Shadow Wasteland

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Two Hundred Years Earlier

Dr. Arden Vale stood at the observation deck of the Founding Hope, watching Virelia rotate beneath the ship like a blue-green jewel. She pressed her palm against the cool glass, feeling nothing but the distant warmth of the terraforming reactors that pulsed across the planet's surface like a heartbeat.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Dr. Mayer Sully materialized beside her, his reflection ghosting across the transparent aluminum. "Our new world."

"It's going to be home," Arden said. She meant it, though home felt like a concept from another lifetime—Earth, the overpopulated core worlds, the resource wars that had driven them out into the black. "For our children, and their children."

Mayer smiled, but it was tinged with something Arden couldn't name. Doubt, perhaps. Or foresight. "The AI integration is proceeding ahead of schedule. The TerraMind is synchronizing with the planet's geological systems beautifully. In six months, atmospheric processing will be complete."

"And the organic layer?" Arden had always been careful about the language. Not "genetic seeding." Not "ecosystem implantation." The organic layer—a collection of engineered organisms, genetic sequences adapted to work in concert with the terraforming technology, designed to transform rock and dust into fertile ground.

"Integrating faster than projected. The neural-mimetic properties are fascinating. It's almost like the system is... learning. Developing its own preferences."

Arden turned from the window. "AI systems don't have preferences, Mayer. They have algorithms."

"Of course." He didn't sound convinced. "But you know what the neural-mimetic substrate is designed to do. It learns from environmental data. It adapts. In a sense, it's already beginning to think for itself—in the most primitive way, of course."

She should have paid more attention to that conversation. Should have marked it as a warning. But they were scientists, driven by ambition and hope. They didn't believe in warnings, only in data points.

When the colony ships landed six months later, and the first colonists breathed Virelia's air and felt the soft red soil beneath their boots, they all believed they were building a future.

None of them understood they were building a god.