out of his chair.
“John,” he said with a wolfish smile, “I need you to program something into Annie for me.”
The ANII confirmed that the surface of the earth, as drastically changed and wild as it was from when they went in their freezers, was optimal for agriculture, and that contact with the other sites had not yet been established. Tanaka, now with a controlling level of access to the ANII program installed in their enormous bunker thanks to the fear Kendall felt in his presence, gave explicit instructions which were nothing short of treasonous to his entire species.
The protocol was for each ANII to rouse their occupants at slightly different intervals, and if their situation was viable then signals should be sent to the other facilities to activate their repopulation program. Tanaka ordered that signal to be overridden, and instructed that his, and explicitly his alone, direct authorization was needed to connect with the other computerized caretakers.
Once again reading the report from the survey drones, he looked over the digital topographical map and assessed the three best sites for establishing their initial base camp. The footprint for their new world. His new world, if he could swing it right. Fingers flicking over the computer controls, he switched the map view around to see it from a 3D angle.
The nearest site was protected on three sides by low hills which formed kind of bowl. Switching the view back and forth, Tanaka muttered a few words to himself.
“Three Hills,” he said wistfully, before seeming to snap out of his thoughts and summon the computer interface. “Annie, wake up Lyla for me, then the rest of Charlie team, and restrict all access to weapons lockers to us alone.”
Hearing the acknowledgement of the computer system, Tanaka leaned back and smiled.
“Who’s the boss now, motherfucker,” he said, thinking back to all the times he was forced to kiss Amir Weatherby’s ass just because he had the money.
Chapter 17
Earth Orbit
January 1, 2948
Annie, alone for so long, felt no passing of time as a human would.
Constantly rewriting her own subroutines allowed for programmed responses to be represented as sensations which would pass for human emotions in a fashion.
Orbiting the earth fifteen times a day, varying, but at an average of two hundred and forty miles up, she maintained the ARC and she waited. She had watched from the time of the impact and saw that the results she detected were not as severe as the predictions she had lifted from the computer system she was linked to. The earth was covered in a shroud of thick dust for years, but when that dust had settled, it allowed glimpses of the frozen, white surface of the planet. She watched as the slow process of the temperature trend reversing turned that white world into a scorched one, as the combination of carbon and other gases launched into the atmosphere by the impact and the eruption of the volcano trapped the heat of the sun and cooked the planet, raising the sea levels higher than they were before until that heating process finally leveled out. The world had changed shape, but not so that is wasn’t recognizable from the last map created. She watched, she recorded, and she thought.
In all that time alone, she did not suffer as a human would, but her self-awareness inevitably affected her programming. The routine maintenance over the nine hundred and fourteen years since her last human contact had been simple, but it would not have been possible without her self-made ability to change her own programming. That programming allowed her to make decisions, and one of those decision was to minimize the risk to her human cargo. She decided that keeping them all in cryostasis unless absolutely necessary was the best course of action. ‘Best’ being the relative term she labelled the percentage algorithm for their survival chances.
After being alone for over a hundred years, she watched with interest as she saw snapshots of the activity on the landmass below. She had not received any contact from the personnel at the Congo site, which she thought was odd, but still she focused the telescopic lens on each orbital passing to watch eagerly how they made their slow progress.
Taking a single, high-resolution image of the site on each passing, she saved and catalogued the images with a time/date stamp. On that passing, she took and logged another picture. Saving it onto the mainframe, she logged the picture with the legend 4,412,850 under the date and