That was an ambitious short story and a difficult start for me. I'm not the strongest SF reader so I had to restart it a couple times. I'm not sure I followed it completely nor understood the big picture that was trying to be conveyed but I did enjoy my time listening to the story.

Earth's people are dying and instead of wasting time trying to find out who caused the plague, they build an AI and put all their memories and knowledge into it. They taught it to think for itself. They "froze" some people to be woken on parts of the AI's journey to a location to create a new earth. There are eggs and sperm frozen to restart humanity at some point. When the AI is traveling with all the human knowledge, it gains some humanity and some empathy. When the location for New Earth is found the AI is at first dissecting and discarding the squid-like inhabitants but then thoughts on religion and a God's responsibilities and how it effected the demise of the humans on Earth are considered. These things are taken into account when dealing with the squid-like inhabitants and for creating the new Earth. Learning to understand and interact with the squid guys takes up a big part of the story and was how the AI learned to apply empathy.

The podcast host's commentary was interesting and raised the idea of some who want something done "by any means necessary". That doesn't always have to be a bad thing.

I really liked Erin Cashier's The Alchemist's Feather (2009) so I hung in through the rough start of the above story, hoping I would start enjoying it. I did. ( )