Now this was my own summary but I thought it was accurate.

“I see,” he said, “and how are you going to punish me and reduce Earth to primal rocks and boiling water?”

“Through a great explosion,” I said. “We are to detonate it, causing Atalantaya to catch fire and explode, and from our disintegrating bodies will come a toxin, a plague that will kill all complex life-forms. The Parents assumed there were stores of explosive materials on the island of Atalantaya. They said that when we detonated, the explosion would detonate those stores.”

“And you believe that these powerful explosive materials are in your bodies?” he asked. “That the toxin is in your bodies?”

“This is what they told us. They told us to come here, get inside the dome, get an audience with you, and then detonate. As I’ve explained, they did allow that if we could persuade you to come out of the dome and talk to them, that maybe this disaster could be averted. But frankly, I’m not sure they were telling the truth with this. They assume that you won’t leave the protection of the dome, and they have emphasized that we were created for this one purpose—destroying you and life on Earth as it is now—and they expect us to fulfill this purpose.”

He fell silent. He appeared to be brooding. And overall, he gave the impression of an emotional and sensitive being, not any sort of cool or detached genius. In fact, throughout this conversation he was seeming more like Derek than any other one among us. He was seeming hot blooded and distinctly mammalian. I couldn’t help but wonder about the mixture of elements given him by the Parents.

Suddenly he rose to his feet and motioned for us to follow him. “I want to show you something,” he said. And when we were all facing the inner wall to the left side of the entrance of the room he made a motion which caused the wall to light up, revealing four strange images. I recognized them immediately as images of us which appeared to show our exterior features and interior features. I could tell this by the outlines, the hair, the female morphology and the male morphology but the images were not pictures so much as vibrant and alive color paintings which showed a complex network of veins or threads all through the interior of our bodies, and small innumerable organs, perhaps, which I couldn’t recognize as human. The tiny organs were threaded all through our torsos and our limbs. In some places the weblike circuitry of veins and threads was much denser—in our hands, in our feet, in our necks, and in our heads.

Now understand. We all had a rough idea of what composed a human being. We knew this from the information implanted in us: we knew humans like all mammals had hearts, lungs, reproductive organs, circulatory systems, brains, eyes, et cetera.