Ojerime rolled off the memory foam and went to the bioprinter. She programmed a salty slab of meat to go with her potato cake. She studied Kurzawa’s sleeping form as she pulled some hanging vegetation down from the hydroponics and jammed it in the blender. Her apartment was built into the corner of a cavern with soundproof walls that separated it from the other dwellings. The walls were interactive screens, currently showing a real time view of the Sun, its filtered light illuminated the room with a golden glow. The floor was polished black basalt which seemed to extend down to infinity. She opened the flask of bright green vegetable juice and took a gulp, then screwed up her face and looked suspiciously at the flask before drinking the rest. The thick layer of rock above the hanging plants offered protection from cosmic radiation and regulated the temperature. When they were living under the fragile domes of the moon-base, she had constantly been in close proximity to her people and their chatter. Now she had her own peaceful space and she relished it. Over by the door, her exo-suit stood next to Kurzawa’s, slumped together like two spurned friends.
A message from Dakila alerted her to the approaching shuttles. With a touch she manipulated the view on her screen and watched them manoeuvring in the space above the Moon. Kurzawa also received the message and woke up. He rolled over and smiled at Ojerime before frowning at the screen. “Oh dear, they are gluttons for punishment aren’t they.”
Ojerime chewed her breakfast with sharp silver teeth. She felt a twinge of guilt at the part the Masama had played in reducing humanity to this. But guilt led to regret, regrets were of the past and she didn’t like to think of the past. Like all of the Masama, she focused on the future.
She stepped into her suit which woke up and folded itself around her body. The suit became an extension of her, reacting to her every movement. It protected and enhanced her. She wore it so often it was a second skin. She took the titanium alloy head piece and studied her reflection on its surface. Her skin was smooth and dark, contrasting her silver teeth and compound eyes. Each eyeball was made up of thousands of independent photoreception units. Ojerime could see tiny reflections of herself in each one. Some Masama took to decorating their suits, adding ornate attachments and different coloured alloys but a standard functioning suit was a beautiful thing on its own. Ojerime put the head piece over her face, and it clicked into place. She did not feel the need to decorate. She exercised her creativity designing the virtual realm.
They walked together out into the central lava tube that ran through the middle of the habitat and jumped onto a small transporter that was moving supplies uphill. They rolled past apartments and the green spaces built where the temperature was most comfortable for plants and people. She glimpsed children playing in the green. Teaching them the sciences was Ojerime’s favourite job. The children had a joyful innocence, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and an amazing aptitude for assimilating new tech.
“Our socialist Lunar utopia, where everyone works for the greater good,” sent Kurzawa.
Ojerime looked at him sideways, she couldn’t tell if he was serious or sarcastic. She smiled behind her mask; Kurzawa liked to keep her guessing; it was one of the things she liked about him.
In the drone factory, a production line of 3D printers produced titanium shells, and robotic arms installed the helium3 fusion reactors. The Masama working with welding attachments were almost impossible to differentiate from the robots. The titanium shells they were working on were printed with cavities for the reactor, the boosters, the operating system, cameras, and a particle beam weapon. The finishing touch was the attachment of the diamond warhead with a one-hundred kiloton thermonuclear bomb. Ojerime looked at them with mixed feelings. They still had over a thousand war drones ready to fly and could manufacture more every hour. They had taken months to build but now production had slowed without the assistance of the Replica robots. She did not want to go to war, there were so many better things they could be used for.
The tube tapered upwards to the crater opening until it was too steep for the transporter. Ojerime and Kurzawa wound their way up the wide stairs to an internal cavern inside the summit that had been processed into smooth black obsidian by the Replica. If she looked up through the opening at the top, she could see stars. They reached the top of the stairs and made their way over to Jejomar and Dakila, arriving just in time to hear Jejomar’s conversation with Lago. His projected image froze as the conversation ended. Ojerime remembered Lago as a man with cold calm confidence. But now he looked demented. His inflamed face twisted with rage. His bloodshot eyes were bulging, and he ground his teeth ferociously.
“The self-proclaimed god of Earth, what a fine example of humanity,” sent Kurzawa. They studied his image before Dakila switched it back to a view of the shuttles.
“He is obviously insane. Everything that has happened to him, and his planet, has broken his mind,” sent Ojerime.
“He is deluded to think he can attack us with his shabby fleet of shuttles. It would be suicide. What can he hope to achieve but certain death?” sent Dakila.
“He is desperate, he has nothing to lose,” sent Jejomar. “That makes him dangerous.”
“The Replica were never meant to devour the entire planet. They were supposed to come back to the Moon and work for us. Now we must hope they never return,” sent Ojerime. She had been so enthusiastic about sending the Replica into the path of the CME to empower them and prove her theory. The atomic nuclei had done more than stimulate sentience. They had created an insatiable Eartheater.
Jejomar shook his head. “The Replica do what they must, they recycle. We are not responsible for them anymore but if they return to the moon, we will try to connect with them. We are their makers, and they will recognise us. Lago’s demise was inevitable. The path he has chosen was always going to lead to his own destruction.”
“I know that destroying his elevator was necessary to stop him expanding and keep him on Earth, but now the Replica are destroying his planet. He has nowhere else to go.”
The Replica sphere has become a conscious entity. Just like us. Its creation was the result of a series of coincidences. The power of the Sun has given the Replica life, just as its cosmic rays stimulated HEMI years ago. This is evolution on display and their existence is just as valid as our own.” Jejomar regarded her for a moment. “Ojerime, what are you suggesting?”
Ojerime despised Lago for his attempted sterilization and subjugation of the Masama, and his bigoted speciesism. She knew he regarded the Masama as little more than inconvenient animals. She did not feel any particular affinity with the human race but the rest of them were not complicit. And somewhere inside herself, she still felt connected to her biological human origins. After all, beneath her tempered skin and exo-suit were mostly human organs. She didn’t want to see a whole species wiped out without doing a thing to help. “Maybe we don’t have to destroy them. Maybe we can accommodate them here on the Moon. It wouldn’t be difficult to build some new domes for them, under our control. Let them live, show some mercy.”
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“Mercy? Do you think they would show us any mercy?” sent Dakila. “They are a plague that needs to be wiped out. A parasite that destroys the host. They slowly and insidiously poison everything and everyone around them.”
Ojerime tuned into the virtual space to discuss this with all the Masama. She had created signal amplifiers and placed them all around the mountain to increase the connectivity so the Masama could participate from a distance. This time the virtual realm she met them in was the space between Sirius A, the brightest star in the sky, twice as massive as the Sun. And Sirius B, its celestial partner, a dense white dwarf. The two stars were locked in an eternal dance around each other, forever circling, as if trying to escape the tether of their binding gravitational orbits. No one had ever been to the Dog Star system and Ojerime only had distant data to create this realm. It was wildly out of scale. The two stars looked close enough to touch. Most of the Masama had chosen comets, asteroids, and moons as their avatars. She had chosen a giant apple.
She floated around the giant binary star studying the detail and examining the other Masama. The virtual space was becoming more tangible. Sometimes more revealing than reality as the Masama were transparently open and honest here. The avatars they chose as representatives were a reflection of their mood and personality, revealing enough on their own. Ojerime’s apple blushed a bright shade of red. The endless possibilities of the virtual realm was an exciting new frontier and at the moment the realm was alive with opinions. Ojerime could sense that very few of those opinions shared any sympathy for Lago and the last shreds of humanity floating with him in their collection of shuttles.
Dakila’s opinions were obvious just by looking at him. An armoured spider, bristling with weapons and razor-sharp claws. Jejomar was a little more circumspect. He was a woolly mammoth, swaggering through the sun-drenched space with thick fur and big curving tusks. “Ojerime, you know Lago would never accept such a proposal; he would never willingly submit to us but if he did, the humans would be little more than prisoners. He is here to kill us all or die trying. I appreciate your empathetic view but there can only be one outcome.”
Kurzawa was one of the few Masama that sympathised with Ojerime. “Lago won’t survive, that is certain. But the rest of his crew don’t have to die. If they could be separated somehow, maybe they could live with us.” For his avatar, Kurzawa had chosen a child from an old horror movie he remembered from his past life on Earth. He had explained to Ojerime the movie had a profound effect on him when he was young and made him wonder about the existence of good and evil. The boy stalked around the space, glaring at the other Masama with dark, sinister eyes. “We could teach them how to survive on the Moon without ruining it. As long as they stay away from Dakila.”
“They are all guilty,” sent a passing comet. “Either they are Lago’s minions, or they are wealthy elite trying to escape their polluted planet. Kill them all.”
“We used to work for Lago once.” Ojerime floated closer to Sirius A. The light was blinding, and heat radiated from the orb. She stopped as she could sense her skin blistering, thinking she would have to adjust the virtual heat settings.
Dakila prowled precisely on his multiple limbs. His weapon attachments were fantastic. Telescopic barrels, razor cannons, spinning drill bits, claws, fangs, and barbed blades bristled all over his carapace. “Everything they touch they corrupt and defile. They are much worse than mindless replicators. Can you imagine if they had achieved interplanetary travel? Spreading their vile pollution and xenophobia around the solar system? Letting them live here on our Moon would be like purposely introducing a cancer cell. They must be destroyed for the healthy evolution of all spacefaring intelligence.”
Ojerime understood how most of the Masama felt, and the overwhelming majority agreed with Dakila. She accepted their consensus with gloomy resignation for the fate of the humans. Her first inclination was to avoid any death at all, if possible, but her allegiances were always with the Masama. The extinction of the human race would not make any difference to her life on the Moon. She floated closer to the Sun until her skin started to split and bubble, testing the heat parameters.
Jejomar strode into the middle of the space and shook his huge hairy head. “Ready the drones and the shuttles, we will not make the first move. We will establish the perimeter and if they cross it, we will destroy them.”
Ojerime shifted back into the real as Jejomar reconnected the comms link with the shuttle fleet. “Lago Santos this is your final warning. If you cross within fifty kilometres of the summit of Mount Haemus you will be destroyed. Go away. Leave us alone.” His metallic voice echoed around the cave. There was no reply from the orbiting shuttles.
Jejomar had set the perimeter. Now it was up to Lago and his fleet of shuttles, if they started a war then so be it. Their choice. Ojerime turned and made her way back down the tube. She knew her duties. She and Kurzawa were to pilot one of the shuttles if needed. They travelled back down the lava tube to the gaping entrance where the other two pilots were waiting. Ojerime flexed her exo-suit and put her arms on the ground. With a glance at Kurzawa, she extended her arms and legs and began bounding across the surface on all fours.
“I doubt we’ll see any action; the drones will do all the fighting. Our shuttles will probably only be used to round up any leftover debris for recycling,” sent Kurzawa.
“Don’t underestimate Lago, he thinks he’s a god. Unkillable. He will never give up.”
“He has a demented strength, but he is only human. He will end up in the decompilers with the rest of our waste.”
“If it’s true the Replica are recycling the entire planet Earth, then we are about to go to war with the last of the human race. I wish there was another way.”
“If it was anyone else but Lago, that might have been possible. But he has single-handedly doomed his people. We have to defend ourselves.”
He was right, but it didn’t help. She focused on the shuttles parked on the old landing pad in the middle of Mare Serenitatis. Ojerime had already connected with the operating system running their ship and woken it up. Solar panels surrounded the shuttles that transferred the Sun’s energy into their operating systems. They had a primitive artificial sentience, but their operating systems had been unresponsive to the cosmic rays. Ojerime had not yet identified the exact conditions in which the cosmic rays would stimulate machine intelligence. Maybe it was all accidental coincidence she thought as they climbed aboard their assigned shuttle, the Hard Vacuum. Jejomar had wanted to name the Masama shuttles. He wanted the shuttles to have an identity given their semi-sentience. After one of the most heated debates in the virtual realm, they had eventually decided on: Hard Vacuum, and Mutually Assured Destruction.
The message came from Jejomar, signalling all the Masama at once. Most of Lago’s fleet had stopped before the fifty-kilometre limit but four shuttles were advancing with a complement of drones and weapon platforms. Ojerime sighed, looked up and focused her sparkling compound eyes on the shuttles above. She could see them silhouetted against the darkness like vulnerable little moths drawn to a flame. She shook her head and cursed. “Is he really blinded by so much rage that he would sacrifice himself, his people, and his shuttles? Or does he know something we don’t?”
“I didn’t think he would have the cojones to actually attack us. Shows you how psychotic he has become. Dakila is right, the universe will be better off without them,” sent Kurzawa.
The first swarm of two hundred drones appeared from the summit of Montes Haemus. They would have flown from the factories, straight up the lava tube, through the cavern inside the summit and out into the space above. The drones stationed themselves over the summit, each one in its precisely calibrated position. The formation hovered in a stationary pyramid, sparkling in the sunlight.