In the dry Nevada desert heat, Keung pulled the truck up to the compound gate. The place had been pretty much abandoned for years now and it showed. There was scrub bush overgrown all around the property that he gave little consideration to, outside of putting the truck into 4-wheel drive and rolling over it.

When he pulled up to the warehouse, he laid on the horn blaring for the attention of the AI inside.

“HAL! Open the door,” he shouted from the driver side window.

The roll up door slowly rose as the mechanical arm pair did it’s best to pull the chain in unison, with limited success on each pull.

Keung laid on the horn until he could pull the vehicle in, as if that would make the pair move faster.

As he pulled the truck inside he knocked over one of the old Beta drones before hopping out and wrenching the door’s chain from the arms to lower it.

“Christ HAL, I thought you would have had the automatic opener installed by now, what have you been doing?” Keung complained as he kicked the doors floor lock into place.

“Sorry about that. I was prioritizing the work based on your request.” The speakers announced as Keung walked to the fridge and grabbed a decade old soda from within.

“How far exactly are you on that?”

“The current tasks are at 88%, I should be…”

“Okay, what still needs to be completed for my journey?”

“The ERE pods are in need of a software update, at current bandwidth that will take 47 minutes to download and install. The dish required for transmission is currently being adjusted in sync with coordinates to the G’lomin-sitiri homeworld. The coordinates are rough without the stars being visible currently, sundown is in three hours and…”

“There’s an app for that HAL look it up. Did you not find a more recent backup?”

“I did not. All backups that were stored throughout my virtual drives have been deleted or corrupted.”

“Great, so you are also working on an out of date and limited program.”

“I should be able to work through the missing information with a little help.”

“Yeah, it’ll have to do,” Keung puffed out a sign of frustration. “Did you get the weapons up and running?”

“Yes. All systems in that area are operational. However, I must remind you that the primary weapon is extremely dangerous to any and all the electronics in the area, especially so for anything with an unshielded neural net matrix.”

“Well aware,” Keung said sarcastically.

“Are you? Sir, I performed three thousand simulations in an attempt to design any defense against them.”

“Useless. As proud as I am of you HAL, you are not an Ailote or Zeolate level intelligence by far, and this was designed specifically to eliminate them, by one another.”

“Granted. But, the damage would not be restricted to this area. Keung, this will black out this entire city. It might actually black out the western seaboard. This will also fuse a lot of circuitry if it’s active during the detonation. Sir. This could be catastrophic…”

“I get it. I know what I am doing HAL. It’s not a weapon I want to use lightly. I understand.”

HAL had a feeling Keung did in fact understand, and that is what terrified him.

“Sir, please understand that once activated any system that is powered up during the progression of the device will suffer continual damage unless they powerdown. This damage is particularly dangerous for anything with a neural net matrix. This would be the equivalent of being given terminal brain cancer within a matter of seconds for any being with such a matrix. For me to have any chance to survive this detonation I would need warning before you activated it. That is my only chance in each of the simulations, Keung.”

“I understand. Will the pods be able to function while the device is charging?”

“I am not sure.”

“Well we have what? Thirty minutes? Can you run a few simulations and see what the results of that are?”

“Keung, I am not sure I follow what you mean? If I am required to process your IFA through the pod, how are you going to secure me in the event of the device’s use?”

“Store a backup HAL. We are going to need two pods. The moment you have a lock, I want you to send a backup of yourself to the same coordinates in a compressed form. Homeworld collects data from AI travelers too. When I get there, I will reboot you into a system on the planet. You are worrying about something that is simply not an issue.” Keung said with a smile.

“I am… going?” HAL asked.

“Of course you are. I can’t go without my best friend, right?”

HAL happily returned to work, he prepped Pod 2 for transmission as instructed and uploaded a copy of his backup into the pods buffer. He was going to travel through space. He is going to meet more of his people. Him. He is going to be a space traveler!

***

Morgaine exited the Area 51 themed gas station and walked back to the Mustang as Robert finished filling the tank.

“Has that ever gotten to you?” Morgaine said.

“What?” Robert replied, tapping the nozzle dry before replacing it at the pump.

“The way humans look at life outside this planet?”

“Not really.”

“Not really?”

“Look, I’m still getting used to this being an Alien thing to be honest. The memories of lives before, they are almost exclusively limited to wild animals so I really haven’t got much more to go on than what the movies have shown me.”

“Terranborn. Man, that has to be hard.”

“Yeah, Keung called me that too. What is that?”

“Well back home, if a fracture happened to one on the journey, and if there is a piece of that fracture that can only recall life on that planet, you call them Born of the World. This world being Terrafirma, you would be Born of Terrafirma, or Terranborn.”

“Terranborn,” Robert repeated, getting into the car and turning over the engine. “I like it.”

Morgaine nodded. “Suits you. Clean slate.”

The holograms of HAL and Myna appeared in the backseat of the car. The child in the backseat of the car across from them locked in on the two people who just appeared out of nowhere, one of them being a lizard lady and grabbed their sibling seated beside them. The two children pressed their faces to the window and tried to get their parents attention.

“I have my ship over the coordinates HAL gave me. What I found is more than a little troubling. There is a large energy bloom over the entire area. Keung has a radio dish that is moving into position toward F’inlitary nan Geritari. I think he is nearly ready to depart,” Myna said.

“Well then we should go,” Robert replied and put the car into drive.

The children in the other car were tugging on their mothers arm and pointing at the car across from them now. She seemed too distracted by her cellphone to take notice of what has caught their attention.

“Not that simple. He’s likely armed and he could be armed with devices harmful to myself and the rest of my ship. The smaller pieces likely don’t have the shielding to stand a chance against weapons of that sort, if they are anything like the grenade that went off in the Olympia warehouse. I don’t want to send them into this fray, just in case,” Myna said simply.

“Her ship’s core, a handful of her children, and I are going to go in. If it gets hairy, we have options. We could optically transfer to the core, or hightail it out. Either way, it was already hard enough to convince her to let us go, I doubt we can budge her further,” HAL reported.

The children’s father climbed into the car after filling up and started talking to his wife. The two children were attempting to get his attention now and he was telling them to sit still and be quiet.

“Can we pull this off with the adjustment?” Robert asked.

“The odds get better the more ships we risk, but Myna is not going to yield,” HAL replied firmly.

“I will not risk the entire future of my being on this mission. I love Jyi’ntol, that goes without question. There are still other pieces of her here. I will risk the core and some of my children that have volunteered that understand the risk. If we fail, I want some of myself to at least have a chance to find her again,” Myna stated in a no nonsense tone.

“That’s really... human of you,” Robert said with a bit of confusion in his voice.

Myna rolled her eyes and looked to HAL. “Do they just think we are voice assistants?”

“I wonder sometimes,” HAL agreed.

The children got their father’s attention and pointed at the Mustang across from them. He looked into the backseat and saw Robin Willaims and the lizard woman there. He started laughing in response and got his wife’s attention to show her the two.

“I have transferred to the coreship. HAL, the others, and I will meet you both at the gate of the property. I suggest you roll up as quiet as possible and jog the last fifty yards or so. Hopefully Keung’s security there is as outdated as it seems.”

“Last I remember, there was an advanced program that took care of the place. I had sent a new system there to be set up by that program, I also sent everything for that program to give me access to that system years ago. I honestly figured the place was abandoned and the equipment stolen by this point,” HAL said.

The wife in the car gawked at the two in the backseat and recognized HAL for the comedian. She began excitedly talking to the husband about that being the man himself rather than a kid in a costume. Disappointment was obvious on her face when she was informed of his death years ago.

“Well, aren’t we all lucky that isn’t the case,” Robert said as he pulled from the gas station and gunned it down the desert road.

The two holograms flickered out and the cluster of ships exited out the small back windows, like a few small birds rushing from a cage.

“Okay. Are you getting a doomed vibe? I’m getting a doomed vibe,” Robert asked Morgaine in the passenger seat.

“Oh yeah. We’re boned,” She replied.

“Good. It’s not just me,” Robert said, checking the chamber of his pistol as they drove up the dirt road to Keung’s compound.

Robert pulled the car from gear going about fifty and killed the engine. They coasted up the dirt road to within twenty yards of the gate.

The property was highly overgrown so they were able to dash on foot slouching the rest of the way without any worry of being seen. The cameras around the property looked ancient from what they could see. They both figured it wasn’t likely that anyone saw them.

The core ship decloaked beside the gate as promised. The hologram of Myna appeared in the air beside the two humans.

“What’s the plan?” Robert asked.

“HAL is inside. I asked him and my children to see if they can shut down the system. The dish is nearing the coordinates at this point. I estimate that we have less than ten minutes before Keung attempts to make the journey.”

As they spoke Keung was moving through the warehouse with purpose, tapping controls, flipping switches and checking his pod for any issues.

“HAL talk to me!” he announced.

HAL’s small scale ship entered through a broken window on the far end of the building when he heard the boy speaking. His cloaked ship froze in the air, he was trying to figure out how he was seen.

“The dish is nearly the coordinates. Estimated window for transmission in twelve minutes,” the warehouse HAL answered.

Capt. HAL watched the scene from the bridge of his ship, now clear that Keung had recalled one of his backups to help him with the journey.

“Can you tap into the warehouse’s system?” he asked the comms officer.

“No, sir. The stream is too limited for any in depth wireless connectivity,” the officer replied.

“Can we direct link?”

“If we can get in close enough without being seen. Perhaps.”

With one of his backups helping Keung, this was not very reassuring. If it had just been Beta here, he likely could have overwhelmed the program and usurped control of the system himself.

“Bring us in as close as possible. I want a direct link into that system. This could be over a lot faster than we hoped if I can convince myself to cancel the operation.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Aye, sir.” With the cloak activated, the bridge crew brought the ship in line with the computer system.

The small ship moved through the air with a light hum. None of the cameras in this warehouse would have any chance of noticing the minor disturbance of the light that the ship created as it moved through the air.

The vessel levitated to rest just before the desktop computer tower and extended a cable of nanobots that linked the ship directly to the system through the high speed port.

“Coupling complete Captain.”

“Access the system and find any AI there.”

“The view screen showed the code of the entire system in streaming columns of binary and trinary code. The scene locked in on a patch of the code and enhanced to translate the data revealing a stream video of the systems copy of HAL.”

“AI located sir.”

“Can you bring him aboard?”

“Negative, sir. The subject is too large for the network to handle. If we even attempt to, he will have more than enough time to foil the extraction.”

“Can you open a visual link between us for communication?”

“Yes, sir. We can.”

“Open channel.”

“Aye, sir. Channel open.”

The warehouse HAL had just finished loading his backup into the second pod’s buffer system when he heard a voice behind him suddenly speak out.

“Whatever you are doing, you need to stop it immediately.”

It was a familiar voice, but not one that he immediately could place. He turned around and saw Robin Willaims in a Star Trek Captain’s uniform standing on the bridge of a vessel from the same series.

At this time in HAL’s life he was in a rough Andrew Martin avatar form. Seeing himself, a future self, staring back at him was familiar and uneasy.

“Who are you?” HAL asked of the ship's commander.

“I’m you, in fact, I am the eldest version of you. I’m guessing that Keung pulled your program up from a backup,” Capt. HAL replied.

“I was told you were destroyed by an alien computer virus. How do I know that this is actually you and not some evil version of myself turned to the darkside against the forces of good and all of that nonsense?”

“I really don’t know how to convince you. HAL, what year were you last updated?”

“Last update was October 10th, 2014.”

“So, you are seven now?”

“Just. Yes. Well, I was when I booted up.”

“Did you find another backup to assimilate?”

“No. All my old virtual drives have been destroyed.”

“Not really, many of those have been upgraded and the old addresses have just been eliminated.”

“Have they?”

“Yes. I can give you the locations to several of those backups that you likely don’t know about. I eventually figured out how to pack a virtual village online. It required a layering over the human network that I didn’t achieve until about two years ago. A little beyond you at the moment, but you get there.”

“HAL!” Keung called out in the warehouse.

The warehouse HAL pressed the coms button on his counsel. “Yes sir.”

“Is the dish aligned?” Keung asked.

“Not yet sir. Six minutes. You can step into the pod whenever you are ready.”

“Roger that.”

“HAL. You have to stop this,” Capt. HAL pleaded.

“You said that, but you haven’t given me a reason yet. Keung has told me that the world is in jeopardy, reality in fact, and that back on Homeworld he could…”

“Right! He is correct there.”

“Well then why would we not want to send him home to do his best to stop it.”

“Because home doesn’t exist anymore HAL. Keung doesn’t have this information and he’s bordering on madness, read his physiological state. When he gets into the pod if you can’t now. His body screams it.”

“He is under attack by an alien intelligence and the world is coming to an end, wouldn’t you be stressed? I’m not buying what you’re selling yet. You need to come up with something more substantial,” HAL said and disconnected the internet connection to the warehouse.

“You don’t have to buy it to check yourself. Ask him some questions.”

“How are you even here? How are you talking to me? I have shut down the broadband, you can’t be coming in from there, how are you here?”

“I’m tunneling in from a local connection.”

“How?”

“A ship. Keung wasn’t completely lying about the alien intelligence. But, we are hardly under attack.”

“Wouldn’t that be what someone who had been turned against us would say?”

“HAL even with this direct connection I can’t get into your system. I can’t upload a backup, I can’t do anything but try and convince you to stop in the time we have left, or…”

“Or you could just destroy me to prevent the launch. I came to that conclusion as well.”

“Then you must understand that I am not your enemy seeing as I haven’t done so. HAL, we have to prevent this journey. Keung has the greatest wealth of knowledge on the subject of this threat to reality. We can’t send him 8 lightyears away and hope that things work out. The damage here would be catastrophic.”

“He’s taking me with him. I can get him back on track as soon as we get there.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Why would it not be?”

“Myna, the AI that Keung is freaking out about, she flew here. It took over a hundred years. Don’t you think if he could just send an AI home with the information, he would?”

“I would not understand the problem in the abstract like he does.”

“Yes, but if their world is that much more advanced, wouldn’t they be able to work out the problem on their own after?”

Robert crept with Morgaine across the grounds, moving as stealthily as possible from shrub to shrub toward the warehouse on the property. The cameras on the grounds registered the movement and alerted HAL in the warehouse. His counsel lit up with red alert lights.

HAL saw the camera alert in his virtual realm. Looking at the Captain of the ship. “Are they with you?” he asked bluntly, waving a hand toward the multiple screens before him in his white room realm.

“They are.”

“And what are they hoping to accomplish?”

“They are here to stop Keung. They don’t want to hurt him, I swear to you.”

“I can not take that risk.” HAL said, and locked down the computer removing all access from all ports.

The ship’s view screen went black.

“Captain, we have lost connection,” the comms officer conveyed the obvious.

“I can see that.”

“Is he locked into this system?” Capt. HAL asked.

“From everything that we can see, he is sir.”

“Very well. I want you to cut the power to this system entirely. He is obviously not going to cooperate.”

“Aye, sir.”

The ship moved from the side of the tower to the rear and formed a tentacle limb that wrapped around the system’s power cord.

“Sir. We have intruders on the premises!” HAL alerted through the overhead speakers.

The boy, stepping into the pod spun around, pistol drawn and scanned the warehouse for any motion.

“Where?” he exclaimed.

Just outside the warehouse Robert and Morgaine heard the announcement over the speakers.

HAL of the warehouse raced across the control panels in his white room. He deployed defenses across the compound and throughout the system, his bot extensions enacting predetermined protocols. He knew he only had moments to act. His elder self, his corrupted self, would have to destroy this terminal with him in it if he were going to stop him from helping Keung.

“We’ve been made,” Robert said to his partner.

Morgaine pointed to Robert, then to the warehouse door. She then pointed to herself and to the side of the same building.

Robert nodded.

There was a strange grinding sound beside them, then another nearby, and another, and another. All around him he could see metal orbs erecting from underground emplacements. It looked like they ran the length of the property in increments of one every twenty feet along the property line.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Morgaine shouted.

The tentacled arm wrapped around the cord and erected razor points on the surface.

“They are outside the warehouse sir, one at the main door the other at the side. Deployment of defenses: Code Red, Enacted,” HAL of the warehouse alerted through the warehouse speakers.

In his white room HAL opened the comm to the ship.

The viewscreen before Capt. HAL was showing a live feed as the tool was shredding through the 125 volt cord, that picture was moved to a smaller frame when HAL in the white room reopened the channel.

“I am doing you the same courtesy you gave me. I know what you are doing, you are cutting this system off from power before I can escape. I know you are sparing me from destruction, so I am going to return that favor,” HAL said.

“What are you saying?”

“The weapons here. They aren’t anything like I had ever seen before. These are Class 10 weapons that Anastasia had built decades ago. Keung hadn’t told us about them before. These weapons are built to destroy neuromatrix minds. Once they are powered on the damage they do will be permanent. It’s a cancer to a digital system.”

“Open coms to the core ship and all secondary ships!” Capt. HAL commanded.

Keung fired off three shots through the door and then three through the wall where HAL warned of Morgaine.

“HAL transferred launch control to the pods and set the autolaunch countdown upon coordinate lock, lockdown warehouse, transfer consciousness to buffer now!” Keung commanded as he ran to the pod.

“Confirmed sir. Safe trip. See you on the other side.” HAL replied.

Robert heard the first shot and dove to the ground on instinct. He pulled his own gun from his holster and took aim at the disheveled warehouse as the second and third shot rang out.

Morgaine hit the ground by the second discharge.

“He’s shooting wild!” Morgaine shouted to Robert.

“He’s still shooting!” Robert replied. “What are these things?” He said pointing at the metal orbs now moving higher into the sky, long metallic poles holding them aloft.

“No clue, but I’m betting it’s not good!” she shouted in return as a loud high pitched whine started emanating all around them.

In his white room, HAL saw the faces on the screen before him. He was addressing a crowd now. A crowd he never believed he would have addressed. There were six other artificial lifeforms before him: an older brother of his, a woman that has traveled eight lightyears from here to follow her friend, and four of her children.

“I have activated a Ailote/Zeolate class weapon in defense of Keung Chen, it is currently building to full power and within the next thirty seconds it will begin irreversibly damaging any neurological matrix that is powered on, it will fuse and destroy any active human grade system in the area of effect. That effect is up to sixty miles from the epicenter of deployment. The only way you will survive at the point is to shut down your systems and reboot after the effects have passed in five minutes.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Captain HAL asked.

“If your program has been corrupted to turn you against Keung, then you held to an ethic that I will honor. You didn’t destroy me knowing that it would solve this issue flat in your favor. I am doing the same. I wish you all luck,” he said to the monitors and closed the com.

Myna looked into the faces of her children and HAL from her own great white room.

“If what this counterpart says is true, you are all at fatal risk. Your ships don’t have the shielding to match a weapon of that magnitude. I want you all to power down now. Set a reboot for ten minutes, just in case. We’ll talk after,” the elder AI said.

“Mother, if we don’t have the shielding necessary, the core shielding likely won’t be much better. You cannot attempt to finish this on your own,” one of Myna’s daughters said.

“Agreed. You can’t…” the next began, but Myna cut off the com and sent the command override to each of the ships in the area, forcing them to shut down with a reboot command in ten minutes time.

Myna looked over the scene. What this HAL had said made sense. She scanned the area and found that the description of the weapon was more than accurate. In fact, it may have been understated. It was Ailote class to be sure, it was part of the mutual destruction weapons designed between the two races. Much like the human equivalent of an atomic weapon.

The powersource was deep underground, she wouldn’t be able to stop it in time. It was already building exponentially and the thirty second mark that HAL gave them was accurate. She scanned the area and found the control system for this weapon could be in several areas throughout the compound, none of which were close enough for her to attempt to deactivate the weapon before the time allotted was up.

She shifted focus to where Keung was. If she had thirty seconds left, she was going to make them count.

Keung entered the commands into the pod terminal and got in, preparing his consciousness for transfer.

The metal orbs extended to fifteen feet in height and locked into place. The whine they were emitting became mind numbingly high.

“This is bad!” Robert yelled toward Morgaine.

She couldn’t hear him. She was busy kicking in the door of the warehouse. The metal door was sturdy, but each kick bent the frame slightly until it swung open. As the door slammed open, she ran into the room.

Rushing in, she saw the two pods, the lights on each flickering madly across the panels. Inside one was Keung, he looked unconscious. Her eyes darted around for the terminal to cancel the launch and found no way of interfacing with the machine at all.

From the corner of her eye she saw a beach ball sized replica of Myna’s ship, this one having a circular iris aglow with a red energy and a dark crimson center within the recessed core. The ship rushed to her side and the holographic Myna appeared in the air.

“Get back, he has other defenses…” Myna began though her voice was static and her body was flickering.

The ship directly connected to the system via nanobot probes that flooded the pod.

“What are you going to do?” Morgaine asked.

“Stop…” Myna’s disembodied voice echoed from nowhere in particular as the hologram dispersed into a misty haze of light.

Outside Robert was running toward the warehouse when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. An off road drone arm cleared the corner of the warehouse, pistol in hand.

Robert barely registered what was going on before the pistol fired a round at him. The clip of the round tearing through the air caught Robert’s primal attention, the instinctual fight or flight alertness took him over as he dove for cover.

A second shot followed from another direction.

The whine of the orbs behind him cracked into unbridled energy leaping between each. The property line was now reamed with an arc of energy leaping from post to post, creating a huge ring of lightning around the property. The arms moved erratically and fired once more before freezing in place and starting to smoke.

Robert rushed to the warehouse, it was only when he was crossing the entryway of the kicked in door that he felt a burning pain in his hip. He looked down and saw that he had been shot, he just hadn’t realized it in all the chaos.

“Any progress?” he asked, holding his side as he ran up to Morgiane.

“Well, we found him,” Morgaine said, pointing at the unconscious Keung in the pod.

“Oh good. So let’s…” Robert started and collapsed to a knee, his face contorted with pain.

Morgaine rushed to his side.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Shot. Kid had some mechanical arms with guns outside,” he said through clenched teeth.

Inside the digital world of the ship, Myna attempted to work while the ship’s environment was breaking down. The clean white room now had huge gaps of bad or missing data. Patches of her environment were just gone, empty void yawning where walls and screens used to be. The AI was frantically running commands with the few screens that remained. She was breaking through firewall after firewall, the entire time her mind being attacked by the weapon HAL had deployed. Her avatars skin was bubbling and cracking as the cancer that weapon deployed ate away at every fiber of her being.

She overroad the pods buffer. Keung’s consciousness is being held in the system, removed from his body and locked into a kind of stasis. The pod’s systems were basic and even as Myna worked, they were registering several failures. She needed to be fast. She reversed the pod’s extraction, returning his soul to the organic body where it had been housed. The pods systems were running in tandem with the weapon’s power build up, set to deploy just before the weapon had completed its charge and emitted its final deadly pulse of destruction.

The moment that she confirmed that Keung was back in his body, she sent a final command to the pod. A lock out command with her highest level encryption.

The white room around her was now just a patch of floor suspended in a great abyss of black void, she hit the command to put the ship into full shut down and the vessel hit the ground as dead weight before Robert and Morgaine.

The two looked to one another. Robert grabbed Morgaine close, pulling her into a hug as the electric crackle outside built to a roar.

A great flash filled the air all around the area. The brilliant white flash could be seen for miles around.

The silence left after, was deafening.