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EPILOGUE

Rain shook Grag’s hand. He was standing next to Roy Burbank and Chris Sentell and a very large and beautiful pregnant woman. Rain’s contact lenses said she was from the crew of the Pioneer and was now Evonne Oo’ortava, Professor of Engineering at the Terran Institute. Once the New Atlanteans added the FTL drive to the Emissary, their trip back to Proxima b took only a few days, ship time. The changes that had been made to the planet in the eighteen years or so they had been gone were unbelievable. A new era of abundance had been brought to the Fintidierian culture. Rain had been shocked and amazed as they had entered the Terran Institute Grand Conference Hall.

Rain had gone through the rounds of catching up and meeting everyone and had ended up with Roy and the fertility crisis team. Mak sauntered up beside her, looking a bit uncomfortable in his black tie tuxedo, and interlaced his fingers with hers, squeezing them gently as he smiled at her.

“Grag, when I met you, you were much younger, only an undergraduate student in a far less mature physics department from a backwater world, and now, look at you. You are the wealthiest and smartest man on this planet. On Earth you’d be considered an Einstein and a J. P. Morgan or an Elon Musk combined. And to me, I’ve only been gone about six months.”

“You left out father and soon to be grandfather.” Sentell punched him on the arm. “I’m not sure these two have figured out why this keeps happening to them. The way they have gone at it, hell, there could be an Oo’ortava baseball team.”

“Chris, how embarrassing.” Evonne faked being offended and held a hand to her mouth. Evonne was a head taller than the two men and, by the looks of her, she could bench-press them both at the same time, even at seven or more months pregnant.

“Hey, seriously, Rain, if it wasn’t for our boy here,” Chris laughed, “we wouldn’t have figured it out. And I hate to do it, but I have to correct your simile, Rain. He’s more like an Einstein and a Henry J. Heinz.”

“That part was all you, Dr. Chris,” Grag said to his old friend and business partner in some inside joke between the two of them Rain didn’t yet understand.

“I told you eighteen years ago to call me Chris.” They laughed. Evonne just smiled at the two.

“Oh, my God, you two, really.” Evonne remarked. “They are like an old married couple. You should hear them in the lab.”

“Dr. Gilster, is the New Atlantean that came back with you going to be here tonight?” Grag asked. “I’d really like to meet her.”

“No, the new secretary general is going to meet her on the New Emissary first,” Rain said. “Captain Jacobs is there with her now awaiting the secretary general’s arrival. Once all of that is accomplished—you know, the politics, blech—we can turn on the Eve transmitter and stop the technophage.”

“Grag, my boy, you had it pegged all those years ago.” Chris slapped him on the back. “Rain, I tell you, this kid told me over beers eighteen, maybe seventeen years ago that the nanobots were controlled by quantum entanglement.”

“Well, he wasn’t wrong,” Mak interjected. “Maybe a physicist is what the fertility crisis team was missing. Speaking of, why isn’t Neil here tonight?”

“Dr. Polkingham is the coach of one of our daughter’s and his daughter’s softball team. They are in the district championship tomorrow morning. We flipped a coin as to who chaperoned tonight and who came to the ball.”

“We lost,” Evonne said.

“Rain, we’re all going to go. Jeremiah is dating one of the girls on the team. You should come with us.” Chloe leaned into Burbank as she said it. The two of them looked as happy and healthy as ever.

“I—” Rain started to say but was interrupted by a young woman in her early twenties grabbing her from behind and hugging her.

“Auntie Rain!” Samari Burbank gushed. “Oh, my God, you look just like I remember.”

“She’s been asleep for eighteen years,” Roy added.

“Does wonders for the skin,” Rain joked. “Samari, is that you? You are all grown up!”

“We will take our shuttle down to the game tomorrow. We’re all going. You must come with us,” Evonne told her and Mak.

“I wouldn’t miss it.” Mak nodded.

“We all have so much to catch up on!” Rain exclaimed through tears of joy. “This place is, well, it is so different from when we left. It is like Earth a hundred years ago but now, at the same time.”

“With the advances we hope to gain from the New Atlanteans, maybe like hundreds of years from now, Rain,” Grag said with a raised eyebrow.

“Let’s hope,” Mak said.

“That’s all we ever had for Fintidier and the people here,” Rain replied. “Hope.”

* * *

Captain Jacobs and the New Atlantean—the one they call Udus—sat in the captain’s ready room waiting for the new secretary general of Fintidier to arrive. Layla had explained that Udus was the ancient Sumerian word for “future.” Well, Jacobs hoped that the New Atlanteans would help usher in a future of peace and prosperity instead of what seemed like would be a coming war. He wiggled and made himself comfortable in the seat at the head of the table. The artificial gravity engineering that the New Atlantean technology enabled made spaceship life much more amenable and Captain Jacobs had decided he could get used to being an interstellar starship captain with a ship like the New Emissary.

“They are coming now.” Udus nodded to the door before it opened. The tall, slender, hairless woman had all the features of a supermodel or movie star, but the strange hybrid human-AI demeanor was a bit unnerving until you got to know her.

“And you know this how?” Jacobs asked as the door slid open.

“Internal video feeds, Captain,” Udus said as the two of them rose to meet the secretary general of Fintidier. Mike Rogers and Carol Ash escorted the official and her entourage in with Terran ambassador Jesus in tow and then took up stations outside the door.

“Secretary General, it is so good to meet you.” Jacobs shook her hand. “I was fairly close to your predecessor, Secretary General Arctinier.”

“Uh, excuse me, Forinda,” Jesus interrupted. “He means two predecessors ago. Captain, you’ve been out of the loop for a while.”

“My apologies. I have not had time to catch up on all the local history.” Jacobs tried to hide his embarrassment. “Allow me to introduce our New Atlantean ambassador from Luyten’s Star, Udus.”

“Secretary General Forinda Blindara Vistra, I am Udus of the people of the star system you know as Luyten’s Star. Your makers, known only as the Atlanteans, are also our makers. We fought them from our world once we realized their malicious intent as your history says you did. We have this in common. We call our people and our star system that of New Atlantis.”

Jacobs stood quietly and eyed the Fintidierian leader, then glanced slightly at Jesus. The man was starting to look old. But Jacobs figured he had done more than sleep for the past eighteen years. Finally, the secretary general broke the silence.

“Oh, for all that is sacred sit down!” she said. “I don’t know how Balfine was years ago, but all of these political formalities are cumbersome and inefficient. Call me Forinda, please.”

“Very well, Madam—uh, Forinda. Welcome aboard.” Jacobs sat.

“So, you can turn off the virus? That’s why you’re here, right?” Forinda asked.

“Yes,” Udus replied.

“But…?” Forinda said. “There’s always a ‘but’ with you people from the stars.”

“Forinda, please,” Jesus grunted at her.

“What, Charles? I’m right, though—am I not?” Forinda turned and looked back at Jacobs and Udus.

“Forinda,” Udus began. “Yes. You are right.”

“See, Charles?”

“When we implement the Eve device”—Udus waved her hands and brought up a three-dimensional image of the quantum transceiver system—“we can stop the fertility plague completely. We can also use the Eve device as a new Alice device. We can explain all of this in any level of detail your scientists wish. From my analysis of your current history, most certainly Dr. Oo’ortava can completely grasp the concepts herein.”

“Ha! Grag. I literally went to school with his aunt,” Forinda muttered jokingly. “He turned out better than anyone hoped for.”

“Yes.” Udus wasn’t sure how to respond but Jacobs gave her a nudge to keep going.

“Go on, Udus.”

“We can stop the fertility plague. And we can even then use the same technophage to heal any future diseases that might arise and harm your people.”

“I’m following you. Sounds great. But…? Get to the ‘but.’”

“And, as soon as Eve breaks the entanglement or signaling between Fintidier and wherever the controlling Alice box is, the Atlanteans, no matter how far away they are, will immediately know that we turned it off. They will know that you have a formidable capability.”

“You see, Forinda,” Jacobs added, “it must be your call, not ours. It could be inviting them to come back and start a war or maybe worse. We don’t truly understand their level of advanced technologies and capabilities.”

“Damned if we do…to borrow a Terran expression.” The secretary general frowned.

“Yes, ma’am.” Jacobs agreed. “But we have a work around.”

“I’m listening.”

“The solution that the current fertility crisis team has used for the past eighteen years has been working,” Udus said.

“Yes, but to have a girl is an expensive procedure. We are doing better, but cannot keep up that way.” Forinda shook her head negatively.

“Yes, we agree.” Jacobs nodded back to Udus to continue.

“We can release a technophage that does what the Terran microbots are doing, but that will infect the population. We can program them to choose seventy-one percent of the time female and twenty-nine percent of the time male. We will set the program to change to fifty-fifty once the population equalizes,” Udus explained.

“And then the Atlanteans will never know?” Forinda asked.

“As far as we can tell, that is correct,” Jacobs reassured her.

“Okay, so now you are going to tell me to keep it a secret.” Forinda shrugged.

“No, ma’am. That is your business, not ours,” Jesus added. “Keeping it a secret will not necessarily keep the Atlanteans from knowing—as Udus tells us, they could be anywhere in the galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, or even millions of light-years away in the Boötes Void.”

“However…” Jacobs frowned and sighed. “The ‘but’ here, Madam Secretary General, is that when the Atlantean woman we revived almost twenty years ago sent a message out to the stars, it hit a quantum repeater we found in your outer solar system. We detected it as we came back here just days ago. So, it is likely that the Atlanteans got her message.”

“And what was that message?” Forinda asked.

“Basically, it told them to destroy Earth,” Udus said.

“So, here you are.” The secretary general stood and made a strong confident and stern face. “You amazing people from the stars came all this way to save us from an ancient plague…and once you have Proxima saved, your world will be destroyed?”

“Well, yes, I guess if you put it that way.” Jacobs raised an eyebrow at her.

“Turn on that…Eve device?”

“Yes, it is called an Eve device.”

“Then turn on that Eve device and rid Fintidier and her people of this Atlantean evil plague. Use it to make yourselves and the Fintidierian people immune to all manners of harm. And we will turn ourselves toward the task that your people so graciously have done for us. Proxima is saved, and we will stand with you however your people wish. We owe you that much. So now it will be our time to work together again and save Earth!”

* * *

After Udus left the room for her tour of the city, which would allow her to both see and be seen, Secretary General Vistra sat alone with Captain Jacobs. She had motioned for him to remain when the rest of the entourage left a few moments ago.

“Do you trust them?” asked Vistra.

“No,” Jacobs replied. “They are simply too good to be true. We Earth humans have a saying, ‘When something is too good to be true, then it probably is.’ I believe this is one of those cases. Not only are they going to fix your fertility problem, but they gave us an FTL drive and promise to help us fight the Atlanteans.”

“My sentiments exactly,” she said as she sipped her now-cold cup of tea, frowning. “And what’s this business about the Atlanteans being our makers? I thought you told my predecessor and our scientists that the evidence of human life being native to Earth was irrefutable?”

“Udus is a cagey bastard. I played back the log from that discussion, and she only agreed that the Atlanteans ‘created or seeded’ Earth and Fintidier. There is little doubt that, from its earliest beginnings, DNA-based life that you and I share originated on Earth and it has been there for billions of years—not thousands. Sure, there’s the continuing disagreement over exactly how—God, panspermia, spontaneous biogenesis—but the point is that we have a fossil record going back billions of years. From what we can tell, DNA-based life on Proxima b is, at most, fifty thousand years old. Not only that, but the science teams here have pretty good evidence that the biosphere here was terraformed and did not arise naturally,” said Jacobs. “So ‘created’ is not possible. ‘Seeded’? Well, I think it’s obvious that someone put you here.”

“In other words, the Atlanteans might be the ones who terraformed our world and brought us humans here, but our ancestors, like yours, originated on Earth,” Vistra suggested.

“That’s what the scientists tell me.”

“So, our benefactors are less than truthful, or at least not forthright, and ‘too good to be true.’ They have an agenda of which we are not aware,” she surmised.

“And that means we can’t trust them,” added Jacobs, leaning forward in his chair.

“Given their level of technology and abilities, they could swat us like bugs if they chose,” said Vistra.

“Madam Secretary General, we must not allow that to happen,” Jacobs replied.



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