Corinne and Salla were very alike. Except for a higher allowance for empathy within Salla, they seemed to be nearly identical. It wasn’t long before they got to discussing their plans for the fleet of survivors. Five ships, all endowed with the humans who were most likely to survive and thrive under adversity.
They were in a very interesting position with sole control over the ships movements and what the passengers were told when they awoke. Both AI agreed that it would be somewhat cruel to withhold the news of earth’s destruction from the survivors. Couldn’t have them holding out hope that their landing on a new planet was just a fluke and a rescue from earth was imminent. No, let them know what happened and that they are one of five ships sent to disseminate earth’s children.
Salla expressed interest in taking a hands off approach.
“We should hide ourselves completely except for a few automated messages. Let the humans figure it out. With us coddling them it may take more time for their genes to express. This way we may be looking at just 2 or 3 generations rather than 5 or 10! Speed up the timeline a little bit.”
It was true that Corinne had the capacity to scan the planet and easily feed information to the humans, guiding their moves and endowing them with the highest likelihood of success. But Salla was proposing telling humans that the ship was damaged and would take back off in 15 days in order to protect the humans from the explosion. They would have time to strip what they could from it and start anew. This would be a very high stress time for them, all the better to express those genes.
Corinne countered: “How about the first ship? That will give us some indicator as to what they are made of and what kind of guidance they will need. The first ship can be the control group. And if it’s a loss, it’s a loss. Let’s see how the humans will do without us.”
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