Ghost of the Gods - 02 (47 page)

“Now I am going to show you the heart of Prometheus,” said Zuris. “Our interface subjects.”

The elevator door opened onto a short corridor that ended at a security door. One of the bodyguards swiped an access badge through a reader, then placed his palm on a scanner, then punched in an access code. The door opened, exposing a corridor lined with glass. The air and walls were cold, reminding Mark of a huge walk-in commercial refrigerator. The light raining down through the glass ceiling was uniform and bright. The floors appeared to have solid sheets of dull metal below the glass panels. Behind the glass walls were rooms that looked like intensive care units in a hospital. Between each room was a large closet of some kind. The closets were completely sealed and required the same triple authentication as the security door. The entrance to each subject’s room was through a rear door that was not accessible from the corridor. The glass was several inches thick and had an almost invisible weave of filaments running through it. Mark could tell from an assist that the filaments were radiating a powerful zone-jammer field. It appeared like a quarter of the rooms were occupied. The subject he was looking at was restrained and held at an incline of about 15 degrees from horizontal with her lower body submerged in a clear liquid. The head and neck were inside the doughnut opening of a compact fMRI unit. Intravenous lines were tapped into ports in the subject’s chest. A pair of clear pipes circulated liquid through the shallow tub in which the subject was partially immersed. Attached to the outside of the glass wall were several flat-panel displays stacked one on top of the other. The displays showed vital signs, fMRI images, digital signal data, and a video of the subject’s face from inside the fMRI doughnut.

The scene put a chill through Mark. These were human beings who had been turned into a biological component of a computer interface. He had not fully grasped what Zuris had meant when he’d said they used hybrids for the interface. He felt the emotions radiating from Kathy and knew this was the first time she had seen this hellish spectacle in person.

“Subjects can be kept alive indefinitely in a deep state of mental hibernation. We need to quiet their minds so their thoughts do not interfere with the interface itself. We use TPN to feed and sustain the body.”

Mark could feel Kathy was growing extremely agitated by what Zuris was saying.

“How do you induce mental hibernation?” she interrupted.

“I had to protect you from certain things,” said Zuris.

“Tell me now!” she demanded.

“A cocktail of psychotropic drugs and general anesthesia is used.”

“Oh, fuck you!” said Kathy. “You’re turning these volunteers into vegetables.”

Kathy’s anger rolled off Zuris as if she did not exist. It was a remarkable display of self-control, which made Zuris difficult to read. Mark decided the man was a borderline sociopath and began discounting his ability to sift Zuris’s facts from lies. Zuris walked over to one of the closets, unlocked it, and then stepped back. The small room was filled with racks of electronic equipment.

“This is where we analyze the results from each subject,” he said. “We are taking every precaution. We have the digital equivalent of the level four isolation of your BVMC lab. In those computer racks are the most advanced firewalls and intruder defense systems developed by the NSA. This is the same equipment the USAG intelligence agencies use to protect their darkest secrets. All data collection and computer control has to pass through that digital gauntlet before it gets into Zero-G’s intranet. Do you see that second and third rack? Just like all other computer systems and networks in this Zero-G facility, we have triple redundancy. We are taking no chances of accidently letting the god-machine slip into our network or the Internet.”

Mark tried to remain neutral. As repulsive as this experiment appeared, he had to balance that against the genocide that had already begun in cities around the world. He knew he would be damned, but he had to try to use this awful tool to protect humanity from the hives. It was the lesser of evils.

“I want to show you one subject in particular,” said Zuris. “This is our most recent addition. Subject seven was the first interface to work reliably and still shows the greatest potential and throughput. He is a very unusual hybrid. Before he arrived here he was acting as a faith healer and actually curing people. We think he was somehow able to inject some of his COBIC into those he healed. He has multiple personalities and psychopathy. He does not know he’s a hybrid and thinks he’s the messiah. This man is a potential cure for many fatal diseases, but he is also like a wasp. Even though he is not conscious, he is
constantly throwing out micro kill-zones as if trying to sting imaginary tormentors. He is a very dangerous subject. Were he not inside a zone-jammer field, all of us would have died the moment we walked onto this floor—with the exception of you, of course.”

Mark stared through the glass, feeling like a visitor at a zoo. This entire Prometheus experiment just got more and more hideous. He looked at the medial monitor tracing lines that measured this poor man’s life. He studied the video feed of the subject’s face and sensed he knew this man, but the appearance matched nothing from a full search of his memory.

“Our analysis indicates that about twenty-five percent of this subject’s brain is nanotech,” said Zuris. “Very soon we will be able to fully interface our computers with the god-machine at the highest abstract levels, but we can never let the genie out of the bottle. This subject will never leave this room alive. Interestingly, it turns out this subject’s fingerprints were on file with the FBI. He was not always a faith healer. Before the plague, he was an assistant DA in New York. Fingerprint evidence from some heinous crime scenes also match. He’s wanted by the FBI for an amazingly large number of homicides. His facial appearance has been changed. It does not look surgical. We can only assume he was able to alter his own appearance using COBIC. He says his name is the Messiah but his real name is Artie Hartman, aka Alexander. I know you both have—shall we say—crossed paths before. He seems to have total memory loss of everything prior to the end of the nanotech plague. His first memory, what he calls his rebirth, is a huge explosion. I wonder what would happen if we let the drugs wear off and told him Mark Freedman and Kathy Morrison are just a few feet away.”

“Which spot is reserved for me in this human tank farm?” asked Mark. “When I’m no longer useful, this will be my new home, right?”

“We only accept volunteers,” said Zuris

Mark recognized that was the first lie Zuris had spoken.

“Fine, I volunteer for a tank,” said Mark.

The bodyguards were staring. Mark detected shock from Kathy and amusement from Zuris.

Mark Freedman – Dallas, Texas – March 15, 0002 A.P.

Mark had been sharing living quarters with Kathy inside the Prometheus bunker for several days. He had access to the isolated pathways of the n-web, which permeated the underground facility like some great abandoned spirit that touched everyone within its reach. He had no idea why Zuris was allowing him this partial connection. It had to be for some devious reason. Kathy was only there as a human shield and knew it. Mark could feel her fiery resentment. She now disliked him for a growing list of reasons. He was saddened by every flare-up of her anger that she radiated at him. Even though he felt what she was feeling and often knew some of what she was thinking, he’d found no way to defuse the escalating situation.

Their room had no windows. Instead, as in all other living quarters in the bunker, there was a large wall screen that showed scenic views synchronized to the time of day. They had office space, a private bath, a real bed, and two very advanced workstations. There was even an online food service with a gourmet menu. The things Zuris did were so calculating. Everything here was engineered with the goal of coercing maximum cooperation from workers. The quarters itself would have felt normal and reminiscent of his time at the BVMC lab, except for the heavy steel security door that locked from the outside. Mark also had no illusions that anything said or done in this place was private. The fact that Zuris had eavesdropped on his conversations with McKafferty onboard an Air Force jet was a constant, powerful reminder.

Mark had done useful work reviewing the Prometheus
interface project. Kathy believed he was collaborating in something immoral. He knew her resentment of this was the fuel that kept their tension at a boil. He’d done the work not only to establish an appearance of cooperation, but also to learn more about his objective. His workstation had no access to Prometheus. If the local n-web could only penetrate into one of the subject’s rooms, he would have access to both the god-machine and part of Prometheus. The logical solution was increasing the transmission power of the seeds to a point where they overpowered the jammer signal. He’d considered many different ways to accomplish this goal. The best option was engineering a synchronized in-phase transmission by an entire phalanx of seeds. The problem was, he had no idea how to issue commands to seeds that were not in his body. Something like a firewall prevented most internal commands from escaping out onto the n-web. This arrangement made a great deal of sense. Without some kind of semipermeable barrier, hybrids controlling their own bodies might also inadvertently affect others nearby or even on the other side of the world. The only firewall exception for seed command and control seemed to be micro kill-zones.

As Mark sat at his workstation, he felt trapped between two opposing fates. The more he studied Prometheus, the more he was convinced it could be made into a shield. Unfortunately, the more he learned, the more he knew he needed to destroy it as soon as he could figure out a way. He was confident Prometheus was not yet advanced enough to provide usable command and control of the n-web. Had he not been convinced of this, he could easily have believed the recent kill-zones had originated from Prometheus. He had to deny Zuris and the USAG this terrible first strike weapon, which they would undoubtedly use for their own brand of tyranny—but first, he had to make sure the hive’s plans were irrevocably crushed.

Mark needed to find some way to enlist Kathy’s help. Zuris had a curious weakness for her that translated into him giving her additional leeway. Mark began typing new searches into the workstation, followed by requests for documents. As promised by Zuris, Mark had few limits to his access to technical information. The retrieval process was very slow, sometimes taking minutes. This delay led Mark to suspect each request had to be approved by some minder who was watching over him. The scientists here had made exceptional progress. They had mapped the basic building blocks of the self-assembling nanotech seeds. They might even be on the verge of beginning to understand some of the mechanisms, which would truly be revolutionary. It was frustrating how the god-machine censored information about its internal workings. Why should he be denied knowledge about how his own body operated? It seemed the only way for him to ever find out would be through the slow work of non-hybrid scientists and engineers dissecting, analyzing, and theorizing their way to breakthroughs.

Some of his new information requests had been approved and appeared on the screen. One long document had several embedded videos. He was able to read information photographically, consuming most documents in minutes. As long as he had a mental snapshot of a full page he could move on to the next without digesting it. Some minutes later, he would find everything in the document all magically integrated into his thinking, as if he had read it. Clearly, some parallel process running inside his nanotech brain was reading and digesting the snapshots.

Mark clicked on one of the embedded videos. He had suspicions Zero-G was conducting Nazi-like human experiments on hybrids. His first tour of Prometheus and stray thoughts from Zuris that day had firmly planted that seed of suspicion. Mark was trying to find out how far they had gone and use that information as a lever to move Kathy. The first video contained deeply disturbing footage of hive members dying under experimental conditions when disconnected from the god-machine. The experiments started with a disconnection that lasted for a fraction of a second and then systematically increased the disconnect time until the hybrid died. The slow death seemed like mental suffocation. Mark called Kathy over the see the experiments. This video had not been what he was specifically looking for, but it did serve the purpose and it also confirmed that Noah had been telling the truth about that particular hive vulnerability. It also raised suspicions that Zuris knew far more about hives than Mark had suspected.

He felt strong emotions radiating from Kathy and knew the video had profoundly affected her. She blamed herself for the torture of these hybrids and hated Zuris for using her. Mark did not like manipulating her this way, but he had no choice. He had to make sure her allegiance shifted firmly to him and remained there.

Coyotes

Sarah Mayfair – Southern Arizona – March 17, 0002 A.P.

Noah’s safe house was situated at the top of a high desert bluff with the world laid out below it. Sarah was staring out a massive seven-foot-tall window that took up almost an entire wall of the living room. It felt like she was standing outside. The Sonora desert ringed by far-off mountains was a spectacle that filled her eyes, but not her soul. It had been almost a week and the shock of losing Mark had increased instead of numbed. At times she was completely panicked and would begin walking in circles through the house while talking to herself and Mark. At other times it was hard to breathe. Mark being gone was incomprehensible. A part of her was still irrationally angry with him for emotionally deserting her days before his capture and so angry at him for being captured at all. The loss had become a catalyst, proving how important he was to her, and his importance went far beyond being the father of their unborn child.

When she’d first arrived at Noah’s safe house, the place had felt surreal. She’d expected something as decrepit as his antique Land Cruiser. This house was worth a small fortune and had clearly been his home for a very long time. It did not fit Noah’s image at all, which meant she had some very mistaken impressions of the man. The ceilings were 15 feet high. Every space was filled with art, some of it very old and mysterious. The house was positioned on the edge of a bluff in the middle of the very definition of nowhere. They were surrounded on every side by desert and hostile mountain terrain. The house was completely self-contained with solar power, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling, and backup generators. Noah had given her a tour, which included explanations of how everything had been crafted with art and nature as key themes. The walls and ceiling were three feet thick reinforced green cement. The house was built into the earth on all sides, except the front. Access to the safe house was from a stairwell that ran down from a small reinforced garage that sat atop the bluff at ground level. The garage blended with the surroundings as if designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The road leading to the house seemed to disappear at every bend like a mirage. She had her own room and rarely saw Noah or talked with him even less. He was a ghost even inside his own home.

Sarah leaned her forehead and hands against the glass wall. It was warm to the touch. Her thoughts wandered back to rescuing Mark, as they did almost every minute of every day. All she had to hang onto was a fragmented memory capsule from after his capture. He was inside a compound in Dallas run by Zero-G Corporation. There were protective suits that jammed the n-web and a dangerous megalomaniac named Zuris, who was Mark’s jailer. She had received nothing more from Mark in six days. She had no idea if he was still being detained at that compound or if he was even alive. Tears trickled down her cheeks, following a well-worn path. She had almost lost him in Chicago and had not gone through all that just to lose him now. Her hands subconsciously rubbed her belly and the new life that was growing inside. Six days ago she’d had another chance to tell him he was going to be a father, but instead all she had sent was that she loved him and then the spotty connection with him in Dallas had been lost.

Sarah turned at the sound of Noah coming down the entryway stairs. Her mind had already recognized the fleeting emotional fingerprint that Noah permitted as a way of identifying himself. He had been out somewhere for two days doing something he would no doubt tell her nothing about. From the couch, Ralph lifted his head, then returned to sleep. Ralph had other ways of identifying people.

Sarah was determined to confront Noah before he disappeared again with the only vehicle. She found him in the kitchen unloading fresh produce from one of several cooler bags.

“Don’t you dare leave me stranded here again!” she complained. “What if something happened? What if I had to leave?”

“Where would you go? After Mark? You know that would be suicide.”

“It’s my life,” said Sarah. “No one appointed you my protector.”

“And where exactly is Mark?” asked Noah. “Is he even alive?”

“You know full well he was at Zero-G in Dallas, and if he’s not there, it’s a very good place to start.”

“And what about the child?” asked Noah.

The child—he knows! Sarah was immediately thrown off balance. All the momentum she’d built was sapped by that simple statement and all it meant. She knew this confrontation would happen eventually. Maybe he’d known all along. Her mind was reeling with questions, or was he in her head, trying to confuse her again?

“You have no idea how important that child will be,” said Noah. “It will be the first child born of two hybrids. That child represents the future of everything. It is a future the hives must fear. A race of hybrids that can breed. You and Mark have changed everything.”

Sarah wondered if she should tell Noah about the hive’s final message. The memory of that last whisper was vividly clear.
Nothing must harm it
. Some part of the hive had discovered she was pregnant. Had that same part acted to protect the child from the rest of the hive with suicide as the solution? Sarah had thought long and hard about this and trusted nothing. Maybe the message was pure deception and the real goal was to steal her child to learn how to prevent a pregnancy from happening again?

Noah stood over her like a giant, exuding mental and physical domination. She decided to keep this all to herself for now. She didn’t understand this man or know how much she could really trust him. She understood the hives even less and her blood bond to them least of all. Something felt odd.

“Bastard!”

Sarah was outraged as she caught Noah forcing a memory into her. He had no right! She was suddenly dizzy and gripped a countertop to keep from staggering. The memory was like a sedative. It was from the last great epoch 40,000 years ago. Approaching the time of their destruction, the entire society had been focused on the possibility of a child being born from two hybrids. The child would be a spiritual sign that everything was about to evolve with a literal rebirth of humankind. The emotions this memory evoked within Noah made Sarah wonder if he had been alive back then, in this life or a past life.

“This safe house can withstand any war,” said Noah. “Any cataclysm unleashed by hive or mankind. In this place you can ride out the coming storm. You must stay here and be safe.”

“That’s not your decision to make!” she shouted. “If my child is so goddamn important, then aren’t both parents equally as important? We have to get Mark back.”

“
No
… I will not permit it.”

Sarah started to laugh in his face. She couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted. She had walked through ground zero of kill-zones where millions had died, while she had survived. What did this man know about her?

Sarah Mayfair – Southern Arizona – March 18, 0002 A.P.

Sarah had woken to find Noah and the only vehicle gone, again. He was obviously keeping her prisoner and he was not out searching for Mark. She was confident of that and she was done being his prisoner.

“Hey, Ralph, let’s take a walk.”

Ralph bounded off the couch, eager to go outside. Sarah got her backpack from the bedroom and then proceeded to the kitchen to fill it mostly with water and then squeezed in dried food wherever possible. At least it was not summertime out in that wasteland. Back in her bedroom, she put on her body armor and Beretta. She checked her M4, the grenade launcher under the barrel, and was set to go. She would have to walk two to three days before reaching any place that had cars, but she had been through worse. An assist projected a topographical map that showed a hundred miles to civilization.

Sarah was covered in sweat, even though the temperature was hovering in the lower fifties. She was walking through an endless region of hilly sand, bristling with aggressive desert plant life. There were thorny bushes, creosote, cactus, and many other varieties of smaller, spiny plants. She had kept up a steady pace all day, pushing her body to the limits and stopping only to eat. She was burning calories at a high rate and had managed to cover almost forty miles. The sky would soon be dark. The landscape was morphing into the rich desert hues of an abstract painting as it began to glow in harmony with the sunset.

To keep her mind off the damage she was inflecting on her muscles, she focused on something Noah had taught her shortly after they’d arrived at the safe house. It was a mental technique that he himself had been taught and mastered a long time ago. It was a way of focusing the nanotech mind using a meditation unique to hybrids. When done properly, the technique brought you closer to what Noah called the
dreaming communal
awareness
. From that state of mind you could supposedly awaken past lives. Sarah had not been able to share in the communal dream, but she had caught brief flashes of memories of what might have been living souls within the communal awareness. Noah had said those flashes were glimpses of past lives. He told her that if they were long enough and clear enough, she could take the flashes and use them in the timeline to find those lives if they’d been recorded. He explained that in past ages, successful matches had been considered irrefutable proof of the immortality of awareness. She had tried to find her glimpses in the archive and retrieved nothing. Failure or success meant little to her. She was already certain she had lived many times before. Her near-death experience had convinced her of that.

Sarah thought about her day spent hiking through the desert and meditating. She had gotten a few more flashes, which were now locked away safely in her nanotech brain, never to be forgotten. When she stopped for the night, she would search for them in the timeline archive. She wondered if she had crossed paths with Noah in other lives. She had an odd sense he might have killed her in one of those past lives. He was such a dark contradiction: part artist and part assassin, part philosopher and part thug. She had to admit she was scared of him and it was possible he was already coming after her.

Moonlight was casting shadows across the desert. Something large moved in the underbrush. Sarah unslung her M4. Ralph was yards ahead of her. She could hear him growling. Ralph charged toward a stand of tall bushes. Sarah ordered him to stop. He obeyed, but his eyes remained locked on his target. A large coyote broke cover with several others. Using an assist, Sarah could detect furtive movements in the brush, which had to be more of them. Ralph easily weighed several times that of the largest coyote and could take them all one at a time, but Sarah knew these wild animals would attack as a pack. The coyotes looked like they didn’t know whether to hold their ground or run. Sarah fired several shots into the air. The animals disappeared as if they were spirits of the desert.

Sarah and Ralph started hiking again, but before long she heard something large behind them moving in the brush. Every few minutes she’d hear sounds behind them and Ralph would turn. She had to repeatedly order him not to attack. They were being followed, which was extremely unusual behavior for coyotes, and that set her imagination free to work on her. Maybe these were not normal animals. Soon her hair stood on end with every rustle or faint snap. As the sounds grew closer, she’d finally had enough. At the next
snap
Sarah turned and fired indiscriminately at full auto into the desert, tearing up the vegetation and possibly a coyote or two. The clip was empty in seconds. She hoped that would discourage the stalkers, but an hour later she knew they were still following, just farther back.

Sarah stopped for a cold dinner. She sat on her backpack while eating and debated whether to keep traveling right after dinner, then decided Ralph needed a break and her muscles needed to heal. She would start hiking again at midnight. The coyotes were probably still there, though she had not heard them in some time. She ate the last piece of a granola bar. In the near distance she could see the outlines of cliffs and mountains as darker areas carved from the star-filled sky. She slowly stood up. Her muscles complained, but not as loudly as before. In another few hours most of the damage would be healed. She put on her infrared night-vision goggles and began to scan for any signs of a vehicle heading her way or coyotes. At this temperature, the heat of a car would stand out. She suspected it was pointless. Noah was a ghost. She would not see him coming.

Just as she removed the goggles, a memory capsule flared in her mind. It was Mark. The goggles slipped from her fingers as she was fully immersed in what he’d sent. The capsule was hasty and contained a complicated jumble of thoughts and experiences. She could tell he was injured from the body awareness that came along with the capsule. He was inside the same Zero-G campus as before and planning to escape tonight. Sarah experienced chaos all around him and had no idea what was causing it. He was inside a small, darkened area that seemed to be shaking. His vision panned and Sarah caught a glimpse of Kathy as the capsule ended abruptly. Sarah sent a reply that she was coming and that Noah was a problem. She doubted her response would get through. She kept the message short in case Noah could somehow intercept it and use it against them. She wondered if her imagined need for brevity was also a convenient excuse not to tell Mark she was pregnant. It troubled her that Kathy was with him. She was relieved Kathy was alive but not so happy about the circumstances. Sarah closed her backpack and shrugged it on. Escaping from that Zero-G prison would be dangerous. Mark needed all the help he could get and he needed it now. She might not find a car for another day or longer, and it could take eighteen hours to drive to Dallas. That was too long. Anything could happen in that time.

“Come on, Ralph… Sorry, sweetie. You can rest when we get some wheels.”

The first road they would reach was an old two-lane piece of asphalt that ran to and from nowhere. It was about six miles away. The odds of there being any car traffic were zero. The only good news was that they would make better time walking on a paved surface.

Sarah stopped.

She had no choice and knew it. The fastest option was Noah and his Land Cruiser. If he refused to help once he arrived, she’d leave him wounded on the side of the road and take the Land Cruiser. He’d heal. Sarah sent Noah a memory capsule containing everything she’d learned and instructions on where to meet her. A reply came immediately almost as if he knew her message was coming. He would meet her. That’s all he communicated.

At midnight Sarah was sitting on her pack by the side of the road with her Berretta concealed in her lap. Ralph was dozing next to her. She’d gone over Mark’s memory capsule again and again.

“Hello, Sarah…”

Noah’s voice appeared out of nowhere. He was somewhere in the desert scrub behind her. Her heart was beating wildly. She was mixed up. He was doing something to her thoughts again. Ralph was on his feet and growing. He was about to attack and she was ready to let him.