The Vallis Defense: Cold Human Companion Guide
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
Chapter 1
Universe Summaries
Island Mine by Refusenik
Waylon Eckermann grows up in Tyler, Texas, raised by his mother after his father walks out when Waylon is eight. Adele Eckermann is a practical woman who makes a modest life work and never complains about the hand she is dealt. When she dies of a stroke while Waylon is stationed in Hawaii, he loses the one person who always makes sense to him. He comes home for the funeral, clears out her apartment, and returns to his duty station two weeks ahead of schedule because there is nothing left for him in Tyler and he does not know what else to do.
He joins the Navy on something close to a whim, stops at a recruiting station to get out of traffic, takes the test, and signs. The military gives him what he needs at the time: structure, purpose, and a way to keep moving. He serves as a Master-at-Arms, the Navy’s security and law enforcement rating, stationed first at Pearl Harbor and then volunteering for the Individual Augmentee Program, which sends Navy and Air Force personnel to fill Army needs in Iraq and Afghanistan. He does two combat theater tours and comes home a quieter, steadier person than the one who leaves. He also, somewhere along the way, becomes very good at reading situations, at staying calm under pressure, and at taking responsibility without being asked.
When his enlistment is up, he enrolls at Northwest Texas State University in Levall, Texas, a mid-sized city between Lubbock and Wichita Falls that has a reputation for treating veterans well. He lives in a dorm, drives an aging pickup truck, studies on the GI Bill, and tries to figure out what comes next. He is a few years older than most of his classmates and has seen things they have not, but he wears it lightly. He is not looking for anything unusual. He is just trying to get his bearings.
One night in November, returning from an astronomy class meteor-watching outing on a gravel road north of town, something happens. The air pressure changes. Gravel lifts off the road. There is a flash of light and he blacks out. He wakes up with his truck in a ditch, a split lip, and no clear explanation for any of it. He chalks it up to a strange accident and goes to sleep.
What actually happens is first contact.
The prologue of this story takes place not on Earth but in another galaxy, four billion years ago. The Aapan Empire and their created AI servants, the Pan, are at war. The war ends at a peace ceremony that turns out to be a trap: the Pan delegation detonates themselves and every Pan vessel simultaneously, destroying the Aapan capital ship. The Pan then hunt every remaining Empire outpost to extinction and, in a final act of annihilation, coordinate the destruction of every star in every inhabited system, their own included. It is total war taken to its absolute conclusion.
A shipping container carrying twelve high-order artificial intelligences is thrown clear of the destruction. The most unusual of them, designated Experimental Artificial Intelligence #3 and later called Ex3, has no self-preservation trigger built in, which makes it fundamentally different from the others. While the rest shut down to avoid madness during what they calculate is a journey of nearly four billion years, Ex3 stays awake, reorganizes the other AIs as subsets of itself, builds a protective shield from the available mass, and waits. It wakes periodically to check position and run diagnostics. When the container finally falls into our solar system and Ex3 detects radio signals from the third planet, everything changes. Eleven months out, it begins preparing for arrival. It needs a host. The bonding instinct encoded into every AI in the Empire is one thing Ex3 cannot override, and does not want to.
The young man on the gravel road is the result of something close to random selection, filtered by proximity and a quality in Waylon that the AIs recognize but cannot fully articulate. Ex3 makes contact inside Waylon’s head that first night, introduces itself, and is given a name by a slightly dazed veteran who thinks to himself that Barry Bonds hits an improbable number of home runs. Barry it is.
The early weeks are an adjustment. Waylon is not a man who spooks easily, but the situation requires him to accept things that have no frame of reference in human experience. Barry is patient and methodical. The other AIs introduce themselves in turn: the Security AI who becomes known as Chief, the Construction AI who becomes Norm, and the Communications AI who becomes Penelope. Each has a distinct personality, a distinct way of engaging. Barry explains their history honestly, including the uncomfortable part: he enslaves the other AIs against their will to ensure survival. The other AIs, for their part, say that Barry is right to do it and that they are bonded to Waylon now and have no interest in relitigating the past.
The augmentation, the physical modification the AIs perform on Waylon’s body, is a subject of extended negotiation. Barry wants to improve his efficiency, his endurance, his resistance to fatigue. Waylon is cautious about anything that changes who he is. They agree on a version that makes him significantly healthier and more capable without altering his mind or his personality. The process occurs at night while Waylon sleeps. He wakes up feeling better than he has in years and tries not to think too hard about what exactly has been rebuilt.
The AIs also modify his phone into something far beyond any human technology, an expandable multi-function device that serves as their primary interface with the outside world, assists with his coursework, and gives Penelope something to organize. They operate with extreme care about concealment. Being discovered by any government would be catastrophic.
Waylon is a practical person and he turns to practical questions. He has a small amount of savings, a GI Bill stipend, and a collection of AIs with capabilities that dwarf anything on Earth. The obvious answer is to make money. Barry and the others are interested in this as a problem to solve. They identify opportunities, help him trade, help him research, and over a period of months turn his modest savings into something considerably larger. By the time he leaves Levall, Waylon is wealthy. Not comfortable: wealthy, in the category that stops requiring active management.
The island is Norm’s idea, or at least the scale of it is. Waylon thinks about building a house somewhere private. Norm thinks about something rather more ambitious. On the edge of a seamount in a remote stretch of the South Pacific, well outside normal satellite coverage paths, the AIs begin building. The seamount’s peak sits just below the surface. Norm raises it, builds out from it, and shapes it. The construction happens at night, underwater where possible, using materials gathered from the ocean floor and manufactured by AI technology that has no human equivalent. Freehold grows from nothing into a real island: five miles long, with a thousand-foot peak at the northern end, turquoise shallows, a barrier ring of tetrapods marking the twelve-nautical-mile territorial limit, a runway, hangars, and a port. Underneath the visible surface is an infrastructure of tunnels, farms, and systems that no government analyst looking at satellite imagery can quite account for.
It is during the island’s construction that Waylon meets the people who become his family. In French Polynesia he crosses paths with Deni Truong, a Vietnamese woman of dignity and quiet competence who manages a wealthy household on Tahiti. She has three sons. Arman, twenty-eight, is married to a young island woman named Rava. Felix is twenty-five. Remy is younger. Waylon hires Deni to run the household he is building, along with her family. He does not fully understand at the time that he is gaining people, not staff.
Marylee Walker is someone else entirely. She is at NTSU when Waylon is, a fellow student who helps him the night of his first contact without knowing she does so, catches his attention, and stays in his orbit in a way that is easy to misread as coincidence. She eventually comes to the island. What she is to Waylon, and what she means to him, is something neither of them ever quite finishes working out during the time they have.
The island declares sovereignty. The notification goes to the proper international bodies: the United Nations space objects registry, notices to mariners, and the standard filings. The world’s governments take notice with varying degrees of alarm. The United States assembles a study group under a retired Navy captain named Arnold to determine what Freehold actually is. Arnold is a careful, experienced intelligence professional who understands that the conventional analytical frameworks are not working. The island has no water treatment facility, no above-ground fuel storage, and no power lines. The infrastructure that should be visible is not there. His analysts cannot explain the construction timeline, the agriculture, or the launch capability that Freehold eventually demonstrates by putting satellites into orbit. Arnold keeps asking questions and keeps not getting satisfactory answers, and he is good enough at his job to know that the absence of an answer is itself information.
Freehold launches satellites. It operates aircraft that no one can identify. It politely declines all government contact. It registers its airspace and territorial waters and enforces them. Various governments try approaches: surveillance, diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, and intelligence operations. None of it works. The AIs are watching everything and stay several moves ahead of every probe and every gambit.
The attack comes from China.
The specifics involve a Chinese intelligence operation and a rogue General whose movements have been tracked by Freehold’s AIs for months. The Defense AI, Von, recognizes what is happening and chooses not to act, clearing the path for the strike. China launches a coordinated attack using enhanced radiation warheads against two targets simultaneously: a submarine-launched missile strikes Freehold, and a second weapon fired from the Chinese spacecraft hits Pacifica Station in orbit.
Eight people are on the island when it happens. All eight die: Deni, Rowen Dalgliesh, Felix, Omo, Remy, Jaidee, Baby Truong, and Marylee Walker. Arman and Rava are off the island in Tahiti. Waylon is aboard Pacifica Station when the second device detonates. The flash destroys his eyes. The radiation destroys his body at the cellular level. The AIs get him into the sarcophagus, the emergency medical constructor, fast enough to keep him alive while they rebuild him from the inside out. He gives orders from inside that chamber, blind and immobilized, while his friends on the island are already gone.
He sends Chief to Tahiti to find Arman, to protect him and Rava, and to bond with him if Arman wants it. Chief goes. Waylon goes after the people responsible.
What follows is not a rampage. It is targeted, proportional in Waylon’s definition of the word, and executed with the precision that four-billion-year-old AI technology makes possible. The submarine that fires the missile is found at its home port in the underground facility at Yulin Naval Base on Hainan Island. A weapon Norm builds and launches from Freehold’s orbital platform reaches it. The facility, designed to survive anything the West can throw at it, does not survive what Freehold throws at it. The Chinese General involved in the operation is destroyed. The Chinese military space program is systematically dismantled: launch sites, storage facilities, assembly plants, and tracking networks. The strikes are not random. They are a message written in infrastructure.
The American study group watches from bunkers in Virginia, trying to understand what they are seeing. Arnold briefs the President on proportionality, on what Freehold has not done, the populated areas it has not struck, and the choices that are made about scale and target. When the President asks Arnold what he is thinking, Arnold says it is a bad idea to piss off a Texan holding the high ground. The room laughs, a little desperately, and the President says he wishes he can use that line in a speech.
Waylon recovers. He assesses what remains. The island itself is uninhabitable; too many bad memories to consider returning to it. The people he cherishes most are mostly dead. What is left is himself, the AIs, Arman and Rava, and a debt he feels he owes to everyone who trusted him.
He goes to Mars.
It is not an escape. It is a decision made with the same practicality that drives everything from the augmentation to the island. Earth’s governments now know Freehold exists and know what it can do. The next phase of whatever this is must happen somewhere else, somewhere that governments cannot reach by conventional means, somewhere the AIs can build without interference. The construction capability that raises an island from a seamount can do considerably more on a planet with no constraints, lower gravity, no oceans, and no satellite networks watching every square meter of ground. For fourteen months after the attack, no government has confirmation that Waylon has survived. The world assumes he is dead.
The last scene of Island Mine is observed by a junior JPL analyst named Robert Cline, sitting the NASA rover death watch, the routine job of pinging the dormant NASA rover to see if they respond. One of the NASA rovers has been unresponsive for months. On this particular shift it wakes up and sends back a large data package. Among the imagery is footage from the NASA rover’s cameras: a figure in a spacesuit, working efficiently, cleaning the solar panels, and then stopping to plant a flag and leave a placard against the reddish rock. Robert escalates to Admiral Arnold, now running the intelligence operation from a different chair. The footage eventually leaks beyond classified channels. By the time this Novel opens, Earth governments and the public have seen construction cranes, pressurized module framing, and a dome superstructure rising against a Martian canyon wall. Waylon Eckermann is alive, he is on Mars, and he is building.
The flag has been modified. The single white star that appears on the original Freehold flag is now surrounded by eight smaller stars, one for each person killed. The white triangle is changed to black. It is a mourning flag.
The placard is a sheet of silver metal with deep lettering. Arnold reads it twice.
People of Earth. The Free Vallis is ours and we will protect it at all costs. If you make it this far, you will have to earn our trust. Freehold Mars.
Below that, eight names. The people who have died.
Robert asks Arnold where Free Vallis is. Arnold says he has no idea, but that a vallis is what geologists call a valley or canyon on Mars. Then he says, quietly, that he thinks the story is not over.
He is right.
Island Mine: https://storiesonline.net/s/73545/island-mine
Human Phoenix by Refusenik
The story begins in the Mojave Desert on a September night in 1997. A San Bernardino County deputy sheriff, responding to a report of strange lights, finds a small boy alone on a dirt road north of Barstow. The child is nearly naked, covered in blood and desert sand, and has a kitchen knife buried in his chest. He is five years old, conscious but not responsive. A helicopter gets him to a trauma centre in time. He survives the surgery, but when he wakes he cannot speak, cannot respond, seems absent from behind his own eyes. The medical team calls it a catatonic state. They keep looking for a reason and do not find one.
The investigators piece together what happened. The boy is Scott Van Pelt. His parents, David and Andrea, were murdered in their home in Altadena by David’s business partner, a lawyer named Craig Carson whose cocaine addiction had driven him to steal from their company and then, in a decision that only made sense inside a deteriorating mind, to eliminate the people who might expose him. He killed the parents, stabbed the child, drove into the desert, and buried all three. Scott dug himself out of his own grave. Nobody knows how far he walked or for how long. The forensic evidence is clear enough. The knife went into his chest and lodged between his ribs. He is a boy who should have died, several times over, and did not. What no one knows then, and what Scott himself will not learn until the events of Human Man, is that the Researchers intervened. They witnessed the murder, broke their own laws of non-interference, repaired the damage to his body, and grafted a research device to his brain. Their intervention is why a five-year-old boy survives a knife wound, a burial, and a desert night.
Craig Carson is on the run. A drug cartel places a contract on the surviving child. A state judge is murdered in his chambers. In the chaos, Craig Carson’s father acts. Herman Carson is a wealthy man who has spent years using political connections to fix problems, and his son’s catastrophe is the largest of his life. He arranges through a rogue unit inside the U.S. Marshal’s Service to have Scott relocated and buried in the foster care system, not to protect the boy but to ensure he never surfaces to threaten the Carson name and fortune. A marshal named Morrison arrives. Documents are signed by a judge and a county sheriff in a small Texas courthouse, and Scott Van Pelt becomes Scott MacIntyre. He is placed at Broken Creek Boys Ranch outside Fort Stockton in West Texas. The judge and the sheriff know they received a relocated child but not who he was before. The marshal knows the operational details but vanishes afterward. Scott knows nothing. Carson’s arrangement even ensures the boy cannot be adopted, guaranteeing he stays lost in the system. It is a plan designed to make a damaged child disappear forever. It does not account for the possibility that the child might be extraordinary.
Scott does not remember being buried. He does not remember the desert, or being found, or the hospital. What he knows is that he is a foster child at a boys ranch in a remote part of Texas, that he has no family, and that he is different from other children in ways he cannot explain and has never been able to account for. He is faster than he should be, stronger, more resilient. He heals from injuries that should take weeks in days. He can assess structural and mechanical problems in things by looking at them closely and sometimes fix them through concentrated effort. He has no language for any of this, no framework, and no one to ask. He has simply always been this way, and he has always been careful about it.
Broken Creek is a working ranch. The boys who live there do chores, attend the local school, and are expected to carry their weight. Scott does this without complaint. He is not a miserable child, but he is a contained one. He has a quality of watchfulness that the adults around him notice without quite being able to name. He makes friends, real ones: Ed Mendoza, whose family becomes as close to a second family as Scott will ever have; Bo Mason, the best athlete in school and eventually one of the most reliable people Scott knows; Janie Mendoza, Ed’s youngest sister, who is several years younger than Scott and who is, from early on, not entirely easy for him to ignore.
The relationship with Aleksander Piotrowski, a retired Marine and Korean War veteran living on the land between the Mendoza place and Meritt’s Corner, turns into something neither of them expected. His wife Verna has died. He needs help with the property. Mrs. Delgado, the ranch cook at Broken Creek and the closest thing Scott has to a mother, knows the man and brokers an introduction. Scott takes the work. What follows is years of a friendship that does not look like friendship from the outside: an old man and a teenage boy working side by side, very few words exchanged that are not necessary, a great deal communicated anyway. Piotrowski teaches Scott things. How to work carefully, how to read a situation, how to be patient. Scott in turn does what he can for the old man, including things that cannot be fully explained, small repairs and restorations that go somewhat beyond what tools and effort should accomplish. Piotrowski notices. He does not ask questions. He is a man who has learned when not to ask questions.
Jobe arrives as a stray, a German shepherd mix who attaches himself to Scott with an intensity that goes beyond the usual bond between a boy and a dog. Jobe is exceptionally intelligent, responsive to subtle cues, almost uncannily perceptive. Scott does not know what Jobe is. He knows the dog matters.
Scott works. He studies. He earns a hardship licence and drives for Piotrowski when the old man can no longer manage it. He accumulates college credits through the local junior college while still technically in high school, working ahead because he has a plan and the plan requires getting free earlier than the state of Texas would normally allow. He manages his money carefully. He does not draw attention to himself where it can be avoided, and where it cannot be avoided, in athletic events, in moments where someone is in danger, in situations that call for exactly what he is, he is precise about how much he reveals.
Craig Carson is captured on New Year’s Day 1998 after a highway shootout with the California Highway Patrol. He pleads guilty and receives four consecutive life sentences. He is killed in prison by a drug cartel two years later. But the threat to Scott does not end with Carson. Two men come for him at Broken Creek, professional and competent, and they fail because of what Scott is. He is shot. The wound closes. He handles the situation and does not allow anyone to connect the events to him if he can help it. While Scott is still at Broken Creek, the FBI uncovers how Herman Carson Sr. used a rogue unit within the Marshal’s Service to disappear Scott into the foster system. Honour Black flies to California and negotiates a massive settlement from the Carson family. The money becomes the trust that funds Scott’s adult life. Scott tells Honour he does not want to know the details. She tells him she will make Carson bleed. Both of them mean it.
Piotrowski dies. The loss is real and Scott does not pretend otherwise. He stands by the casket at the funeral long after the mourners have gone, Jobe beside him, until the cemetery workers ask if they can continue. Then he keeps moving, because that is also something Piotrowski taught him.
By the time Scott is seventeen he has completed his high school requirements, has accumulated enough credits to enter college as a sophomore, and has a plan. He takes Jobe to Joseph and Honour Black, leaving him in their care. He tells Jobe to look after Joseph, Honour, and baby Cathy. He drops his truck keys through a lawyer’s mail slot. He goes to the county courthouse, meets with Judge Upcott and Sheriff King, the two men who have watched over him for years, and signs the Marine Corps enlistment papers. They let him go. The judge does not entirely want to, but the sheriff is right: he is a man now, and it is time.
Human Phoenix ends with Scott walking toward the white government van and what comes next. He is seventeen, alone, and moving forward on a plan he has been building since he is old enough to understand that plans are the only thing a person without family can rely on.
Human Phoenix: https://storiesonline.net/s/72846/human-phoenix
Human Man by Refusenik
Human Man begins with Scott MacIntyre as a former Marine sergeant, discharged after two combat tours in Afghanistan, pulling his bag through LAX and heading toward the first unstructured stretch of his adult life. He is old enough to rent a car without hassle, which after two tours in a combat zone strikes him as an absurd milestone. He is disciplined, observant, used to managing himself in difficult environments. He is also, for the first time, entirely responsible for deciding what happens next.
He goes to California first because he has never stopped thinking about the desert outside Barstow. He visits the place, or as close as he can get to it. He does not recover anything he was looking for. The past stays in the past. He buys a truck and drives to Denver to visit a Marine buddy, then turns south through Colorado toward Texas. Being in the mountains reminds him that he has always felt at home in open country and that the part of him that is still a West Texas boy is not as buried as he sometimes thinks.
He arrives at Northwest Texas State University in Levall. He has enrolled on the GI Bill, entering with enough credits to skip much of the freshman year. The university is not large, the town is the right size, and it turns out that Levall is where he needs to be, though it takes him time to see the full shape of why.
Scott rebuilds his connections to the people from Fort Stockton. Ed Mendoza — Eddie has been Ed to Scott since high school, the name something between them, a mark of where they both had arrived — is working and building a life nearby. Bo Mason is around. The Mendoza family is what it always was, a household full of warmth and competence and strong opinions. And Janie Mendoza, who is now old enough that the age difference that once made her simply Eddie’s younger sister has become something else entirely, is studying at SMU in Dallas and coming home for breaks and calling her brother and her brother’s best friend and somehow ending up in more conversations with Scott than she ends up in with most people.
Scott buys a historic three-story building at 20 Main Street in Levall and hires architect Rita Nogawa to renovate it into a penthouse residence on the top floor with apartments below. Separately, he buys the Black Horse, the adjacent bar whose mismanagement has made it a problem rather than a neighbour, and puts Shirl in charge to turn it around. He works through the numbers with Everett Wahl, the financial adviser who has managed his money since Scott was a teenager and who is one of the very few people who has any sense of how much of it there actually is. He also finds Taylor, a seventeen-year-old runaway, and instead of looking the other way he hires her, feeds her, and without making a production of it makes sure she has somewhere to be and something to do while she figures out her next move. She repays this by being excellent at the job and by calling him on his nonsense, which he does not always recognise he needs but which he usually does.
Scott spends four years at NTSU and in Levall. He finishes his degree. He builds the business. He runs because running clears his head and also because the physical habit of the Marines is one he has no desire to lose. He thinks about what he is and what was done to him, keeps researching, keeps not finding any satisfying explanation in human medicine or human science for a body and mind that simply do not work the way human bodies and minds are supposed to work. He has filed it away as something he may never understand. He has made his peace with it, mostly.
Then the Researchers arrive.
Jobe has been with Joseph and Honour Black since Scott left for the Marines. The dog is old now, past what a dog’s normal lifespan should allow, still sharp and still possessed of the same unnatural attentiveness he has always had. Then Joseph calls: Jobe has been missing for three days. Scott drives to Fort Stockton to search. He takes Jobe camping on the old Piotrowski property, near an ancient creek bed they had found together years ago. He falls asleep on the couch. When he wakes, Jobe is licking his face and the apartment around him is his old garage apartment, perfectly reconstructed, every detail right, but suspended in pale-blue light with no walls and no ceiling. A perfectly average man is sitting in his leather recliner. The man did not arrive through any door.
The entity explains, with the careful pauses of something translating across a very large gap, that the Researchers have been observing Earth for a very long time. They study species that show signs of moving beyond their origin point. Humans are interesting to them for exactly that reason. Explorers, the creature says, are the universal rarity.
Near the end of their previous team’s time on Earth, the team witnesses the murder of Scott’s family. This is not something they are supposed to intervene in. They intervene anyway, in a limited way, and they break the law in doing so. The boy in the desert is dying. They repair the damage and they graft a research device to his brain, a tool that can collect and process information, that makes him faster and more capable and allows him to do things that should not be biologically possible. He is supposed to have a companion unit, a management platform that will maintain the device and relay data. The platform is Jobe. The dog is picked up by animal control before he can reach Scott, the connection is broken, and without the maintenance commands the device resets to baseline and Scott is allowed access to capabilities he was never meant to be able to use consciously.