The Destroyer

Chapter Seven

The distant past

Laszlo was now living at the research facility full time. Lately, the conditions were so bad and unpredictable that workers were lucky to get into work three times per week. Sometimes the dust storms hit when people were trying to go back home and people had to stay in the city overnight. Like refugees, people were camped out in the parks and lobbies of public buildings. Or, if they had planned ahead and had the money, they were staying at hotels.

Laszlo's parents had made it to the city on this particular morning, leaving early to give themselves time to come visit Laszlo before going to work.  He was happy to see them. Yet he didn't miss home anymore.  He had his best friend here at the research facility and had even made some new friends, including girls! The food was good and he could play outside whenever he wasn't in classes or doing lab tests. Sometimes he felt bad for not missing home, but the guilt was short lived as he was soon off on some new adventure in the big city.

No one saw the old lady anymore. Lola. Rumor was that she was now just a ghost living in the machine, which was creepy because Laszlo had to talk to her every few days. She was like the sweet grandmother he never had, always making sure he was well cared for.  "Laszlo, do you remember talking to me yesterday about the Martians and what they found on Mars down in the caves?"

"No, I don't remember."

A few minutes later, after discussing some other unrelated things about his classes and his friends, Lola once again came back to the same subject. "Laszlo, do you remember talking to me yesterday about the Martians and what they found on Mars down in the caves?"

"Oh yah. That was cool. You said the Martians were like so small and weak, but they were really smart. And people now think that we came from the Martians. Maybe everything that's alive came from Mars. Is that true."

"Maybe it is. That's one idea. It has to be proven."

Lola had had the conversation about Mars a day earlier with Laszlo's online instance. Laszlo had not been recalibrated with his online instance since that time. Then during the course of his live conversation, the recalibration took place and then he recalled the meeting from a day earlier. It was a routine exercise the researchers did every week, with all subjects, to make sure that everything was accurately retained and shared. In the latest revision of software, there had never been a flaw detected so far.

The beauty of the online instance was for the young Laszlo, and any other students that were still learning and growing, the rate of educational development. The online instance was in school all the time and never grew tired. It resulted in an astounding  rate of academic progress.  Lola figured that the loss of biology wasn't so bad after all, especially for an old woman who already had a lifetime of human sensory input, mostly on an earth that was still livable. And eventually we will have more sophisticated vision systems and robotics and all kinds of great sensory input. It was a massive parallel engineering effort to enhance all of these technologies to complement a human race that was to be otherwise confined to a universe of bits and bytes.

But Lola soon had a new premonition. There was no confusion this time about whether it was just her vivid imagination. Despite here online existence, she literally experienced chills running up and down her spine. That was a nice sensation in itself, but it was caused by a very unsettling realization. Before Mother Earth phases out humanity within her domain, an unwanted visitor will come and make the end of mankind sudden and final, and leave Mother Earth badly scarred in the process. Lola saw a gamma ray burst (GRB) on its way. Not only did she have a sense that it was coming but she saw its direction, its distance and its intensity and duration. From that information, she quickly calculated when it would occur and also which part of the earth's surface would receive this unmerciful and unstoppable pounding of high energy light waves.