The Earth was dying. It had started long before the fall of Eureka, Alexander Gromov had known this truth for almost his entire life. While others had remained oblivious, he had made preparations. He had learned, studied, something, anything to prevent the seemingly inevitable end of humanity. He knew from the start, he was on his own. Nobody else seemed to realize or to care. Whatever his solution would be, he would have to sugarcoat it for the fools, make it look like some new glittering toy. Something so entertaining or useful, that nobody would be able to refuse it.
When had he first thought about the possibility to save human memories on a computer like all the e-books he was used to read? When had he decided, that if it wasn't possible to save humans as a species, he would simply save their souls by storing them for all eternity?
In the end, he had been so close to his goal, that he wasn't able to notice anything else anymore.
The signs had been there. All the test subjects, being reduced to gibbering idiots without signal. The unexplainable 1%, people who's minds turned out to be incompartible to the system, for no apparent reason. The errors and glitches in the programming, always occuring, when seemingly nobody was around to cause them. Gromov had spent his whole time working around the problems, but he hadn't searched for the source. More transmittertowers, higher security, psychological treatment for the 1% or even constant surveilance for the obvious troublemakers among them.
And in the end a single cup of tea had meant the difference.
Had the ANNET shown its true face then, for the very first time? Had she, Annie constantly been deceiving him?
It was useless to think about all that right now. Strange how such things tended to surface, how the whole past seemed to roll like a movie in your head, when you were facing death. During the last weeks, this had happened at an alarming rate. Gromov wondered how Snippy was actually coping with that. Currently the former tour guide was running close behind him, once in a while turning around and firing a shot at those things that had been chasing them for the last ten minutes. The engineer didn't know what the future would bring and in the moment a place with a door he could lock from the inside, was all he was wishing for.