“By, uh … drones, I meant replacing the lunar astronauts with mining equipment that could be remotely operated back here on Earth. All that was needed to do the job was a supercomputer to operate the drones. The way my uncle figured it, if a computer could remotely operate everything from a passenger jet to a surgical appendage performing brain surgery, then why not a mining operation on the moon? That was the reason my uncle recruited me for Omega, to join the best and brightest scientists in designing and engineering GOLEM.”

“What’s GOLEM?”

I sucked in a breath as her lips kissed my stomach. “GOLEM? It’s an acronym that stood for ‘Geological Offsite Lunar Excavation Machine.’ Whoever made it up stole it from a Bible story about a soulless being, created by man, to serve his needs. See, GOLEM wasn’t going to just be a supercomputer, it was going to be the ultimate in artificial intelligence—a machine that could think and adapt in order to control complex multilayered tasks a quarter of a million miles away.”

I closed my eyes, willing her mouth to venture lower.

She stopped. “Keep talking, Eisenbraun. How did a young track-and-field nerd like you get involved with GOLEM?”

“My uncle was confident I could resolve the computer’s design flaws, so he assigned me to work under GOLEM’s director, Monique DeFriend, the former head of CSAIL, a prestigious artificial intelligence lab. She buried me in menial tasks, until I submitted a design for GOLEM’s DNA matrix that blew everyone away. Two days later she placed me in charge of GOLEM’s programming. I had just turned twenty.”

“Nice. So what happened?”

“What happened? The GDO happened. The world went to hell.”

Andria released me, her mood darkening. “Who are you to complain? You survived, Eisenbraun. You, with your solar panels and water filters and lake water. I didn’t have seeds and canned goods; I didn’t have a backyard filled with fruit trees.”

“You also didn’t have starving anti-Semites as neighbors. When the government collapsed, my parents preached secrecy to my younger sisters—‘If the neighbors find out we have food, they’ll take first and ask for handouts later,’ but it’s hard for teens not to want to help when their friends are literally starving to death.

“I was on my way home from the chaos in Washington the day our neighbors struck. My parents and sisters were butchered for three bags of brown rice and a bushel of apples. The rest of our supplies were still hidden in the garage attic.”

“I’m sorry.” She lay back down, her hand draped across my chest. “After they murdered your family … what did you do?”

“First I buried my family behind the orchard wall. Then I used the rest of our gasoline to burn down the murderers’ homes while they slept. I’ve been alone here ever since.”