Ghost of the Gods - 02 (26 page)

Sarah returned from her walk and sat down next him on the tail of the Humvee. Mark was beginning to like her short cropped hair. Ralph looked expectantly at both of them, and when no food or petting was offered, headed off to do whatever dogs do when bored. Mark showed Sarah the e-mail from Karla.

“That is not what I expected,” said Sarah. “I thought Noah was leaving us something that would help us understand his side of this war.”

“Maybe he did and we’re just not getting it.”

“Maybe, but what I am getting is we need to warn these communes without leading Noah to them,” she said. “I think he’s shadowing us.”

“Agreed,” said Mark. “I have a theory the communes we’re sensing will remain untouched forever if we go in the opposite direction, but if we head for one, Noah will destroy it before we get there. And the really bad news is, I don’t think he needs to even physically follow us. I think he can trace us by our activity on the n-web. There’s no doubt he can read our emotions and pick up our stray thoughts. We have to come up with some way of confusing him, some way of hiding our thoughts and emotions from him.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Not even a bad one.”

Kathy Morrison – Dallas, Texas – February 19, 0002 A.P.

Kathy was in the lab late at night, as she had been almost every night since beginning her research work at Zero-G. She was double-checking the final details of a key discovery before presenting it to Richard and the other scientists. The discovery had come so quickly that it had stunned her. It was almost as if some crazy kind of synchronicity was at work. Two events had collided to give birth to her discovery: Her failed experiments at using jammers to regulate COBIC blood levels and Richard’s breathtaking disclosure about ancient technology.

The night her COBIC blood level experiments hit a brick wall, she’d had a terrible dream. In the dream she was performing human experiments to prove that a small amount of COBIC in the brain was required to control biological systems for the body to work normally. In the dream she was purging patients of all COBIC and making them seriously ill to prove the theory. She awoke very disturbed that she was performing harmful human experiments. She’d made some mint tea and sat in front of the computer. While staring at the data from her failed rhesus experiments, an idea suddenly clicked into place. It was a crazy idea—no, an impossible idea—but if it worked, they could cure almost any disease or injury. What was missing from the current COBIC treatment regime was a brain to orchestrate the huge body of COBIC infused into the patient.

The next day Kathy had set up her first experiment using a rhesus monkey. Right from the beginning it had worked, not perfectly, but it worked and it was reproducible. She’d found the key to hyper-healing almost all aliments, not just genetic diseases, and most importantly, this key worked with lower saturations of COBIC in the bloodstream. The breakthrough discovery was a different way of using medical-jammers. In addition to using a jammer to block COBIC from migrating into the brain, a second jammer could be used at a much lower power setting as a network bridge. Using her discovery signals from the residual amount of COBIC found in everyone’s brainstem could be bridged to the higher saturation of COBIC infused into a patient’s bloodstream. The nanotech inside the medical-jammer did what Kathy had been told it did best. It connected the two isolated n-web networks found in the brain and in the body. That first night of discovery she’d been giddy with excitement. She decided to keep the results to herself until she was sure there were no serious problems with her discovery.

Her follow-up work confirmed that COBIC in the brain stem was responding to the neurological signals of the brain. These signals included those occurring when the brain was receiving damage reports from the body. The result was that when these natural damage signals were detected, COBIC in the brainstem orchestrated a response from COBIC in the bloodstream that paralleled that of the body’s own repair systems. If the bloodstream had enough free-swimming COBIC, a cure was effected. If not, the healing instructions went unfulfilled. With her breakthrough, the natural healing directives of the brain were amplified, enabling a patient with only moderate levels of COBIC in their blood to experience a great deal of enhanced healing. This new interface offered many of the advantages of seed infestation of neurons without the actual infestation or, as Richard put it,
seeds taking root in the brain
. With her protocol, the residual COBIC in the brain stem did not multiple or invade neurons, so no information could be injected into the patient’s memory. The result was zero risk of being influenced or controlled by that god-machine monster.

Her protocol was not perfect. It had its weaknesses. Like the original application of medical-jammer technology, her new application worked, but she did not understand how the nanotech did its small miracles. While that was troubling, the big weakness of her discovery was that it could not be used to heal the brain. That meant it was not a cure for terrible illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or brain cancer. A high level of COBIC could not be infused into the brain without immediate risk of infestation of neurons. Still, this exact same limitation also applied to the current COBIC treatment regime. Kathy found herself wishing there was some way to use jammers to force seeds from an infested brain without leaving behind a mound of ruined gray matter. Sadly, she now understood that while all these stunning approaches could greatly extend life expectancies, they would never come close to providing the lifespan of a hybrid.

Kathy tried to keep in mind that this was really just the first baby step. Who knew where this technology might be in ten or twenty years? As a last resort for terminal patients there was the option of infusing a super saturation of COBIC into the brain. Unfortunately, the risks of brain damage or hybridization were very real. One or the other was the guaranteed prognosis. Kathy wondered if she would submit to a treatment like that. Fear of death would probably force her to accept the risks, and there was no proof that hybridization robbed you of your identity or your soul. Mark was still Mark—as far as she could tell.

Mark Freedman – Buffalo, New York – February 20, 0002 A.P.

Mark was weary from driving. The sun was glinting in his eyes. They had traveled as far away from all the communes as possible without entering Canada or heading out to sea. He rubbed his face and could not get used to the new, bristly experience. The close cropped beard was now thick enough to change his appearance. The radio was tuned to the
Corley Cox
Show
. The government-sponsored show was supposedly guaranteed by new FCC rules to be free of bias and contain only substantiated facts. Reality strayed very far from these guarantees. The
Corley Cox
Show
would have been right at home with any other entertainment news show that was popular before the plague. The show was, among other things, a national platform for an extreme pseudo-Luddite group called Wright’s Faith
.
This hate group took the USAG’s scientist
as
villain propaganda and expanded it to include all scientists, not just the alleged perpetrators of the nanotech genocide. Wright’s Faith and its splinter groups had a membership estimated in the tens of thousands. There had been bombings of private research facilities, shootings, and even a public hanging while government facilities and scientists went unharassed. Mark suspected Wright’s Faith was doing some of the bloodiest work for the USAG, work the USAG did not dare to do even with Peacekeepers. Corley Cox was speaking in her low, seductive trademark voice.

My friends, we have subversives out there. Some are probably listening to this show just as you are right now. These radicals are not like us. They are not on our side. They see us as villains, as despoilers of the Earth, as a virus that needs to be stamped out. They do not know their Bible. They do not know that God gave man all this bounty for us to use wisely. They want us to use nothing. They want our children to starve so that some endangered butterfly is not disturbed in its cocoon. These subversives are the same criminals who were eco-terrorists before the plague. These radicals are so mentally deranged they think genocide is an acceptable way to save Mother Nature from civilized people.

We have some new names added to our list of criminals against humanity. The names should ring a bell from that recent bombing in Canada. A Nobel Prize winning scientist named Mark Freedman and his cohort Sarah Mayfair are now at the top of our list. I’ll tell you more about them later, but the most important fact to know right now is that Freedman is the monster responsible for genetically engineering COBIC and making it possible for that bacteria to operate with a nanotech seed inside it. Billions of innocent lives are not enough for this Bonnie and Clyde nightmare duo. They are still out there and still at it. I know you all have seen the footage from the bombing in Canada. But I’ll bet you don’t know there was a second bombing in our own backyard in Portland, Maine. The authorities have not announced it yet. They want to make sure they don’t make a mistake, but I have it on very good authority that Freedman and Mayfair are also responsible for that bombing and possibly more. This means they are in the motherland and at large. They could be in your town right now planning on killing your neighbors and your family. They need to be stopped before more innocent people are murdered. They need to be stopped before they can get their hands on some other weapon of mass destruction, because make no mistake—they will use it.

These vicious criminals should not be considered part of the human race. They should be executed on sight. I know our government won’t do that, but it should. I have an idea…

Mark turned off the radio after Corley Cox had broadcast her plan. The only reason to listen to this hate speech was to take measure of the minds of one of their adversaries.

It had started to snow. The sky was a uniform gray. There were no individual clouds, just a solid dome of winter storm. In another hour they’d reach their stopping point for the night. The GPS had taken them off the highway, and the next turn would be a dirt road. The KOA campsite was perfect. Most of these sites were now way stations for a new generation of gypsies. It was too cold and unpleasant for anyone managing the campground to care about who came and went.

Mark had a plan to prevent Noah from tracking them through the n-web or following them in any way to the next commune. Part of the plan required air travel, and Karla had agreed to make the arrangements for them on a military jet. He had just explained some of the plan to Sarah and she was not happy.

“How can you trust the USAG with our lives!” she shouted.

“Karla has arranged everything and we have a fail-safe.”

“That’s right. It’s going to fail and we won’t be safe!”

“Karla knows we have all kinds of incriminating material. I told her we lost equipment at Lake Erie, but thank god we hung on to the Sentry Kit. If those recordings had been found by USAG forces, we’d be in a lot of trouble. Karla is smart. She’s connected the dots.”

Sarah was silent. Mark could tell the audacity of his plan had just become clear to her.

“You’re actually blackmailing Karla?” asked Sarah.

“I hate that word. She knows we’re all in the same boat and will make sure we stay safe, which she’d have done anyway.”

“You are a bastard,” said Sarah. “But that is a good plan. You know those recordings could even land her in front of a firing squad.”

“What choice do we have? Besides, I erased them.”

“What if Noah gets a stray thought from us before we take off that tips him to where we’re going?”

“We keep ourselves in the dark to keep him in the dark. We wait until we’re safely in the air before randomly selecting the commune from a list of at least ten that are widely scattered over an area eight hundred miles across.”

Sarah nodded to herself. Mark again went over the plan in his mind. The basic idea was simple. The only way Noah could be following them was by picking up their data going out over the n-web and using it to track them. To get to a commune before him meant they had to block their signals. Mark knew only one way to do that. They had to go by air. As soon as they took off, their link to the god-machine would be severed. While they were miles above the ground it would be impossible for their signals to reach the god-machine’s nanotech network, which covered land and sea but not the air. Noah would experience a mysterious blackout and realize the game was on, but he would have no way of knowing which commune they were headed toward. Mark had needed Karla to make this happen. Her division had Air Force jets at their disposal. Even if they didn’t need to make their random midair decision, he and Sarah could never make it get through a TSA checkpoint without being recognized. They also needed Karla to arrange for the loan of an advance armor Humvee at their destination. Mark hated not having their modified Humvee on this excursion. He’d done all that work hardening it and now they were leaving it behind to get on a jet. It was always a waste to fight the last battle, yet the reverse was to fight human nature. At least they could bring most of their gear with them.

Karla had appeared eager to help and she’d received something in return. Mark was going to allow her to run him through an fMRI for a full workup. The tests were also part of the cover story for all the air travel. They were going to meet for the fMRI work at a children’s hospital in Columbus, Ohio. The same small jet that brought Karla to Columbus would be waiting for all of them at a nearby Air National Guard field. After driving to the airfield, in less than two hours they could be on the ground near whatever commune their selected.

Sarah Mayfair – Pennsylvania – February 22, 0002 A.P.

The plan was in action. They had landed in Philadelphia two hours ago. Sarah was driving a new loaner Humvee at highway speed. They were initially not sure if the Trenton commune was in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. After an hour of driving west through Pennsylvania, it had become clear the commune was not in Pennsylvania. They now were headed toward the nearest crossing into New Jersey. An hour ago, Mark had been thrilled at how the plan had come together. They’d even learned something useful from Karla’s fMRI and psych workups. The fMRI had shown that the nanotech brain interface boosted the activity of not just hybridized neurons but also uninfected brain cells as well. There was no other way to interpret the data than Mark’s problem-solving ability was off the charts.