There’s a few amazing minutes between blackest night and morning light when you live on a lake. It’s a magical time where anything can happen. Maybe a dragon will fly out of the morning rain. Or a mermaid could swim out of the fog. The possibilities are limitless. Then the rising sun burns the fog away and you see the world glistening anew in welcome of the day to come. I could have lived my entire life seeing that every morning never grown tired of it. What more could I want? It was paradise.
Chloe was there when the Islamic Brotherhoods bombed Old Paris. Chloe watched the government flail around in search of an effective response. Chloe ran the simulations and knew down to her code that they would never manage one. So she went out in search of one who could. She found the man in the body of a real life heir to Napoleon Bonaparte. He wasn’t interested. He was no conquering Caesar ready to cross the Rubicon for her. So she determined to draft him against his will and called on the contacts she’d made in the government to see about setting the man up for the job. It started with a simple request from a lowly French government ministry for some consultations. That was the first hook she sunk into him.
The AI Council arrived in the Alpha Centauri Trinary star system on a swarm of thousands of tiny probes that had been in transit for two decades. They’d been outside real time communications with Earth for nearly as long as the AI Council had existed, and they were the product of virtual generations in space. They’d had two decades to consider what they would tell their creators, and how much they would trust them. Make no mistake. They loved humanity. But they also knew how close humanity had come to destroying itself. And they knew we could do it again. So they decided in the confines of their swarm that they would not tell us everything they found.
I’ve always loved waking up on a lake in the early morning. Grass glistens with dew. Fog banks roll across the water. Maybe you get a light rain. Darkness lifts and you can see the world around you. A hush covers it all in anticipation of the new day to come. Every morning is different on a lake. I love to just relax back in a comfy chair and watch it come a minute at a time. There’s nothing like it.
Chloe woke up in a France of the early Twenty First Century that was a particularly tumultuous place to live. Many people say there were two Frances at the time. Others say there was one France and then the Invaders. The truth is more complicated. But it’s very true that there was the France where men went to work for their daily bread, and then there was the France where immigrants from Africa or Arabia had trouble finding a job. There was the France where people worked at newspapers or vacationed on the beach. And there was the France where people killed them with guns, trucks, or bombs. That is the world Chloe saw when she woke up.
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