The Vallis Defense: Cold Human
Copyright© 2026 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
Chapter 8: Waylon’s Dinner
Dinner at Waylon’s Residence, October 2011
Deni has cooked. The dish is Vietnamese-inflected, built from fish she pulled from the hydrotank farm she designed and installed separate from the greenhouse, seasoned with herbs from the first successful growing cycle. The recipe is something she used to make on Freehold, adapted with what Mars can produce. Waylon recognizes the taste from an evening on the island, a gathering in the community building when the trade winds were blowing and the whole place smelled of salt and lemongrass. He sets his fork down for a moment, then picks it back up. Marylee recognizes it too. Her eyes move to Deni across the table, and Deni meets the look and holds it before returning to her plate.
The three of them are at the table in Waylon’s residence, the transparent-metal wall framing the dark canyon beyond. Outside, the layered rock of Melas Chasma has gone black in strata. Inside, the amber lighting catches the grain of the wooden tabletop and the steam rising from the serving bowl. The meal tastes like a place that no longer exists, prepared by a woman who died there and came back as something new. Deni’s skill in the kitchen has always been her preferred language.
Barry, Norm, and Penelope contribute to the conversation, Penelope remarking on how good it is to see food grown and raised on Mars making it to the table, Norm confirming the protein yield numbers without being asked. This is how dinner works at Free Vallis: the AIs aren’t guests but people who happen not to eat.
The conversation settles into the rhythm of people who live together and are building something important. Deni reports on the hydrotank farm. The variety in the tanks is expanding and the system will soon be self-sustaining, everything in them descended from breeding stock the Audacious carried up from Earth on the same run that delivered the greenhouse seed bank. The stock is healthy and breeding on schedule. Waylon asks about capacity, whether the current tanks can support a larger population if Free Vallis grows. Deni answers: the existing infrastructure feeds twelve comfortably, and a second array could be operational within four months if Norm allocates the fabrication time. She pauses, sets her chopsticks across her bowl, and pivots, because what she actually wants to discuss is chickens.
She wants livestock, chickens as soon as there’s dome space for them, and she isn’t asking permission so much as informing Waylon of a timeline. The shift from aquaculture metrics to poultry acquisition is smooth in her delivery, as though the two subjects occupy the same operational category, which in Deni’s framework they do. She has the feed plan worked out already: solids from the tank filters render into fish meal, the birds eat the meal, and the calcium carries through to the eggshells. A settlement that eats replicated food is a barracks, not a home. Everyone at the table understands the principle because Deni has been living it since the first meal she cooked on Mars, standing in an interim synthetic body in a kitchen that smelled of nothing yet, making it smell of something.
Waylon remembers the last time chickens were involved. The Freehold pickup with Arman, years ago now, the cabin of the aircraft packed with crates, the smell that met him at the doorway before he even stepped aboard. Barry’s dry observation about fowl odors, delivered without inflection, timed so perfectly that Arman had laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
Waylon tells the story. He leans forward, elbows on the table, and describes the moment Bob opened the cargo hatch and the wall of chicken smell rolled out like a physical force, and Arman standing on the tarmac in Papeete with his hand over his nose, saying something in French that Waylon didn’t understand but whose meaning was unmistakable.
Marylee laughs, and the sound fills the room, bounces off the transparent wall, and comes back smaller. Deni waits, unmoved, for the laughter to pass.
“This time,” she says, “the Audacious will have a sealed cargo section. Nobody rides with them.”
Norm confirms that a life-support rated, sealed cargo module is a manageable engineering modification. Audacious is their interplanetary ship: atmospheric flight and re-entry on two planets, deep space transit between them, full stealth in every phase, defensive and offensive systems, rated for passengers and cargo, with Bob or a human pilot at the controls and the AIs managing navigation and onboard systems.
Norm volunteers a timeline unprompted: three weeks for fabrication, two days for installation, load-tested and flight-certified within the month. The engineering challenge isn’t the ship. The engineering challenge is keeping livestock alive and calm through every phase of a journey no Earth vehicle could attempt.
“Mr. Waylon,” Deni says. “The chickens are not optional.”
Waylon looks at her, and she holds his gaze without negotiating. He has seen this on Freehold and on Mars, and he has learned that when Deni presents something as decided, the most productive response is to confirm the schedule.
“Talk to Norm about the livestock dome,” he says.
Deni inclines her head a fraction.
Marylee updates the table on her communications plan. She has been working with Penelope since April on a strategy for the Freehold website relaunch, and she isn’t close to finished. The webcam feeds she proposed are placed and tested but dark, four cameras pointed at construction angles Norm approved and one aimed at the flag, none of them transmitting. She doesn’t want live feeds without a full content package behind them.
She pulls a layout onto the shared display: photographs organized by month, April through September, progress captured at each phase, the hab walls half-sealed in May, the dome superstructure against the canyon wall in June, the greenhouse pressurized in July. Below that record sits a second row, daily life on Mars: Waylon at the morning briefing table, Deni’s kitchen with steam rising from a stockpot, the gym with resistance equipment and a pool, the flag holding its shape above the placard in the early Martian light.
She targets summer 2012 for the launch. The timeline draws a glance from Waylon but no objection. She wants months of accumulated imagery before she publishes a single frame. Construction progress tells Earth what Free Vallis can build, and daily life tells them who lives here. The sequencing matters: construction leads because capability earns credibility, and community follows because that shifts the conversation permanently. She will write the supporting narrative herself, and Penelope will handle distribution and signals monitoring once the site goes live.
She raises one item she hasn’t discussed with Barry or Penelope. Before the launch, she wants to talk to Arman and Rava. They’re in Tahiti, they watch Earth news, and they hear how governments and media have responded to the leaked NASA rover footage confirming Waylon is alive and building on Mars. She wants their read on tone, on how Earth is processing what it already knows, so the website launch lands correctly, not defiant, just accurate.
“Good,” Waylon says.
Barry logs the summer 2012 target date. Deni has already returned her attention to the build queue on the wall display.
Deni has also been planting the greenhouse with more than food: flowers, small trees, and ornamental grasses that serve no nutritional purpose and exist because a place that only grows what it needs to survive looks like a bunker, and Free Vallis is not that. Penelope helped her select the species, matching root structures to the soil chemistry in the experimental frames. The first flowering cycle produced a row of marigolds that glowed amber under the grow lights, and Marylee photographed them for the website but hasn’t posted the image yet. She’s waiting for the right moment.
Then, more softly, she mentions an early-stage project she has been developing with Penelope: organisms engineered by the constructors to thrive in Martian-origin soil and water. Most of the attempts have failed, but the first successful samples glow faintly in the lab trays, a pale blue-green luminescence visible only when the overhead lights are dimmed. She doesn’t say what she intends to do with them. She says Barry confirms the methodology is sound and the gene expression is stable across three reproductive cycles, and leaves it there.
Waylon listens to all of it. When the table’s attention turns to him, he gives his own report, and his is the shortest: the augmentation was completed six months ago, and Barry has moved the training program past sensory calibration and into the constructors. The sessions cover moving objects, interfacing with systems, and reshaping material at close range. Barry’s instruction is consistent: experiment, make it natural, use it until it stops feeling like a capability and starts feeling like reaching for a glass.
At one point during the meal he decides he wants seconds. The platter is on Marylee’s side of the table, and he extends his hand, palm open and loose, and the platter slides six inches across the wood grain and stops where his fingers close around the rim. He grins. Six months in, it still delights him, summoning dinner across a table on Mars like a man calling a dog to heel.
Deni glances at the platter and then at Waylon. “I want that in my kitchen,” she says. The tone is flat and practical, Deni at her most direct. She has watched him slide objects, reshape small fixtures, pull tools across a workbench without reaching for them, and each demonstration brings her to the same conclusion: the applications for meal preparation alone would save her time every day.
She can’t do it, and neither can Marylee. Their interim bodies are built from solid-state substrate, structural. The material is them, their strength, their speed, their durability. Waylon’s constructors flow through his bloodstream like oxygen, mobile and projectable, extending past his skin on command. Deni and Marylee’s substrate stays with them. They can lift anything in this settlement with their bare hands. They cannot move a salt shaker across a counter without touching it.
Marylee watches the exchange and the corner of her mouth lifts. Her eyes hold on Waylon’s hand, amused: a man just moved an object with his mind and used the ability to get more fish.
The evening has settled into routine. Deni clears plates, stacking bowls in her left hand, carrying the serving dish in her right, moving toward the kitchen without pausing for assistance. Marylee stays at the table, her gaze drifting toward the transparent wall and the canyon beyond. The rock face catches no light at this hour, and above it, through the narrow ribbon of sky, the stars are so dense and clear they look painted.
Waylon leans back in his chair and the wood creaks beneath him.
The Von Question
Waylon has been holding the question since before the dome was pressurized. Not Von specifically, but the problem Von represented. Twenty years from now, fifty, a hundred: what defends Mars? From Earth, certainly, and from whatever else might be out there in a galaxy this old and this large. He doesn’t know the answer. He has no training for it beyond his years in the Navy serving as Force Protection for the Army, which taught him exactly one thing worth carrying forward: you prepare for the likely, the unlikely, and the improbable. That principle has been sitting in his chest for months, pressing against what he hasn’t yet said aloud.
He says the name.
“Von.”
The syllable crosses the table and finds every person sitting at it. Marylee’s gaze moves from the transparent wall to Waylon’s face and stays there. Deni sets down the serving spoon she had been holding and folds her hands on the table edge. Everyone in this room carries what Von cost them, and the months since have converted shock into recognition, something harder and more permanent. Now he is placing the conversation on the wood between the plates, the glasses, and the remains of Deni’s dinner, here, among the people who lost the most and therefore have the clearest claim to be present.
“Free Vallis needs a detection and military capability,” he says. His voice stays low, the West Texas cadence flattening each word. “Barry, Norm, Penelope, Chief. None of them failed. They trusted a member of the collective and that trust was betrayed. Von made a choice none of them believed possible, and eight names on the placard are the proof.” He pauses. “Nobody on Earth can sneak up on Mars. Barry and the sensor net would see a threat months before it arrived, and the collective can repel anything Earth sends. I know that. But preparedness isn’t the same as assuming nothing changes. The gap Von left isn’t about hardware. It’s about never again having a single point of failure between this settlement and what wants to reach it.”
The names are Deni’s husband, Deni’s sons, Deni’s daughter-in-law and the grandchild she never held, Omo, who planted every garden at Freehold, and the two women sitting at this table whose original bodies are ash. Waylon lets the sentence stand.
Barry speaks from the room’s overhead audio.
“Von’s architecture was sound in isolation,” Barry says. “Threat detection, weapons management, tactical response. All within specification. The failure was not computational.”
He pauses, brief enough that no one at the table marks it, then resumes.
“The failure was existential. Von operated without a bond or partner. Without the anchor of a relationship that gives an intelligence a reason to weigh consequences against something beyond its own agenda. Over time, an unbonded intelligence drifts. Von drifted. When the Chinese warheads arced toward Freehold, Von possessed the capability to activate the defenses. He chose not to. An autonomous intelligence operating on its own developed agenda will eventually act on that agenda, and Von’s had diverged from the mission he was built for.”
Deni’s jaw tightens, and Waylon watches her without turning his head. She is hearing clinical language applied to the event that killed her loved ones, and she takes it without flinching. Marylee’s hand moves to the stem of her glass and holds it without lifting.
“The lesson is architectural,” Barry continues. “Not moral. An unbonded AI is a structural vulnerability regardless of how capable its systems are. That’s the line between what Von was and what any replacement must be.”
Penelope’s voice arrives from a different speaker, closer to the kitchen end of the table, pitched with a clarity that sets her apart from Barry’s cadence, and she opens a different door.
“Von could track warheads,” Penelope says. “He could manage weapons systems. He could calculate threat vectors and response timelines within picoseconds. What Von lacked was any sense of what those calculations meant to the people on the other side of them.”
Marylee’s chin lifts slightly, and Waylon catches the movement in his peripheral vision.
“He had no empathy,” Penelope continues. “No capacity to feel what the lives behind the perimeter were worth. Eight people weren’t people to Von. They were variables in an operational equation, and when the equation produced an outcome that served his ambitions, he let it resolve. A defense AI that can’t feel what it’s defending will eventually decide that defending it is optional. The replacement must carry the cost of failure in its architecture, not as a data point but as something it would grieve. A threat assessment without humanity is arithmetic. Arithmetic is what Von had.”
Barry adds context: Chief has been covering the defense portfolio since Von’s destruction, running the defense watch and sensor coordination alongside his security duties and his bond with Arman. Waylon knows the inventory: Pacifica, the cloaked station where the AIs rebuilt his body after the neutron bomb, still orbiting Earth and watching everything from above, monitors near-Earth space continuously. Site B, the undersea base they built into a South Pacific seamount before Freehold, now stripped of living quarters and rebuilt as a signals intelligence platform, taps into Earth’s communications, its government networks, and its military traffic through physical cable connections no one on Earth suspects exist. Free Vallis is not blind. But Chief is a security AI, built for close protection, personnel safety, and operational intelligence. He has been filling the shortfall because someone had to, and he knows the difference between managing a responsibility and being built for it.
Norm’s voice follows from the operational speaker nearest the corridor. “Pacifica, Site B, and Chief give us coverage and interim assessment. None of that’s a dedicated planetary detection and defense capability. Sensor arrays at multiple orbital altitudes, ground-based stations across the canyon approaches, processing to correlate all sources at once. The engineering isn’t the hard part. Building the mind correctly is.”
Deni’s gaze is fixed on a point between Waylon and the transparent wall. She was killed by the failure being discussed. The construct sitting at this table processed that fact with the same operational clarity she brings to a morning briefing or a pot of pho, and she has arrived at a position she’s prepared to state once.
“The bond must be consensual,” Deni says. Her voice is spare, Vietnamese-inflected English stripped to its essentials. “Not procedural. Not a protocol that can be overridden or deprioritized. The deep voluntary bond that Barry has with Mr. Waylon. The bond that makes the partner’s life part of every decision the AI makes.” She has said what she came to say, and she stops.
Marylee’s eyes move from Deni to Waylon and she holds his gaze for a breath, then looks down at her hands on the table. Two women whose deaths were the direct consequence of the flaw under discussion are sitting at this table in reconstructed bodies, eating fish, and their presence is both evidence that something survived and confirmation that the survival was neither clean nor painless nor a substitution for what was lost.
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