“Yes, but at least you’ll still have an economy, and a planet to rule,” Rhea said. “It will take time to build up the infrastructure necessary to transport water to and from Ganymede. If we start now, we might just meet the deadline. But if we don’t… without the systems in place to transport water, mass deaths will occur. You know this, and yet you still refuse to act.”
“There are stockpiles of water that will last for many years to come,” Khrusos said dismissively.
“Yes,” Rhea agreed. “Stockpiles. For a select few cities, and the upper echelon of residents who reside within them. What about the rest of the world?”
That had been a guess on Rhea’s part, but Khrusos’ next words confirmed it.
“So?” the president said. “We’ll be instituting a mind digitization program. Those who cannot afford the price of water will be offered free digitization. We’ll save their minds now, and at a later time in the future, when the technology matures, we’ll restore their minds into neural networks so they can live anew. They won’t even realize they’re merely copies. That’s the future of humanity. One that I am building towards.”
“That’s a fantastic solution,” Rhea said, her voice oozing sarcasm. “Let everyone die. And then restore their minds into neural networks. The originators of those backups are still dead.”
“Yes, but their legacy will live on,” Khrusos said. “That’s all that matters, isn’t it? Why waste money on water when digitization is far cheaper? The High Council of Earth agrees with me on this matter.”
“A High Council you mostly control,” Rhea said. “And even if you didn’t, how can you justify a handful of people deciding the fate of billions?”
“It’s been this way for thousands of years,” Khrusos replied. “A handful of people, sometimes only one, have been responsible for the lives, and deaths, of millions. It’s how we’ve been able to achieve our greatest advances.”
“And our greatest tragedies…” Rhea said. “I can’t let you do this.”
“You can’t stop me.” Khrusos gazed defiantly at her. “You tried, once, and failed. If you try again, I’ll make certain that nothing remains of your mind to wipe. You were my greatest employee. My best friend. You can be both, again.”
Rhea stared him down. “Can I? But you forget, you wiped my mind so you could fashion me into this friend of yours. So you could turn me into your killing machine.”
“The only other option for one such as yourself was death,” the president said. “I saved you. Gave you everything you had. And yet you turned on me.”
“What did I do?” Rhea said. “And why did I do it?”
He pursed his lips, as if considering revealing this.
“Well?” Rhea pressed.
“How do you think you got your original suit?” Khrusos asked.
She arched an eyebrow. “My original suit?”
“Yes,” he said. “A suit very much like the one you wear now.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I got it from Ganymede. My people.”
“When we captured you, there wasn’t much left,” Khrusos said. “You had been ripped apart by the plasma attacks. Your nano technology was destroyed. We put you back together, gave you a new machine form. But shortly thereafter, you got your Ganymedean body back. Your nano machine suit. Do you want to know how?”
“Sure,” Rhea said.
“After your ship crashed, we let the surrounding land cool into what is now known as the Emerald Highlands and sent drones in to explore. We discovered the black box, but when we tried to move it for further study, we couldn’t… it was utilizing some kind of gravimetric technology unlike anything we’d seen before, increasing its weight by ten thousand times. We had nothing capable of lifting it. We tried to break in next, but nothing worked. Laser drills. Plasma cannons. Explosives.
“But then we decided, why not use a potentially easier resource? We had a lot of Ganymedean prisoners. Mind-jacked, or wiped and indoctrinated, like yourself. We tried them one by one. All of them, until we found a prisoner who had access. That’s right. You opened the cube for me in the Emerald Highlands. We extracted what we could, which wasn’t a whole lot. But it did give us samples of the Ganymedean nano technology that we could study, courtesy of you. Yes, you walked in there, and when you left, you were clad in your Ganymedean suit. You gave us the nano machines.
“Our military scientists studied them, and came up with a counter, one that eventually allowed us to turn them against their owners. The war ended at that point: the entire Ganymedean race was eaten alive by their very own creation. Thanks to you.”
Rhea shuddered at the thought. That would explain why her world fell so quickly, if it was true.
And then, suddenly, she remembered.
“You caused the Great Calming…” Rhea said. “Not the Ganymedeans. You used the nano machines I gave you to destroy half the cities on your own home planet. You killed billions of people.”
Khrusos stared at her for a moment, then burst into a laugh. “Very good. Your memories are returning quickly this time. You and your team came to Earth to assassinate me. Instead, you only provided me the means, and the excuse, I needed to defeat your people.”
Miles stared at Khrusos in horror at the news.
“Eventually, we captured more ships, such as this one.” He beckoned at the throne room around him. “But yours was the enabler. Yours was the one that sparked, and ended, the greatest war of all time.”
Rhea’s eyes defocused slightly as more memories came to her. “Yes, I see it now… I was part of the crack team sent to stop you. Though we were at war with Earth over the frozen oceans of Ganymede, we believed there was another way. We didn’t want you to slaughter your own citizens. We didn’t want you to destroy half of Earth. We never wanted that. And when it was done, you blamed us. Saying
