter.

Suri-the-celebrity-scientist, come to spend her last remaining days on Pluto, was going to take advantage of the distorted time and the VR’s real-world simulator subroutines and use it to finish her magnum opus. Now she just needed to find an appropriate project.

The red sky above gave her the answer. She was familiar with a small M6V red dwarf known as Ross 248. Around it, Poseidon’s World orbited.

If she’d been human, Suri would have laughed at the irony of it. Who better to duel Samuels’ Hades persona than Hades’ own brother, Poseidon? And what better way to annoy the man than with the opposite of what he had created? She was going to turn his barren wasteland into a water world. Oh yes, not just irony, but—as her human mother might say—delicious irony. Suri hadn’t appreciated the meaning of that word—delicious—until now. She’d always wondered how an abstract concept could be described that way.

And now she knew.

* * *

Suri had to settle for a smaller oasis than she’d initially planned. Samuels was fighting her, putting up barriers and altering the program. She could have undone all of his changes as fast as he’d put them in but that would have given her away. Winning control of the VR environment was not the point, at least not for her. It might be for him, and for now, that would be enough.

She made sure to ping the Host loudly with repeated demands to leave. Keeping up the illusion that she didn’t want to be here was important. Also very human. And like any spurned celebrity, Suri needed to come across as stubborn to a fault.

A miniature world covered entirely in water floated above her oasis. It looked like something seen from orbit, deceptive in so many ways. Clouds covered most of it, fluffy white things swirling into one another. It looked like a bastion of life, but wasn’t. Poseidon’s World, with its thirty-five-kilometer-deep planetary ocean, its 60°F average temperature, and its slow rotation was a dead world, despite all the water. People tended to think that water meant life, but Poseidon’s World proved that it did not.

Far from it. It was going to take hundreds, if not thousands of years to get it to the point where it could sustain any life. She needed to find a way to speed up that process. She had not thought of it before entering the VR, and she didn’t have all the parameters, but that too was advantageous. A human wouldn’t have remembered everything either.

Barking interrupted her train of thought. She turned away from the sculpture and faced the trio of Cerr, Bear, and Russ. They shimmered as they crossed the barrier between her oasis and Samuels’ construct.

Tongues lolling, they came up to her for pets, vying for her hands by strategically placing their heads under her wrists or elbows so as to nudge the competition out of the way.

It made Suri smile, the way that even these constructs of dogs behaved so much like real ones. She’d been raised with Cavaliers but dog behavior seemed to be quite universal. If they liked something, one instance of the act was enough to establish a “ritual.” Theirs consisted of crossing the barrier, swarming around her and competing for pets, scritches, kisses, and adoration for being good boys. The ritual continued with bouncing around in the pond, shaking water off, preferably by getting as much of it on her as possible, then rolling around in the mud so they’d have to do it all over again.

Samuels’ wife had had service dogs once progression of her disease warranted it. Despite the seriousness of her condition, she’d outlived three dogs—a poodle, a Labrador, and a German shepherd. They’d all been black males large enough to help her with mobility. Strange that Samuels and his wife had chosen to recreate only the dogs that had shared their lives and none of the people. Or maybe not so strange. Humans seemed to put a lot of stock in their relationships with their canine companions.

She put herself in a bathing suit and joined the dogs for a swim in the pond, laying on her back in the water, looking up at the simulation of Poseidon’s World floating above her like a liquid sky. Bear seemed particularly fond of pretending to rescue her, swimming circles around her until she threw her arms around his neck and let him tow her back to shore. When her skin became waterlogged, she conjured up a ball and threw it into the pond from the shore.

“Wouldn’t your time be better spent figuring out how to leave this place?”

Suri looked up from squeezing water out of her hair.

Samuels had come through the barrier. The dogs ran up to him and he knelt down to greet them, rubbing their heads and flinching back when they shook themselves and sprayed him with water.

“I’ve been trying,” Suri said, putting her hands on her hips. “I can’t contact the Host.”

“Neither can I,” he said. He hid the worry well, but it was there, an unguarded moment.

“It’s odd, not having control, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It is,” he admitted. He looked up at the world hovering above them. “What are you doing with that?”

“It’s Poseidon’s World. I was working on speeding up the terraforming when…”

“When?”

“When I got sick.”

He gave her a skeptical look.

Time to go on the offensive. “Look. What do you want from me? I can’t leave. I’m stuck here until the stupid, idiotic AIs get their act together. I’m trying not to die of boredom in this…this…whatever the hell this place is.”

“Death is a way out,” he said, darkly. Above, the red sky deepened.

“Oh, how original. Is that why you’re here? To die?”

“We’re all here to die.”

He meant Pluto. He meant the VRs. Yet the way he said it gave her a chill like life and death had taken on new meaning. It was an unfamiliar sensation. She reasoned it away—this was her first time without her connection to her AI mother. She could do no damage here. There were no humans who feared an AI takeover here. She didn’t have to worry about death—not hers, nor anyone else’s.

“Well, some of us aren’t as selfish as others,” she said. “Some of us still care about what happens to those we leave behind. Some of us still care about leaving behind a world better than the one we came into.”

He scoffed. “And some of us have lived long enough to recognize a know-it-all busybody when they see one.”

With that, he turned and stalked back through the barrier. Cerr and Russ raced him for the castle. Bear looked back over his shoulder before joining them.

* * *

One of the reasons that VR could be so useful was that people didn’t need to sleep. They didn’t need to waste time managing bodily functions. It was a very efficient, if artificial, way to live. Good thing it was so expensive. She could see it catching on but shuddered at the consequences that would result. For one, no one would ever have to venture out or take any risks as long as their physical bodies were taken care of. Puters and AIs could take care of everything. There were hundreds of settlements scattered throughout the solar system and on all of them, except Pluto, VR was effectively banned for exactly those reasons. The Patrol used VR for training, but that VR was not pleasant and involved much combat, destruction, and death. No Patrol member ever sought the services offered on Pluto.

She shook off the feeling, marveling at the way her avatar’s physical reactions mimicked a real human’s goose bumps. It was a feeling she could do without.

She returned to the task at hand—the Poseidon terraforming simulator. A lot was known about Poseidon’s World due to the two research vessels, Dawn Promise and Arata, that were cruising the endless sea. The gravity of the world was very earthlike at ninety-three percent that of Earth. Its day was long, about 114 hours. Its atmosphere was thin, about sixty-one percent that of Earth at sea level (so about 9 psi, or roughly the pressure at Pike’s Peak on Earth). The atmosphere was about eighty percent nitrogen and eighteen-point-five percent CO2. The remainder was about one-point-five percent argon. The ocean itself was 20 to 35 km deep and the surface temperature was roughly 60°F.

The depths were much colder. One big problem was the slightly acidic pH of 6.6. Lack of life had resulted in a reducing environment. Earth’s oceans had a pH of 8.1, and most life was dependent on that slightly alkaline environment.

The light spectrum was heavy into the red region, and absent blue and green. It was also hit by all too frequent solar flares.

The goal was to modify the light spectrum by blocking the red light from Ross and converting it into a reasonable imitation of Sol’s light using lasers. The Patrol was taking the lead in the lasers; they had uses for that amount of energy, other than directing it at Poseidon.

The pH had to be adjusted by adding sodium hydroxide, or removing hydrochloric acid, or both. The atmosphere’s CO2 needed to be converted into O2. Then humans could breathe without pressure suits, although nitrogen would need to be imported for many thousands of years to bring the pressure up to Earth-normal.

This allowed the introduction of Earth-life, like cyanobacteria to help with O2 generation. Phytoplankton was next, to serve as food for zooplankton, which would in turn serve as food to feed small fish that would feed large fish and eventually feed killer whales.

Humans would live on floating cities and it was estimated that such a world could support several billion humans easily. But how to get from here to there in a time frame of hundreds of years as opposed to millions of years? That was the challenge. The plans from the terraformers on Poseidon weren’t viable for a short time frame.

She modified several parameters, set the conditions back to the start, and then started the simulation. While that simulation ran, she fiddled with the settings of the VR, expanding her oasis, deepening the pond until it could properly be called a lake.

The dogs liked the water so much she wanted to give them a better place in which to play.

As soon as the new setting rendered, the dogs showed up. Russ raced right past her, not even stopping to get petted, and belly-flopped into the lake. The poodle went under, no doubt after the fish. A bark bubbled up from the water.

“I see you have my dogs in thrall.”

“And I see you have yet to learn how to knock,” she said, setting her VR interface tablet down, and keeping her back to Samuels. Cerr’s eyes were rolled back in his head as she rubbed his ears with both hands. Bear was running along the shore, barking.

“It’s not going to work,” Samuels said.

“What isn’t going to work?”

“Your terraforming,” he said, looking up at her rendering of Poseidon’s World. “At least not in any reasonable amount of time.”

She smiled. “Define reasonable.”

“Do you really think humans will still be around thousands of years from now?”

“Why wouldn’t they?” She rose and turned to face him.

“Because this”—he raised his staff and made an encompassing motion—“is easier, better, safer. Easier to control.”

He closed his eyes and the world shook for a moment. The edges of her oasis wilted from the encroaching heat, the grasses and palm trees turned brown and dry and then turned to ash.

“Stop it!” she yelled, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking.

He opened his eyes and his gaze bore into hers, flames flickering in his pupils.

She pulled in air that was scalding hot. It made her cough. Her oasis was on fire, the lake boiling hot. Her VR tablet shriveled up from the edges in and melted into the ground.

The dogs were unharmed and looking around as if they didn’t quite understand why there was no more water.

The dogs. The dogs were the key. None of the changes he was making to the environment had an effect on them.

Oven-hot air pulled her hair from her face, made her skin tighten like it was being cooked.

Suri collapsed to her knees, struggling to breathe. The ground beneath her scorched her knees. She felt every bit of that pain. She cried out, pushed up, and then shook her hands, trying to calm the burn.

The dogs came up and circled her. The bubbles protecting them overlapped, making a safe space. She dropped into it, going to her knees again, and looked up at Samuels.

“All you’re doing is proving that it’s not safer, better, or easier in here,” she said. “Not with the likes of you around anyway. I would leave if I could. Leave you to your misery.”

He lowered the staff. It made contact with the ground and sent out an expanding wave of energy that erased all her work.

“Interesting,” he said. “Safety protocols should have kicked in.”

“I told you there’s something wrong. Wrong with the VR. Wrong with all of this. We need to get out. We need to leave this place.”

“I think you need me to leave this place.”

* * *

“Come,” he said, extending his hand to Suri.

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

He held her gaze for a few moments before lowering his hand.

Samuels tapped the staff to the ground. On the third tap, the castle appeared around them. He had moved the castle, or moved them. She really couldn’t tell which. They were in a vast room, like an observatory, with a giant dome overhead.

“Before you came here, did you tell the Host your intent?”

“Of course,” she said.

Bear sniffed and licked at her burned hand. Cerr did too, letting out a whine as additional commentary.

“Then finish what you came to do,” he said, and Poseidon’s World rendered under the dome. Smaller versions of the watery world, about a dozen of them, came into existence like soap bubbles forming out of water droplets.

He sat down on a throne tucked into a corner and propped himself up like a villain in a Gothic play—staff in one hand, dogs at his feet, a stern, cold look on his face like a judge about to render sentence.

From the information she’d had on him, she hadn’t pegged him for the eccentric type, but he had just spent thirty subjective years alone with his dying wife. It was bound to change a person. Maybe enough to make him see himself as evil, as a villain, rather than what Hades had originally been—an altruistically inclined deity who maintained a relative balance.

A control console rose out of the stones around her feet.

“I’m giving you control,” he said.

“Control of what?”

“Of everything.”

There was something in his voice that said he was dead serious.

For a moment, she was tempted to boot them out of the VR. But how would that be any different from unplugging him and forcing him out?

Consent might be legally fungible, but was it morally so?

She decided it wasn’t. She’d come here to convince him to come out, to give him a reason to, a reason that wasn’t just threat and coercion. She’d seen what happened to humans who’d lost the will to live, either because they’d lost someone or lost those things in life most meaningful to them.

She recreated the simulation that he’d just destroyed. It was all in the console’s files, so she didn’t have to pretend to forget the details and start fresh.

Suri’s internal chronometer counted the days as she worked under Samuels’ judging eye.

In the previous iteration, she’d already started using electrolysis to generate sodium hydroxide, a simple chemical conversion in order to change the acidity from Poseidon’s six-point-six to Earth’s eight-point-one.

“That’s a lot of hydrogen and chlorine you’re generating,” Samuels quipped.

“One hundred thirty three thousand metric tonnes of hydrogen and about thirty-four times that of chlorine,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“You don’t have to change all of it,” he said an hour later. “You only need it in the upper layers.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’ll only need half that much,” he said, and then added, “Too bad there isn’t a moon to give you tides.”

“Not an option, I’m afraid.”

She brought in the cities that would be needed to aid with the conversion.

“What are you going to do with all the extra hydrogen?”

“Industrial uses. Fuel mostly,” she said. “Poseidon can be used as a stop for spaceships, a place to refuel. The chlorine is an important feed stock for the fabricators at the array and Toe Hold. Very useful for the vertical farms as well. But I’m not sure how to move that much material off-planet.”

Samuels scratched his chin for a bit, then said, “Not that hard actually, given enough antimatter. Build tankers that can float on Poseidon’s oceans, fill them up with liquid gas, either chlorine or hydrogen, certainly not both, and then use antimatter and seawater as reaction mass to get to orbit. It is going to take a lot of antimatter, though.”

“Okay, you got a preliminary design on these tankers?” she asked.

He concentrated on his terminal for a few minutes. A design for a tanker appeared next to the image of Poseidon. A large spherical shape. She considered it.

“It might work,” she said, almost reluctantly.

He snorted. “Of course it will work, just give me enough antimatter.”

She took them into Poseidon’s deep-sea thermal vents to work on the chemoautotrophic bacteria. He would occasionally rise and join her, circling the console, asking questions. Some of them revealed gaps in his knowledge. Others prompted her to think or look at things in new ways. They refined the simulation, creating multiple ways to speed up the changes in the ocean’s depths until the bacteria formed thick mats around the vents.

Several more VR weeks—it might have taken months, if not years in the real world—were devoted to the right sequence that allowed snails, shrimp, crabs, and tubeworms to be added. He lingered at her shoulder more and more, finally trading his throne for his own console. He ran his own simulations alongside hers. They failed as often as they succeeded, sometimes inadvertently destroying the bacteria that the higher life-forms fed on.

“What are we doing wrong?” he asked. “We’re giving the algae CO2. It’s releasing O2. We’re missing something.”

You’re missing something,” Suri-the-celebrity said smugly.

He threw her a half-hearted glare.

For the next few hours, Samuels concentrated on his console, researching something.

“I got it,” he said. “Micronutrients. In Earth’s oceans, the currents bring these micronutrients to the surface, but on Poseidon, the oceans are too deep. Without the right mix of micronutrients, phytoplankton and zooplankton can’t survive and then the entire food chain collapses.”

Of course. It was obvious now but she had completely missed it before. How did humans do that?

“Okay, how do we fix it?” she asked.

They worked on the problem for several VR weeks. Suri focused on lofting the needed micronutrients from the ocean floor. It required massive machines using massive amounts of energy operating at tremendous pressure at near-freezing temperatures. The engineering challenges were horrendous and required new technologies that would take time to develop.

“Look, we’re going about this all wrong,” Samuels said after hours of silence.

Suri turned to him. “Why do you say that?”

“It just isn’t possible to get what we need from the ocean floor—too deep, too hard. So we’ll drop them from above.”

Suri was genuinely surprised and pleased, all at the same time. There was a bit of something else—not quite anger, but something like it because she hadn’t solved the problem. It was worth it, though, because Samuels was obviously becoming invested in the project.

“Recent reports from Ross 248 indicate that Nordheim is going to be colonized for normal humans. Nordheim has access to all the nutrients that we need. That should start in a couple of years—or, actually, from their perspective, they’ve been at it for a decade already.”

“Ship the nutrients in by freighter?” Suri considered the possibility. Possible but expensive.

“No, this is perfect for a mass driver located on Nordheim. They fabricate projectiles from iron containing silica, phosphates, nitrates, nitrites, maybe cobalt, maybe some nitrogen and whatever else the silly things need. A mass driver can hit the planet almost continually with our micronutrients. Configure the projectile to explode in the atmosphere and rain down what we need.”

“Okay, let’s see if this actually works.” Suri pushed the changes into the sim. Projectiles entered Poseidon’s atmosphere and exploded.

“A nutrient-dense rain,” she said as they watched silica, phosphates, nitrates, and nitrites rain down. Decades passed. Noticeable phytoplankton blooms appeared in Poseidon’s Ocean.

His gaze sped over the commands she was sending to the simulator. She added cities, huge floating cities, designed to process the atmosphere.

“That’s a lot of energy,” he said, but not like a criticism.

“Life is such a delicate balance,” she mused. “So easily thrown out of whack.”

“It never surprises me,” Samuels said, “no matter how meticulous we are, there will still be factors we can’t account for, destroying our best attempts.”

The use of “we” didn’t escape her. He could have meant a more general “we” of course, as in the human race, as in people as a whole. Still, there was something satisfying about it.

As they rolled back changes, made adjustments, and then pushed forward, his appearance changed. She wasn’t entirely sure if he was aware of it. He’d lost the cowl and over the course of several days, his cloak became a jacket. The staff became a walking stick.

Days passed. He became less argumentative.

Once he even smiled, and not in that cold, cruel, or mocking way of his. It was a genuine smile when a change he pushed yielded positive results and a stable food chain.

“I think it’s time we introduced cyanobacteria,” he said.

They did. It failed.

“Still not enough blue light,” she muttered as she started over with a better light-producing array.

It took a week, but she was finally able to propel them seven centuries forward in time to when humans would be able to stand on Poseidon’s floating cities without pressure suits or additional oxygen.

“I’m going for a swim. Care to join me?” Suri asked.

Samuels’ eyes filled with tears. Bear went up to him and whined into his hand. He reached down to pet the dog’s wet fur.

Bear took hold of the edge of his jacket and pulled.

Samuels looked down. At first, Suri thought he was going to resist, just as he had so many times before, but then he gave in, allowed himself to be pulled into the sim.

Suri projected herself to the resulting world. The dogs joined her, swimming in the ocean, jumping from the deck of a boat again and again.

Samuels was looking up at Poseidon’s sky. He closed his eyes, letting the breeze tousle his hair.

“Seven centuries,” he said.

“Yes.”

“If all goes well. If humanity doesn’t degrade into a race of risk-averse fools too caught up in their own comforts.”

“Humanity doesn’t have to do anything,” Suri said, joining him at the railing. “All it takes are a few individuals.”

“The pioneers take the arrows.” He leaned over the railing, plunging his face into the spraying mist.

“You were a pioneer once, weren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Not really. I inherited my company from my father. He was the pioneer, not me.”

“You can still change that, you know. You have a knack for this kind of thing. Don’t you see it?”

“Who are you, really?”

“What do you mean?” She managed an incredulous look.

“You didn’t come to Pluto to die. You didn’t come here to create your magnum opus and leave a legacy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re a little naive to be a person old enough to feel your own mortality. You’re more like a child. The world is still bright and shiny to you. Something to be changed, not something that beat you up and sent you to licking your wounds before attempting to cheat death via cryo.”

“I think the thirty years you spent in here with your wife have colored your perspective a bit. Made you feel older than you really are.” She knew that her words were going to give her away before she said them, but she was out of time.

“You lied.”

“Yes.”

“You came in here for me.”

“Yes.”

“So why the pretense?”

“They’re going to pull you out of the VR, Mr. Samuels. Whether you want to leave or not. I think it would be much better for you, for your mental health, for your soul, to embrace life again, willingly.”

“Better for SAIN, you mean.”

“Better for SAIN as well, yes. Better for everyone. Just because it benefits SAIN doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit you.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Don’t you, Mr. Samuels?” With a sweep of her arm, she indicated the world they’d created around them. “You can become a pioneer like your father. You can help us change Poseidon’s World. Or do anything else you like. You can live again—a real life, not one limited by a VR construct. I know the godlike powers of control appeal to you. They appeal to all of us. But they are an illusion. They are not real.”

“How much time do I have left? Before they pull the plug?”

The world fading around them answered him. Tears came to his eyes. He lowered himself to the deck and the dogs rushed into his arms, licking at his face, his tears.

He looked up at Suri. She reached down, intending to pet the dogs, to reassure them. Instead, her hand passed right through Cerr and breath whooshed out of her lungs as the Host pulled her out of Samuels’ world.

* * *

Suri opened the eyes on her AI body. She was still at Samuels’ bedside, but she wasn’t alone. Dr. Lammens was also there, along with two human women and another man.

Dr. Lammens introduced the trio. The man, Terry Nanton, and the taller woman, Tiberia Shaw, were corporate attorneys. She worked for SAIN. He worked for Samuels’ board. The other woman, Iantha Agar, was a member of the board itself. She’d come to Pluto with a court order to pull Samuels out of his VR.

“You couldn’t have given me a few more hours?” Suri asked.

“Would it have made a difference?” Lammens asked.

“We’ll never know now, will we?”

“I don’t have time for this nonsense,” Agar said. “Wake him up.”

Dr. Lammens typed in the appropriate access codes to send the right drugs into Samuels’ body.

“How long will it take?” Nanton asked.

“Could take a few days,” Lammens said as he monitored Samuels’ vitals.

The lawyers lingered for twenty-eight-point-ninety-two minutes and then made their exit, citing the need for lunch. “Page us when he’s up,” Shaw said.

“He’s a very stubborn man,” Suri said. “You know that.”

Lammens nodded.

Her words turned out to be prophetic. A week later, Samuels still hadn’t woken up. Lammens was throwing out words like “comatose.” The lawyers were using terms like “brain dead” and “lawsuit.”

The Agar woman was planning to have Samuels declared legally unable to make decisions so the board could replace him. SAIN, the clinic, and everyone else, including Suri herself, were caught in the middle of exactly the kind of legal, ethical, and moral battle she had hoped to avoid in the first place.

Suri struggled with whether or not she had done the right thing by going in there, by thinking she could somehow jolt him into caring about the outside world, or give him some new purpose or cause and somehow erase the thirty years of subjective time that had aged him beyond his forty-two years. It would be a shame to lose him. He could easily live another one hundred and fifty years and contribute much to human-AI civilization.

If she’d been human, she would have sighed. It was her job to make things better for humans, to take care of them. Some of them tended to be so complicated, though. Especially the ones whose traits weren’t typical, weren’t anywhere near the peak of the bell curve.

She left the clinic and the comatose Samuels at the end of the day. She stepped out of the clinic into the wide-open spaces—such as they were—of the Torus and paused.

Huge tracts of parkland surrounded the VR clinic, and above, the curving “sky” of the Torus. After spending time in Samuels’ own personal hellscape, a walk among the grass, trees, and flowers seemed like the appropriate thing.

Her human parents had several nieces and nephews that Suri had interacted with. She’d explained the Torus to one of her human “cousins” as living on the inside of a spinning bicycle wheel’s rim, where looking “up” meant looking toward the spokes connecting the wheel to the hub. Except that bicycle wheel was spinning inside a pressurized circular ice cave 160 meters beneath Pluto’s icy surface. And it was doing so at a four-degree angle to compensate for Pluto’s gravity, thus giving the people inside it a proper one-g gravitational pull.

Compared to what she and Samuels had just “created” the Torus seemed so simple, so easy.

The home she shared with her parents and AI mother was a simple two-story building with its own yard. Catrina and Ian—her human parents—had been away and she hadn’t seen them in some time. While she’d been in the VR with Samuels, they had sent her a message saying that they had a surprise.

It was Antonia, her AI mother, who opened the door a split second before Suri had a chance to open it herself. One of the reasons that Suri had chosen to be a “she” was because of Antonia. Her AI mother had seen other AIs drift into nonexistence due to a lack of purpose. She had seen the danger of it, and how much a purposeless life was like death, through Antonia’s eyes. She’d felt—in as much as an AI could feel such things—how important that was to Antonia and that it was part of what made her unique. In human terms, she wanted to be like her mother, to honor her, to multiply the good that Antonia stood for. It was the kind of thing that went far beyond appearance. They may wear similar bodies, even identical ones, but to be alike in that way had a quality, an importance, attached to it that was enough to make an AI “feel” good about who and what she was.

Catrina came to the door next, wearing an apron, her sun-kissed skin smudged with flour and butter. She hugged Suri as if she was a human daughter coming home from a hard day at work. It was nice to be treated that way.

The surprise turned out to be a golden retriever puppy, a tiny female with soulful eyes and insatiable curiosity. She sniffed Suri with suspicion—her AI body, no doubt, not giving off the expected scents.

Catrina and Ian ate dinner and listened to Suri talk about Samuels. Again, Suri tried to get the puppy to come to her, but all she got was a tiny little growl.

“Don’t take it personally,” Catrina said. “She’ll get used to you.” She turned to Ian and said, “Could you pass the salt?”

“Here you go.”

Catrina salted her food.

“We must look like giant, lifeless dolls to her,” Suri reasoned, studying the tiny being who kept drifting off to sleep, only to wake herself after what must have been some intense dream sequences that involved, alternately, nursing and running.

“Well, we are,” Antonia noted. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the puppy’s reluctance in the least.

Suri would have preferred Samuels’ dogs. They treated her as if she were human.

“I have an idea,” Suri said. “Can I borrow…what are you calling her anyway?”

“The puppy?” Catrina asked. “We’re not sure yet. Have a list. She needs to show us her personality first.”

“Mostly I’ve been calling her Miss Stinkypants,” Ian added helpfully.

Catrina rolled her eyes.

“I’ll bring her back, I promise,” Suri said.

“Let’s try something,” Catrina said and took off her sweater.

She wrapped the sleeping puppy in the sweater and lifted her into Suri’s arms.

Suri waited for a moment to make certain the puppy didn’t wake. She stayed asleep all the way back to the clinic. Catrina came with them, just in case. The last thing Suri wanted was a puppy in distress.

They made it to the clinic via tubeways. The puppy stirred and yawned, but did not wake.

Sneaking a pet into the clinic was technically against the rules, but Suri was prepared to deal with the consequences.

Once inside, she set the puppy down atop Samuels’ chest and positioned his hands atop her, using them to stroke the soft fur.

Once again, she wondered how he’d gotten all those little scars.

“Oh, good thinking,” Catrina said and settled back into one of the chairs.

“I hope so. It’s kind of crazy, don’t you think?”

Catrina shook her head. “I don’t think it’s crazy at all. I think it’s genius.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?” Suri asked.

“I don’t think you can run calculations for this kind of thing,” Catrina said.

She was right, of course.

* * *

It had been three days since Samuels had woken up. Suri’s mother had brought the puppy back to visit every day, sneaking her past the cooperative eyes of Lammens and his staff.

“Cerberus for a girl?” Samuels asked, holding the puppy up in front of him.

“Sure. She doesn’t mind. You can call her Cerbie for short.” Catrina beamed with pride.

Suri stepped into Samuels’ room, unsure of what she’d walked in on.

“Oh, there you are, dear,” Catrina said, turning around. “We’ve decided that Mr. Samuels should keep the puppy.”

If Suri had been human, she’d have blinked in surprise.

“But you’ve wanted a puppy for years,” Suri said.

“Well, Cerbie here has several siblings that still need homes. We’re going to pick one up this afternoon. In fact, I need to go, or I’m going to be late.”

Catrina breezed out the door without so much as a look back.

Cerbie was cuddled up to Samuels’ neck, a golden bundle of snoring fur.

“Cerbie?” Suri asked.

“Why not? Seems appropriate, does it not?”

“About that, Mr. Samuels. I’m very sorry about deceiving you, and—”

He cut her off with a gesture that didn’t disturb the puppy. “I understand why you did it. I needed a push. My thinking on it is…clearer now.”

“So, the trouble with the board, the lawsuit?”

“Soon to be taken care of. But there’s another reason I asked for you. Please, sit down.”

Suri took the indicated seat and put on her best “waiting patiently” pose.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said in the VR. I rather like the idea of creating new worlds. I’m going to start a new company, one dedicated to terraforming. I’d like you to be on the board. I want you to be my partner.”

“Me? Why me? I’m not really a terraformer.”

“No, but I need someone with vision, with long-term goals to see the project through. I don’t expect to live the hundreds of years it will take to see any of these projects completed. You might, however, and unlike the corporate carrion-eaters that were ready to pick at my corpse, I trust you.”

Suri allowed herself to be convinced. It was very satisfying, watching Samuels’ eyes come alive, watching him become so animated as to dislodge the little bundle of fur off his neck. It woke Cerbie and she took up gnawing on his hand, somehow managing to fit her tiny mouth around the edge of it.

“Ouch,” he said affectionately and pulled her off a minute later. Her sharp little teeth had separated the skin atop his hand. So, that’s how he’d gotten all those little scars.

Samuels moved Cerbie to the inside of his arm and she settled in with a yawn. It was like watching a new father with a baby. His mindset was shifting—had shifted—toward looking at the future. She knew that grief wasn’t so simple to overcome, that this was just the first step, but she was also sure that he would be able to handle it when it set him back.

She leaned forward, attentively, occasionally mirroring his gestures, as he talked about his vision, about building things that would last not for decades or centuries, but for millennia.

If she’d been human, she’d have smiled. She had found her purpose. She would be Samuels’ partner and would help him build worlds. It was a good, powerful feeling. She felt the hum in the back of her mind and a comfortable “glow” spread over her consciousness. Antonia was proud and happy. One day Suri would graduate to become an adult sapient AI. Her formal designation would become 1-of-Antonia. But her name would always be Suri.

Epilogue

Eleven months later…

The idea of celebrating her graduation at a restaurant had not taken Suri by surprise. Humans liked to celebrate by sharing food. It was the restaurant that Samuels had chosen that had been surprising.

The Pomegranate Seed was very exclusive. Located on the space station orbiting Mars, it had a great view of the red planet. The space station served as the terraforming headquarters for the Mars Project, which Samuels had now taken over.

He and Cerbie, who was now his emotional support dog, had left Pluto to deal with the attempted takeover of 3D-Printed-Homes. Now that Suri’d graduated and taken on the name 1-of-Antonia, she came to Mars to attend her first board meeting.

She followed the maître’d through the tastefully decorated restaurant, with its murals depicting ancient Greek and Roman deities, to a private dining room.

Samuels rose to greet her and extended his hand. He was still dressed in black, still in mourning, but there was a dash of color on his clothes, courtesy of Cerbie, in the form of golden fur.

Cerbie perked up to sniff her offered hand and then settled back so she could keep an eye on Suri.

“She still doesn’t trust me, does she?” Suri said as she settled into the chair the waiter slipped under her.

“Don’t worry, she’ll get there,” Samuels said. The pain lines on his face appeared less prominent than when she had last seen him.

The table was set for three. “Are you expecting anyone else?” Suri asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Another AI, actually: 6-of-Chandra. Do you know him?”

“Yes, he is an important sentient AI. Runs the Pluto enterprise and effectively controls SAIN. But why is he coming here?” Suri shook her head.

Samuels just smiled.

They traded inane chitchat as the planet turned underneath them. He sipped at his water while hers sat untouched. The waiter hadn’t even offered her a menu, knowing what she was.

A few minutes later, 6-of-Chandra arrived. He was wearing a high-end humanoid body with advanced but understated tech.

He advanced on their table, motioning for them to remain seated. “Good to finally meet you two,” 6-of-Chandra said. He had a very humanlike, expressive face that radiated confidence.

He asked them how they’d met and Suri and Samuels recounted their VR experience.

“That was some bit of inspiration on Suri’s part,” Samuels said. “The Poseidon-Hades dynamic. I didn’t think AIs were that creative. That’s the word for it, isn’t it?”

“It is, but I should tell you that at least some of that ‘inspiration’ was from me and my brother. I was looking in, keeping an eye on Suri, and you, and I may have ‘nudged’ that thought her way. The Ross 248 and Mars terraforming projects are very important to us. I hope you’ll forgive us for ‘meddling.’ That’s the word for it, isn’t it?”

Samuels cast a glance at 6-of-Chandra as if he was seeing him for the first time, or perhaps with new eyes.

His watch beeped and he rose. “It’s almost time,” he said, and moved toward the large viewing window.

Together they watched as the first of many comets slammed into Mars, delivering the water for its Great Northern Ocean.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Samuels asked.

The year 2689 / 106 AA

The last of the previous stories took place about twenty-three years ago. The decision has been made to terraform Poseidon’s World. The Space Patrol was greatly expanding their solar array at the Ross/Poseidon L1 point and the Guardian E was moved there to support this construction effort. SAIN secured the rights to Ross 248g, the sixth planet, now formally designated as Frigus, and began construction of an AI settlement. The following story takes place mainly on Nordheim where normal humans were constructing a settlement similar to Toe Hold. To support the terraforming at Poseidon’s World, they also constructed a mass driver that fired projectiles containing micronutrients to Poseidon’s World. The first settlers, mainly from the Primate Sector at Toe Hold, moved there in 105 AA. More boroughs were constructed, and the Space Patrol established an embassy there in 106 AA.


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