Ghost of the Gods - 02 (30 page)

The original rise of the guides occurred in the same way as all evolutionary jumps. It was the result of a successful chain of mutations. The first mutation was an organizing principal for society called the
way of twos.
This mutation was born out of an antediluvian empire ruled by a small hybrid class that had ordained themselves incarnate deities
.
This empire possessed weaponry and other high technology based on the same nanotech as the relic Noah had given to Sarah. These weapons were used without mercy by the small number of living demigods to rule the vast world of organics. The Earth was theirs to plunder. The empire did not understand the advanced technology it was using. The technology had been appropriated from an even more ancient culture, a primordial culture from whose ashes all had emerged. The empire knew little of this primordial culture, this first accent of humankind. So Mark knew little of this culture too other than they were pathologically warlike, highly technologically advanced, and ultimately doomsday suicidal.

The way of twos was a kind of backlash against this failed primordial culture. The way of twos was a two-caste society that was formed because the living deities could not be breeders. All hybrids were sterile. The empire’s greatest minds believed hybrids by design had to be sterile and were assembled that way by the goddess. Immaculate conception was the restructuring of a human brain and DNA giving rise to a new, living deity.

The living deities viewed their sterility as a mark of pride. The great twofold problem of immortality that they faced was overcoming limited habitable biosphere and preserving genetic diversity. A two-caste society composed of living deities and breeders was the ultimate solution. The two races never mixed, never even breathed the same air. When a living deity perished, a replacement was chosen from the ranks of the breeders. These self-ordained gods lived closely together in small groups, which offered the perfect soil for the second mutation. This mutation was in the poorly understood nanotech digital realm. A newly sentient nanotech virus, soon to be called
guide
s, emerged out of the event horizon of a digital singularity. In one day and one night, the virus took complete control from the living deities in a bloodless coup. All this history was imparted to Mark as knowledge without a single image, sound, or emotion. He had no way of verifying its accuracy. It was a flat view of a multidimensional world.

Sarah Mayfair – Morristown, New Jersey – Date unknown

Sarah was screaming. The voices in her head refused to stop. She endured as the rapist filled her with its propaganda while hacking programs into her nanotech brain. What the guide was doing was awful, but these voices were pure insanity. She knew they were not from the guide. She was not even sure the guide was aware of them.

She learned from the voices that
this commune had recognized her from the moment she began traveling toward it. Some of the pull she’d felt was the commune inviting her home. Several hybrids in this commune were family, people Sarah thought had died before she was born. She was horrified to be related to this commune by blood. She now understood where her genetic predisposition to the nanotech seeds had originated. She had been cultivated from birth. She was nothing more than a fortunate breeder selected from the human herd to join the ranks of the false deities.

Sarah clenched her teeth. The voices were back. They were bragging how their power was growing as new hives blossomed in fields fed by streams of n-web nourishment. How could she tell any of this blood-relation to Mark?

Sarah pleaded to be blinded as the future was shown to her in a single stoke of pain. It would be a terrible darkness. Great herds of breeders would live ordinary lives, unaware of their masters controlling them. This transformation was already well under way. The hives had great wealth, influence, and power. Protectorates were nothing less than the resurrection of the human farms from countless thousands of generations ago. In them, the new proto herds of breeders were already controlled and tended in all ways with every need meet by the state. The final encore would arrive as the birth of a new, organized religion. There would be cullings with designer diseases or wars to avert overpopulation disasters. It would be a flawlessly efficient, soulless world.

Mark Freedman – Morristown, New Jersey – Date unknown

The passage of time crept on. As water wears down a stone, Mark felt his identity fading. At moments he desperately wanted to be a full, participating member of his hive. The communal mind had nearly absorbed him as it filled him with new knowledge. It was impossible to do anything the guide did not permit. He had lost contact with Sarah, but could only assume the same was true for her. The door to his cell opened to admit a hybrid who delivered his dinner. The tray held a bowl of gruel with dried fruit and a pitcher of water. Mark did not touch his food until the guide gave him permission.

Mark Freedman – Morristown, New Jersey – Date unknown

Mark awoke in confusion amid a reprogramming trance. The room lights sputtered, then went out. It was night, but it appeared like the faint orange glow of a rising sun was coming through his window. He felt more like himself than at any recent moment he could recall. He had a terrible feeling of something huge that was missing. Without warning his stomach knotted up as he slumped to the floor. A hellish experience overwhelmed him. He was reliving the instantaneous death of everyone in his hive. There was no floating away to the land of dreams as there was with Sarah’s near-death experience. He experienced only a collective scream of pain and surprise, then nothing. The communal mind was gone; the hive was dead. From out of the midst of all the terminated lives an excited river of memories came to him from Sarah.

Mark was overwhelmed by the realization of what had happened. He was free of the guide. At the same time he was deeply saddened at the loss of the peace and fulfillment he’d grown to love. He went to the window and saw the remains of the mansion smoldering. It had been decimated. The snow was melted in a wide circle around it. Amid the melted circle small grass fires burned in spots. The roof was gone, leaving only the scorched outer brick walls that were toppling in places. The inside of the structure was gutted: Windows and doors were gone, leaving ragged holes in what remained standing. The bricks around the openings were faintly glowing from impossible heat. The explosion was an all too familiar sight.

Mark spotted a figure walking toward his building. As the image resolved he was able to pick out details with the aid of an assist. His heart began pounding. Noah was striding toward their prison while dragging someone small behind him. Had Noah come to finish the job and kill them all? Both he and Sarah were now part of this hive.

In a few minutes the lock released and the prison door opened. Noah stared at him in silence. The hybrid was backlit from the glow of what must have been emergency lights in the hallway. His shadowed face betrayed no readable expression. The hybrid was very intimidating this close up. He was at least six and a half feet tall with a stocky frame and obvious physical prowess, which gave him the looming presence of a god. Mark sensed the hybrid could literally rip him apart and there would be nothing he could do to stop it. A single instruction blossomed in Mark’s mind.

Wait here... Do nothing…

Less than a minute later Sarah ran through the open door with tears in her eyes. Her arms flew around him in a tight embrace. Noah walked over to the bed and set down the nexus he had given Sarah, followed by their guns. The dim firelight and shadows gave him a ghostly appearance. Noah then pulled in from the hallway a stunned Mustafa, whose hands were bound behind his back. Noah roughly pushed Mustafa toward them in a clear gesture of offering this hybrid as a gift.

Sarah whispered in Mark’s ear. “I’m experiencing some of Noah’s emotions. He doesn’t trust us.”

Mark glanced at the relic on the bed. It was not a helpful offering. The relic was being returned for some obscure reason, and for an even more obscure reason this offended him.

“Why are you returning the relic to us?” asked Mark. “You gave it to Sarah so hives would come after us. That relic is the reason they took us prisoner. You set us up. That’s what you did, isn’t it?”

Noah smiled thinly but said nothing.

“Why the hell would we want it?” asked Mark. “Every hive will be hunting us for it. Seeking out relics is very important to them.”

Mustafa blurted something to Noah in a language that sounded Middle Eastern. The words came out as if Mustafa was spitting at Noah. Unflustered by the outburst, Noah stared down at Mustafa and spoke in the same dialect. His voice was strong and flat, with a tonal quality that did not ring human to Mark’s ears. Was this hybrid a different species? That was impossible. Everything about his appearance, plus the medical assists, confirmed Homo sapiens.

Mustafa’s face grew redder as Noah spoke. Soon, Mustafa began shouting back. An assist identified the language as Akkadian. The assist followed up with more information when Mark registered confusion.
Akkadian, the earliest Semitic language, considered extinct. Spoken today only by scholars and obscure religious groups.

Mustafa spat on the floor. Noah struck the hybrid backhanded across the face with a loud clap. The blow appeared strong enough to snap his neck. Sarah gasped. Though there appeared to be no serious effort behind the blow, the impact was formidable. Mustafa’s face colored as blood poured from his nose and split lip. Mark was shaken by the casual violence. He could see in a medical assist Mustafa’s body healing itself at a rate far beyond what Mark’s body could accomplish. The blood flow had already abated.

Noah took Mustafa by the arm and forced him to sit on the floor like a dog. He then addressed Sarah and Mark for the first time. Speaking in English, his voice sounded far more normal, but his foreign accent colored his speech with a vague, otherworldly flavor.

“These hives have violent plans to cull the breeders and restore their reign. Your indoctrination was more than anyone needs to understand the horrors that would bring. Take this illuminati, Mustafa, with you. Critical information you need will be provided by this creature. Without him you will not last long. Take the nexus too. It will be of use. It can retrieve data from places the goddess cannot reach. Do not waste time. Hives will be coming after you like fire ants pouring from a speared nest. You both can sense the presence of hives. Stay away from them until you learn more. If you stray too close, they will find you by your emanations carried by the seeds. You two are very noisy and must learn to be quiet.”

Noah gazed down at Mustafa on the floor.

“Do not worry about danger from this thing now that he is severed from his hive,” said Noah. “You have no choice but to keep both this thing and the nexus until their usefulness is done. I sense your resistance but you have no option… without the advantage they provide, you both will die. This thing already knows too much. If you leave him behind he will send others after you within hours. As for the nexus, don’t activate it wastefully. Hives can only sense it when it is disrupting the network. Once switched on, they will sense it from a hundred kilometers off and come in a swarm if they have not already detected your undisciplined, noisy minds.”

Noah stripped a pillowcase from the bed, then tugged it over Mustafa’s head and tied it in place with a severed lamp cord.

“Keep him in the dark,” said Noah. “The less he knows, the better it is for you. Separation from his hive makes him like a baby who has dropped from its womb. He can do nothing on the network now, but like all babies he will learn to walk and then run. You must be done with him before then.”

“This is insane,” said Mark. “How does any of this help keep us alive? We can’t run around with a prisoner and a relic that is a distress beacon to every hive on the planet.”

“You must go,” said Noah. “This explosion will bring your military. Mustafa is an influential and wealthy man.”

Without warning, new memories from Noah erupted in Mark’s mind. He somehow knew Sarah was just as mesmerized by the same flood. The lengthy, violent chain of recollections was filled with recent atrocities committed by hives. The flood ended in what seemed like an instant with a single clear thought from Noah remaining in Mark’s mind:
“Leave now!”

Noah had disappeared in the midst of the flood of memories. Mark took off after him. There was enough illumination from emergency lights and fires outside to see from one end of the hallway to the other. The ghost had vanished.

Mark returned, unsure what to do next. Sarah was checking her Beretta and then tossed it back onto the bed. She checked his gun and also tossed it onto the bed.

“Empty,” she said. “He’s smart not to trust us.”

“I think we should trust him for now and get out of here fast.”

Mark Freedman – Morristown, New Jersey – February 27, 0002 A.P.

Mark, Sarah, and their captive reached the graffiti covered house they’d been using without incident. The post-plague world was a very different place. Thirty minutes after a huge explosion and still no one had come to investigate. As soon as they left the estate, Sarah had grown very concerned about Ralph. Mark was worried too. Neither had seen him the night they were captured. He had not barked while the house was ransacked, which was a bad sign. The best Mark could hope for was that Ralph had been drugged or knocked out in some way.

Once they were in sight of the house, Sarah started to run and call for Ralph. Mustafa muttered something Mark did not catch. It sounded like an Akkadian curse.

“You better hope the dog is alive,” said Mark. “I won’t stop her from killing you.”

Mark saw Ralph’s head appear in one of the broken windows, then disappear. A moment later the huge dog was bounding out the open front door. As soon as Ralph saw Mustafa, he started to growl. Sarah had to restrain Ralph from attacking.

Mark and Sarah were soon busy packing up their gear and loading it into the Humvee in the garage as fast as possible. Ralph was okay. He was not even undernourished, which was a mystery. Sarah had found food and water in dog bowls in the kitchen. Someone had been taking care of him.

Sarah came downstairs with a curious smile on her face. She tossed Mark a .45ACP bullet. He caught it but had no idea what was so interesting about it.

“I found that and ten of its cousins arranged in a circular design on the bathroom counter upstairs. It’s the bullets emptied from my Beretta.”

“So Noah’s been here,” said Mark. “Why did he wait so long to rescue us?”

“Maybe he wanted to show us what the hives really are about and—”

They both stopped talking at the same moment. A clear impression of a convoy of soldiers racing down a highway toward Morristown had flashed into Mark’s mind. He knew without asking that Sarah had experienced the same memory capsule. The perception was imbued with a feeling of anxiety—a need to move quickly—a need to run. The capsule was from Noah. They had to go now. It might already be too late!