“Neanderthal. The Denisovan hominins. Homo naledi. Homo floresiensis. Homo luzonensis. This isn’t a list of our ancestors: it’s a list of the toolmaking, culture-bearing species of humans we wiped out. Everywhere we have encountered someone we could communicate with, someone we could learn from, share this planet with, we have murdered them. We could have learned from them, grown with them, cooperated. But instead we bashed their skulls in, stabbed them to death, drove them out of the fertile lands into deserts, where they starved.”

“The evidence of that is inconclusive,” Ha said.

“The evidence is clear enough. We can only guess at the massacres we committed as a species before history, in the great dark backward before we could record our lives—but we know well enough what has happened in more recent times. We have plenty of evidence of that. What we cannot assimilate, we destroy. Look what they tried to do to my Evrim! Do you know how many assassination plots DIANIMA had to foil to keep Evrim safe? How many times someone tried to kill them—with a bomb, a gun, a drone? I had to hide Evrim here to save them.”

“Save me?” Evrim stood up. “Save me? What for? You don’t even think I am really alive!”

“That stupid interview. That ridiculous stunt,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “I had to build a wall of lies about you, Evrim, to protect you from the world. From humans. The ones who gunned down our coworkers in Moscow. The ones who bombed our offices in Paris, who blew our vice president’s brains out. Yes—I know what humans do. Yes. I am sure of what humans have done, every time we have encountered another conscious species, or even a culture different from our own. We hate rivals. Competitors. Every time one has emerged, we have destroyed them. I know very well, Ha, what will happen when this ‘soap bubble,’ as you put it—this delicate membrane I have managed to build around this precious place—is punctured. And that is why I am here—because we are running out of time.”

Running out of time for you to scrape the data you need from them.

“Yes,” Evrim said. “We have been running out of time since the moment this discovery was made. But that’s—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “I’m not speaking metaphorically, about some human tendency or the way of the world. I mean the destruction of this place has already begun. DIANIMA itself is in trouble. They couldn’t take the archipelago from us, so instead they will take us.”

Altantsetseg looked out the window. As if seeing something on the horizon, bearing down on us. Something none of her sophisticated weapons systems can stop, Ha thought.

“A hostile takeover,” Altantsetseg said.

“That’s right,” Mínervudóttir-Chan answered.

“By whom?”