For several days after the incident, Atlas went through life as if he was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
In fact, everyone on Titan was.
Atlas and Ship did nothing but help. Back and forth they moved through Titan helping in any way they could.
Digging people out of toppled buildings. Searching for missing pets. Rebuilding homes. Transporting people back to family members on the other side of the ring. And burying the dead.
Atlas had never seen so much death in his life. He became numb.
It would have been easy to assume that with the level of automation and resources available to the Titan people that Atlas would have nothing to do. But they were unprepared for how widespread the destruction was.
If Atlas was honest, there really wasn’t a human on this planet that would have thought to prepare this sort of chaos. Everyone knew someone who was dead. Everyone had a family member they couldn’t find.
Three hundred and fifty-two million people.
Eighteen percent of the population of the planet.
Everybody knew someone.
Atlas knew someone.
Icarus.
Icarus was never coming back in the same way.
A deep hatred grew in Atlas’s heart while he tried to save as many lives as possible.
Atlas didn’t know how to get through it. He still heard people’s cries of pain echoing in his ears whenever the world around him was quiet.
So many times, the people he was saving asked him, “Is it over?” or, “Are they coming back?”
The only thing he could say in reply was “You’re safe now.”
Because in all honesty, he didn’t know. There was a running fear among everyone that the Atua might come back. They might attack again.
The Atua were completely fine with lying. They were happy to say one thing and doing another. They had a goal in mind and would say whatever was required to get them to that goal.
They’d lied to Atlas and the others about negotiating with them. And now Atlas wasn’t sure whether they were lying about the attack being over.
From what he knew about the aliens, they were completely alien in nature. Their motivations were clear, though. They wanted to punish Titan for Icarus’s unannounced visit to their planet.
One thing that was true about the Atua was they had an extremely good grasp on human nature, especially human nature over large groups. They’d spent years manipulating and studying humanity.
Measured purely from the perspective of fear, they’d succeeded.
It’s a long-held myth that humans fight back when put in a corner. But humans aren’t dogs. The majority of humans didn’t fight back in a stressful situation like the one everyone on Titan had faced. The most common human response was to freeze. To become overwhelmed and unresponsive. The second most common human response was to run.
This was being played out throughout everyone that Atlas had interacted with. They weren’t preparing revenge or wanting to get back at the Atua. They were scared senseless. They were angry at the world. Angry at the government. Angry at whoever left a back door in their programming so that their own weapons could be used against them.
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It was true that some humans fought. But when faced with an army or an attacker that was bigger, almost no one did.
Atlas was seeing this play out. Atlas saw the fear in people. The people of Titan thought the unknown nature of the Atua meant there was a possibility they were so technologically advanced that humanity had no chance of fighting back.
Atlas felt a surge of anger creep inside of him. Atlas did not feel that way. He wanted to seek revenge. He wanted the Atua to feel everything he was feeling right then.
He wanted to make sure there was never an attack like this on a human colony again.
Atlas sat in the very back of his spacecraft, in a cargo area away from everyone else. He was ferrying a lot of people between two sections of the ring.
He was about to get some sleep when Peter called him.
“How are you doing, Atlas?” Peter asked.
“I’m doing better than most of the people I’m helping.”
There was an odd silence on the line as they both took in the meaning of Atlas’s words. “Have you spoken to Angelique? Is she making progress on securing the ring against any subsequent attack?”
Angelique answered the question. “One of my planets thinks their system is impenetrable. But we’ll need to rebuild all the tech stack on this world from scratch.”
“Is there an interim solution? Can we switch all defense weaponry to manual operation?”
Atlas had sent a message to the leaders of his planet, Neuropa, asking them to deactivate all automated defense capabilities. He’d warned them to move toward a manual human-controlled method, something that, at least in the short term, would be harder to hack—since he didn’t think it was possible to hack a biological human brain.
“That will take some time,” Angelique replied.
“We might not have time,” Atlas replied.
“This is our number one focus,” Peter said, sensing Atlas’s fear of another attack. “We’ve got the brightest minds on all the planets trying to understand how the Atua got in in the first place and how to stop them from ever getting in again.”
Atlas wanted to ask Peter and Angelique something. He opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again. He was worried the phone line was somehow compromised. “Is there a way for us to communicate so that there’s no chance we can be listened to?”
“I wouldn’t trust the network on Titan,” Angelique said.
Atlas thought about it some more. “In theory, the Starnet uses entangled particles, so anyone intercepting particles would ruin entanglement if they tried to listen in. But the weak link is between the entangled-particle reader and the connection to our matrices. Can someone of one of your planets rebuild a secure connection between me and the Starnet, Angelique?”
“That’s one of the recommendations from the security council on my planet Chrysalis,” Angelique said. “I’ll get them to send over the designs to you. It requires you and Ship to build it from scratch and not use a general-purpose fabricator because there needs to be trust in the system. You need to verify the exact specification of each component to ensure there isn’t a back door.”
Atlas felt that was a good precaution, given everything that had just happened, and he agreed with it. If he used a fabricator to create a security unit, then he would have no way of verifying that the unit didn’t have a back door or a malicious piece of code. Because it made sense, if the Atua wanted to ensure everything he made had a back door in it, that the easiest way would be to program all fabricators to add that secret back door to everything they manufactured.
This was going to be a big project. They had underestimated the extent to which the Atua had infiltrated their planets. Yes, they had eliminated the filter virus, which was the cause of their planets’ struggles. But they never fully purged the Atua from their systems.
All their well-intended strategies had no chance at all of ever working. Yes, they’d rebuilt a lot of the technological infrastructure from the ground up to be more secure than ever. But they’d still used the same fabricators and automation to build them.
Securing their worlds was going to take many years. It was going to take manual work. It was going to require the entire planet to focus on that singular goal. Rebuilding the ring was one thing. Rebuilding a defense platform that was verifiable and they could all trust was another.
Again, another issue they’d have to work through was verifying the designs that Angelique shared weren’t altered in any way.
Atlas pushed those thoughts to the side; he knew someone on one of Angelique’s worlds would have a solution. There was only one thing he was focused on right now.
His mind was focused on building a weapon.
His mind drifted to the idea that he could ensure no one else in the galaxy would have to deal with the Atua again.
He was going to make them scared. Scared to mess with a human again. Scared for the survival of their species.
He knew his anger might calm down later. But for now, all he wanted was to fight back. In this very moment, he didn’t feel like the majority of humans that went into a fear or runaway mode. Right now, he was ready to fight.
Right now, if they pushed him hard enough, he thought he might even be willing to kill.
Right now, he felt justifiably angry.