Ghost of the Gods - 02 (16 page)

Richard continued talking, but Kathy only heard bits and pieces as she stared at the video. At this stage they were trying to find better ways of coaxing the seeds into healing. If successful, they would no longer need to saturate a patient with COBIC. The need for daily infusions of fresh bacteria would be a thing of the past. The sight of this hybrid hooked up and strapped down was unsettling, but the project itself was deeply exciting because of the human potential.

“Kathy…”

“Huh?”

“Will you join the team?”

“Are you kidding?” said Kathy. “Big, burly men with guns couldn’t stop me.”

Kathy Morrison – Dallas, Texas – February 6, 0002 A.P.

The living quarters Kathy was assigned felt luxuriant. In addition to an office it had a separate sitting area, refrigerator, and wet bar. There were no windows. Instead there was a large wall screen, which she left displaying live video from the Prometheus project as a reminder of what was at stake and the sacrifices being made. She’d spent the entire night and day reviewing the project she’d been assigned. She had consumed vast quantities of coffee and real food, and had no intention of letting up on work just yet, even though a large sofa with a pillow and blanket was calling to her. She could easily see herself sleeping there for several days straight once she gave in to it.

The team to which she’d been assigned had two main goals in the project. First, they had to reduce the level of nanotech seeds that were infused and in doing so lower the risks to the patient. The current therapy had genetically damaged and even killed several lab animals. The second goal was expanding the use of this therapy to non-genetic problems, specifically infectious diseases. Kathy was an expert in immune system response and infectious diseases. She felt she could make a good contribution in this area. Some of the material she’d read was troubling. Hybrids had been injured during experimentation, but since they were hybrids they’d recovered quickly. As a result, there was a certain implied callousness toward them. You could push experiments further than would normally be allowed in human trials. Regardless of her discomfort with the ethics, this was an opportunity she could not refuse. If successful, she was being offered a chance to work on something that could cure humanity’s ills and give her Mark’s longevity without any risk to mind or soul.

Following a knock at her door, Richard stuck his head in. He had stopped by to check on her like this several times already. He’d said he wanted her to be a happy indentured scientist. He had such a charismatic personality. Kathy could not help being buoyed by each of his short visits. Richard was guileless. He was a little odd, but his genius made him very appealing.

Kathy Morrison – Dallas, Texas – February 8, 0002 A.P.

For Kathy each day was too short to get everything done. She was in her office working on finalizing her experiments using jammers to regulate COBIC blood levels. She planned on starting her first experiment that night. She liked the quiet of an empty lab. The first experiment called for using a jammer to regulate levels in a rhesus monkey. The goal was to be able to go from a residual bloodstream level to a supersaturated level and then anywhere in between on command and within minutes. She heard a knock at her door that she now recognized as Richard. She knew he would open the door and invite himself in. He never waited for permission to enter. While the man was impossibly endearing in many ways, this violation of her space had quickly become irritating. She had forgotten to lock her door and so was about to receive a visit. When the door opened, she could tell Richard was energized. Standing just behind him were his two guards.

“Hello, Kathy,” said Richard. “You look hard at work.”

“I am.”

“I don’t want to interrupt, but I have very exciting news. There is something I felt you should have been told from the start, but I don’t make the decisions around here. Our corporate overlords have had a change of heart. I’ve come to show you something I know you will find fascinating.”

“When?”

“Why, now of course.”

“But I am in the middle of this work and—”

“It can wait,” said Richard. “I promise what you see will change how you are approaching your work. Grab a coat. We are going outside.”

Kathy knew she had no choice. Richard would not take no for an answer, and she did not want to alienate the one person that was on her side. During the walk to another building, Kathy tried to find out what he was going to show her, but Richard remained tight lipped with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.

They finally came to a stop in front of a vault door. Richard entered a security code and swiped his badge. The door opened into a room full of clear, acrylic display cases. He led her to a case that contained a row of unimpressive looking black objects that looked like small tablets. She could see more interesting objects in other cases. Some items looked like weapons and other objects looked like optical headgear.

Richard opened an electronic combination lock on the display case. The acrylic was a couple inches thick and looked like it might be bulletproof. He removed one of the tablets and handed it to her. The weight was surprisingly light. It must have been hollow, because it felt like she was holding a sheet of paper. The tablet was about six inches wide, eight inches tall, and an eighth of an inch thick. One side was black and the other side looked like a dull liquid metal similar to mercury, but was hard to the touch and felt like lubricated glass. She rubbed her fingers together, thinking there was a film on them, but they were dry.

“What you are holding is at least twenty thousand years old,” said Richard. “But it could be far older, maybe fifty thousand.”

Kathy’s grip on the object reflexively went tense. She stared at the simple looking device, then started to have doubts about what Richard was telling her.

“Feel how slippery the shiny side is?” he said. “That’s the touch display.”

“You’re teasing me, right?”

“I am very serious,” said Richard. “This is real and there’s much more to show you.”

He did something to the tablet while she held it. The screen came to life with the display of a rotating earth and moon. The tablet began to feel cooler instead of warming. The display was three dimensional, full color, extremely realistic, and like nothing she’d seen before.

“What is it?” asked Kathy.

“That’s a good question. We only have guesses. Some type of networked personal computing device is our best guess. What’s more important is it’s made from self-replicating nanotech, and what’s even more important is that we use small cubes cut from these devices to make our jammers.”

Kathy was momentarily speechless. What did this mean? Her mind began to fill with questions.

“Is this the same nanotech as seeds?” she asked.

“It’s different, but could be from the same source. We have no way of dating the device with any real accuracy because it is self-repairing as well as self-replicating,” said Richard. “Since any network it might have used was long gone, we expected little from it. When we figured out how to activate it, the artifact scanned all radio frequencies, analyzed the encoding, and began communicating. It sent out beacons. It momentarily crashed nearby Wi-Fi access points and then released the frequencies, allowing our systems to come back, then went after them again but with more finesse. It is clearly some kind of very sophisticated AI computer device. In a short time it had reverse engineered our encrypted Wi-Fi and Ethernet protocols and began using them to communicate. It tries to connect with everything within radio range. We’ve been able to communicate with it from our computers, but its replies reveal nothing. The device wants some kind of access code and we have not been able to crack it. We tried using the touch screen… but watch…”

Where Richard touched the screen, the device drew a circle around his finger, then displayed a large blue symbol.

“It’s locked. The power source is unknown. It just works. If you scratch the device, it heals itself using whatever it’s in contact with for raw materials. You do not want your fingers near it when it’s healing. It will use your flesh to repair itself. A member of our team found that out the hard way. We tried X-raying it and found nothing but a solid block of material. We found that if we cut off a tiny piece the size of a speck of pepper, the speck regenerates into a simpler device about the size of sugar cube without a human interface, but with all the communications functions intact. We found a way to embed these regenerated cubes into microchips for experimentation.
After long, fruitless lab work, we
discovered a way to inject various signals and received back complex waveforms that looked like n-web traffic. This device communicates with the god-machine and seeds. We found that injecting a certain signal results in an output we use for our jamming of COBIC. So our brilliant jammer technology is really just trial and error reverse engineering with some luck mixed in. You see, we do not dare mass produce the jammers just yet. We are concerned that if we cut off too much of the mother device or just cut it too many times, it will eventually cease to function. We’ll be left with nothing. Some people on the team speculate that the cubes we have grown are talking to the mother device. They theorize that it is the mother device that contains all the intelligence. If this is true, then when a mother device is damaged, all its children, the next generation of cubes, could stop working.”

Kathy handed the tablet back to Richard and stared at all the other acrylic cases in the room with renewed interest. She started to wander down one aisle and then another. Cases upon cases held larger and smaller versions of the same black tablets. There were cases with objects that she could have easily been mistaken for computer servers. Other items were more unusual. Some machines looked like portable distilleries or miniature chemical factories of some kind. There were transparent gauntlet gloves and a very peculiar helmet with a solid face shield covered in tiny pyramid shaped bumps.

“Are all these cases full of… umm…” said Kathy.

“Prehistoric technology,” said Richard. “Every case is a treasure beyond imagination. Some specimens are clearly much older than what you were holding. As I said, it is impossible to date these items with any accuracy, but they are clearly not made by our society. Yet all evidence suggests they were built by modern humans. Amazing, isn’t it? Here we have proof that humankind reached great heights in the past, only to be set back time and again. We are certain there were at least two epochs before our current time, though there could easily have been more. Zero-G archeologists speculate the downfalls were caused by natural catastrophes or war, but were I a betting man, I would bet every downfall was the work of a sphinx like enigma called the god-machine.”

First Contact

Mark Freedman – Chicago suburbs, Illinois – February 6, 0002 A.P.

Mark dragged open the barn door and saw their slant back Humvee sitting unmolested inside the dilapidated structure just as they’d hidden it. Bits of dust and old straw floated in shafts of sunlight that angled down through holes in the roof. Mark had no idea how worried he’d been until this moment. They’d had to leave everything behind when they smuggled themselves into Chicago. They would have been in trouble if this armored Humvee with all their gear had been stolen. Mark felt a vague melancholy drifting as an undercurrent below the surface of his relief. Back when they’d hidden the Humvee, at some level he had not expected to return. The singularity could have changed everything.

“What are you waiting for?” said Sarah as she brushed past him into the barn. Mark followed her inside. He knew she’d empathically felt his emotions and why he’d hesitated. He was annoyed that she could read him so easily.

Sarah began checking the Humvee to make sure it was ready for the road. They’d spend the night here, then head out at first light. Neither of them needed the rest, but driving at night put them at a disadvantage with reduced visibility. If they used their headlights, they would be broadcasting an open invitation to gangs that prowled the Outlands. The glint of headlights could be visible for miles.

Mark looked up from his Android tablet. Like his Droid phone, the tablet used the same postage stamp-sized ID cards so he could change network identity at will. He had been drafting a response to Karla Hunt’s request for another face to face. Sarah was working through a weapons check. She had an Army manual displayed on a tablet in front of her. An MK19 40mm belt fed grenade machine gun was stripped into pieces on a tarp. Once checked and reassembled, it could be mounted through the roof hatch on an exposed turret. The MK19 was a murderous weapon similar in size to a .50 caliber machine gun. At first glance the weapon could be mistaken for a stocky version of a .50 caliber but the similarity was not even skin deep. The MK19 could burst fire up to 375 explosive rounds per minute. Each 40mm grenade could punch a hole through two inches of armor and deliver a blast radius of 50 feet. With an effective range of close to a mile, this was the kind of weapon Mark wished they’d had when fleeing across the southwest from Alexander’s militia two years ago. He smiled to himself. It was human nature to always fight the last battle and never be prepared for the next.

An AM radio was playing from inside the Humvee. The pirate radio station Air Truth was broadcasting a story about scientists who were wrongly prosecuted for involvement in the nanotech plague. The reporter was claiming he had just uncovered a massive USAG conspiracy. Wrongful imprisonment and executions were the true crimes. The reporter was questioning an anonymous guest scientist about the history of the plague and whether it could be a fabrication. Mark could easily imagine the USAG working very hard right about now to find this guy and silence him with extreme prejudice.

Mark Freedman – Ohio – February 8, 0002 A.P.

Mark glanced in the driver side mirror at the sun moving lower amid the tobacco colored clouds. The pillar of smoke was still visible a hundred miles behind them and to the south near the Indiana border. The land they were now passing through was unscathed. Earlier in the day, driving for hours through the burned out forests and spans of suburbia had been unnerving. It felt like the aftermath of a nuclear war. As unsettling as that sight had been, passing the head of the wildfire itself had been life threatening. No one had imagined mega-wildfires would turn out to be the second most destructive force unleashed by global warming. Only the god-machine’s plague was worse.

They had been on the road for two days and had been detoured due to highway problems almost every hour, including while passing the head of the wildfire. At points they had been no more than ten miles from the edge of the inferno. The wandering cauldron was larger than most cities.

The fires were at last no longer visible. Sarah was pouring him a lukewarm cup of coffee from the thermos. They were on Interstate Route 90 heading east. Mark was driving the military Humvee at near suicidal speeds for these war torn roads. He was fully confident in his reaction time. It was a choice between driving too fast or driving at night. For the moment the speedometer was at 85 mph, the maximum speed on the gauge. So far they’d seen no patches of ice or snow on the roadbed. That piece of luck would not last much longer. For some reason the temperature had been steadily dropping as they neared Lake Erie. Mark knew these freakish weather patterns had to be caused by global warming. The GPS displayed a two-hour ETA. They needed to arrive at a stopping point before it grew dark. The smart thing to do was set realistic driving goals. Working against the smart thing to do was an instinctive yearning to reach the next singularity as soon as possible and a nagging sense they were already too late.

Triangulation had shown the singularity was somewhere near Montreal. Just as in Chicago, Mark expected this singularity to be connected with a group of hybrids. What if the singularity was a side effect of a growing tribe of hybrids reaching some kind of critical mass? If that were true... Mark pushed harder on the accelerator. They needed a better plan. Trying to figure out a safe way of approaching the hybrids in Chicago had cost valuable time. The delay had also likely saved their lives. If they had acted more rashly, they could have been inside that townhouse when it exploded.

“This time will be different,” said Sarah, as if reading his mind. “I just don’t believe those hybrids intentionally killed themselves. It’s more than intuition. It’s like an unexplainable fact in my brain. Maybe I was subconsciously picking up emotional cues from them or something?”

“There’s a burglary, then days later the place is blown up by a military grade weapon,” said Mark. “There is nothing innocent about that.”

“Maybe for once the USAG propaganda machine is reporting the truth?” said Sarah. “They were a militant group planning a bombing and killed by their own device.”

“It’s possible,” said Mark. “They were clearly at war, but what about the execution I witnessed? It’s also possible that a critical mass of hybrids leads to some event other hybrids want to stop. Maybe it’s an evolutionary leap of some kind? We have no idea what’s going on. You know it could just as easily be the USAG who blew them up. Either way we could be walking into a ticking time bomb in Montreal.”

“Maybe we should just stay away?” said Sarah.

She was smiling. Mark knew they both thought staying away was not an option.

“It’s going to be dark before we stop for the night,” he said.

“Changing the subject, are we?”

The sun was gone. Their progress had slowed as the highway became snowbound. Their ETA was less than thirty minutes. Mark was using night vision goggles. The brake lights were disabled and the headlights were off. While he was still able to drive as fast as conditions permitted, he was also driving partially blind. The goggles had limited range and ability to show detail when compared to using other night vision options. His impaired vision worried him, but he would put up with it because this type of goggle did not need an infrared light source. Starlight that had traveled for countless lifetimes to reach this roadbed was enough illumination. There was no point in switching off the headlights if you then had to use an infrared spotlight. The bad guys had night vision goggles too and an infrared illuminator would draw them in like mosquitoes to a nice, warm blood meal.

The layover point they’d chosen was a summer vacation area on the shore of Lake Erie. The shoreline community
had multiple roads leading in and out in addition to access by water. Karla Hunt was meeting them twenty-four hours from now at whatever abandoned house they ultimately selected. For safety there had to be as many escape routes as possible. Mark liked lots of crisscrossed roads. Using Google Earth satellite imagery, they had selected an ideal neighborhood that was along their route to Canada.

Earlier in the day, finding fuel had slowed them down. It was usually easy to come by derelict filling stations with leftover gas. This leg of their journey had not been usual in more than one way. They had seen a large amount of combat damage along Route 90, including the burned out shells of mechanized war machines and crashed aircraft. Just as everywhere else, all the signs of conflict appeared to be years old, but the scale of what had happened here was unprecedented. A secret war had been fought with this highway as a battle line. Untold numbers of people had died and it was very likely no one would remember a thing.

The turnoff toward Lake Erie appeared out of the gloom of his night vision goggles. Dense forest lined either side of the highway. The trees should have shed all their leaves by now, but global climate changes had confused them. A small number of the trees still held most of their leaves and looked so oddly out of place. Mark slowed to a crawl as he went down the circular exit ramp from the interstate. Now came the risky part: selecting a house. It was cold out. The road was icy and had a mostly undisturbed covering of snow. It looked like some traffic had been through here but not much.

“I guess the only good thing about arriving after dark is that we can use thermal to see if anyone’s home,” said Sarah.

She climbed into the back of the Humvee and returned with a thermal FLIR imaging gun sight. Mark knew, with this high tech visual weapon, she could spot a man three hundred yards away hiding in dense foliage and identify his face. It would make child’s play of finding the coldest houses on the block. Sarah pointed the gun sight at Mark and peered through it.

“Maybe I can’t see through walls with this
Star Trek
toy,” she said. “But clothes are no problem.”

“You have to turn it on first,” said Mark. “Then there’s the problem of not enough temperature gradient between clothes and skin to see any detail.”

“Wrong answer,” said Sarah. “You’re such a jerk!”

The neighborhood they’d selected using Google Earth turned out to be perfect. It was close to the interstate highway, yet isolated. The area was crisscrossed with dirt roads. Most of the houses were vacation cabins made from logs. Remarkably, many of the lots were still campsites. They’d spotted some deer clustered around a saltlick that appeared to be new. While staring at the deer, a huge skunk like animal lumbered into the road. An assist identified it as a badger and that it should be hibernating. Mark hit the brakes. The Humvee skidded on icy ground with the big tires trying unsuccessfully to bite. Mark gritted his teeth as possible outcomes flashed through his mind. An assist displayed the best course of action to avoid an accident: lift off the brakes and hit the animal. He ignored the assist. In the end the badger survived its close encounter with man.

It didn’t take long for Mark to grow convinced this whole summer camping area was deserted. Sarah had the FLIR scope aimed out the open window, targeting cabin after cabin.

“The only heat signatures I’m getting are the small, furry kind,” she said.

“Okay, let’s turn around,” said Mark. “It looks like nothing has garages. We’re going to have to park behind a cabin, use a tarp, and hope that’s enough camouflage to hide our presence.”

Mark Freedman – Ohio – February 9, 0002 A.P.

The morning came early. Mark awoke to the smell of coffee and wood burning in the fireplace. He looked out the sliding glass door facing Lake Erie. Sarah was sitting on the wooden deck with a mug. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, no coat or hat. The air looked still. He could see wisps of fog coming from the coffee and her breath. The shoreline had a brittle layer of ice a few inches thick, which reached far out into the lake. Beyond the ice he could see the glittering movement of choppy water. The rough textured ice around the shore reflected the colors of the sunrise as if illuminated from within. An assist informed him the lake should have been frozen to the horizon this time of year.

Staring at the great lake, Mark had a powerful sense of déjà vu. A little over two years ago he’d stood at the shore of Lake Superior in a biohazard suit watching deadly plumes of COBIC wash up on shore, forming thick mats. A few hours later a kill-zone had hit Lake Superior. It was the first time he’d been caught inside that inhuman terror. He’d thought he was a dead man but had survived. Mark sighed. He’d had no idea at the time that he’d survived because something yet to be called the god-machine had plans for him. In retrospect, that had been the moment his life had changed forever. Within a few hours he would be exposed to infected COBIC through a tear in his biohazard suit. Days later, while quarantined at the BVMC lab, he’d discover that his body was healing at a freakish speed. Mark shivered, but not from the cold.

As he was stepping away from the glass door, he saw a moving glint far out on the lake. It looked like a boat’s windshield reflecting sunlight. The glint came again. Karla Hunt was due to arrive within the hour. Was that her? He’d assumed she’d be coming overland from the nearest airfield. As director of one of the most important research projects going, she had the unlimited resources of the USAG to tap. She was the director overseeing the most important scientific project the government had running. It was her job to study the nanotech seeds and help avert another plague. The glint was now solidly there and growing. He could tell it was heading directly at them. Sarah had gotten up and was looking at the same threat. Ralph was by her side. The huge Rottweiler appeared tense. An assist informed Mark the object was traveling at approximately 56 miles per hour. The estimate was made using a calculation based on how fast the size of the object of interest was increasing. Mark’s phone emitted the ringtone for a text message.

Don’t shoot. It’s me, xxoo

A few minutes later, Karla and her escorts arrived in a pair of gray USAG Navy ice airboats. A third ice airboat began patrolling five hundred yards from the shoreline. The boats were about 30 feet long and armored. At low speed they were too heavy to ride the ice and had cut trenches through it on their way to shore. They had enclosed cabins the size of the passenger compartment of a full sized SUV. A huge, shrouded pair of aircraft propellers took up the rear third of each boat.

Mark and Sarah had closed all the blinds and were staying out of sight inside the cabin. Their faces were on at least one secret government watch list and probably more. Ralph had refused to budge from his staked out position of about six feet from the sliding glass door. Anyone coming through that door uninvited would not last more than a few seconds.

Mark and Sarah were both staring at the ruggedized tablet from the MSK-II sentry kit. On the screen was a feed from one of the pill bottle sized intruder detectors. The software was in record mode, saving everything to the tablet’s memory. They watched bodyguards in Navy SEAL uniforms exit the boats and set up a parameter around the cabin. The soldiers were armed with short barrel HK416 assault weapons. On each boat a soldier took up position with a turret mounted SAW machine gun. Two anti-sniper specialists began scanning the area with oversized binoculars. The area was clearly considered hostile. Mark again thought about the remains of a secret war they’d seen on the highway. He split the screen to check the other feeds. The first one he checked was a view of him and Sarah looking at the tablet. The tablet’s screen was in view and caught up in an infinite loop. It reminded him of the age old paintings of the alchemist seeking wisdom in a mirror reflected into another mirror into infinity. Earlier, Sarah had asked why he was installing some of the sentry detectors inside the living room. He’d told her they were to purchase insurance.