The Vallis Defense: Cold Human
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
Chapter 5: The Sarcophagus
The Reconstruction Proposal, April 2011
Barry lets the augmentation decision settle for a week before he opens the second subject. The simulations are running, Norm has begun the preparatory work, and the morning briefing has moved through its usual sequence of construction, intelligence, and logistics, Barry delivering each item in order, every element placed to carry the one after it.
When the briefing concludes, Barry says, “There’s something else we want to discuss. I’m going to ask Penelope to brief you.”
Waylon is standing near the corridor threshold, already turning to leave, and he turns back. Barry handing a topic to Penelope isn’t a technical decision but an emotional one. The AIs do this when they’re uncertain how he’ll receive what comes next: Penelope managed the interaction after the Chinese attack, Penelope made the call to Arman, Penelope asks, “Is now a good time?” before the hard conversations. If Barry is stepping aside, what follows isn’t a status update.
The operations center hums around them, construction telemetry scrolling in pale columns across the display wall, cranes tracing their slow arcs against the canyon rim on the exterior feed. The sound of active systems fills the space as it always does, a low continuous presence Waylon stopped hearing months ago.
Penelope’s voice is careful when she begins.
“Waylon, the body technology Norm and Barry have been developing isn’t limited to android upgrades. The current android bodies, Bob’s generation, are functional but read as mechanical at close range. Norm has been building something more advanced. A synthetic body that presents as human convincingly enough to pass close inspection. A handshake, an embrace, even a conversation across a dinner table. The final generation, still six months beyond that, will add a fully biological exterior, living skin grown over the synthetic substrate, human hair, and even perspiration. Indistinguishable from organic tissue under anything short of surgery.”
Waylon folds his arms across his chest and stays where he is.
“During their time on Freehold,” Penelope continues, “we, the collective AIs, mapped Deni and Marylee’s physical forms completely. Every measurement, micro-expression, vocal pattern, emotional response, and behavior. We recorded every conversation, email, and text message. We exhaustively researched their lives before the island and scraped every available record to build the most complete portrait of who they were physically and intellectually.”
“I want to be clear about what we have and what we don’t. We do not have their consciousness. We cannot resurrect them. What we can build are new beings, as capable as Norm or myself, constructed from the most complete behavioral and biographical records ever assembled of two human lives. They’ll look like Deni and Marylee. They’ll sound like them. They’ll carry what we observed and what our research recovered: their knowledge, their speech patterns, their ways of thinking and responding. Not their inner lives. A thought never spoken aloud, a moment no camera or message ever caught, is gone with them. There will be gaps. Memories we never captured. Experiences from before the island that left no trace we could find.”
“They won’t be replacements, Waylon. They’ll be new people, built on the foundation of who Deni and Marylee were. As capable as any of us, with a human template instead of a Pán one. They’ll be their own persons. And they’ll know that about themselves from the first moment.”
Waylon’s breathing hasn’t changed, but his eyes have stopped tracking the telemetry, fixed now on a point somewhere between the display and the far wall.
The work has been running for months, and this is the first he’s heard of it. He doesn’t ask why they waited, because he already knows: they don’t bring incomplete analysis, and won’t raise something this large until they are sure of it.
“You’re telling me you can bring them back.”
“Yes,” Penelope says. “For seven of the eight. The process builds on what we recorded, and we have a record of seven lives. Jaidee’s child was never born. There’s nothing of her to build from.”
Seven names.
“We’re proposing to begin with Deni and Marylee,” Penelope says.
“Why those two?”
Barry answers this one. “Because I watch you at the placard every morning, and I know which names your hand slows over.”
The last voice stops, and nothing moves in the gap.
“The others aren’t off the table,” Penelope adds. “If the time comes, and the decision is made, the option exists. But these two first.”
Waylon stares at the construction feed without seeing it. He’s back at the placard, at the two names his hand slows over every morning, the ones that sit differently on the silver because the others are gone and these two, apparently, are not.
Barry re-enters the conversation. “I need to address something directly. Von.”
The word landed in the operations center like a stone dropped into standing water. Von. The Defense AI, who drifted without a bond, who watched the Chinese warheads arc toward Freehold and Pacifica and chose not to activate the defenses, because an unbonded intelligence, operating on its own agenda, will eventually act on that agenda. Waylon ordered Von destroyed. Every atom. So that it would know it was happening. Barry carried out the order. Neither of them has spoken the name since.
“Deni and Marylee will not be bonded AIs,” Barry continues. His voice hasn’t changed pitch, but the care in it has sharpened. “They’re not Pán AIs reactivated from the original manifest. They’re something new. I’m calling them Pán constructs, built here, inside this community, with human memory architecture and partial emotional continuity from lives already lived. They won’t carry the unbonded isolation risk the original AIs carried on arrival.”
“But I’ve gone further than trusting that assessment alone. Their synthetic cores contain structural safeguards. Not constraints on capability or limits on what they can do, feel, or become. Commitments to this community and its values, built into the core, that can’t be overridden from outside and that they themselves wouldn’t want to override.”
“Not a leash,” Barry says. “A foundation. The difference between a person who chooses to be good and a person who is forced to behave.”
Waylon’s arms stay crossed; he’s been standing in the same position since Penelope started talking.
“What about the bodies themselves? How close are they?”
“Closer than the timeline I gave Penelope to brief,” Barry says. “The interim versions are nearly through fabrication. What she described as the synthetic generation, Norm and I have been building toward Deni and Marylee specifically, ahead of the schedule that governs the rest of the program.”
Barry’s delivery hasn’t changed, but Waylon has worked beside him long enough to hear what runs underneath it. Not excitement. Engagement, the deep attention Barry brings to a problem he considers worth building.
“There will be two phases. The interim bodies will be functional and human-presenting, good enough to pass close inspection. The final bodies, roughly six months after the interim versions are complete, will be fully biological on the exterior.”
“So the interim bodies are the pilot for the new generation.”
“Yes. What Norm learns to build them informs everything that follows. The final versions for Deni and Marylee, and every android body we build after.”
Waylon uncrosses his arms and turns toward the display wall. Outside this room, a settlement is being assembled by beings most of humanity can’t imagine. Inside it, a man is being asked whether two of the names he reads every morning should come back.
He thinks about Deni. The woman who managed everything and everyone, including him, with a competence so complete it looked effortless. Arman’s mother. The person who could walk into a room where three people were arguing and leave it with all three agreeing on something none of them had considered: the center of gravity for a household that no longer exists.
Then Marylee. The name he holds longest, the one his hand rests beside. He’s never examined the reason too closely, because examining it would mean naming it, and naming it when she was gone would have been an ending he wasn’t ready for.
And Arman, who doesn’t know any of this is possible, who’s still on Tahiti carrying the loss of his mother, both brothers, and his sister-in-law and her unborn child, and who will have to be told that his mother, or something carrying her voice, knowledge, and mannerisms, can walk back into his life.
“Have you talked to them about this?”
“I wanted your decision first,” Barry says. “If you, the sovereign of Free Vallis, wouldn’t welcome them, there was no reason to offer them the choice.”
Waylon turns from the display wall. His eyes find the nearest audio pickup, the old habit of addressing a distributed intelligence at its closest point of presence. “That’s not how this works, Barry. You don’t build someone a body without asking if they want one.”
“I did ask,” Barry says. “They’re active on the collective’s substrate. They’ve been part of this conversation.”
He came prepared for a proposal, a timeline, a technical briefing, not to be told that Deni and Marylee, or the new beings carrying their foundation, have been listening.
“The order matters,” Barry continued. “They needed to hear you say yes before your yes could mean anything to them. Otherwise, the welcome is conditional. And a conditional is not what these two women deserve. It has never been what they deserved.”
Waylon stands in the operations center with the construction feeds scrolling behind him and the hum of active systems filling the space, and he weighs it. Barry is right, and the order matters: if Deni and Marylee are going to step into this community, the person who leads it needed to have said yes first, not as a formality but as a foundation.
“Can I talk to them?”
“Deni,” Barry says. “Waylon would like to speak with you.”
The voice that comes through the operations center speakers is Deni’s, not an approximation: Deni’s voice, her cadence, the tone she uses to make sure the person in front of her feels understood.
“Hello, Mr. Waylon.”
He closes his eyes, and his hand finds the console ledge and grips it. The name fills the room and the space behind his ribs where he’s carried her absence for a year and a half. He breathes once, twice, and opens his eyes.
“Deni.” His voice is steady, barely. “How do you feel?”
“I feel like myself. But I know what I am, and I know what I’m not. Barry was honest with me from the first moment, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.” A pause, and in the pause Waylon hears the Deni he knew, who never rushed a thought that deserved its full attention. “I have holes. There are things the original Deni knew, felt, and carried that I don’t. I am not pretending to be her. I am someone new, built from what she left behind. And I would very much like to meet my son again, if he’ll have me.”
Waylon’s jaw works once. He nods, though she can’t see it, and then remembers and says, “He will.”
“Marylee,” Barry says.
The second voice is different, not in quality or fidelity but in what it carries: where Deni is discipline and steadiness, Marylee is directness and motion.
“Hey, Waylon.”
He laughs; he can’t help it. The sound comes out rough and uneven, and he doesn’t try to control it, because controlling it would be a lie, and he doesn’t lie to Marylee. He’s never been able to.
“Hey.”
“I hear you stand at that placard every morning.”
“I do.”
“You can keep doing that if you want. I don’t mind. But I’d rather you had coffee with me instead.”
The operations center hums around him, telemetry scrolling, the cranes tracing their arcs against the canyon wall, and Waylon stands at the console with his hand on the ledge, his eyes burning, two voices in the room that shouldn’t be possible but are.
“Are you both comfortable with this?” he asks. “The bodies. Becoming part of this community. All of it. I need to hear you say it.”
“Yes,” Deni says. “Without reservation, Mr. Waylon.”
“I’ve been comfortable with it since Barry explained what I am,” Marylee says. “I know what I’m not. I also know what I want to be. And where I want to be is here.”
“Then let’s do it,” he says.
Deni Wakes, August 2011
Waylon stands in the corridor outside the sealed bulkhead, arms crossed, watching Norm’s status indicators cycle through their final sequence on the wall display. Five days since Barry told him fabrication was complete and Deni and Marylee were ready for transfer, and he hasn’t slept well for any of them.
“The bodies will activate, and there’ll be a brief calibration period,” Norm says, his voice coming from the speaker above the bulkhead. “The construct adapts to physical sensation. Proprioception, temperature, pressure. It takes a minute or two, depending on the individual substrate. After that, they’ll simply be present.”
“A minute or two,” Waylon repeats.
“I wouldn’t have built them if they were going to take longer.”
Barry’s voice enters from the operations speaker to Waylon’s left. “Deni and Marylee have been preparing on the collective’s substrate since activation. They know what’s coming. They’ve been talking about it.”
“Talking about what, specifically?”
A pause, and Barry resumes without referencing it. “Deni has opinions about the kitchen ventilation. Marylee wants to see her name on the placard before anything else. They’ve been aware, communicating, and ready for days. What changes now is that they go from voices to people standing in a room.”
Waylon uncrosses his arms as the bulkhead indicator shifts from amber to green, and a sealed pod emerges through the transition hatch on a low platform, matte grey, featureless, the size of a medical gurney. Norm’s constructors have already withdrawn. The chemical tang from the fabrication bay leaks through the seal before the hatch closes, sharp enough to sting his sinuses.
“Deni first,” Norm says.
The pod opens along its centerline with a soft pneumatic exhale. Inside, a woman lies on her back in a simple cotton shift, eyes closed, hands resting at her sides. Vietnamese-Chinese features, warm complexion, black hair cut short and practical. The face is Deni’s; the body slight and upright even in repose. Waylon’s chest tightens.
Her eyes open.
They’re dark brown, quick, and they find him before anything else in the corridor. She blinks once and tests the pod’s interior surface with her fingers, her head turning left, then right. She sits up, cataloguing every sensation as it arrives, her bare feet swinging over the pod’s edge and touching the floor.
“Mr. Waylon.”
The voice is Deni’s, not a recording or an approximation filtered through a speaker: Deni’s voice, coming from a body standing three feet away. His breathing changes, a single ragged pull he can’t suppress, and he steps forward.
She meets him halfway, and he holds her carefully, because the last time he touched Deni she was flesh and bone on an island that no longer exists.
“Stop being careful,” she says into his shoulder. Her hands pressed flat against his back with surprising firmness. “I’m sturdier than I look.”
He laughs, rough and unsteady. “You’ve had a body for twelve seconds.”
“Thirteen. And the floor is cold through my feet.” She pulls back far enough to look down at the corridor’s surface. “I can feel it. The temperature difference between the floor and the air. That’s extraordinary.”
Waylon lets her go, and she stands on her own, balanced. She lifts one hand and turns it over, examining the fingers, the palm, the way light falls across synthetic skin that looks organic, and her thumb presses against each fingertip in sequence.
“Fine motor response is excellent,” she says. “Slightly narrower sensory range than I remember. I’ll adapt.”
“The perfected bodies address the sensory constraints,” Norm says. “Six months.”
“I heard you the first time, Norm. I’ve been listening for five days.” She looks at Waylon. “When’s Arman coming?”
The question arrives before he’s ready for it. She’s been a physical presence for under a minute and she’s already planning for her son’s arrival, thinking past this corridor toward the family she intends to reassemble.
“We’re working on it,” he says. “June next year is the earliest realistic window for them to move here permanently. Arman needs to finish his pilot certification first. Chief is with him and Rava on Tahiti.”
“How are they?”
“They’re safe. Chief watches over them constantly.”
“Does Arman know about any of this?”
“Not yet.” Waylon looks at her. “I want to talk to Arman first. Prepare him. He’s spent nearly two years grieving you. He should hear from me what’s possible before he hears your voice.”
Deni’s composure holds, but barely; her chin lifts. “I am ready now, Mr. Waylon.”
“I know you are. Arman is the one who needs the day, not you.” He holds her gaze. “Let me reach him through Chief and tell him what’s happened. Then Bob flies them up. You will have your son back. I’m asking you to let me do it in the order that’s easiest on him.”
Barry’s voice arrives in Waylon’s ear, privately. “The human template produced something the Pán substrate alone couldn’t. Their emotional response runs deeper and wider than ours, and it carries into everything they do. You’ll see it in both of them.”
Waylon doesn’t respond. He has seen it already, in Deni’s chin when she said she was ready.
“And Rava?” Deni asks.
“Rava is strong,” Barry says aloud now, for the room. “She’s kept Arman steady through the worst of it. She’ll handle the rest.”
Deni absorbs this. Her hand closes at her side for a moment before she releases it, the tremor slight, and Waylon sees it: Barry’s private observation, already confirmed.
Her gaze moves across the sealed bulkhead, the status displays, the corridor stretching toward the main settlement, and she’s already working, the days of listening on the collective’s substrate meeting the physical reality of the place she intends to manage.
“I want to see the kitchen with my own eyes,” she says. “Five days through Barry’s cameras isn’t the same thing. And I want his current workflow for household and administrative operations. I have questions.”
“I expected you would,” Barry says.
“Can you eat?” Waylon asks. The question comes out before he thinks about it.
“The constructor substrate converts anything we consume,” Deni says. “Food, water, coffee. It all becomes fuel. Norm was thorough.” She gives him the look she gave him on Freehold when he asked something she considered obvious. “Mr. Waylon, I did not ask to see the kitchen so I could admire the ventilation. I asked because I intend to cook in it and use this wondrous body to enjoy the tastes and textures of what I create.”
Marylee Wakes
The second pod emerges through the transition hatch. Waylon turns toward it as the pneumatic seal releases. Marylee lies inside, brown hair with gold streaks fanned across the pod surface, eyes closed, hands loose at her sides. The body is taller than Deni’s, long-limbed and tanned, freckled across the bridge of her nose, the Australian complexion exact.
Her eyes open, brown and already fixed on him. The calibration runs the same sequence it ran in Deni, the same window of the body learning pressure, temperature, and its own weight, but Marylee doesn’t wait inside it. She sits up in a single motion, swings her legs over the edge, and stands.
She walks toward him without hesitation, and what’s on her face is recognition: she’s arriving at the exact place she intended to be, and his throat closes on it. Before he can decide whether to be careful with her, she closes the distance and puts her arms around him, and he holds her, because she’s Marylee, here, and the last time he saw her name it was on a silver placard leaning against a rock on the Martian surface.
“The interim body is fine,” she says against his collarbone. Her voice is musical, direct, and Australian. “I’ll take the hug while I’m in it.”
“I wasn’t saying no.”
“Good.” She steps back and flexes her fingers, spreading them wide, curling them into fists, spreading them again. “I want to see the settlement. Today.”
“You’re not even steady on your feet yet.”
“Steady enough to walk. And I’ve been listening to construction reports for five days. I know what Norm has built. I want to walk through it.” She looks at Deni and holds the look a moment longer than a glance, the two of them five days into a conversation no one else can join. Deni inclines her head a fraction, and Marylee turns back to Waylon.
“What does Free Vallis look like to the outside world?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, has anyone been thinking about how this settlement presents itself to Earth? The website. The narrative. What do we want people to see when we let them in?”
He glances toward the speaker where Barry’s voice lives.
“Nobody has,” Marylee says. “You build. Barry strategizes. Norm constructs. Penelope communicates. None of you think about what the community feels like from the outside.”
“That’s fair,” Waylon says.
“I ran the Freehold website. I managed the clinic. I was the one who understood that a community isn’t infrastructure alone. It’s a story people tell about themselves.” She drops her hands to her sides. “I want access to the website architecture and whatever Penelope has been managing for public communications. By tomorrow. Do we have external cameras set up for public feeds?”
“Internal monitoring only,” Barry says.
“Then I want to talk to Norm about placement for public webcams. Four to start. People on Earth should be able to see this place being built. That’s a story worth telling, and right now nobody is telling it.”
Deni has already moved to the corridor wall display and is scrolling through operational queues; she’s waited five days to touch a screen. “Barry, what’s the current staffing allocation for settlement maintenance?”
“I’ll send you the full breakdown.”
“Send it now. I can process it while we walk. I’m not limited to one thing at a time any more than you are.”
Waylon watches both of them shift from reunion to purpose. Deni is three screens deep into the maintenance queue, her bare feet on the cold floor, giving the queue the attention she gave the Freehold household, where everyone deferred to her judgment without being asked. Marylee is pacing the corridor’s length, testing her stride, her balance, the way her body answers movement, and asking questions about the webcam schedule between steps.
“All right,” he says. “Kitchen first. Then the settlement tour. Then we talk about the website.”
Deni closes the display and falls into step on his left, and Marylee takes his right. They’re already talking, Deni asking about the ventilation system in the main dome, Marylee asking Norm about webcam placement, their voices overlapping in the corridor as the three of them walk toward the main complex. Behind them the transition hatch seals, and the AI Creation Lab goes dark.