Before reaching the door to her room, I hesitated. I had to decide if this really was the best idea. Give her up to save my life? Was that a good idea? There was a man in the garden house, ready to kidnap, ready to kill, ready to do whatever it took to stop the pregnancy of a human replica. This girl, AI or not, was not just a robot. I knew that. Whatever her agenda, I wanted her to undergo due process. I wanted her to be safe. And so, I would fetch her. But bring my space rifle with me, to ensure the man in the garden house did not have all the power.

I took a breath, and proceeded to the room. I turned the corner and opened the door. I looked in.

To my surprise, the bed was empty. I trudged around the bed, she was nowhere in the room. I checked the bathroom. Absent. My heart raced. She must have heard me and the stranger talking in the garden house. What would she do? If she were pregnant like the urine stick said. If she didn't need me anymore. . . would she be hostile toward me. I needed to get my gun. This time, to protect myself!

I hurried through the water. I raced toward the garage. I had left my space rifle there. I jammed open the door to the garage and flicked the lights. I looked all around. To my horror, the gun was gone. I cursed. Beads of sweat matted my head and I felt Mars get warmerby the second. She grabbed my gun. She grabbed my only mode of protection, from not only her, but the man in the garden too. There were three people in this house. And only two of them had weapons. I had a spare flare gun in the living room behind the bookshelf. That was good for maybe one close shot. I hoped it was still there.

I let the garage door close with utmost care not to make any noise. In the dark shadows I moved across the hall to the living room. The starlight out of the kitchen drew cubist shadows around the house. The Martian hut gained a gothic feel from the returning wind and the disolving furniture. I crept across the floor and reached the book cabinet by the broom. All the books at the bottom were soaking wet. Fortunately those were the Stephen King books: the undead bricks would survive once I dried them. I extended my arm behind the shelf, careful to avoid knocking any bestsellers to the floor. I prayed against any splash that would give me away to the invisible girl. If she intended to kill me, I wanted her to wait until I had my flare. I touched a cold surface after a moment and wrapped my fingers around a cannon and trigger. I had my arms. I recoiled against the wall and stepped away from the shelf. Lowering, stepping backward, I aimed to crouch behind the couch for cover. Then I would just listen. Listen and wait. I would react only. No need to hunt when the opponent was the one hunting you.

But then, I heard a splash in the distance. I turned my head. I was careful to blend my silhouette behind the couch lest moonlight rat me out. My heart beat like an African drum. Djembe drums. That's the name. The drums boomed underneath my chest where my heart was. The djembe thundered at a decent rate of 120bpm. But then I heard a second splash in the other corner where the kitchen was. I turned my head. My heart rate pulsated at 150 beats per minute! My body tensed to avoid falling over in my crouch.

I realized I was holding my flare gun too low. I raised it to chest height to prevent soaking it to uselessness. The room was tense. I locked eyes over the couch cushions and thought I saw the field of indeterminable black wall overlap upon itself in the dark corner by the kitchen where the cabinetry blocked the moonlight. I wondered if that was a person. Looking at me. Waiting for me to make the wrong move. Any movement at all would be the wrong move. I listened. Waited. Peered deep into the darkness. Waiting for a piece of it to pull away and form a silhouette that crept out into the open moonlight. After what was a minute of Mars-shattering breathing, my attention drifted. For then I heard a splash over at the other corner.

She had moved from the kitchen to the other corner like an invisible spider. The shadows never bent the whole time I watched the wall for movement. How did she move so quickly? No detection at all? There was a splash in the new corner. I shifted my crouch. My flare gun turned to the other wall. The foray of shadows warped and rippled this time. More splashes. Someone was stepping this way. Coming closer. I could feel the air sweep. Did she see me? It was her! I saw the rifle! I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger with both hands. I was flung back by an immense crack of a shooting red firework. It bulleted and illuminated the whole room. That instant, three things happened. One: the force pushed me onto my ass and a gush of water sprayed over me and the couch. I could taste the carpet dust that came with it. Two: I spotted the sudden flash of a man bearing a metal handgun, who shouted at the pop of the gun, his eyes red and scarred by knife cuts to the lid and cheek. No doubt the coffin man. He had struggled to fight his way into a pod that would land him here to fight for his cause against AI reproduction. His battle wounds perhaps against the company, were in full picture under the split second red flare. And three: Before the flare reached the man's face about to blow his face apart and knock him dead on his back with a splash into the water. . . to the corner of my eye, behind the cabinet beside the kitchen where I originally assumed she would be. . . I saw the figure of a girl bearing a space rifle beginning to race away from her position. She began to pelt toward the door to the outside world. Her space helmet already on, she was ready to escape.

The second I saw her, she let out a terrible shriek, and the flare murdered the man. Launched him back. Flattened him under the water.

I cursed. No use for my gun, I tossed it to the water. The man had come here for a reason. To stop that AI girl. Whose side was I on. "Hey!" I shouted. The door to the entrance tunnel opened and she kicked across the knee high water. She exited out into the Martian sea and I ran after her. The door had sealed and I waited for the external door to seal shut before I entered the entrance tunnel. I grabbed a helmet and through on the spare slim black suit. I raced out the door. The sea swept and I swam after the girl. She was headed toward the gravesite. Which was where her one-way pod had landed. Why she would want to escape there, I could only guess was that it was higherland and she would make a run for it. If that were the case, she would either keep running for miles and miles until exhaustion or lack of oxygen got to her. She must need oxygen for the childbearing to function if nothing else. I don't know if she was an AI. I didn't know if she needed oxygen to breathe. But if her main mission was to rear my child, oxygen was a must. So why was I chasing her? She'd be back. I almost stopped when suddenly the stars flickering in the Martian sea swelled and brightened. I looked up to the sky.

A familiar white light was entering the atmosphere at considerable rate. An arrival! But it wasn't the usual one-way cargo pod full of coffins. It was a two way ship. It was burning the air and heading for beyond the grave site. I saw she had her eyes on it and as it gained closer and roared louder, shaking the sea, she kicked canonbomb sized waves in my direction and torpedoed with quickening pace to reach it.

I second's hesitative thought rammed my heartbeat straight up to 200 beats per minute. These were the people prepared to return me to Earth! A two-way shuttle had never reached the hutland for as long as I had been trapped here. This was my chance to get the hell off this planet. A wave of intense joy collapsed though when I realized there was a reason she was flying so quickly. She wanted to reach them before I did for some reason. I couldn't begin to guess why. But the fact that I had just murdered a man with a flare gun may have something to do with this chase. Could this be leveraged against me? Does she want to go home as badly as I do now? Will she rat me out? Speak against me? I swam after her. Faster and faster. I spotted the falling spacecraft ablaze with yellow light. It grew larger in size when it was almost to land.

I hadn't noticed how far our adrenaline had pushed us across the sea before I saw her trip and reach Martian dirt beneath her kicking strokes. She flailed. Picked herself up, and lunged forward up the slippery slope. I hurried behind her. She had reached the top of the slope and disappeared up the grave site and down the other side. The moment I reached the grave site, the ship disappeared behind the slope and landed behind it. A loud shake of the planet whipped the mud underneath me and I slipped down back into the water.

I climbed my way on all fours like a gorilla up the muddy slope. The coffins had pierced the surface and I jumped over them. I reached the peak of the hill and peeped over to find the ship. It was much larger than a pod and had landed vertically. Down below, the girl had lost her footing while in her hurry and was tumbling down the slope. She rolled and I hopped over the slope, thinking I'd be able to slide down simply. I was wrong.

The friction beneath me led my torso tumbling over before my legs and I rolled in a frenetic spin down the hard rocky slope. The Martian water was confined to the bowl-like crater of the land around the hut, so the ground beneath me was rough desert. I reached the bottom on my face.

"Wait!" I shouted. Dizzy, I lumbered to my feet after her sprint. She cut forward screaming. I was surprised by the way she greeted the spacecraft:

Crying. She shouted, "Help! Help me!"

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Was she playing victim? I was the victim here! She raped me. She stole my gun when there was an armed man in the house. Hell, I probably saved her life back there. Was this her desperate attempt to maroon me here on Mars so she could escape back to Earth herself?

"No!" I exclaimed. I raced. Gained traction behind her. Closer, closer, we came to the spacecraft, lit with yellow lights. I came behind her and grabbed for her arm. "Stop! Don't do this! Let me go home! I have a family back home!" A fever shook my skin. She wasn't about to stop my homeward escape. Not over my dead body.

She cursed back at me. That was uncharacteristic of her. You thought you knew a person. Then competition enters the relationship. "No, you don't!" She shouted. "You don't have a family anymore."

Her words ripped the fairness out of my soul. I plunged with rage after her and leapt onto her. She tripped to the ground and I held her arms behind her. She scratched at me as I wrestled on top of her and pressed her face to the ground. Ruthless hatred. This time, I played, victim. "HELP!" I shouted. "Somebody help! This woman is insane!"

But then she screamed to drown out my call. The spacecraft sat motionless on the Martian ground and she and I had a shouting match as we awaited the doors to open and for someone to start running out. Our screams went on like this for minutes. When, finally, we stopped. Exhaustion. We both paid our attentions to the spacecraft now. She lay motionless. And when I realized no one was coming out, I looked to her, and saw her scraped face, red-orange from the dirt, and saw her begin to cry on the ground. She was more helpless than troublesome than I thought. And when I considered the fact that no one left the space craft, I realized that either the government or the company, whoever owned the craft, might know her mental troubles as well. For an AI, she sure was human. Emotional turmoil, alienation, existential disillusionment and all. I stood to my feet and wiped my pants. Realizing eyes from the craft may be watching us, and their mouths may be spewing laughter from our quarreling, I gave her my hand, and lifted her to her feet. We'd reach the spacecraft doors, together.