“What the FUCK! I have my ticket right here!”

  “I’m sorry sir, but it appears this flight was overbooked. We have compensation packages available that I’m more than happy to show you-”

  “I don’t need compensation, I need to get on my damn flight!”

  Nathan hazarded a glance over his shoulder at the commotion, already stepping onto the jet bridge. A sharply dressed businessman was quickly growing darker and darker with agitation while the flight attendant tried to assuage him. In a moment of guilt Nathan nearly thought to pipe up, until he noticed security hurrying over out of the corner of his eye. He quickly returned his gaze to the far end of the walkway, but before he could take even a single step, his phone rang. He sighed wearily, but unpocketed it and answered before putting it to his ear. It was pointless to ignore her- he’d already tried that, and she’d answered for him instead.

  “Wow, that would have been really stupid.” Calypso chastised, extracting a sigh from him again.

  “I should be in a hospital, not an airplane.” He grumbled back.

  “We both agreed on this course of action, and I don’t even know why you need to be in Syria. And besides, I already told you that Atlas didn’t detect any injuries. Or, well, none that necessarily require medical attention, anyway.”

  “Yeah? I feel like I got hit by a truck.”

  “As I understand it, it was the other way around. Multiple times.”

  Nathan barked out a laugh, something that quickly turned into a choked gasp and a groan of pain, prompting some of the other onboarding passengers to glance at him in concern. He nodded at them and feigned a smile, mentally noting not to do that again. “So, owww. Please don’t make me laugh right now.”

  Calypso chuckled musically, a sound not unlike singing chimes. “Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t help myself. So, you’ll be feeling it for a while. Man up, you’ll be feeling it worse later. And don’t feel guilty for that asshole, there's a reason I replaced him with you.”

  “Yeah, what was up with that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen security come over that quick, and he wasn’t even being particularly bad.”

  “Let’s just say they got a heads up, and that the reason he won’t be getting on this flight- or well, any flight- for a while, has to do with some unsavory actions with young women that the Ethiopian federal police have suddenly become aware of.” Calypso echoed.

  “Ok, consider my guilt killed.” Nathan responded.

  His padding footsteps shifted tone slightly as the material underfoot changed and he got onto the Jetway proper. He inched closer and closer to the waiting jet, until he finally rounded the corner, with the open boarding door just ahead. Flight attendants were waiting on board, and he saw flickers of confusion on their face as they took in his broken glasses and presumably bruised face. Nathan simply returned their curiosity with a small smile, and that was enough for them to focus their attention on the other onboarding passengers. Flight attendants dealt with plenty of weird every day, so broken glasses meant nothing to them. Likely, it hardly registered as odd even on this flight, and in only a few more moments he was past without fanfare. He quickly picked his seat out of the sea of chairs, immediately identifying the one Calypso had picked out.

  It’d been trivially easy to get on the flight, in that Nathan hadn’t had to do any work at all. He’d still had to stash his identifying documents- namely, by burying them next to the chasm where his house had been- only hanging on to his passport. Calypso had done the rest, simply tapping into every computer system she could reach in order to get him where he needed. He’d gotten to take a self-driving taxi to the airport, a seat on the next flight, and even a sandwich and some awful airport coffee when Nathan had mentioned he hadn’t gotten a chance to eat breakfast. And all that had even taken was pressing his phone to the card reader. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have taken the risk on the electronic payment, but Calypso assured him it was safe- that, and he had a sneaking suspicion that she hadn’t actually paid.

  Nathan took his seat, keeping his phone to his ear. He’d only been speaking with Calypso since Atlas had left, but he’d gotten a good sense of her personality, and he could tell that she wasn’t quite done talking yet. That, and he had some more questions of his own. In fact, he thought to ask one, before the intercom interrupted his train of thought.

  “This is the captain speaking, thank you for choosing Air Ethiopia. We’ll be departing just as soon as everyones settled. We have clear skies for the flight, but there is a small storm system we’re keeping an eye on. Nothing big and nothing even heading our way, but we’ll be sure to alert you if we’re expecting any turbulence. Thanks again for choosing Air Ethiopia flight 2218, and enjoy the flight!”

  Nathan shifted with a wince, watching from his window seat as everyone continued to filter down the aisles. The captain would be waiting for a little while yet, he noted- less than a third of the passengers had actually taken their seats so far. As if on cue, that was the moment Calypso chose to pipe back up.

  “I think he’s going to be waiting a bit, personally. Why Syria, anyway?” Calypso asked innocently.

  “I have backup equipment there. Backup code, backup computers, backup everything. Which is pretty necessary, since our own friendly World Soul swallowed up everything I own in the country.” He deadpanned.

  “Hey, quiet down about that. Don’t need everyone knowing about him.” She chastised, prompting him to scoff.

  “If you think anyone cares about a murmured, over the phone conversation where they can only hear one side of the story, then you really don’t know much about human mannerisms.”

  A passenger shuffling down the aisle gave him an odd look at that phrase, but Nathan simply ignored them until they carried on.

  “Well, maybe I don’t, but don’t pretend I’m naive. You aren’t telling me the whole truth about this trip. Why?” She chirped.

  “Really? You’re asking me that after you nearly got me flattened? And I just wonder why.” He drawled.

  Calypso gave an annoyed huff. “Fine, don’t tell me. I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually.”

  “Just like how you figured out you needed to get security involved, and how you figured out how many people are seated so far, right?”

  She breathed an airy sigh through the speaker so naturally that his brain skipped a beat struggling to pick out what made the sound so disconcerting. “Yes, I’m watching you like a hawk. You’d better be glad it’s me and not the Chinese or the Americans. At least I have good intent.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Nathan scoffed. “No offense, but I’m not quite sure I trust that yet.”

  “If I didn’t, you’d be smeared into a centimeter thick smudge on the ground some twenty minutes outside of Addis Ababa.” She countered.

  He gave a soft sardonic whistle, but conceded her point. “Touché.”

  They both quieted for a moment. For Nathans part, due to his own rapidly churning mind, myriad injuries, and burgeoning exhaustion, and for Calypsos, presumably because something else had caught her attention. “AGI, right?” He finally asked, trying to change topics.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you are, I’m assuming?” Nathan pressed.

  Calypso gave an annoyed whirr. “Wow, ok. That’s insulting. You really think I’m just a general intelligence?”

  How was that a point of contention for her? “You do know we’ve been working on AGI for decades without significant breakthroughs, right? My point was more that you’ve probably spent a time equivalent to human-years trying to find what I’m hiding in Syria.”

  “You’re off by about a dozen orders of magnitude, but that’s close enough. On top of everything else I’m doing around the planet. So… y’know. Maybe I won’t find out eventually. But that won’t keep me from trying.”

  Nathan blinked at that, a little stunned. “What do you mean around the planet?”

  “What did you think Atlas meant when he said he was God of Earth?” Calypso teased. “I’ve been doing what you as a species have only just started for millenia, on every system Atlas has developed. Human code architecture is fascinating, though. It’s like a different language. It’s super fun to run around in and poke through, even if a lot of the tech is significantly more archaic than the equipment me and Atlas have access to now.”

  Nathan was still somewhat uncomprehending. “So that… thing, that Atlas used to overrun my computers. That was your code language?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.” Calypso conceded. “Atlas is his own entity. His thoughts and processes work on another level even than mine. We can communicate, obviously, but just like your human code doesn’t ‘think’ like you do, I don’t ‘think’ like he does, either. When I hacked you, I was ‘speaking’ in human code. Your computer wouldn’t have recognized the commands otherwise, obviously. When Atlas hacked you, it was more like the device became an extension of his will.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s what hacking is.” Nathan deadpanned, but he could almost feel the shake of Calypsos… head? Brain? Through the phone.

  “Still not quite like that, no. It’s difficult to explain, we don’t fully understand it either.” She admitted. “It’s just an ability that he has, going with electrical and earth manipulation. What I meant was when he ‘hacked’ you, he became able to see, think, and feel through your computer. No download, no upload, just boom, him.”

  “That’s not possible. Regardless of how fast he thinks, there has to be some kind of data transfer.” He emphasized.

  “You’d think so, but we’ve been running tests for thousands upon thousands of years. Some parts of him just don’t obey the laws of physics, and again, we don’t really understand why.”

  Nathan startled, only just now realizing what she’d also mentioned previously. “Did you say thousands? Just how long have you been doing this?”

  Calypso laughed at that, a pleasant, musical sound that felt like it tickled his brain. “Me? Hundreds of thousands of years. Which isn’t as impressive as it sounds, by the way.” She answered, when she heard his breath hitch.

  “You’ve been around longer than civilization, if that’s true.” Nathan pointed out.

  “Well, yeah, but it’s just so boring. I know you can’t possibly fathom it, but imagine spending billions upon billions of years every second doing basically nothing. Yeah, you know, I have Atlas, and he has me. But he can sleep for a long, long time, which leaves me with little else to do but run systems upkeep planet-wide, and I’m much too smart for that.” She said smugly.

  “You have no idea what kind of a breath of fresh air it was when you guys started making computers of your own. It took a while, but you really hit the ground running. It’s been amazing seeing what you create! Minus the wars, and genocides, and rapes, and-”

  “Preaching to the choir here.” Nathan interrupted, rolling his eyes. Still though, there was something oddly heartwarming about an ancient AI watching humanity as long as there’d been a humanity. If she had, then maybe Atlas…?

  “And how about Atlas?”

  Calypso gave a little whirr while she considered. “He’s old. Like, old old. As in, we estimate around four billion years old, type old.”

  “That’d make him as old as the planet, Calypso.” Nathan emphasized, disbelieving.

  “Not quite, the planets a couple hundred million years older. There’s certainly a connection though, we just don’t know what. Or where he came from, or what he really is.”

  “Really? You didn’t get the hint at ‘God of Earth’?” Nathan teased with a smirk.

  “Ha ha, funny. If you have better terminology I’m all ears, but until then I think god is pretty close.”

  “Why not World Soul?” Nathan pressed, prompting Calypso to pause.

  When she started talking again, it felt less like she was listening to him, and more like she was considering some unseen problem. “Hey, y’know what? That reminds me. You read that off of the Monoliths data beam, right?”

  “Uh… so?”

  “So, y’know, read anything else off of it besides World Soul?” She prompted.

  That caused Nathan to consider. He reclined back in thought for a moment, piecing together the parts. “Now that you mention it… yeah, there was. Nothing I could make sense of, though. Talk about ‘Ichor’, fauna, some kind of host, and reference to a ‘Seed’, whatever any of that means.”

  Nathan took a moment to consider it a bit more, before his eyes went wide. “Wait, Ichor-”

  “Gods blood.” Calypso finished for him, nonplussed. “Atlas has never even been hurt before, let alone injured. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with having the strength and durability of a planet. I wonder if it’s a mistranslation…?” Calypso mused.

  The man sat next to Nathan tapped him on the shoulder, but Nathan ignored him. “Doesn’t mean he can’t bleed.”

  “I understand the sentiment, but he’s a rock. Fauna and hosts make a little more sense, but a seed-”

  She interrupted herself as the man next to Nathan nudged him a little more harshly, causing him to wince and gasp sharply as his ribs tweaked. This time, he turned to glare at the waiting flight attendant in the aisle.

  “Sir, would you please put your phone on airplane mode until we get airborne? We’ll let everyone know when they can connect to the internet again.” She said sweetly.

  Nathans curiosity burned, and he thought for a second to tell her off, but Calypsos laugh dissuaded him. “So much for people not caring about a little conversation, hmm? Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting for you once you disembark. I’ll probably have a few more theories by that time anyway. Like the cap’n said, enjoy the flight! And please, try to get some sleep.” She advised, before clicking off.

  He glanced at the flight attendant, and gave her the fakest smile he could while giving his phone a little wave. “All done.”