Humanity 2.0, Year 146, Day 181

Tristan shook his head. "No, you shouldn't. And we haven't told anyone else, if that's what you're wondering." He gave me a conciliatory gesture. "We agree, it should stay under wraps basically forever. Even if we have to use some of them, we should still find a way to pawn it off on a third party. Too many questions, inside and out. Some in the family might break away because of it. We can't afford that."

"Sorry, old man. I can say - it didn't happen the way you're thinking." Blake patted me on the arm, taking another drink then giving me an understanding look.

I shook my head. Should I move them? Change the arming codes? I tabled it for now. "So tell me the rest of the idea."

"You haven't guessed the rest?" Blake cut off Tristan before he could resume. "We bait them into raiding Malta proper, wait until harvest is in full swing, then set off the nukes." He made a gesture with his hand. "Boom. A few box shots to pick off stragglers as we're rushing south - full offensive, scour Libya and push as far as we can get. Try to rope in NATO to help, but if we're following the whole plan and open with a huge missile blitz, we probably wouldn't need them... if we don't get stupid."

He waved his beer around, one finger pointed out and tracing a downward path in the air. "Scorched earth. Don't bother taking or holding a thing - just torch it all, everything, avoid any dug-in forces and just divert to softer targets constantly, use our mobility... burn everything we can until we're spent."

Blake glared at Tristan, repeating a plan he obviously had heard before. "Then we bail - hide in Osana or preferably the Vault while the rest of the world goes into a feeding frenzy on Axum. Come back out a few years later, stay off the radar and focus on cleaning up the other, isolated little shithead cells once we have both hands free to do it."

Tristan nodded. "About the size of it, yeah." He was glaring at Blake for most of the time, finally turning back to me. "So that's my idea. If you want Osana safe and sound, Naglfar dead as hell - that's the play we need to make. It won't be pretty, or clean, but it's the way we win."

I was silent for a time, not wanting to hear Blake's idea just yet. I pulled out another beer from the case, holding the cold can against my head and thinking it through. It would require a lot of risk - the Axumites might not fully commit on rushing in, and it was unclear exactly how much control they exerted over the cell's ghilmen. How soon could they react if the cell sensed a trap? Would it matter?

The rush south would be brutal and fast; if done right it could inflict catastrophic damage, particularly if we had a year or two to build up a huge supply of missiles and stash them somewhere Axum wouldn't see... it might not cost me any more of my own kin's blood, if we didn't get stupid. We just had to ignore the untold millions of Axumites and those under their rule who would die in the resulting inferno.

A number of you may be shocked and disgusted - some that Tristan suggested all this, others that I seriously considered it. I'll say again - war is a brutal and horrific thing, and he was right about one thing... the inhabitants of the other island - now allegedly called New Rhodesia, but still Malta to most - weren't long for the world.

They styled themselves invincible and brilliant, but virtually none of them had any training, let alone experience. Their government was a sham, rife with extortion and corruption, and they were the butt of constant jokes in all the media from East to West. It was a place for those who enshrined greed and cynicism to play at being philosopher-kings, at least until another philosopher-king stole the shirt off their back, or shot them due to a perceived lack of ideological purity.

New Rhodesia was so rampantly unpopular that it was unlikely anyone would rush to their aid if Axum came to harvest them, which was actually worrying. Every brain added to its pods was another to be used against the rest of the world, even if many of them didn't realize that. It was one of many complications with the war against Naglfar.

Unfortunately, the 'harvest' was widely believed by humankind to be something akin to a religious ceremony to the Axumites, performed on fallen enemies on the battlefield, helped along by no small amount of the shit-tastic journalism that you would often see in wartime.

Virtually none believed in the reality of what happened to those harvested - that they became part of the monster. We were a bit lucky, insofar as the monster had yet to find a way to add a hominus mind to its collective... but it hadn't stopped trying. That was the reason for the failsafe devices, machines that I hated as much as Naglfar itself.

Still... I knew the cost of Tristan's suggestion as well. The blood of a quarter million people on our hands, and that would just be the start; we didn't have accurate figures on the population of North Africa under Axumite rule, but it had to be at least fifteen million. In a best-case scenario, near-total achievement of our goals, ten to twenty percent of the civlian population would die in such an onslaught.

Yes, many in Rhodesia were awful people, who thrived on hatred and hypocrisy - but many were also simply their children, or those who had gone there because they had family there, or because nowhere else would take them. Many had fled the advance of Axum as it conquered North Africa, but that didn't mean those who remained there welcomed the invaders. I couldn't ignore any of that, even in those years.

"Well, now I know why you don't say this around Nina." I shrugged. I looked up at Tristan. "T, I get the plan. But don't just think about surviving the war. Think about surviving the world after it, that may well hunt us into extinction for that kind of genocide. Barring that, think about surviving your own conscience for the rest of your life. Could be centuries. It's a line I don't want to cross."

"They're all toast, no matter who pulls the trigger, old man." He seemed unperturbed. "You're really going to put your own conscience in front of stopping Axum? In front of another however many dozen of our kids-"

"Enough, T." Blake was moving to stand up, clenching his fists.

I put my hand on his forearm, stopping him and shaking my head. "Blake. I asked him. Sit down."

Tristan paused as Blake sat back down, then waited a few moments longer. "... Yeah, I did go a bit too far on that one." He took another drink. "But you get the idea. A lot of them are my kids too, you know."

"I know."

I'd lost fourteen of my own kids and two of my wives by that point... my youngest wives, now Lost Mothers. Every morning, I recited the names to myself, looking again through a small, old-school picture book I'd long since memorized. The knowledge of it weighed on me constantly, like a wet blanket thrown atop my mind. I constantly wondered what else I could have done, what I could have done differently to prevent each's loss.

It was no better for my sons. Tristan had lost four of his own children, and his brother Jacob. While we all suffered, Blake was perhaps the worst off; not a single one of his nine children from before the war's outbreak had survived. He hadn't told me directly, but I had it through Nina that he'd said he wouldn't father even one more until the last cell was dead.

It was the youngest ones, you see, who had the worst chances. Naglfar figured out, sometime early into WW4, the weakness of the hominus species - neurotoxins. Our mixed genetics blended from dozens of different animals made us vulnerable to a broader spectrum of them than humans. So it mass-produced them, coming up with designer cocktails of the stuff - usually encapsulated within armor-puncturing uranium shatter darts.

Our incredible abilities of self-control, down to the cellular level, enable us to neutralize poisons within our own bodies, within limits - but I'm sure readers both young and old can attest: reaching that level isn't easy. It's rare for any of us to have that skill mastered before our first century. Doing it under battlefield conditions is even harder. It's little wonder that the list of those who survived World Wars Four and Five is skewed so heavily toward those of us who were of age prior to their outbreak.

Tristan finished his thoughts. "This way keeps Osana and all the clowns here safe, and by extension keeps Axum from reaching Europe." He leaned back, frowning at my expression. "But if you don't like it - I get it. Not writing the future in blood, or whatever poetic bullshit Blake is-"

I held up a hand. "Be nice."

He only shrugged, but stopped. I turned to Blake. "So your thoughts, Sage Blake?"

He shrugged, taking a drink. "Don't call me that." He paused. "We definitely can't EMP the fuckers from on high?"

"Not at this stage." I shook my head. "It's not on our feeds, but the US internal reports have it on good authority that every key facility of theirs is heavily shielded or fiber-based - but most NATO stuff is too old to shield. It would hurt us more than them, and that's not even looking at the civilian cost."

"Okay..." He rolled his eyes.

I glanced at Tristan, who was giving him the same narrow-eyed stare, then wen t back to Blake. "Don't tell me you didn't already know that."

"I had a decent guess. I wasn't sure if it was that, or just the only people with enough EMPs want to hang onto them in case Axum tries to make it across the Atlantic."

I shrugged. "That might be a factor, but I think you're underestimating exactly how many bombs and missiles they like to make back home. Every flavor and variety."

He held a hand up. "Okay... then we don't have a lot of good options. Get NATO to put another half-dozen missile subs in the Mediterranean, and it would buy us another few years before it comes, but I think your mom is already on the ball with that." He nodded towards Tristan, who nodded back. "If that works - which they would be stupid to ignore, not at current force strength - then we've got... say four years."

He put his beer down. "The truth is - Tristan, there's no way in hell you're the only one who thought up your plan. There's probably a whole case file on it in the Pentagon, a few other places, where they've simmed through every possible scenario on it a hundred times. If we don't nuke or otherwise fry New Rhodesia in that situation, someone else will. It knows that. It won't lunge in on a single full-commit like we'd need."

"If you say so." Tristan shook his head. "Even if it's smart enough to know, can it even stop itself? Running the thing into traps was the most effective strategy we had for the entire war. Hunger is its only motivation. More harvest, more pods. On top of that - the stories we get from refugees now are the same as before. They haven't learned; the priests are just going to double down going into the next war. It's all they understand."

Blake waved a hand. "I still don't think the priests matter. They're just selling to the public what they're guessing the machine is going to do. You're confusing the network's hunger with stupidity."

Blake took another drink, then held up a finger. "It's plenty smart, it just can't see or think of anything past its desire to fill more pods. Everything else is just an obstacle to that, but over time it's gotten a lot smarter about how it approaches that goal. It's survived without an offensive thus far by eating the Axumite underclass, but that's not going to last much longer. I really doubt we'd get away with a nice, clean trap like that to wipe out the entire North African contingent. It's not going to lose another war; it does learn, we've seen it adapt."

"So what then?" I held out a hand.

"So Tristan has one thing right." Blake nodded to his brother. "Stay out and contain it, eventually hide when the time is right - and hope it doesn't find us, with no allies under our rock..." He paused, frowning. "... or go all in and burn the fucking thing to the ground."

He put his beer down, turning to me. "There's not going to be a silver bullet. There's no virus we can sneak into its systems or loophole in its program we can abuse. Mom's 'light, fast, surgical' doctrine isn't wrong exactly, but it's only going to piss the thing off long-term. If we can't nuke or EMP the holy shit out of it, and NATO isn't going to get off their ass, then we split up or hide in the Vault, hope that works... or we settle in for an even longer, uglier slog than the last war."

There was silence for a time. It had been what I was afraid of. Nina was still pushing for a series of targeted raids, surgical stuff to keep Naglfar from crossing the sea, but I had doubts it would do much. There were just so few of us, and I agreed that hiding all of us in the Vault was a horrible idea. Piling on the defenses at Osana alone would be even worse; any more here than we had, and the place would just become a bigger target.

Tristan nodded, holding up his beer, finishing it in a few final gulps, then looking between us. "Meeting adjourned?"

I took a long breath, then gave a shrug. Tristan mentioned something about wanting to bang Wren while she was here and headed downstairs, leaving Blake and I. An ocean breeze came through, warm but comfortable.

"Another?" I gestured to the case.

"Nah..." He waved a hand.

"Your mother tells me..." He was already rolling his eyes. "Hey. Your mother tells me you're sleeping alone most nights."

He was quiet for a while. "Do we have to? Now?"

I nodded. "We have to."

"It's..." He shrugged. "... something like an experiment, I guess. How long can I go?"

I shook my head. "You aren't even banging them when they come to sleep with you, are you." A sigh escaped; it had been what I feared. "Blake-"

"When I... lost interest for a while... I thought it would get harder to resist, you know, the urge - over time anyway. For the first few weeks, sure. It was almost mechanical, but my heart wasn't in it, so I just slept it off. But now? It's gotten easier every day." He turned to me, meeting my gaze. "If you're here to tell me it's actually about my daughters and I haven't dealt with it..." He shook his head. "... don't bother. It's not like I don't know."

I frowned. He'd had exactly two left after the war, both later lost to skirmishes and assassinations by suicide drones. None had been children, but all still young by any standard. Tasha, the last and his daughter by Claudia, had died only a few months before then. It had nearly broken him. I put a hand on his shoulder. "You know none of the girls here would even sneak another on you, right? You can trust everyone in the family."

"It's not that. I'm not worried about that." He went silent for a time. "I will, okay? Just... I've been spending time in the city. Going to different temples, madrassas, even a few of these bullshit hippie circle things about a Supreme Energy Being. Smoked some herbs of choice. Trying to find something. Anything." He paused. "Still haven't found shit. While we're on the subject, how'd you deal with, you know... Jacob."

I was silent myself for a time, then finished my own beer. "I still haven't either." I gave him an exaggerated shrug. "I don't have your answer, Blake. I'm not going to order you to go bang some girls or whatever either. Just... wanted to mention it. Hope I helped."

He shrugged. We sat for a while longer, maybe ten minutes, saying nothing; we just looked out over the sea through the forest of particle cannons and quench guns around us. Eventually we went downstairs, where most involved in the festivities were passed out naked in one place or another; we tossed a few blankets around, then he went back to his room and I found Emily and Nina again, each curled up against the others. They hadn't followed through on the whole of Nina's sexy little plan, but I could smell the salt water on them both and knew they'd made love in the sea and the shower after.

My sister and I went back to the city in the morning, meeting with Farhad again to go over their nerve wire scanners and some other defensive plans. We met with his trade ministers after, negotiating more electronics and building material shipments from our firms in Elysium, all critical. The rest could be handled by other people who lived in Osana full-time.

We left around midday for Geneva to oversee the new prion treatment package release; I don't know how much I really helped, but it helped me a lot to see something real being done, an unequivocal Good Thing being added to the world. There were so few of them we had to offer now, compared to back when we were building Elysium. I often wanted to laugh at my old self's naivete.

We were leaving Geneva when we got word of the raid on the Banana Boat. Three sub drone carriers, targeting us specifically, approached the Boat from all directions - raining poison death from all directions. The kids had scrambled, and put on a valiant defense.

The carriers were likely driven by pods near expiration - an easy way that Naglfar disposed of neural matter near the end of its usefulness, while eliminating some of us in the process. It had done this before, but not on the same scale, and had used some new kind of stealth tech we didn't know much about yet to get that close. The kids' defense was valiant. Many took shots in the process, but none died... except one.

Sheldon had charged out first, single-handedly destroying a carrier with only his bunker crash suit - but had taken too many hits. They got him back inside, but he only lasted another half-hour, even with six of us linked to help with the toxins. It was simply too much, and overwhelmed his heart. His mother had just landed in New York when she heard, and she was a wreck for months.

My daily list of names became one longer.