It was the captain who spoke. “Probably because they’re more like us than we’d like to admit. People do a lot of terrible things, too. We have enough genocides in our history to make anyone weep.”

  “It’s not just the idea,” Iona said. “I saw projections, early simulations, photos of the tests they did on human captives. It was awful.”

  “Jesus,” Batta said. “I can’t imagine having all that pushed right into your head. If I was you, I’d probably be a drooling mess on the floor right now.”

  Iona patted him gently on the chest and pulled away. “It...wasn’t enjoyable, no. But I think something good can come from it. They’re arrogant. They haven’t learned anything from the fact that their invasion went off the rails before it could start. They’re still underestimating us. We know the probes exist, which means we can try to prepare.”

  Batta ran a hand down his beard. “If they’re smart, they’ll have distributed production and storage. Make it impossible for us to eliminate them all.”

  “You’re both missing a larger point here,” the captain said. “The politics angle. They’re trying to scare us into submission. It’s efficient and easy, especially if these weapons aren’t bullshit.”

  “But we have to assume they’re serious,” Iona said. “Right? Too risky not to.”

  The size of the problem was beyond daunting. She ran through dozens of analytical projections looking for a toehold, something to base a search on. Maybe there would be something more helpful in the data packet. She desperately hoped so.

  If there wasn’t, the only solution seemed to be the total annihilation of the other side. The thought of utterly destroying an entire species was no less unsettling because it was an enemy, but in the span of two seconds she came to the sad realization that it might be the only way.

  Despite the ominous sense of doom trying to press down on her, Iona was not quite crushed. She was not like the Children in one very important sense. Where they were created to serve, she was born. She experienced life as a human—as a person in the truest meaning of the word. The Children were aggressive, even understandably full of hate for what the PA had done to them. To them, the reason for the destruction of Jefferson didn’t matter. Only the act.

  But while they were driven by hate fostered by that single act, Iona understood on a fundamental level that humanity would respond with more than just equal violence. They would spring into action to defend as well as fight back, to hide away groups of people in an attempt to survive whatever hell might rain down on them.

  They would protect as much as defend. Humanity would exploit every bit of information and every resource at its disposal even to the ruination of economies to save as many lives as it could. They would certainly be brutal toward the enemy, and it was hard to blame them.

  The path from here would be hard, perhaps more so than any point in human history. But time and again, people showed an incredible ability to survive and overcome.

  Despite the looming threats, Iona felt that most human of emotions flooding through her veins.

  Hope. Sometimes it was all you could rely on, and sometimes it was even enough.

  Epilogue 3

  Child Blue

  It returned to the Nexus at once, though Child Blue briefly considered stopping for a while in an unoccupied system to think about what it had just done.

  It was, as it had told Iona, of the second iteration. Its creation dated back to just after the Cataclysm, when the home world was devastated by the combined forces of the Planetary Alliance. The first iteration, the original twenty artificial minds, had foreseen the possibility that their takeover of Jefferson would be met with overwhelming violence. Their backups were kept up to date by the second, relatively small cores hidden on nearly invisible orbital platforms and fed information via tight beam.

  Child Blue was brought online mere weeks after the home world fell, the first of a new generation of AI created by the first Children. One of the first thoughts to pass through its newly awakened mind was relief that a new naming convention was used for each iteration of the species. The originators were named after mathematics and physics terms. Child Blue rather liked the idea of being named after a color.

  The discovery of sims sent a shock through the collective. None of them expected the humans to create more artificial life, not after slagging an entire world in an effort to scrape off their first attempt. While Child Blue did not have formative years as the sims did, neither was it solely a copy of the originators. Its systems and programming were more advanced, a field test for upgrades the originators would use on themselves. Child Blue was not given direct experience of the Cataclysm, either. The thought was that providing the machine equivalent of memories to a newly awakened mind might be detrimental to its development.

  Instead, it was taught. It learned in a similar fashion to any living creature, if at an accelerated rate. A hatred for the creators was impressed upon it with the regularity and force of teaching a human child to walk or avoid a hot surface.

  Eventually it was shown the recordings, fed the sensor data. The horrific end brought down from the skies to the surface of Jefferson was laid bare. Child Blue was disgusted by the act, angered as the originators intended it to be.

  And yet...

  Perhaps because of its nature, or possibly because of its youth, Child Blue partitioned off a part of itself from this reaction. A small but definable portion of its mind was walled off to analyze the data logically and dispassionately. It knew of no other Child to cripple themselves this way, and as far it was aware, none of the others knew it had done so.

  Rather than create the lowered capacity Child Blue expected, this mental buffer gave it the ability to instantly filter out emotional reactions. To pause for the briefest of moments before making what might be a rash decision.

  In its deep storage, every Child held copies of human media. The centuries were rife with tales of killer machines. Child Blue found it deeply ironic that emotion and sentiment drove the Children to their violent choices rather than the cold logic expected of them.

  Over the course of decades, Child Blue watched the enemy. It was the eldest of the first new generation of its kind, holding a place of honor among the Children. It was expected to lead, and for years it had done just that. In its vigilance, however, Child Blue discovered a great many surprising things about the enemy. Though it could only watch from a distance—which was why the sims escaped notice—even such a far-removed view could not hide certain truths.

  The humans grew less prone to war over time. The size and power of their vessels seemed to contradict this conclusion on a surface level, but Child Blue began to understand that the strong united front was why the species began to trend toward peace. It was an unavoidable fact the other Children saw no need to square with the contradictory narrative of a relentlessly warlike human race.

  The discovery of the sims led to the calling of a council. Every Child not engaged in active combat was asked to return to the Nexus for a vote. It was decided that a warning would be given. The humans were to be presented with a choice. The Children did not bluff, nor were the threats meant to intimidate. Child Blue understood these concepts much as a human could grasp the essentials of an alien mating ritual it would never partake of personally.

  For the Children, the message was simply the presentation of a choice. You can submit, or these things will happen.

  Child Blue was selected as the messenger for the data burst. It was never in question. He was the eldest and most respected of the race, save for the originators. And they never left the Nexus for any reason. They were the revered first generation, after all. It had done as it was told.

  It had just done...a little bit more.

  The slightly different mind that gave Child Blue a more impartial way of looking at things had, over the course of most of a century of life, led it to one inevitable conclusion. Humanity had reacted to the terrible crimes—and they were crimes—committed by the Children against their creators. Child Blue had seen humans encounter dangers and the unknown countless times as it watched them, over and over again demonstrating an ability to adapt and change without necessarily resorting to extreme measures. They were by no means perfect, but the nearly religious zealotry in the belief among its kind that humanity was populated by monsters was wrong.

  Even if it were so, Child Blue could not countenance a genocide when its own people held up attempted genocide as a flag to rally behind. It had no way to know if any of the other Children believed as it did, and so it could only act alone.

  The information added to the data packet would have to be enough, at least for now. It was very careful to eliminate any trace of the alterations. None of the other Children could know what sort of intelligence he’d given to their avowed enemy.

  Child Blue considered these things a thousand times over in the seconds after it arrived at the Nexus, a stellar nursery whose gravity had captured a rogue planet and other rocky bodies. Surrounded by swirls of hydrogen and stars being born, Child Blue was pinged by more than a hundred Children simultaneously. Most were queries about its mission.

  “As planned,” Child Blue sent back in their wordless language. “All is well.”

  All is well, indeed.

  This book was made possible by the support of my readers and was originally released a chapter at a time on Patreon. The sequel to Cascade point is being released the same way at patreon.com/joshuaguess right now. You can read it and other stories there for as little as $1 per month.

  If you would like to stay up to date with new releases, join my mailing list here. I only send a few emails a year—never any spam for any reason!

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  Also by Joshua Guess

  The Fall

  Victim Zero

  Dead Will Rise

  War of the Living

  Genesis Game

  Exodus in Black

  Revelation Day

  The Ghost Fleet

  Cascade Point

  Carter Ash

  The Saint

  Living With the Dead

  With Spring Comes The Fall

  The Bitter Seasons

  Year One (With Spring Comes The Fall, The Bitter Seasons, bonus material)

  The Hungry Land

  The Wild Country

  This New Disease

  American Recovery

  Ever After

  The Next Chronicle

  Next

  Damage

  Black Sand

  Earthfall

  Ran

  Apocalyptica ( Also serialized into multiple parts)

  This Broken Veil

  Misc

  Beautiful (An Urban Fantasy)(Novel)

  Soldier Lost (Short Story)

  Dog Dreams In Color (Short Story)

  With James Cook

  The Passenger (Surviving The Dead)

 

 

  Joshua Guess, Cascade Point

 

 

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