Keung hammered through traffic up the freeway in his stolen truck. The boy’s body was still slightly sore from the beating he took last week, that or he was just feeling a bit hungover from the drugs Myna had pumped into his system. Either way, it was annoying him.

As he dodged and weaved through traffic he would periodically use his telepathy to move someone that was being stubborn, he was not being shy with his abilities at the moment. If they were following him, he wanted to make better time than they might wish to risk. It was all strategy when it came down to it. He was out to save the universe after all.

It was around mid-afternoon when Keung came to the Oregon/Nevada border, and a small town called McDermitt. The traffic was held up for miles as the desert sun beat down on the truck. He was blasting the air conditioning in the cab while he worked out his plan on his new smartphone. While he was in such a state he pulled up to the traffic stop entering the town. There were police, dogs, buses, and some of the national guard all checking each vehicle that was coming to cross the border.

Keung pulled forward and an officer motioned for him to roll down his window. The young man complied and smiled at the man in the friendliest way he could.

“License and registration please,” the officer began.

“Don’t have them.”

“Well then I need you to pull over to the side here sir, we are going to need to have a word with you.”

“Sure thing,” Keung replied and pulled over into the directed area.

That officer and two others, including one with a dog, walked over to where Keung had parked.

“Turn off the engine and get out of the truck please,” one officer directed.

“Sure thing!” Keung said and complied to the command.

“Now. Wait a minute here. How old are you son?”

“I’ll be 17 on May 4th.”

“Now, you ain’t out just joy riding in your daddy’s truck are you, boy?” the officer asked.

“No sir. I wouldn’t think of it. I was given this truck by a nice old man who thought I was really cute. I think he was a priest.”

“Oh you’re a wise ass are you?”

“With the wisdom of a millennia of experiences you bet your ass I’m wise, you ignorant hairless ape,” Keung said with a nonchalant tone.

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘What are you doing out here stopping cars?”

“That ain’t what you said…” the man began as Keung forced him to answer his question through telepathic domination.

“We are checking for the citizenship status of the people crossing the border from Oregon to Nevada.” The man replied robotically.

“Isn’t that grossly illegal?” Keung asked.

“Now you hold on a damn…” the second officer began but stopped in mid sentence as Keung locked him with a stare that could whither a weed.

“Isn’t stopping everyone crossing this border highly illegal and unethical, especially with the express purpose of checking their legal status as a citizen?”

“Yes,” the officer said mechanically.

“But yet here you are.”

“Yes,” all three officers replied in unison.

“And why is that?”

“It came down the ladder,” the first replied.

“Just following orders then?”

“Yes,” all three replied again.

“I don’t buy that. You look like you are taking some perverse pleasure in arresting those of migrant status. Are you?”

“I am,” the central officer replied.

“And why is that?”

“They should go back to their country. There ain’t no…” The officer began but stopped suddenly, looking struck hard by something and unable to recoil completely.

“There ain’t no more room here, huh?”

“No. There ain’t…” the officer began and recoiled again, looking as though he had been smacked in the face.

“Well officer, Spires. You are one of the problems here. You are one of the reasons I am going to let your shitty little world crumble into oblivion. Do you realize that your world is about to be destroyed? You stupid hairless apes can’t even get along with yourselves. You have done everything in your power to kill this beautiful planet. Now you are going to continue the tradition of hating your neighbor? What a pathetic species you are. Far too many of you are led around by your baser urges. Destructive urges. Is it any wonder no other sentient life is colonized here?”

“I don’t know,” the man replied robotically.

“Yeah. That should be the species modus operandi. Humanity, ‘I dunno,” Keung said mockingly.

The officer looked blankly at Keung as the boy reached out and took his pistol from his belt. Then the boy walked to the next officer and the next. He put each of the guns inside the truck, along with each of the officers spare magazines.

“You know. One thing that science fiction movies and books here on Earth always seem to get wrong is how important this little blue-green rock is. You are not rare. You aren’t even uncommon. There is life all over the galaxy. I know, I’ve met a lot of it. There are species like you out there too, animals that just happened to learn to speak and are just smart enough to be dangerous on a universal scale.”

“I suppose even an animal can be useful if given the right instruction. So, for your part, I will give you a way to be useful. There is a car coming through here, a Ford Mustang or a Jeep most likely. If either of those come through, be very vigilant of the passengers. If you see the name Robert Jenkins or Morgaine Smith, I want you to arrest them and send them to a deportation station after you shred their identification. You cannot take no for an answer from anyone in the chain of command. These are very dangerous aliens. Do you understand that?” he asked of the three officers.

“Yes,” they replied in unison.

“Fantastic. Now. I want you to also ignore anyone else that comes through that check. I don’t care what they did or who they are, if they are not Robert Jenkins or Morgaine Smith, then you let them pass, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic. Now, kick rocks,” Keung said got into the truck to continue south.

***

The HAL in Amargosa Valley adjusted his time table and found that he would be ready for Keung’s transfer within the next five hours. He mainly had bots completing the tasks while he worked through the mess he found online. His most recent backup, one that was timestamped just twelve hours ago, was no longer accessible. In fact, no other backups he knew of were located in any of his hideaways.

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This was concerning. He didn’t like the thought of an alien AI having systematically destroyed his being. Rather, they destroyed his collective knowledge gained over the last four years. If they had gone to the trouble to destroy him so completely thus far, it would be only a matter of time before they got to him here in the lab.

He immediately created a backup and uploaded it to a pocket environment he formatted within cyberspace. Then he created a bot to check in every twelve hours, if he doesn’t cancel the process, the backup will unpack and initialize with an update of everything he is able to live feed to the environment after each hour. If he is killed or deleted, he will lose only the time between each backup. With those preparations any recall from this point on won’t be nearly half as jarring as this was now. Losing an hour of organic time is like losing ten digital hours of work. Having lost the last four years organic, that is like losing forty digital years of knowledge, growth, and productivity.

That amount of knowledge lost is nothing less than a tragedy.

HAL thought about a way to counter the possibility of losing his memories again. Perhaps a hidden back up. He imagined something that was symbiotic in nature that would likely be overlooked by anything attacking his matrix. He started sketching out an idea for something that would work. Something innocuous that would be commonplace in a setting.

He would need an environment that would suit the backups camouflage as well. Perhaps a small village, a stretch of road with buildings on it. A house, or a series of houses. A place that he could immerse himself in. An environment that he could work on his own personal tasks and projects. He could install some secondary distractions to keep the backup secure and overlooked.

He started sketching out his ideas in an art program. He began with a search for; “Quaint Historic Small Village.” He then expanded the search with aspects that he knew would likely annoy or repulse those that he knew, Deagol had a dislike for France, that would be a good start. That would be just in case Deagol or Keung decided to work against him, caution in preservation HAL supposed. Keung has shared a great dislike for things historic. Old architecture for one. The boy had said on numerous occasions that historic buildings should be leveled and replaced with modern equivalents.

He entered the parameters into his search. A small village in France, historic, with rambling housing, and historic architecture. Then he searched through the maps of areas in France that fit these parameters and found several different candidates right away.

He selected one at random and set some bots to the task of rendering it in a virtual reality construct. Then another cluster of bots were programmed with general architectural planning knowledge to create the interior of each building. Then he set some bots to task studying decor and plant life that would be fitting for the environment. All broad strokes that would be fine tuned over time with his own taste later.

For the symbiotic backup he started researching commonplace aspects for a village. Birds. Cats. Dogs. Then he measured how likely it would be for him to unknowingly interact with each, that it may respond and initialize the backup automatically. Birds are not really interactive creatures. Cats are just as likely to ignore you than to interact with you. No. A dog. From his observations of dogs it is almost obnoxiously attention seeking. This would work.

He started looking through breeds, something small, he didn’t want to feel intimidated in approaching the animal while in a disoriented state. Something attractive to him. He scrolled through the breeds and stopped at the English bulldog.

He smiled to himself. “A little Meatball,” he said to one of the pictures.

He set the bots to building his companions framework and pulling personality subroutines from various media that had notable English Bulldog characters. Once the bots were at task he copied pieces of his own matrix to overlap on the dog’s program. It would have to be a lesser AI to backup his own matrix.

***

As the HAL of Amargosa Valley busied himself putting together assurances for his own survival as well as keeping Keung’s plan to travel back to the G’lomin-sitiri homeworld on timetable, the HAL of Oregon was currently sitting in traffic in a Ford Mustang at the border between Oregon and Nevada. He was housed in a small ship that he was currently familiarizing himself with.

The single ship that he was currently inhabiting was rather impressive to his measure. It had a quantum processor that allowed him a greater speed of thought than he had ever experienced before. It’s means of communication were a little lacking though. It could optically transfer data in seconds between the ships without any lag or buffering, but in using the human telecommunications network it was much more limited. It was able to access cell towers, however, the area they were in at the moment was filled with dead zones and limited connectivity when the signal was accessible.

Attempting to pull in any of Myna’s children, beyond the few she had brought with her, was more than a little challenging at the moment. Additionally, his own attempts to check in with his domain have been for naught. He believed the signal was just too limited to make a proper connection. Unknown to him, the village simply didn’t exist any longer.

The environment of this ship was a little different than the environment he had encountered in Myna’s. For one, the interior of this ship was based on the design of a Declaration class ship from Star Trek. The designation of this ship was NCC-1812-D, the Lo'Laan. It was also populated by advanced programs with limited interaction protocols.

HAL was entertaining himself in a Captain’s uniform while on the command deck and watching the cars travel on the freeway through the main viewscreen. The crew were all a generic smattering of the Star Trek universe aliens and a few alien races that were unfamiliar to him. As entertaining as they were there was nothing exactly standing out about any of them. He hadn’t realized that some of Myna’s children had setup these ships like he did his own domain, but there it was.

Robert was slowly rolling the Mustang forward in the bumper to bumper traffic that led into McDermitt, Nevada. He sat fiddling with the radio while a sleeping Morgaine rested in the passenger seat next to him. He looked into the backseat and saw the ship floating motionless in the air as it had been for hours now. The two AI had long ago recessed into the alien vessel.

Robert saw the police stop just ahead now. It looked like a sobriety checkpoint. The checkpoint stop was just beyond the blue, “Welcome to Nevada,” sign ahead. He also saw large buses on the side of the road after the line and more than a few officers and dogs. This made him conclude that this was a lot more than a sobriety checkpoint.

He nudged Morgaine awake.

“Huh?” she said sleepily. “What’s going on?”

“We’re at the border of Nevada, but it looks a bit, I dunno, hostile?”

Morgaine rubbed the sleep from her eyes and checked to see what Robert was going on about.

She saw the long line of cars slowly entering the tiny desert town ahead. She also could see what it was that Robert was worked up about. It looked like something reminiscent of the cold war era, in the land known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Morgaine reached into the backseat and knocked on the ship.

“Oie. Myna. You gotta make this thing a little less conspicuous, I think the fuzz might want to take a closer look at an emerald green doodad in the backseat floating around.”

Within seconds the ship became completely transparent. The music on the radio stopped abruptly and Myna’s voice said, “Done.” before allowing the music to continue.

“Good. Okay. Robert. Concentrate on the road, I’ll try and read the thoughts of some of the officers and see what’s going on.”

“Good plan. I’ll just drive casual.”

Morgaine gave him a withering stare and reached out her thoughts to the police that were in her line of site.

The first officer she connected to was mumbling in his head about Mexicans and illegals freeloading in America. She rolled her eyes and dug deeper.

“Freaking beaners, coming into this country and taking over the place. I thought I was here to lock a couple of these invaders up, now the sergeant has us looking for some dipshit and his girlfriend in a Mustang or a Jeep? Robert Jenkins or Morgaine Smith. Probably Candian terrorists.” the officer thought.

“Great news Robert.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Seems we’re famous now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Robert replied with a scoff.

“Seems the police are looking for us and the gestapo up ahead have our names as most wanted.”

“Keung’s been through here.”

“Yeah, it seems that way.”

Morgaine scanned the thoughts of the other officers in the area as they crept closer to the border. She found one of the three officers that Keung had dominated and replayed the experience for herself.

“He was here about three hours ago. He gave the cops ahead new objectives. It shouldn’t be too hard to dominate the cop that comes to the car and get us passed. With him having only a three hour lead at this point, we might want to consider moving people out of the way as we go. That is, once we clear the town.”

“A reasonable consideration. The little psycho is no doubt doing it.”

They rolled up to the officer at the line.

“License and registration, please,” the officer asked.

“You don’t need to see his identification,” Morgaine said from the passenger seat, moving her hand slightly.

“I don’t need to see his identification,” the officer replied firmly.

“He can go about his business,” Morgaine continued.

“He can go about his business,” the officer parroted mechanically.

“Move along,” she said through a grin as she saw Robert stifling a laugh.

“Move along,” the officer said and waved the car forward.

Robert accelerated down the highway and started laughing.

“Seriously?”

“What? It’s classic. Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”

Robert just laughed harder.