I awaken the next morning with Eve snuggled next me, soft rays of the sun beaming down on us through the skylight, which is tinted to keep the room from overheating and to help us sleep in as late as we want. We've been through a lot, but last night was the best night of my life, no doubt. It marks the beginning of something special between Eve and I. Even though I know we had been intimate physically in the past, our pool encounter felt like the first time, ever. It makes me want to retrieve the transmitters Abraham sent down to us in the pod. Eve doesn't want to download the memories of our past life together, but after last night, I want to know more about our relationship. I want to get to know her better, which makes sense to me.

I don't know how early it is, but judging by the sun's angle in the sky, I'd say it's shy of mid-morning. Carefully, I slide out from under the covers and leave Eve sleeping peacefully. Last night she reminded me of a lovely mermaid and now, before I shut the door, she makes me think of an angel, one who came down from the heavens, from a space ark.

In the common area, I whisper to Jinx. "I'd like to get the transmitters."

"What about Eve?" he asks.

"I think I'll let her sleep. She had a rough day yesterday." As I talk, I make my way past the lab rooms, Jinx's voice following me, switching to different speakers in the ceiling as we move.

"As you wish," he says. "I suppose it's no harm in letting her sleep."

In the Animal Barn, the drone emerges from the storage room, floating on jets of air, buzzing beside me down the main hall between the empty enclosures. We take a right, cross over the catwalk and the shallow stream in the canal beneath my feet.

"I see you started work on our artificial creek," I say. "Any fish in there yet?"

The screen on the face of Jinx's drone dances with blue waves. "I started the fish egg fertilization, but will need you and Eve to transport the eggs to a slow-moving location in the canal. There is such a place beneath the catwalks on the habitat's port side, near the exit corridor."

We reach the sliding doorway. "So right here is where the fish eggs need to be deposited?"

"That is correct."

Jinx had distracted me with the talk of fish, but as we enter the rear-facing corridor leading to the airlock exit, my pulse increases and I feel a tightness in my chest and throat. It's hard to breathe. I know it's anxiety, so I push it down, but it doesn't go away.

"Jinx, do you have any weapons?"

"I have shock wave percussion rounds and grenades."

"I'm glad to hear we'll have protection," I say as we approach the airlock door. "What about the code?"

"Remotely, I can unlock this passage, but I can't reveal the passcode." Jinx hovers next to me. "I must accompany you anytime you wish to leave the habitat."

Of course, we can jump in the river if we want to leave on our own. Although, we'll have to be sneaky about it to keep Jinx from closing the retractable floor before we escape.

"I understand about the passcode," I say as the inner airlock door opens. "Back to the percussion rounds and grenades. How do they work?"

"Energized air encapsulations. The fifty caliber rounds stun and the grenades incapacitate temporarily." As I follow the drone along the river's southern bank toward the west, Jinx continues his explanation. "Using protons and electrons, I create an electrical charge, forcing the current into the shape of a sphere. Then I launch the ball of energized air at the target. The result is like a mini lightning bolt in each fifty caliber round. The electrical current doesn't enter the body, but discharges into the air, blasting the target with a super-focused shock wave. Quite efficient to stun any creature. The grenades impact with a greater charge, entering the body of the target, able to knock a rhino-bear, as you call them, unconscious in most cases."

"What would it do to me?" I chuckle.

"Stop your heart, possibly electrocute it beyond repair."

I crane my neck at the drone. "Make sure you aim your percussion rounds and grenades away from me, please."

"Of course, I would do nothing to threaten the survival of humanity."

I'm thrilled about that, but I'd prefer he cared more for me, personally.

As we leave the habitat behind, Jinx tells me the pod sent by Abraham landed one-point-seven miles to the west, and a quarter mile south of the river. We could take a direct path to the impact site, but he explains it's safer to steer clear of the forest for as long as possible. That's the natural habitat of the vile bears, and we shouldn't encroach their territory. Considering our past encounters with the ferocious creatures, I don't challenge him.

To my right, the river rushes beside us, the current crashing in my ears, almost drowning out Jinx's voice as we push onward. Over a mile into our journey, the bank bends to the south and so do we.

Jinx explains the pod is half a mile away.

"I would think Abraham could have picked a landing spot a little closer to the habitat," I say.

"It was too risky. Bringing an uncontrolled pod down to Earth is not as precise as you might think, but doing so within a two-mile window is quite skilled. He had to launch it at the right moment."

I glance at Jinx. "If only you could have done the same with the habitat."

Still in motion, he angles toward me, the blue waves wobbling on his video screen. "I'll have you know the habitat is a much larger object. Even though it has thrusters, it was not a simple task to land it, decelerating from seventeen thousand, five hundred miles an hour."

I huff. "Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you."

"No offense taken."

Though it didn't sound like he took my statement well.

"We're almost at the impact spot." Jinx swivels back inland, away from me. "I have yet to detect any vile bears. Fortunately for us, they've yet to awake from sleep." The drone halts, hovering in a clearing, spanning from the riverbank all the way to the tree line, a distance of one hundred yards. "There it is."

In the center of a field, the pod lies in the bottom of a twenty-foot diameter crater, six-feet deep in the middle, smoldering. Black soot covers the exposed dirt, the smell of burnt grass sizzling in the air. 

Jinx lowers one of his arms, inserts a star-shaped tool into a panel on the pod, removes it, and then tells me to extract a small white case from a hollow chamber. The case is larger than my hand, twice as thick. After depositing it in a rear compartment of the drone, we set off for our return trip to the habitat.

Back at the river's bend, heading east, I say, "That was easy enough."

"Eve is awake," he says, as if he knows I should have woken her up before I left. He must know she doesn't want to download the memories from our past lives.

"She is?" Alarm rises in my throat. "Oh, good."

Jitters fill my stomach.

"I sense an elevated heart rate," Jinx says. "You must think Eve will be angry with you since you left without telling her."

"You're very perceptive."

"I'm a highly advanced form of artificial intelligence. I sense and know more than you think."

I glare at Jinx. "I can see that."

In the next thirty minutes, I hike the distance back to the habitat. My jitters turn to dread, especially considering the progress Eve and I made last night. At the airlock, Jinx opens the door and we enter. Once we arrive at the Animal Barn, he parks the drone back in the storage room. I creep past the lab rooms and cross the threshold into the common room...

"Where have you been?" Eve's voice rings out from the far corner of the room where she sits with her back turned in front of a desk at the computer terminal. Her tone suggests a subtle trace of irritation.

"We went to the impact site of the pod," I say.

"I thought we agreed we would not use the transmitters." She twists her neck toward me, her brow arched.

"Did we?" I just wanted to remember everything about our lives before the global flood.

"While you were out—after I woke up—I searched the computer archives myself. Remember, we were going to do that together? I found a ton of information about artificial insemination, embryos, human and animal alike. I discovered how we can grow the fetuses in artificial wombs. We can fill the enclosures with animals and raise a village of children... without what we did last night."

Her eyes glare at me with the hint of a threat.

"I didn't mean to do anything against your will, Eve," I say. "I just went to retrieve the transmitters in case we changed our minds. Here they are." I hold out the small white case, a peace offering.

"Of course," she continues, "what interests me more than the files I could access are all the files I couldn't. Marked restricted. Access denied."

"What's she talking about, Jinx? I thought Abraham granted us access to everything."

"I'm sorry, Noah. You must have misunderstood," he says from a speaker up above. "There are some things you don't need to know. It's better that way."