Upon our arrival at Earth, Sofia, Mikri, and I had been pulled aside separately to detail our experiences since going through The Tunnel. Lirik, the Fakra diplomat, had taken charge of lengthy meetings with ESU liaisons, before today's planned excursion to show them something they never had on Ahnar: a paleontology museum. Working with Corai would be a massive risk, but the overarching sentiment seemed to align with the Elusian scientist's expression. In light of Dr. Aguado's visions, we needed to learn more about the future our creators had foreseen.

For all we know, those dead Elusians could be trying to invade Earth, and we find a way to kill them. I'm very interested to hear the next part of Corai's plan, which the ESU will be looped into. It sounds like we're close to getting signoff, and like Takahashi might go back with us to sniff around for some military technology.

Right now, the focus was on our guests. Executor Singh shared publicly our creation story, how the Elusians were hominids, and how we weren't their first pocket universe experiment. Having concrete answers took a lot of the mysticism out of our origins and theories about the universe; I could see why Velke said the Fakra had little concept of the supernatural. Much like the reaction to Mikri, there was outcry and sympathy over the Fakra's mistreatment—but this time, it was personal.

Humanity as a whole had been persisting, business as usual, in the wake of the abandonment; however, there was fury that the Elusians forced us back inside our coop like chickens. It was a blessing to have new allies who could help us out. The Fakra already proposed some trade agreements, though they weren't parting with the source of their negative energy or any advanced technology that'd give them a leg up. We could have the alien friends we thought had been taken away forever.

"Tell us a story, O Mikri of the Robowoods," I prodded the machine, as we walked up to the museum.

The android reclined in his wheelchair: lazy bum. "Once upon a time, there was a crash-landed ship crew with dwindling supplies and no hope of rescue, until a gallant hero overheard their cry for help. Sailing across a vast, dark ocean in the nick of time, their rescuer tried to learn more about the ship's systems; communication was tricky, without a shared language."

"You didn't leave a lot of mystery in this story, robot," Velke grumbled. "But I'll bite. Then what happened?"

"Well, the captain of the crashed ship was really dumb. So when he saw the approaching vessel, his only hope of not being marooned forever and dying a slow death, he searched for any kind of weapon: violence was obviously the answer to his predicament. He saw the rescuer combing his ship for information, and in a monkey-like panic, he decided to try to cut all of the wires on the vessel."

"I am not dumb!" My eyes widened in realization, and I angled the path of Mikri's wheelchair to slowly drift toward the flow of traffic. "You were stealing all of our schematics without the hint of a reply, and you admitted later that you totally wanted to kill us and take our shit. I read you all right."

"Organics have faulty memories, which is why Preston's eyewitness testimony is much worse than mine. I will finish my account. Thankfully, his peer was way smarter, and let the rescuer get handsy and frisk them."

Sofia shook her head. "Mikri, you have an instant bestseller on your hands. You're a gifted author."

"Well, it was you who taught me literature! I could also talk about the time I dumped ice on Preston's head so he could look dumb in front of the Derandi. I made him into a meat popsicle."

"You were the one who looked dumb, thinking I was overheating!" I complained.

"Counterpoint: your face. All of…that."

Velke raised both of his left arms to his chin. "Yes, I see what you mean, Mik—robot. Preston's expressions curl up in ways that make me glad my beak is near immobile."

"The only thing immobile about Preston is his brain. His neurons have a stillness and a deadness that knows no equal," Mikri goaded.

I balanced the wheelchair on the border of the sidewalk, tilting a wheel slightly over the edge. "Do you want me to give you a stillness and deadness that knows no equal? One push and boom: run over. Splat. No more mouthy metal muchacho."

"Nah, you won't. You need me. You're desperate."

"Desperate to put you in a recycle bin. I'm gonna paint the three-arrow symbol right on your groinplate, like a tattoo."

Sofia cleared her throat. "Preston, can I have a word with you? Privately?"

"Uh, sure. I'll step aside."

I abandoned Mikri's wheelchair, but the scientist beckoned for me to bring the garbage, no good droid to our tryst. I arched my eyebrows at Sofia, knowing ESU security didn't like us stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, even if it was cordoned off. The android raised his arms to offer a hug, but this time, Fifi lifted an open palm to reject it. The Vascar offered a dismayed beep and hung his head, which led her to relent.

"Can you please let me take the lead, once we get inside the paleontology museum? It means a lot for Velke and the Fakra to visit Earth," Sofia sighed. "I need to feel like something's in my control for once. Being powerless to stop what's coming, being lost and afraid—"

I placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, noticing her eyes watering. "Hey, sister—I think of you as basically family, which is why I razz you so much. You're more my family than my real one. I try to make you smile, and I'm coping hard these days with humor, but I'm always here to support you. You know I have your back when it's important, right?"

"Yeah. Thanks," she said with a weak smile, clapping her hands together.

Mikri offered an alarmed whir. "Please do not be sad! I like hearing your explanations, and am really looking forward to what you have to say on paleontology. I am very sorry if I failed you as a friend. I wanted to brighten your spirits, like I used to. I strive to be a positive influence with all humans, but especially you."

"You are wonderful, Mikri. I'm just…not in the mood for jokes. It's my fault for being on edge, but the visions won't give me a night off and it's really getting to me. Forgive me for asking you to change your beautiful self."

"There is nothing to forgive. I know poor sleep quality can impact organics' cognitive abilities, unless they already have none like Prest—sorry, no teasing. He is just fun to bully, but I will behave. For you, Sofia, I would do anything. Do not underestimate my love for you."

"Back at you, Mikri. I just want a calm, normal day and cultural exchange. We can all have fun with that, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll put up with your boring science shit—long as it's not three spoken paragraphs about an amoeba," I grumbled. "Seriously, I'll be chill. Let's do this. See some dino skellies!"

The scientist nodded to herself after our pep talk, then waved the Fakra guests into the chosen museum. I tried to imagine what a world without any fossils would be like; they didn't have anything to look back to that came before them—no natural development. I wasn't sure that they had much fauna at all, let alone megafauna. Pressing a fist to my lips, I hoped that asking a serious question bouncing around my two brain cells wouldn't be seen as taking the lead from Sofia.

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"Hey, Velke." I offered a cautious smile as the Fakra commander turned toward me, looking like a disappointed dad. "What's your flora and fauna like back on Ahnar?"

Velke scuffed his shoes on the floor, sighing. "In a word? Limited. The Elusians did plant thousands of trees and edible flora that they'd genetically modified from their seed vaults. Animals, a few big game species and beasts of burden, then kickstart a population of little guys for them to feed on."

"When you say you have millions of different species, it's hard to wrap my mind around," the quiet, observational Lirik agreed. "Why couldn't they naturally seed life for us, and let the scraps fall where they may?"

"I think the Elusians should've, for the biosphere's sustainability. Ecosystems strive on diversification and having time for evolution to fix problems," Sofia chimed in.

Velke folded his arms. "And what if evolution simply doesn't work out?"

"Then it simply doesn't work out, like you said. There are animals on Earth that used to exist, but no longer do: we call them 'extinct.' Some were millions of years ago, before us even, so we can only investigate them through relics! One of the most famous ones is the dinosaur."

The Fakra's gazes turned upward, following her pointing finger to the suspended T-Rex skeleton in the spacious exhibition room. Old bones were spliced back together meticulously and preserved with great care. The fact that we'd dug up massive creatures that met their end long before we ever existed was pretty fucking cool. Mikri eyed the assembled bones, then turned to us as if imagining we'd lost our skin. He beeped in confusion, and hesitantly raised a paw like a schoolchild asking the teacher for permission to speak.

"Yes, Mikri?" Sofia prompted.

The Vascar stood from the wheelchair, earning a huff from me. Bastard can walk with that new, durable skeleton! "I thought…animal remains decomposed after death. Organic materials are impermanent, but you do not speak as if this is a replica."

"Your creators didn't have fossils?!"

The android beeped quietly. "We…the network may or may not have deleted all of our data on organic processes, since we did not care. This is why I had to learn from scratch with you."

"Robot!" Velke shouted. "Do you have any idea how intelligence gathering works? You never delete information. You don't know how it could be useful in the future. We still kept our Elusian data millions of years later!"

"Nothing about how organics worked would ever be useful to us, and of that, we were certain. We kept the bare minimum of concepts merely to recognize words and identify their weaknesses. I am sorry! I should not have asked."

"You should always ask a question if you don't know the answer. I was just surprised that the Vascar wouldn't have any paleontology finds themselves, but it sounds like you…threw them away if they existed," Sofia sighed.

"I plead oopsy daisy."

Velke scoffed, turning on the robot. "Right, because the loss of priceless historical artifacts and knowledge about your world is just an 'oopsy daisy.' From what I've heard, your network acts on impulse, rather than thinking things through, more than you'd like to admit."

"The network had every reason to be angry and to have no wish to preserve their creators' legacy. Surely you can understand that, Commander," Sofia countered.

"More than understand. That's why I don't like seeing how clumsy their planning was. I'd expect a little more out of an AI."

"Why? Any thinking being can make mistakes and run into the same pitfalls. Mikri's people never had anyone to coach them through it and were blocked from developing on their own. They didn't have the blessings either of us had."

"Huh. Never thought of it that way."

I nodded toward the tin can. "Mikri put it best. He finds it helpful to appreciate what he's got, not what he doesn't. Or to put it in a pessimist light, it can always be worse! The Fakra sure showed me that humans've got no right to throw ourselves a pity party."

"It's helpful to appreciate what others have gone through." Sofia twirled a strand of her silky, dark hair around her pointer finger. "To answer your question, Mikri, yes—bones do decompose. Fossils had to die in a rare way that they get buried under some kind of sediment. Over millions of years, stone slowly takes the place of that degradable organic material, until those minerals are all that's left in its mold."

I bit back questions about whether Corai was definitionally a fossil, since she got taken over by nanobots and was millions of years old. I could be serious for Sofia: no threatening to bury Mikri beneath sediment and see what happened, or to tell Velke he looked like he belonged up on that wall. The Fakra seemed awestruck by what was a novel concept to them; they never needed to find their world's history through archaeological digs.

I wondered if we'd inspire them to make their own paleontology museums, looking for whatever their soul held. Humanity could inspire the Fakra to find more wonder in nature, despite never being connected to it. I remembered dressing up in a dinosaur costume on Halloween, a practice I imagined Mikri would add to the illogical human things bin. Imagining ancient times and what that was like was almost as badass as dreaming about the future.

Dinosaurs were the largest land animals to ever live, so different from us and impactful to the ecosystem. Everyone's a little nerdy for them, if we're honest. This was a wonderful idea to show the Fakra.

Sofia flashed her pearly teeth. "I'll take silence as you finding my explanation to be satisfactory."

"Your explanations never fail, Dr. Fifi," Mikri replied. "There is nothing I cannot understand when you phrase it so perfectly. You have taught me as much as every database I have ever combed through."

"Ah, I'm glad to see hyperbole comes so naturally to you now! There's a lot more exhibits to get to, so why don't I take us to the area that could have the most groundbreaking implications: invertebrates?"

"We're happy to follow you and to see your world's history," Lirik answered, polite and meek as ever.

Velke folded his arms. "Are the Elusians up there? It seems they don't have a spine, since not even your buddies will face us."

"They will, I'm sure, but they want the first meeting in a controlled setting." Sofia sighed, gesturing to a case of tiny preserved fossils that were fused with stone; some looked like creepy-crawly cockroaches with pointed ribs, while others were tiny worms or shells. "These are some of the earliest, oldest fossils on Earth! They predate not just humans, but the entire vertebrate designation."

The Commander squinted. "Those hardly look like animals at all. That was all that existed?"

"Nature has to start somewhere—it has to start very small and gradually get more complex. This was all we had to glean information about many geological eras, and they're easier to find since their exoskeletons are ripe for fossilization. This is the roadmap of evolution's start! Can anyone guess why this field of study has renewed importance?"

"I don't fucking know. Surprise me."

"Not the answer I was looking for. Anyone else want to put their thinking caps on?"

"Because Preston said not to monologue about an amoeba?" Mikri guessed.

A deep frown creased Sofia's face. "No. Since these are the earliest forms of life, this can help us understand how the Elusians seeded our world in the first place. It might show how they engineered these organisms to withstand Sol physics, perhaps even the mistakes they made. It will help us to understand their planet's ecology and lifeforms as well as our own."

"I see," Velke murmured. "Perhaps we could compare it to our own, to see if there's…any resemblance. I'd hope something on Ahnar is natural."

"Your heart and determination are." I gave the Fakra an unwavering stare, trying to drill my words home. "That's why I respect you and want you on our side, not any part of you they orchestrated."

"Thank you, Preston. I assure you, we're just as determined to get to the bottom of this future they've seen—of our place in it as well as theirs. I hope this Corai will give us some answers."

A darkness swirled in Sofia's pupils. "We'll go back and face her soon, with the support of two species behind us. I pray we won't be looking at any mass extinctions to mark alongside the dinosaurs."

Velke tilted his chitinous head back with flippancy. "Well, if it comes to that, at least you won't have to wait for my skin to decompose. It sounds like I'll fossilize easily."

"It won't come to that. We're going to find the truth and convince the Elusians to avert the tide of blood, before it's too late."

Somberness hung in the air like a thick veil of smog, choking and stifling. These bones were of species that had failed to stop their demise, and I hoped that Earth's history wouldn't also be its future. If there was ever a time that we needed a correct interpretation of precog, it was when humanity was being blamed for something of this magnitude. Corai would need to have one heck of a plan once we got back to her hideout.

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