Ghost of the Gods - 02 (39 page)

Mark felt completely off balance. Mustafa’s disregard for life was appalling. Mark sat down on an old wooden folding chair. His head was beginning to ache.

“Much has changed since the last plague,” said Mustafa. “The lifting of the veil is now unstoppable. Our guides have constructed a weapon to create order out of the chaos of this damaged world. We have set in motion fulfillment of the prophecy. Unrestrained breeders are like locusts in the wheat fields of Gaia. Communes will complete what the goddess would not. With our new weapon we can send signals over the n-web to trigger our own kill-zones. We have a strategy and unlike the goddess, we will not stop until the breeders are a herd Gaia can sustain and we can manage. We will bring back the way of the twos and there is nothing you can do to stop us. There is nothing the goddess will do to stop us!”

“You’re insane!” yelled Sarah.

“Shut up, foolish child. Show respect. I am the only surviving host of an ancient and wise sentience. My deity was murdered by that betrayer with help from both you imbeciles. The intellect of a guide is beyond all our feeble comprehension. To murder such a being is a crime against nature herself. The lifting of the veil is something your uninitiated minds cannot understand. It is the yin and yang of chaos and order. It is life in balance on a planetary scale. It is necessary and so we have set the prophesy in motion. The end of the breeders’ reign is happening now and unlike the goddess, we will never stop.”

Mark was surprised by the confidence and arrogance radiating from this man. It was the first time he’d sensed so much emotion from the illuminati. The ancient man could not have been more different than Noah, who was calmly listening with both his eyes and his mind wide open.

“Forty-seven thousand years ago during the Great Struggle, our strategy worked as we knew it would,” said Mustafa. “We did not have the weapons needed to defeat your ancestors, but your ancestors did. They had a powerful weapon from a far older age of war. Through manipulation and deceit we set events into motion. Your kind did all our killing for us. It is what you are good at. We failed only because we underestimated the power of the ancient, forbidden weapon, as did your ancestors.”

Noah looked as if he was confused and distracted. A moment later he interrupted Mustafa’s bragging.

“You’re speaking of a myth,” said Noah. “Something no one remembers because the destruction was so great it shattered the timeline records themselves. You are telling me nothing of value—nothing that can be verified. Do you have control over kill-zones or is this all just another of your lies within lies designed to manipulate?”

“No… no… this is no deception,” said Mustafa. “Check the nexus.”

“I know the hives have dug in deep around the world like so many ticks,” said Noah. “I’ve seen your very obvious bunkers. The only thing missing were signs with big, flashing neon arrows to announce your presence. You might as well have erected signs saying
attack here
. Because of the depth of your bunkers, the only weapons that can now sterilize all the nests rapidly are nuclear. I suspect the bunkers are all located just by accident in some of the most fertile and vital regions of Gaia. Are you goading the organics into attacking the heart of Gaia with nuclear weapons? Is that the real plan? Do you want them to wound the Earth so deeply that the goddess launches a nanotech plague to stop them? Is that it? Are your bunkers Trojan horses that are empty? I think the hives have instead gathered in some hidden stronghold ready to laugh at the simpleminded breeders who brought destruction upon themselves for a second time.”

Mustafa smiled thinly and said nothing. His eyes were defiantly locked onto Noah’s stare. Mark was overwhelmed by the volume of information from the god-machine flooding his mind through the entangled interface. He assumed Noah was also receiving the same information. One of Mark’s new memories provided n-web engineering information for the first time and proved the impossibility of a kill-zone coming from any source other than the god-machine. Another memory demonstrated how and why it was beyond the creative ability of hives to craft anything new. They could copy and rearrange, but they had no ability to create something completely original like this alleged new weapon.

“If hives have discovered and use technology that turns seeds into weapons, then you will lose everything,” said Noah. “The goddess would never allow such an aberrant thing.”

“The goddess does not care!” scoffed Mustafa. “We are not using our weapon to injure Gaia. We are not breeders. We are using our weapon to help Gaia. As I said, the goddess’s desire for noninterference in her experiments is our greatest tool. You know I am speaking the truth. You have the nexus monitoring my brain. What does it tell you?”

“You are speaking the truth as you believe it,” said Noah. “But I don’t trust your memories. You may have been programmed with defensive lies. The test of your truth is to see if your bunkers are full of vermin or empty.”

Noah removed a capped syringe from his pocket. It contained a milky liquid that reminded Mark of hand soap. Mustafa eyed the syringe. His lips began trembling.

“A painless quick-acting toxin that directly stops the heart,” said Noah.

“I told you everything,” whined Mustafa. “I kept my word. You promised not to kill me.”

“I said I would not kill you and bring you back,” growled Noah. “I said nothing about permanently killing you and leaving you dead.”

Mustafa tried to get up from the chair, but had no chance with his hands cuffed behind his back. Noah pushed him down into the chair and continued pushing the chair backward into the wall. Mark wanted to look away as Noah expertly injected the toxin into Mustafa’s neck, but could not avert his eyes. The deed was done. Mark looked at Sarah and saw a grim expression on her face. He could feel warring emotions radiating from her of hate and justice and never enough. Mustafa slumped out of the chair and onto the floor.

“Something’s wrong,” said Sarah. “He’s not dying.”

“It’s not toxin,” Noah informed her. “As long as I inject him every twelve hours, he’ll remain in a coma. We’ll need him again before this is done.”

Mark Freedman – Kansas – March 4, 0002 A.P.

Hours ago they had left the higher elevations behind them, and the roads were clear of snow. Sarah was driving the Stryker. Noah was leading the way in an old Toyota Land Cruiser. They were driving toward a decommissioned mine in a remote Colorado forest, not far from the Kansas border. The mine had been recently converted into a bunker. Noah had experienced tidal pulls that seemed to emanate from the bunker. The mine shaft sank a quarter of a mile into the earth, making it very difficult to be sure where the singularity was located or if it was there at all. It was equally possible the tidal pulls were the result of some type of deception. Property records showed the mine was sold to a private development company over twenty years ago.

At Noah’s instance they were taking a circuitous route that seemed completely random. They had passed through Colorado into Kansas and were now headed back toward Colorado on a different road. Noah had offered no explanation for their route. Mark was in the back of the Stryker, staring at a video from a forward-looking camera as the food basket of the country rolled by. They had passed so many farms, nearly all growing wild or fallow. The food supply was clearly in danger. Why wasn’t it being managed by the USAG? Climate change and the plague had destroyed so much. Without food from this part of the country people would starve.

Mark’s thoughts drifted back to questions that worried him about Noah. The man they were now following could be deceiving to them. When Sarah had asked Noah how the hives could override the god-machine’s control of the n-web to cause kill-zones, Noah had said there were ways, but now was not the time to discuss such dangerous ideas. Noah had not mentioned a thing about the god-machine’s engineering information that showed override was impossible. Was he trying to manipulate them, recruit them, or was it the truth?

Noah was slowing as they approached a highway interchange. His Land Cruiser had to be at least forty years old. The ancient bag of bolts had no armor and accelerated as if it was running on fumes. The cab was a separate compartment from the rear. The back three quarters of the Land Cruiser had a weather-beaten cloth roof and sides complete with several holes. A tan camouflaged paint job was the only thing that looked remotely recent on that rolling wreck. An unconscious Mustafa was in the back of the Land Cruiser under a tarp with his hands and feet cuffed to a metal rail.

Mark kept having feelings of déjà vu about Noah’s Land Cruiser. He had seen this truck before. Mark replayed photographic memories of the only other Land Cruiser he’d recently seen. He watched in his mind as a red Land Cruiser blew through a roadblock at the Delaware Water Gap Bridge. Both trucks were similar in body style and year. They just couldn’t be the same vehicle. He doubted Noah’s piece of junk could reach 100 mph. As Mark scrutinized Noah’s run-down Land Cruiser he thought how suicidal it was to drive around in something that decrepit. A highwayman with a pistol could stop it with one shot.

Without warning, Noah pulled over to the shoulder again. He had done this many times already. He never gave an explanation. They’d wait and after what seemed like a random amount of time he would pull back onto the road.

Mark climbed up and stuck his head out of a hatch. Wind was tugging at the decrepit cloth top of Noah’s Land Cruiser like a ship’s sail. Gray tumbleweeds rolled and bounced across the highway. In the distance, dark clouds flickered from within with lightning. An assist projected stats from a weather forecast into his vision. Just as before, the weather forecast looked like something copied off the Internet. How was the god-machine doing this? A scattering of fat drops started hitting around Mark. He ducked back inside and went up front behind Sarah. She engaged the parking brake and shook her head.

“It feels like he’s avoiding something by making these stops,” said Sarah.

Mark suddenly understood why they kept stopping and why the random, circuitous route. Noah was a ghost and stealth was his weapon. Part of that weapon was evasion and part of it was camouflage, such as an old Toyota truck not even worth stealing.

“He must be able to sense what’s ahead of him and avoid problems,” said Mark. “Look at how vulnerable he is in that Land Cruiser. He should be dead by now. He doesn’t need heavy weapons or armor if he’s invisible to those who do.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Sarah. “It’ll be dark soon and I don’t think we’re stopping.…”

Mark Freedman – Kansas – March 4, 0002 A.P.

The sun was setting. Although the day had become so gray, it was difficult to tell the difference. Sitting in the back, Mark watched the rain and thunder lashing the Kansas plain. Even on a video screen the ferocious storm was intimidating. March used to be too early in the year for the kind of storms that could give birth to tornadoes, but global warming had changed those rules. The clouds lit up with tendrils of lightning crawling through them like flashes of dangerous ideas forming in a giant mind.

They were following Noah’s Land Cruiser with their headlights on so that they would not run into him. Shortly after entering the storm, Noah began sending both of them streams of memory capsules. He was teaching them part of the knowledge he’d assembled about the many fallen human civilizations. He was using mental communications uncomfortably reminiscent of the hive’s attempted assimilation. Mark was surprised to learn Noah was an archeologist. It was difficult to guess how much of this history Noah believed, but two things were clear: He did believe some of it and the hives believed all of it; and that made it very important information, whether factual or not. All of the prior, doomed civilizations had historical knowledge of their preceding parent civilizations. Only in our current epoch had we lost all knowledge of our deep heritage. It was unprecedented how much history evaporated when the preceding civilization fell and blinded the god-machine 47,000 years ago.

In all the more recent civilizations that were technologically advanced, their science and religion had diverged and then ultimately come back together in dramatic head-on collisions. As if in some exotic experiment in a partial accelerator, these collisions had fused these two divergent belief systems into a single, unified definition of reality.

Over the eons, common themes could be identified in all the unified belief systems of all the civilizations. They all believed in a collective awareness that was sustained by all living things embodied and disembodied. They believed this collective was god. They believed we, the creatures of the universe, were literally the soil from which the spirit of god sprang forth. They did not believe we were created by god, but instead believed it was from us that the spirit of god was
born
.

They had scientific evidence obtained from experiments that unnervingly echoed some of the ideas that had driven Mark to conduct his past life searches in the archives. They had evidence that our cerebral cortex was the endpoint of a conduit, a quantum entangled transceiver linked to a permanent higher-self that existed outside of time and space as we know it. In their model the cerebral cortex did not store any thoughts other than a kind of short-term memory buffer. Our feeling that we are inside our bodies was only an illusion created by the operation of the transceiver. Every aspect of us that mattered was not located within our physical bodies.

Reincarnation to these societies was not only being reborn into different lifetimes, but also the repeated
rebirth
of awareness into the same lifetime.
My beginning is my end and my end is my beginning.
They had somehow scientifically demonstrated that a soul relived the same lifetime through a large number of cycles before moving on to begin a new lifetime. In their theorem, each cycle through the same lifetime was different. The free will of the individual and others sharing each lifetime could, in theory, create an infinite number of variations over an almost endless number of cycles. They also believed there were fixed points or events that were near immutable. Catastrophes great and small were examples of such fixed events. It was only after achieving perfection of the current lifetime that a soul moved on to a new one.

When Mark tried to understand their scientific theorems, his mind grew too confused to make sense of what he found. Concepts like déjà vu and precognition were incorporated into the theorems. The theorems themselves were mathematical models of an infinite, multidimensional quantum entangled universe. There were strange ramifications, such as precognition was not considered the ability to see the future. Instead, precognition was incomplete dream-like recall of memories of a fixed event that had already been relived countless times during prior cycles. They regarded birth and death as an unbroken continuum. They saw the wheel of life as a symbol of
eternal recurrence
, a wheel without beginning or end. During this cycling, death was simply your awareness falling out of linear material time and being drawn back to the moment of birth, like a magnet. Mark knew this cycling part of their theories dovetailed interestingly with quantum physics and its splitting off a new dimension for
every quantum possibility,
but with one big wrinkle. In this ancient knowledge, each cycle was a new, immutable parallel dimension that split off only at the moment of reoccurrence instead of at
every quantum possibility
. It was as if consciousness itself was responsible for creating each new dimension.