You have entered a Cage-type Multipersonnel Virtual Recording. The three interconnected headsets are primed for replay. Play memory now.

  March 15, 8076 CE

  Lothe could feel their heart drumming in their chest as their boots pounded against the dark steel floor. Sweat trickled down their face, pooling around their protruding chin and dripping off. The repetitive bee-wheep of the emergency alarm echoed throughout the long, winding corridor, jarring Lothe’s ears.

  “Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia, Gaia,” they muttered to themself, a prayer for survival. “Deliver me from harm, purge my enemies, deliver me from…”

  The Earth Mother was unfortunately too weak to aid Lothe at the moment, and they could hear the sounds of gunfire and screaming emanate from the deeper recesses of the corridor. The sounds jarred their memories of recent trauma.

  Abruptly, the corridor turned and a heavy metal blast-door lay in front of them. Lothe ran the fifty or so feet from the bend to the door and began to bang on it. Hopefully, Reccah or Leif were watching for survivors. Steeling themself, Lothe began to shout.

  “This is an emergency. YLD-4 has deviated from its intended programming. Instead of maintaining Outpost VI’s biosphere, it is attacking the colonists! Help!”

  A few seconds later, the door slid open, retracting into the walls. A thin masculine person with a scraggly red beard and long unkempt hair answered Lothe.

  “Lothe!” they called. “Good to see you alive.”

  “Same to you, Leif,” Lothe responded. “Where’s Reccah?”

  “Right here,” a mature feminine voice answered. Reccah’s popped around the corner. They wore the beige robes with red, blue and green stripes that denoted a Gaian priest. “Quick, get inside!”

  Without further ado, the three people entered the safe chamber. Lothe’s heart pounded in their chest like a sledgehammer on concrete, but now they could relax.

  “Where’s Chuck?” asked Reccah. Chuck was a junior mechanic who had been a good friend of Lothe and Reccah.

  Lothe winced. Chuck had been killed by the robots immediately after the beginning of the attack. “They didn’t make it,” Lothe sighed.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Reccah answered. A faint pang of sadness entered their face, but they knew that any devout Gaian would eventually be reincarnated.

  “Are we safe?” Lothe asked.

  “This chamber has a blessed EMP field surrounding it. YLD-4 can’t reach us here,” Leif said. Reccah beamed at that, clearly impressed with their own skill in combining technology and holy magic. This new expression dispelled at least some of the sadness.

  “Oh thank goodness,” Lothe sighed. Then, they started. “But that means that we can’t use our comms to get help…” he trailed off.

  “Not to worry. I sent a message before putting up the EMP field,” Reccah interjected. “It should make it to the portal in orbit around the Outpost, then the Gaian Empire can send ships and troops to destroy YLD-4.”

  “About that…” Leif winced. “The damned AI’s hijacked the spacecraft in orbit.” They were using blessed radar, the only electric device that could work in a blessed EMP field. “Now they’re crashing the ships into the portal.” They looked up, then looked back down. “Aaaaand it’s destroyed.”

  “Well, shit,” Reccah cursed. “Confound it all. Guess we have no way to get out of this.”

  “Nearest other portal-linked world is nearly 500 light-years away. Gonna be a loooooong half-dozen centuries before we get rescued,” Leif said. Their expression was more sour than it had been a couple minutes ago.

  Lothe sighed in defeat. They had just watched their colony be massacred by hijacked guard robots, down to the last adult and child. They were lucky - they happened to be walking near the entrance to the planet-spanning maintenance tunnels that the terraforming robots used to transport materials when the attack happened. They had initially been joined by Leif, the colony’s senior mechanic, and Reccah, the priest, but Lothe had taken a wrong turn and had a nasty run-in with a weaker guard robot. They had managed to shoot it before the robot could damage him, but it still had fired at them. They had encountered several other colonists, but they all had been massacred.

  They chuckled. The Old One had a cruel sense of humor sometimes. They had survived several encounters with the robots in miraculous fashion without even being injured, and had managed to get to safety. But help wouldn’t arrive for half a millennium. Even with the average life expectancy being over 300 years at the lowest, the safe chamber had a finite food supply - three years at most, if rationed. They had experienced only 103 years of life, and they didn’t fancy dying of hunger. The chambers were designed for terraforming maintenance workers to retreat to in case of an emergency, where they would be rescued within a few days at most. Nobody had anticipated that the main terraforming AI on Outpost VI would turn against its creators and slaughter them.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  They were silent for a good ten minutes, then Reccah spoke. “I’ve extended the EMP field to cover the terraforming tunnels in a thousand-mile radius around us. That should keep anything controlled by YLD-4 from further tampering with the planet’s structure.”

  “I don’t understand a word of what you just said,” Lothe responded. “I’m no scientist.”

  Reccah sighed. “In layman’s terms, I meant, ‘I made Gaia extend a big blessed bubble around us to protect the tunnels from the big bad robot’. There, do you want a bedtime story as well?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Lothe said. They turned their gaze to Leif, who had sat down on a plastic chair sized for a small child. They sagged uncomfortably in the chair, making their position almost like lying spread-eagle on the ground. Their lips were working in what probably was a prayer.

  Noticing Leif’s lips, Reccah asked, “How about we pray to the Earth Mother? We’re gonna die soon, we might as well make it so our stay in Purgatory is shortened and we get reincarnated faster.”

  Lothe and Leif nodded. Reccah smiled, then the three survivors opened their mouth. The prayer they spoke was familiar - the Gratitude of Gaia. Said at almost every prayer session in the entirety of Gaia-controlled human civilization, the lines were familiar on the trio’s tongues and hearts. They spoke it in Humantoungue, but variants of the prayer in Post-Ingles, Hispanite and Syndican were written as well.

  Gratitude of Gaia, Prayer no. 1 in the Section of Prayers in the Book of Gaia.

  Gaia loves us.

  Gaia loves us more than anything else in the cosmos.

  Gaia gave humanity, and humanity alone the strength to dominate the cosmos.

  Gaia gave us the ability to succeed.

  Thank you, Gaia.

  Thank you for blessing us with sustenance, happiness and beauty.

  Thank you for choosing humanity when we passed your trials.

  Thank you for staying with us in our darkest times.

  I love you, Gaia.

  I love you for protecting human and nature alike.

  I love you for helping to spread your will all throughout the cosmos.

  I love you for granting us the ability to do so.

  I am grateful for you, Gaia.

  I am grateful for your heavenly nation in Earth and Space.

  I am grateful for the nature you created, and the cosmos you allow me to see.

  I am grateful for you giving me the ability to redeem and love myself.

  Praise Gaia. Praise Gaia. Praise the Divine Earth Mother. Praise your blessings, and all you give us. Praise Gaia. Praise Gaia. Praise the Divine Earth Mother. Praise all we stand for.

  The prayer ended, sombering the mood. The weight of what had just happened crashed into Lothe like a truck. Everyone they knew was dead. Everyone. Even them, in a few years. They turned around, taking in the room for the first time.

  The safe chamber was a 50-foot square with a 10-foot ceiling. A large self-powering generator sat in the middle of the room, maintaining the EMP field and lamps that hung all over the dark metal ceiling. Metal crates containing food, water, medicine, blankets and a hundred other necessities were stacked high around the perimeter of the room, completely obscuring the wall. Lothe began to pace around the room, groaning with sheer anguish. They would spend the rest of their life in the chamber, powerless to stop his homeworld from being destroyed.

  “Wait,” Leif said after a few hours. They startled Lothe out of his moping.

  “What?” Lothe asked. “What could it possibly be?”

  “We should record the past few hours,” Leif suggested. “What if someone finds our remains?”

  “What would we have to tell?” Lothe asked. “When the spaceships get here and put down the robots, they’ll be able to gague what happened from other sources. Three colonists’ accounts will be like putting a syringe of water in an ocean.”

  “It can’t hurt,” Reccah said. “Also, one of the goals of the Gaia-faith is to record all knowledge and experience. We’ll do our part to ensure our time in Purgatory is short.”

  “You’re right,” Lothe said. “I’ll get the cage headsets.” They walked over to one of the boxes and withdrew three familiar-looking helmets. Often used in conjunction with cryo caskets, these devices accessed the virtual Infinet, which housed all the knowledge, communication and entertainment the species had accumulated in the five millennia since its invention. The headsets were so advanced that they could even record memory.

  “Let’s record it from the beginning of the robot attack,” Reccah said.

  “Good plan,” Leif said. They donned the headset and immediately sunk to the ground, unconsciously uploading their mind. Reccah did the same, and finally did Lothe. As they lost consciousness, they prepared to record their memories - all the pain, sorrow and grief the past few hours had brought. The last thing they felt as their world faded to black was sheer hopelesness. Even if they recorded their memories, who would find them?