CHAPTER 2: The Prayer

H(Earth Year 2020, December 21st. Four days before the arrival of Aster The Executioner.)

Forgive us our sins. And lead us into everlasting life.

Amen.

Those were the last lines of his prayer. A prayer he has prayed over and over again for the past ten years that he has lived on the moon. It is a prayer that he wanted to be able to pray for three hundred and ninety more years.

For it will take four hundred years for the earth to evolve again and sustain life.

Our hero is an evolved human, displaying none of the qualities of what humans were.

Except for one.

He prays. He prays to God every earth day.

With him on the moon is the non-sentient and artificially intelligent techno lifeform he has named Nerissa.

Nerissa overhears him praying every earth day, because she has already finished building her cybertelepathy components.

She doesn't wonder why he does that each earth day. She stopped wondering three years ago, after she completed her cybernetic emotion protocol. After that, she understood faith.

"Any breakthroughs?" he asked her.

"I'm still working on it." He heard her thru her telepathy. And again, just like each day, he heard her say straight to his mind, "It is four hundred years. In human earth years."

Ever since the emotion protocol was built and installed, her processing power had slowed down. Neither of them knew this.

He does not know that she is depressed. She does not know that her emotions are slowing her down.

If both of them knew this, it will only take one hundred and twenty nine years to create the technology that would resurrect humanity.

On bended knees, he prayed again. He prayed for Nerissa. He prayed that she would finally gain sentience, and silly as it seemed to him, at least be able to pray also.

Maybe if there were two them of praying, God would forgive.

Forgive us for what we have done.

Forgive us for being so selfish.

Forgive us for creating the seed of humanity.