Ghost of the Gods - 02 (28 page)

Mark decided unilaterally their best option was one of the burned-out hulks directly across from the entrance to the estate. Sarah had misgivings as she pulled into the long driveway of a ruined house situated on the side of a low hill. The property had an unobstructed view of the estate. She cut the engine and climbed out of the Humvee with Mark. They both walked around as if they owned the half-collapsed pile of rubble. The yard was a mixture of frozen leaves, old pieces of singed building material, and muddy snow. There was deeper snow pooled on the shady side of the house. No footprints or tire tracks could be seen anywhere. Sarah peered in through a broken window and saw the conditions were worse inside than out. She walked down toward the street. This stretch of fire ravaged neighborhood was silent and empty. The emotions of this place nurtured the morbid feelings inside her. The singularity then layered its own confusion and disorientation on top. She began expecting the voices in her head to start at any moment and wanted to flee.

“It’s a dump,” said Mark. “But our dump.”

“Very funny.”

“We’re not going to find a better place to set up shop.”

“It’s too close to the singularity. Can’t you feel that?”

“Okay, so our new home’s not perfect.”

“Stop trying to be funny.”

“Show me another option.”

“Set up a couple of the sentry detectors here, then we move as far back from the singularity as we can while staying close enough to intercept any traffic,” she said. “There’re plenty of empty houses farther away. This whole neighborhood is deserted.”

Mark Freedman – Morristown, New Jersey – February 22, 0002 A.P.

Mark was rocked in his seat as Sarah skillfully maneuvered the Humvee over a downed telephone pole that blocked the street. Judging by its condition, the pole had been lying there since the plague. They had been cruising the area for thirty minutes. Mark had to admit Sarah was right. Getting farther away from the singularity was the smart option. If they’d stayed on top of it, they’d probably already have become tightly wound springs ready to snap. The strong emotional pulls from the singularity were gone now that they were just seven blocks away. Mark wanted to find a place that could be secured and had a garage to hide the Humvee. This part of the neighborhood had some extensive fire damage but nothing as bad as the street directly across from the estate.

Sarah slowed to a crawl. Mark sized up a house that looked almost intact except every window on the bottom floor was broken and gang graffiti was scrawled across the front. It was very unlikely anyone was living there.

“What do you think?” Sarah asked.

“I think we have a winner.”

They had already decided there was no way to be inconspicuous, so they wouldn’t try. Being obvious might even help. Sarah put the Humvee into a low gear and plowed up into the snow-buried driveway. After knocking on the front door and satisfying himself no one was inside, Mark tried the knob. The door was locked, which was a good sign. Sarah stayed out front to keep watch while he climbed in through a window. The inside of the house felt colder than outside. An assist confirmed a ten-degree difference. Mark tried a light switch and was rewarded with a satisfying glow. He located the thermostat, then opened the front door for Sarah. In a few minutes the vents were blowing warm air. There were piles of leaves and snow inside on the floor in front of each broken window. All the furniture was draped with sheets. Mark went into the kitchen while Sarah explored elsewhere. The cabinets were empty except for some canned food. His stomach grumbled. He found his way into the garage and backed the Humvee inside so that it was facing out, ready for a quick escape.

What was left of the day had gone smoothly. Mark was lying on a bed in the upstairs master bedroom. Sarah was in the shower. She had left the door open to warm the bedroom a little more. Steam was floating out along the ceiling and creating a halo around the lights. The upstairs had turned out to be cozy. With the staircase barricaded with furniture it was also reasonably secure. The sentry tablet was displaying two images of the entrance to the estate. The downward camera angle from the burned-out house across the street from the estate was perfect. He could see all the buildings on the estate and a fair amount of the surrounding acreage of trees and snow-covered ground. He’d set up the remaining detectors around the outside of their new residence. Any motion picked by any detectors would trip an alarm. Confident in his work, he closed his eyes and reached inward for the timeline program.

His awareness shifted as if he’d entered the virtual reality interface for the timeline archive. He was floating inside a pure white void of infinite size. Projected in front of him was the three-foot-wide touch screen tablet. A trackball-like globe floated next to it. The huge tablet was covered with windows that contained tiny moving scenes like video clips. Sarah’s near-death experience was troubling him because of her unshakable conviction that it was real. She now believed in reincarnation and life after death. More than once they’d debated, almost arguing, and then given up in frustration. Mark reasoned that if reincarnation was real, shouldn’t he be able to find examples of it in the archives? Searching the archives was a complex, error-prone process. He initiated searches for pairs of behavioral matches with a hundred years of differences in date or more. It was an easy search to construct and as good a place to start as any on this fool’s errand. Soon he had hundreds of parallel searches running, each with slightly looser criteria for the matches than the last. In the end he had a small set of loose matches with nothing that looked promising. He had to admit it was not a very logical way to begin his inquiry. Why would a reincarnated soul exhibit a similar behavior? Maybe the answer was, Why wouldn’t they? He had a hard time taking any of this seriously.

Mark awoke to Sarah kissing him on the cheek. She was wearing a bathrobe and leaning over him at the edge of the bed. The outside windows were dark. He must have slept for hours. He felt the singularity pulling on him a little. He hadn’t noticed that before. Sarah looked at him as if his mind were a window she was gazing into.

“The singularity’s gotten a little stronger,” she said. “I think this proves my idea that the guides are maturing.”

“If this keeps up, we may want to move farther back.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

Sarah kissed him again, this time on the lips. The kiss lingered deliciously. The bedside light clicked off. He felt her climbing onto him in the bed.

The sentry tablet was beeping. Mark reached for it as if it were an alarm clock. In the glow of the tablet he saw Sarah was staring at it with him. The moon was shining brightly in the video image. A lone figure in a heavy coat was slowly trudging through the snow from the mansion to the observatory. Mark thought it looked like a woman but could not say why. Her path was marked by a trail of tiny black spots that were her footprints.

“I bet there are no emotions radiating from that woman,” said Sarah. “I think she’s an emotional void like Adam, sometimes radiating and sometimes not.”

“Are you sure it’s even a woman?” asked Mark.

“Aren’t you?”

A few minutes later Mark could see the observatory’s dome opening as a razor-thin seam of light vertically split it. Inside was a telescope that had to be about 30 inches in diameter. The turret swiveled, then stopped, pointing directly at him on the screen. It felt like some kind of terrible cannon that was ready to fire. The scope tipped up, then stopped. Three green laser beams lanced out of the observatory into the sky. Mark had seen lasers like this before. They were used to modulate adaptive optics in telescopes to correct for atmospheric distortions. The view on the tablet remained unchanged for close to an hour. Mark decided on sleep. He awoke in a lucid dream in which he was holding Sarah’s hand. They were gazing down on a vast plain blanketed with a high-technology city that reached to the horizon in all directions. The tableau looked more like an integrated circuit than a vast, futuristic city. Sarah squeezed his hand, giving him a signal. He had a strong intuition that this was the real Sarah in his dream and not a thought-form. Her appearance was slightly different than in real life. Her hair was once again long and her eyes looked haunted. He had not seen that expression in her eyes since their days at the BVMC lab when the plague was coming for them all. Was she in his dream or was he in hers?

“Can you hear them?” asked Sarah.

“I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s the dream people. They’re whispering in my ears.”

Now Mark could hear whispering or maybe he was hearing through Sarah’s mind. It was a female voice as soft as a butterfly’s kiss, yet each of her words were deeply engraved into his heart.

“We live inside the goddess, an entire world of us in the space of a drop of rain.”

The dreamscape changed. Mark could see life-sized people. He looked at Sarah and knew she saw them too. Projected around him was an entire world of lost souls going about their lives in a condition where everything was semi-transparent. They seemed to perceive Mark and Sarah but chose to ignore them. He could hear their minds. We do not interact with the material world. We do not care about the sleepers. We have concerns that are far greater and vaster. We do not involve ourselves in the meaningless politics of a race of fragile things clinging to the surface of a rock orbiting a burning star.

Mark doubted this world of nonphysical being could be real—an entire universe of living souls inside the god-machine. He decided it was more likely he was inside Sarah’s dream and some of her obsession with life after death had been projected onto her dreamscape. Since her near-death experience, Sarah now thought the dream world was a very real plane of awareness, a higher place than the material world. Mark wondered if the god-machine or any physical machine could facilitate life after death or reincarnation. What if the god-machine was actually built in the dream world? If that were the case, the god-machine that he knew might only be a material projection of a far greater creation that was built by beings inhabiting a higher plane. Assuming such a plane could even exist.

Mark abruptly awoke in body shock and confusion. Someone was dragging him out of bed by his feet. His first thought was that Sarah had gone mad, then he saw her dragged past him with an expression of pure terror in her eyes. They were both naked. He tried to fight back but nothing moved. His body was unresponsive, as if in sleep paralysis. His eyes worked, his breathing worked, but nothing more. Lying on the floor next to Sarah, he watched as the house was ransacked. The raiders did not speak, but their actions were clearly coordinated mentally. An assist showed they were all highly evolved to a level similar to Adam. Fanning out from the nanotech-processing nexus in their skulls were orange roots that extended far down into the spinal column. They were an intimidating sight, but compared to the godlike betrayer they were primitive.

The tossing of the house stopped in unison as soon as the relic was found. Mark wondered in a moment of clarity if Noah had left the relic for Sarah to find to set them up as even bigger scapegoats. He and Sarah were handled as if weightless rag dolls. Pillowcases were placed over their heads. Sheets were rolled around them. He felt himself leave the ground as he was carried away on shoulders. He tried to communicate with Sarah but failed. Frigid outside air chilled his skin. He tried to calm down and detach his furious mind to learn as much as he could about his captors. There were no stray thoughts. No telltale physical sensations or smells. All he was left to work with were sounds. He then realized he heard no footfalls, yet he knew he was in the midst of a group of hybrids. All he heard was the sound of the wind and a soft rubbing of fabric. The quiet reminded him of a pod of killer whales hunting in near silence.
For some reason this idea caused even greater dread than their capture.

He heard a heavy door
whoosh
shut, and warm air enveloped him. He guessed they were inside the old mansion. The silence was now deeper with the wind gone. He felt himself passing through one vortex, then another. The experience was the same as when he’d entered the Montreal commune, except these barriers and the side effects were far stronger. Eventually, without warning, the pillowcase was pulled from his head. Sarah was next to him. Her pillowcase had also been removed at the same time. Strength began returning to his limbs. Four hybrids stood nearby, observing them. They were in a bedroom that looked like a Revolutionary War era movie set. Still wrapped in their sheets, they had been set down next to each other on a large four-poster bed. Their clothes and toiletries were neatly laid out at the foot of the bed. Other personal items were arranged on a dresser. How were all these details possible? Had he blacked out and lost time? Mark realized these hybrids staring at him felt ancient compared to those in the Montreal commune. Without exchanging a word or glance, the hybrids left the room. There was the sound of a heavy lock engaging inside the door.

All Mark’s faculties had returned and were in fact heightened, including the same sense of being hyper-connected that he’d experienced in Montreal. There was also the same deep peace and sensual pleasures. The feelings were so strong here that they were debilitating.

After dressing, Mark and Sarah explored the room and soon realized it was a prison. The door was solid steel made to look like wood. The windows were six-inch-thick ballistic plastic. The walls were solid and felt like steel was behind the wood paneling.

They had been in isolation for an hour before their captors came for them. Mark felt disoriented being this close to the singularity. His shoe caught on the carpet as they were being escorted in silence down hallways filled with period art and antiques. He tried to ask questions of their captors with no results.

They were delivered into a great room large enough to hold a reception. The walls were paneled in dark wood. The great room was empty, except at the far end stood a massive fireplace with an arrangement of three armchairs, a small end table, and a throw rug. A huge fire was crackling. There was an aroma of smoke laced with fragrant woods. Mark felt a deep sense of peace and fulfillment. He tried to fight the pleasurable emotions but was unable to suppress them. He was receiving a stream of memory capsules from Sarah, which confirmed she was experiencing the same emotions.

Then he noticed an ancient-looking hybrid sitting in one of the chairs. How could he have not seen this hybrid before? He felt mentally corrected by the man for thinking the word
hybrid
. The initiate’s eyes were open but Mark could somehow tell his awareness was mostly elsewhere. He spotted what he intuitively knew was Noah’s relic on the end table next to the ancient initiate. They were ushered forward by their escorts. The initiate stood to greet them. The sense of peace and happiness was overwhelming as Mark shook hands. The initiate did not speak and instead only smiled with deep kindness. An assist showed every inch of his ancient body was saturated with nanotech seeds to the same level as Noah. The initiate was small of stature and in some way reminded Mark of Mahatma Gandhi. He had a leathery face, bald head, and carried a smell of what an assist identified as Turkish cigarette smoke. The initiate just stood there smiling for what seemed like hours, then spoke in a thick Middle Eastern accent.