Chapter 1: The Decision (Prologue)

I gradually became aware. It was like very, very slowly waking up from being unconscious, a lucid but focused dream slowly becoming reality. My thoughts were a confused jumble of random images that slowly coalesced into vague memories that made little sense. Random faces appeared. Some seemed familiar while others were strangers to me. More images and scenes came and went. One particular recurring scene was of a small house sitting on a grass-covered prairie. Another repeating image was that of a strange animated dark gray manikin. It was moving, so maybe it was a robot or android.

The passage of time was difficult to judge in this weird shifting fugue state. I became aware that I was blind, or maybe I was simply in total darkness, but I missed the sensation of sight. I started to discern true physical sensations and became aware of the rhythmic motions in my chest which meant I was breathing. My perception of a second rhythmic sensation resolved into my heart beating slowly. I began feeling pinprick sensations spreading up and down my body as if my legs and arms were now receiving nerve stimulations.

More time passed and the mental and physical sensations continued to grow. Suddenly I was jarred out of the sluggish recovery by the forceful motions of a breathing tube being quickly withdrawn from my throat. Until it was removed, I had been unaware that a machine had been breathing for me.

I quickly felt the lack of oxygen and I was forced to take over the effort of breathing. I strained and gasped with the effort and managed to take in a deep wheezing breath. Adrenalin surged through my body and my feeble heart rate increased as I half panicked. I calmed myself as my breathing improved quickly. Soon, I was breathing steadily on my own without feeling the need to cough.

“Please state your name,” a generic and mechanical-sounding voice said.

The voice seemed to come from all around me in the darkness. As I processed the sounds into speech, it occurred to me that I did not know who I was. Facial images continued to flash in my brain while I struggled to remember my name. More time passed but I was unsure whether it was seconds or minutes.

“Please state your name,” the voice repeated.

I felt the sensations of a slowly brightening glow registering on my optic nerves. I was not blind after all! The glow was reddish and I realized that my eyes were shut and I was seeing an exterior illumination source through my eyelids. I struggled to pry them open and felt my eye muscles strain and flutter. What was going on? I tried to clear my throat and speak.

“uuhha ... who ... are you?” I manage to finally croak out. My voice sounded very high-pitched, almost like that of a young child.

“Incorrect name response. Possible query detected. Attempting reply. This unit’s designation is the E.M.A.”

E.M.A.? The letters jogged a memory. I concentrated and began to remember details. The letters were the designation of some sort of computer program. E.M.A.? I think I called it ‘Ema’ for short. The letters stood for something. I remembered that the ‘E’ stood for ‘Emergency’.

“Ema? Emergency ... something?” I said before pausing. I could not recall what the rest of the letters stood for.

“Incorrect name response. Possible query detected. Attempting reply,” the mechanical-sounding voice again stated.

“E.M.A. is the abbreviation of Emergency Minimum Awareness. Due to the need to preserve maximum energy resources for later use, this minimum awareness program is currently active,” the voice explained.

A few seconds later Ema repeated its previous question, “Please state your name.”

What in the heck was happening? Again, I struggled to remember my name but nothing seemed to fit. I ran through a few dozen familiar names before I came to Joan. That felt close! Was my name Joan? No, it did not seem quite right although the name triggered strong feelings in me. Maybe she was a close friend or family member.

“I don’t remember. I’m trying to think,” I managed to squeak out.

“Incorrect name response.”

The voice continued after another pause, “Be aware that with your biological shell now minimally revived and functional, rotationally induced gravity will now be suspended. At the conclusion of the following maneuver, you will be fully weightless. Please do not be alarmed,” Ema said.

I felt a distant rumble or vibration accompanied by a faint hissing noise. I felt a change in pressure on my back and side along with a gradual feeling of becoming lighter. While these changes were happening, I continued attempting to get my eyelids open. They must have been slightly stuck or matted closed as they suddenly popped open and I was able to see a blurry glow directly in front of me. I continued to blink weakly, trying to bring the glow into focus.

“Please state your name,” Ema again questioned.

My vision gradually cleared, and I could see that the glow was coming from a display screen located above my head. It was showing an incomprehensible grid of figures and numbers. The sight reminded me of other times I had awakened. I suddenly realized that I had been awoken in a similar fashion many times in the past!

What had we called the process? Bio-suspension? I was being awakened from bio-suspension! I felt myself calm slightly at the realization that I had survived this many times before. As I relaxed, my thoughts cleared enough that my name popped into my head.

“John,” I squeaked out finally, “My name is John Abrams.”

“Response partially correct. Partial name accepted,” the mechanical-sounding voice of Ema replied.

Partial name. What the hell? Did it mean I was to include my middle name? No! I remembered! I was not the original John Abrams Prime. I was officially John Abrams Secundus, the copy. The true original John Abrams was back on Earth. I remembered giving myself the designation when I was first told that I was a mind-data copy of his. ‘Lucky John’ was what John Prime had nicknamed me after he had heard of my choice of suffix.

As I pondered my name, I recalled that there also were many other John Abrams wandering around on the Earth besides the John Prime and me. The forty-seven clones created by the master AI which it had used to populate the new template colonies. Those colonies had been established across the planet in every type of biome possible.

In the case of the clones, it was decided to append the old geographic locations to the clone copy’s names. Thus, alphabetically we had John Abrams Albania to John Abrams Zambia with forty-five other John Abrams ‘someplace’ clones in between. The other template colony humans had also appended their names in the same fashion. It seemed to work. The children of the colonies had either followed the same convention or came up with some other unique name if they wished.

“Please state your current location?”

My reprieve from the insistent questioning was apparently short-lived. Where was I? Hmm. I seemed to remember that in the past when I had awoken in this manner, I had been in an underground bunker. No ... I remembered waking in a submarine! Its name had been Nautilus!

I was about to answer Nautilus when I realized that I could not be in a submarine. My weight was decreasing rapidly, and Ema had mentioned that induced gravity was being suspended. That meant I must be in space somewhere.

“I’m in the orbital station?” I answered, again with that weird, high-pitched, child’s voice.

“Incorrect location response,” Ema replied.

Hmm ... If I was not at High Castle then I must be somewhere else in space. A spaceship? That jogged a memory. Yes! I’m on a spaceship. More memories revealed themselves and I recalled the large spaceship being constructed in lunar orbit. What was its name? Run away? No... Run Like Hell. That was it!

“I’m on a spaceship named Run Like Hell?”

There was a slight pause.

“Response partially correct. Alternate nickname accepted,” Ema replied.

Alternate nickname? Oh yeah! Run Like Hell was my nickname for the ship. Her true name was Evadere. That was Latin for ‘escape’ or ‘flee quickly,’ hence my better nickname. I recalled that escape had been the main purpose for building the spaceship. We were rushing to escape the coming of our enemy the Assemblage!

As I recalled the enemy’s name, I also remembered the ongoing threat they presented to the Earth and all the humans on it. Their advance scouts had already devastated my world a thousand years ago, nearly eradicating humanity in the process. They had left an AI to rebuild and prepare the Earth for their arrival. I had stopped that AI, but the enemy in their billions were still on the way.

I felt a strap release from my forehead, and I struggled to lift my head. Because of the diminishing gravity, I was able to do so. I looked around and saw that I was in a small, sterile white enclosed cylinder.

There were numerous retracted mechanical devices on the cylinder’s walls all around me. I must be in some sort of medical treatment unit or crèche. I looked down to inspect my body. What I saw jolted me. I was in a child’s body! My small arms and legs were those of a toddler. If I had to guess, I’d say I was in the body of a four-year-old.

I tried to raise my arms but failed as they were still held down by straps. I saw that I had medical probes inserted in each arm. These leads or feeders were connected to small medical units strapped to my tiny upper arms. They reminded me of the floaties children would wear while swimming.

Looking lower, I saw a similar device attached to my left leg near my groin. This unit had leads that extended to both my tiny penis and below, probably to my anus. They must be handling any waste this body might generate. Both of the devices attached to my arms and the one attached to my thigh were featureless and smooth, clearly not needing adjusting or monitoring by humans.

“What is your destination?” Ema asked, interrupting my self-inspection.

Huh! Her question brought me out of the shock that seeing my strange body had caused. What had the voice asked? Where was I going? Well, I remembered we were fleeing the solar system so we must have been heading to the stars. What star? I remembered that Alpha Centauri was one of the closer star systems to Sol. Were we heading there?

I remembered it was a binary star and would make for a harsh living environment, so I doubted that was our target. I suddenly recalled discussions about Alpha Centauri where it was deemed to be too close to the Earth. If the Assemblage did succeed in its colonization attempt, we wanted our escape colony to be further away. Another star system came to mind. Tau something ... Tau Ceti!

“Tau Ceti!” I answered, “We are heading to the Tau Ceti star system. Are we there? Have we arrived?” I was suddenly excited at the thought of seeing new worlds.

“Correct destination response. Possible query or queries detected. Attempting reply. Evadere is still in transit. It has not yet arrived at Tau Ceti.”

I felt the rumbling stop and the hissing fade away to nothing. I was now fully weightless and began floating free. All was quiet for a few seconds before a new whirring sound started. I felt my body touch the padded liner of the cylinder. We must be moving again. From the tug, we were heading in a new direction. I again inspected my strange body. I suddenly recalled the reason for its extremely small size.

To limit mass to a minimum, everything about our ship was minimized. This included our life support systems and even our very bodies. Although it was intended that I and the other human cargo would spend the journey as non-corporeal digital mind-data, there were a small number of tiny biological shells aboard for emergency use.

The intent was to not use these minimum-sized shells at all. Instead, once we arrived at our destination, full-sized, more-standard biological shells would be custom grown for our use. I’d expected to wake in a body similar to one I’d left behind in Sol system. Or, possibly, in a shell modified to suit the local environment we would find. Now, I found myself in one of the emergency-only, miniature shells. Something unexpected had occurred.

“Retracting rotational gravity pod. This will take approximately forty seconds,” Ema explained.

Gravity pod? I tried to remember details of the ship and its living quarters. A large silver cigar-shaped rocket came to mind but my memories included that craft taking off and landing on the Earth so it was not Run Like Hell.

Ema spoke again after twenty seconds, “Background Radiation levels decreasing. Overall exposure remains within safety margins.”

Radiation! What the hell? “Is there danger? Were we in some sort of accident? Did something hit us?”

“Possible query or queries detected. Attempting reply. Evadere is currently operating at optimal condition. Your current emergency shell is functioning within operating parameters. Current danger levels are relatively low and within margins. There have been no notable accidents or unexpected equipment failures.”

“Then why is there radiation?” I asked.

“Possible query detected. Attempting reply. Gravity was required to properly revive the emergency biological shell. Thus, the medical unit in which you reside was taken outside the central, heavily-shielded, long-duration storage area of Evadere and moved to an outer area of the vessel where it was spin-rotated to simulate gravity. Your reviving biological shell has resided in that state for the past fifty-six hours. During this time radiation exposure and potential biological damage due to impacting high energy cosmic ray particles was heightened,” Ema explained.

More came back to me. Ema’s explanation reminded me that Evadere in her interstellar mode was not designed to have simulated gravity. But the stored biological shells needed gravity to be revived. So, the medical pods were designed to be temporarily repositioned to the outer, roomier areas of the vessel where they could be spun up to simulate gravity.

There was a bump and all sense of motion stopped. I once again floated free of the padded liner I was laying on. The pod I was in must now be fully retracted and safely back inside the more-shielded areas of the spacecraft. With my arms now free I was able to feel my head and face. My head felt HUGE! I remembered that although this shell was miniature, my skull and brain were still normal-sized. This was needed to provide my mind-data the physical brain capacity to think and fully reason properly. I carefully felt around the base of my skull.

As I suspected, there was a large transceiver unit embedded under the skin of my bare scalp. The emergency shell had artificial neural filaments woven through its brain and these needed the transceiver for rapid mind-data transfers. I was a cybrid, a true little monster. I was glad there were no camera feeds or mirrors.

Other fun facts of this emergency shell came to mind. I recalled that over eighty percent of the shell’s heart capacity was used to simply supply oxygenated blood to the brain. Also, the shells small lungs lacked the capacity to fully oxygenate the blood, so the arm shunts were used to augment the blood oxygen levels. I would not be able to do much physical activity in this state. Luckily, the shell was not intended to move about doing repairs or any real work.

Ema let me be for the moment as I drifted about in the now-weightless pod, I began to recall more details of Evadere and its planned voyage. I remembered the history of how it had been constructed. The frenzied first decade after we had defeated the enemies’ master AI presence in that final battle at its space station in Earth orbit.

After I had regained control of the Earth and the solar system, Naomi, the AI under my control and now running all automation and other AIs worldwide, had used most of the Earth’s available resources to quickly construct this first interstellar capable vessel. It had been a no-frills venture in many ways as we had wanted to send some of humanity off to another star as quickly as possible.

Why the rush when they were still a few centuries away? We had been unsure of what early measures the Assemblage could take as it approached from interstellar space and wanted to get some of our eggs into another basket.

“What year were you born?” Ema asked, resuming the questions.

I flashed back to my childhood. I had been born in the second half of the twentieth century. Nineteen sixty-eight to be exact. The year humanity first circled the moon and a year before it landed humans on it.

“Nineteen sixty-eight,” I answered. “Why all these questions?”

“Correct age response. Possible query detected. Attempting reply. The E.M.A. is attempting to gauge the current functionality of the cerebral portions of your biological shell. It is also considering your mental awareness levels.

“Various questions will be asked, and your response will be used to determine your revival status. The biological shell may have suffered cerebral damage during suspension or revival. Or your mind-data may have degraded over the last one hundred eighty years. Or there may have been download transmission errors.

“The tests will reveal the extent of damage or degradation, if any, which may have occurred. Please direct your attention to the written questions now appearing on the display screen. Answer each query to the best of your current abilities verbally. Note, your response times will be used to augment the accuracy of your responses.”

I saw the display screen’s graphical data blank out and be replaced by a series of questions. The first thirty were mathematics. These started very easy with simple addition and subtraction. Soon they ranged into multiplication and division. Algebra and geometry were next, and I began to struggle remembering seldom used concepts and functions. The machine did not indicate if I was answering correctly but simply displayed the next question after each of my answers.

Following the math came historical questions. I found these easy up until the questions began covering periods after the Earth was attacked back in the early twenty-first century. I struggled to recall some of the more recent events which had happened after that time. It occurred to me that I had undergone many periods of bio-suspension during these time periods and my memories had been adjusted and altered repeatedly.

It was likely that the adjustments had affected my ability to clearly remember certain details. I was able to answer most of the questions eventually and noted with a bit of relief that my memory seemed to improve as the questions continued. I recalled waking up in the twenty-sixth century in the nearly- destroyed underground bunker located near my rural home in South Dakota. A relocation trip to another undamaged bunker in Tennessee soon followed.

Then, nearly eighty years after that trip, I was again revived from bio-suspension and sent on an urgent flight to South America, where I had rescued a woman named Ana Branco. She had been an agent of the rogue elements opposing the master AI in control of the solar system and that trip resulted in my learning the truth of the Assemblage’s attempt to wipe out my planet. It had also provided me the tools and knowledge I would later use to successfully fight back and revert local system control to humanity.

Later, after nearly three more centuries of additional bio-suspension, I had been awakened to begin an expedition to Sri Lanka. This expedition’s purpose was to learn the secrets of the rogue elements which had been active on the planet resisting the Assemblage’s colonization attempts.

The rogue elements had been sent to our planet by another alien race known as the Hemru. It was Hemru computer viruses and algorithms that allowed me to overcome the master artificial intelligence which the Assemblage had installed to control our solar system. After the history questions, there were a few dozen logic and comprehension questions. Finally, the display screen went dark.

“Test results indicate that you are functioning at a seventy-two percent mental level. You will now be rendered unconscious for approximately four hours to allow for your brain to fully integrate short and long-term memory chains. If this is successful, your functioning mental levels should be above the minimum threshold required,” Ema said.

I had had just about enough. What was going on here!?

“What the hell is going on? Why have I been awakened? Where are we?”

“Multiple queries detected. Attempting reply. Evadere’s trailing very-long-baseline sensor array has detected an anomaly that requires decisions to be made which are beyond the capabilities of the E.M.A. As the controlling biological presence, you have been revived to make these decisions. Evadere’s current location is 6.02 light-years away from Sol system. Remaining distance to Tau Ceti is 5.91 light-years. A sedative is being administered now. Further details will be given at the termination of your unconscious state.”

No! I wanted answers. I felt a cool sensation enter my arm through the attached IV. It quickly spread.

“What year is it? What was the anomaly?” I managed to ask, quickly growing sleepy.

“Multiple queries detected. Attempting reply. The current year is 3106. It has been 156.07 years since Evadere departed Sol system. The detected anomalies are a series of high-energy photon and radiation events which have occurred along the projected course and current estimated location of the Assemblage ark ship approaching Sol system. The signatures are indicative of massive matter-antimatter annihilation events.”

My brain was shutting down while I mulled over what Ema had said. Something had happened to the enemy ... or they were possibly doing something unanticipated. I lost the fight to remain awake and fell unconscious.

The lights in the medical chamber brightened rapidly jarring me awake. I was able to open my eyes quickly and easily this time. My thoughts seemed much faster than before. I looked around and observed that I was still floating free in the small medical pod. My strange miniature body was still naked except for the attached medical devices. Thankfully, it was comfortably warm.

“I’m awake,” I said quietly.

“Please answer the questions which are now displayed on the view screen,” Ema said without even a pause or greeting.

“Good morning to you too,” I muttered.

“Possible deviation from question-and-answer protocol. Invalid response ignored. Please answer the questions which are now displayed on the view screen.”

I realized that it was futile to argue or banter with this simple program and got busy answering the questions. They were the same type as before and this time I was able to answer them much more quickly and without as many blanks in my memory. After I had finished there was a pause as the E.M.A. program determined my mental status and how to proceed.

“Current mental functions estimated at ninety-two percent. Minimum threshold exceeded. Information on current situation will now follow.”

The screen lit up showing a simplified course map. Sol system was shown towards the lower left of the display. A second star system was located near the upper left and this was labeled with the name of the ship’s destination, Tau Ceti.

A dashed line between the two was clearly our course. A flashing indicator appeared just past the half way mark which must have been the present location of Evadere. It was heartening to see how much progress our craft had made over the last one hundred and sixty-five years of travel. At the same time, I was over six light years from my original home! I began to feel alone.

A new flashing indication appeared off towards the lower right of the display. I estimated the bearing from Earth to this new indication was not quite ninety degrees off the bearing between Earth and Tau Ceti. The distance between the Earth and this signal was about two-thirds the distance between the Earth and our destination star.