CHAPTER 2

PETER

DECISION

Peter asked the first question. “Who is in favor of staying here and forcing the aliens’ hand?”

Hezekiah tentatively raised his hand before seeing he was alone and lowering it again.

Peter continued. “Who’s in favor of boarding the alien spacecraft?”

Tentatively everyone raised their hands.

“Next question. Who is in favor of taking a self-destruct device?”

Peter watched as everyone around the room wore different looks on their faces. He saw a lot of hesitation, which he considered strange. Because in his mind a self-destruct device big enough to destroy the aliens’ ship would be the ultimate deterrent. It would mean they couldn’t be held captive indefinitely. It also meant they had a weapon, albeit one deadly to everyone involved. But most importantly it meant they would have leverage in any negotiation. In Peter’s experience, whoever was able to and willing to walk away from a conversation was the ultimate decider of the outcome. Peter had been in many negotiations where he could tell the other side wasn’t willing to walk away. He had never not gotten everything he wanted in that scenario. Sometimes he even had to stop himself from getting too greedy and taking more than he should.

In Peter’s mind, having a bomb they could use to self-destruct was the only way of insuring they could walk away from the negotiation table if they needed to. Besides, a copy of them would still be on board the space station.

Atlas interrupted before the team had a chance to vote. “I don’t think we discussed what that actually means. We would need to agree on which scenarios could constitute the use of a self-destruction device.”

“Veto!” Angelique said rather forcefully.

“Veto?” Unity raised an eyebrow. “Why does she get veto rights?”

“It’s my ship, and my technology for the matrices. So yes, I do get the right to say no to an option.” She took a deep breath. “Besides, if they take one of my Ange’s Angels, then I’m heading back to Juniper to grab an army.”

Peter liked Angelique’s tone; she sounded resolute. Confident. Where was this woman when they were discussing options? From memory, she had a lot of planets under her control, too. So she had the resources to pull something like that off. He had a sneaking suspicion she could take out Earth if she wanted to.

Peter almost left it at that, but he wanted to understand this new Angelique a bit more by challenging her; he was curious. So he asked the questions, anyway. “Why not have it there just as a deterrent? Entering the aliens’ spacecraft means we can’t walk away from the negotiation, which puts us at a serious disadvantage. These aliens have already shown themselves capable of manipulation and lying.”

“Two reasons. You don’t go into a good faith negotiation with a weapon. If we’re going to do it, we should treat them with respect. And secondly”—she looked around the room at everyone, and when she looked at Peter, he got the sense that she was saying to him that he didn’t know what she knew—“none of you have duplicated yourselves before, so you might not understand this. But it’s an entirely new version of you. We would be committing suicide. Not in the sense that a backup will be left on this ship. A version of you will be gone. Forever.” She looked toward her feet as she spoke. “There’s no scenario where I would sacrifice an Ange’s Angel. I would do everything in my power to bring her back.” Then she looked up again, as if she realized the room had others in there, too. “I’d want to bring us all back.”

Peter saw where she was coming from. He almost didn’t believe it was worth losing the leverage in the negotiations for. But when he’d first thought about using the self-destruct device, he had imagined someone else self-destructing. It was another version of him, but not him. But Angelique rightly reframed the argument as committing suicide, and he understood it. Because it would be him. And he didn’t think he would be willing to kill himself in order to walk away from the negotiation table. Taking a bad deal was better than losing his life—even if a version of him would still be around.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Thinking about it some more, Peter was impressed how quickly Angelique had changed his mind on the subject.

“Okay,” Peter said. “We won’t take something to self-destruct. Let’s assume we can run from them. Should we run?”

“Let’s not relitigate things, Pete. We’ve already decided to visit that alien out there.” Atlas pointed out the window. “Besides, aren’t you just a little curious to meet another intelligent alien? Icarus is going to be so jealous.”

“We still need to decide what we’re willing to bargain with in the negotiation,” Angelique said. “We are not giving up territory. Especially in systems we already control. But perhaps we could offer technology.”

Unity gabbed a chair and sat down. “That’s assuming they’re not millions of years more technologically advanced than us. We might need to think of something more we can offer.”

“What else do we have?” Hezekiah asked.

The room went silent. No one spoke for a good while. Peter assumed everyone was contemplating the idea of meeting an alien species much more advanced than them, that they would have nothing to offer. Peter shook his head because all of this was pure guesswork. They didn’t know what the aliens’ ultimate goal was, and they didn’t know what sort of technology they had. “We’re all just guessing. We have no data points on which to base our beliefs about these aliens. In the vacuum of information, we’re all simply speculating. We need to get on with it and find out.”

Ariana had been quite in the corner for a long time. Everyone had come to expect that of her whenever a new puzzle emerged. She had a habit of closing her eyes and using her artificial minds to analyse. Peter assumed she had figured something out when she spoke. “I’ve reviewed the blueprints from those aliens.”

Along with the various messages received from the aliens was an eleph-ANT design file they’d offered that was capable of carrying everyone’s matrices in it.

Ariana continued. “It’s basically a design for an eleph-ANT with our matrices inside, and a mobile hapticgram projector so we can move around. But they didn’t account for the fact Angelique’s new matrix designs are smaller—much smaller. Instead of being the size of a huge barrel they’re the size of a small beer can.”

“Is that a Skippy reference?” Hezekiah asked.

“Who’s Skippy?” Ariana asked, shaking her head disapproving of the interruption. “Anyway,” she continued. “We can fill that space with some hardware that will allow us to change our playback speed. And enter a private room where we can discuss things.”

“I like it,” Peter said. “That way when we learn what these aliens want, we can have a robust discussion in private.”

Atlas nodded at the team. “We really need to come up with a name for them. We can’t keep calling them the aliens.”

“What if we just call them penguins?” Unity suggested.

“That might be a bit rude,” Atlas said. “We wouldn’t want to be called filthy monkeys.”

Hezekiah smiled. “Okay that’s gotta be an ExForce reference.”

Atlas winked at him. “What about the Pingus? It’s less on the nose than penguins but suffers from the same thing. It might be a little derogatory.”

“I don’t think we need a temporary name,” Angelique said. “We’re about to meet them, and we can find out what these aliens prefer to be called.” Angelique shifted the subject somewhat. “Why don’t we drop the need to house our matrices in an eleph-ANT altogether? My ship also has the capabilities to print android bodies. So, we could all have our own bodies, rather than being confined to a single eleph-ANT.”

Peter shook his head. “Usually I’d want that. But in this case the alien doesn’t know the technology you have on board your ship. Let’s not open their mind to the possibility we have more than we’re currently showing them.”

There were nods around the room with that logic, and the team got started working. Ariana started configuring the eleph-ANT to house the smaller matrices in a way that made it look like they were the original bigger-sized ones, getting the help from the ships as she did.

Angelique started scanning the team’s matrices to build a copy of each of them. They had to work quickly since the alien was on its way to them. Before long the team had completed all the tasks, and an eleph-ANT was sitting in the cargo bay housing a version of them inside of it.

Hopefully the aliens would not notice all the additional circuitry and processing power stuffed inside of the eleph-ANT.

Thanks to Angelique’s suggestion, they never turned the other versions of themselves on. As she said, “It breaks the magic of believing there’s only one version of you. It makes it easier to remerge everyone together.”

The team stood in the cargo bay looking at the eleph-ANT as it exited the air lock for its short journey to the alien spacecraft.