Immortality (64 page)

He took his prize fossil into the bathroom and washed its surface with hot water and alcohol. He soaked it for several minutes in the basin and then took a ping reading. The level was zero. He pinged the water in the basin where he’d soaked it. The reading was a hair above zero. He was satisfied that he’d eliminate any immediate source of seed contamination. He cracked the fossil open on the edge of the sink. His chest ached at what he’d done to his best specimen, prayed it was worth it, then measured the freshly exposed surface. The reading was zero, but not unexpected. He’d been thinking about Dr. Marjari’s report. Infrared light was a suspected power source. If there were dormant seeds embedded in the fossil, then exposing them to light and heat might wake them up. He took the fossil out to his desk and shined an incandescent desk lamp on it inches from the exposed surface. The ping tester continued reading zero. His heart sank, but there was no way of knowing how long it could take to power the seeds up if they were there. The red line ticked up a little then sank back to a flat line. He looked at it. Was it possible? The red line ticked up again but this time it held and then started to rise. His heart beat faster. He felt dizzy. He couldn’t believe it. There was advanced nanotechnology embedded in this hundred million year old chunk of minerals; and it was waking up.

Mark rapped his knuckle quietly on Sarah’s door. He heard rustling, then footsteps. The door opened. Sarah was wrapped in a sheet. Her hair was tousled. The pupils in her emerald green eyes were dilated. Was she using psilocybin every night? If it really did what she claimed, there was no doubt in his mind he’d be doing the same. She stepped back from the door, allowing him to enter. He shut the door with a soft click. The room was completely dark except for a small glow of moonlight filtering through cracks in the blinds.

“I want to try it,” he said to the darkness.

Sarah said nothing. He heard what might have been her sheet dropping to the floor. He saw a vague shape and heard soft feet padding away into the darkness. There was a swoosh of fabric and the sounds of things being moved around. He heard a match strike and then saw a flare of light. Sarah had lit a candle. He could see by the yellow glow that she had donned a long gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans.

“The way it happened for me was a little rough,” she said. “I was trying to overdose. Don’t ask why. I won’t go there. I think I took a dozen capsules, maybe more? It should have been enough to fry my brains, but it didn’t. Since then, I’ve figured out three is enough for me. I don’t know if the dose should be more because you are bigger. It’s up to you, but I’d start with three. If that doesn’t work, you can always take more.”

“Three sounds fine.”

Mark swallowed three capsules with a glass of tap water. He felt like he’d just crossed a line he shouldn’t have, and one from which he would never return. Sarah was sitting in a corner of the room watching in silence. She looked ethereal. In the shadows, only parts of her face and body were visible. She told him it would take about thirty minutes. He knew it would be the longest thirty minutes of his life.

The candle had burned over halfway down. It had to have been almost an hour since he’d swallowed the capsules. Mark had begun wondering if the drugs were real. He started to get up and felt lightheaded, almost as if he was not getting enough oxygen. This worried him for a moment, until he noticed the candle flame was moving in odd ways. He forgot about oxygen and grew fascinated by the dance of the flame. He settled back down and stared at it for what must have been a very long time. At some point, he realized the flame had gone out; yet the glow of candlelight remained in the room. He looked over at Sarah. She seemed to be in a deep trance. Her only sign of life was the rhythmic expansion and collapse of her chest as she breathed. He looked back and the candle was burning.

“Pray for something you want to know,” whispered Sarah.

Mark tried to empty his mind except for a single thought.
What are you?
He focused on this single thought, repeating it in a whisper. He repeated it until his lips were dry and his throat felt hoarse. His head felt lighter, but no flow of information from the outside came into his mind. At some point he stopped whispering, stopped thinking. His mind was filled with memories of a sphere floating at the bottom of an ocean. He knew the sphere contained all that was knowable, and more. The memories blended into a waking dream. He reached out to touch the bubble-like surface and was immediately pulled within, like a swirl of living water drawn into a siphon. The world went bright white as time was bleached from existence.

Mark could not remember when his awareness had come back to the room. All he knew was that at some point, his mind had started working again and that he had returned. There were new experiences inhabiting him like memories, but they were not his memories and many were fading quicker than he could even grasp them. He knew confusing things that he hadn’t known before. He realized he’d come close to seeing the race that had created the seeds. There were fragmented memories of what they’d accomplished and what their civilization was like. The room was growing brighter. He looked at the window and realized it was morning. He’d been in a trance for hours, not seconds. He looked to Sarah for answers. Her eyes were closed. They opened slowly as if she knew he was looking at her.

“You lose time,” she said.

“I could almost see the ancients,” said Mark. “They were like us, but different. Their civilization was both so amazingly advanced and surprisingly simple.”

“What did they feel like?” asked Sarah.

“They were deeply peaceful. I got an impression they hadn’t evolved from predators; and because of that, they were inherently docile. They had no history of war.”

“I remember knowing that,” said Sarah.

“I think the god-machine has changed since it was created,” said Mark. “It’s been acting outside of its original programming for a very long time. It may even be broken in some way. I remember coming back to consciousness one time before this, when it was still dark out. I was back in this room; and I remember thinking that if this is a machine, it must have a shutdown command. I remember deciding to try to find that command so I could stop it from murdering. I’d gone back to the same memories of the ocean floor where it dwells and found nothing; the memories had been altered. I’m not sure what that means and I’m not sure what I’ve forgotten.”

Sarah got up and walked toward Mark. He saw a schematic of her internal biology superimposed like an overlay onto her body. Her fingers brushed through his hair as she passed. He followed her with his eyes, hypnotized by the schematic. The organs, circulatory, and nervous systems were drawn three-dimensionally, in fluorescent colors. An orange mass was visible in her brainstem with fine, almost invisible, roots growing out into various regions of the brain. Like a forgotten memory resurfacing, Mark realized he knew a crucial detail about the ancients who created the god-machine.

“Our civilization builds machines in the image of man and nature,” he said. “This ancient race built machines in the image of their god.”

The bathroom door clicked shut. He was alone in the office. He stood and straightened his clothing. He opened the office door a crack to see if anyone was in the hallway. The corridor was empty. It was early morning. He slipped out and closed the door without a sound. He walked down the hallway to the stairs and headed up to the roof. He needed some fresh air to clear his mind. His body felt weak, as if it had been wrung out. His bones seemed thinner, almost fragile. The drugs were still working deep inside him. He could feel it. There was a numb sensation in his skin. He climbed the stairs. By the time he reached the roof, only one flight up, he was winded. He pushed open the door. The air felt unusually crisp, almost icy. Colors were brighter than they should have been. Birds flying between trees left motion trails behind them. A mathematical vector diagram briefly appeared, showing velocity and trajectory for a bird. How odd, he thought, as he stood at the eastern edge of the roof with his hands buried deep in his pockets and watched the sun moving higher in the morning sky.

Carl had set up a Kill Zone Monitoring Center with four computer workstations wired into the NSA system and round-the-clock staffing, with rotating shifts of volunteers. The center was also connected to the national alert network set up years ago by the Department of Homeland Security. The network could be used to send flash messages to local police and emergency workers, to warn of impending kill zones.

The world had been lulled into a relative quiet after the Atlanta kill zone. Not a single large event had occurred for days. At seven o’clock in the evening, the quiet ended. Mark hurried into the monitoring center after receiving a call. They had detected precursor signals in Southern California. As he looked at the nearest screen, red circles were already forming across Los Angeles. He felt disoriented from a second dose of psilocybin which was beginning to take effect. He’d swallowed three capsules an hour ago and now desperately wished he could eliminate the drug from his system. He was trying very hard to act normal, and worried that he was failing. He was obsessed with the possibility of finding a shutdown command, and so he’d taken the drug again as soon as the first dose had worn off. He was probably deluding himself that he stood any chance of succeeding. He’d thought about how all modern computers were engineered with a goal of having them run indefinitely. Why would a system as autonomous as the god-machine have a shutdown command at all? His search could all be a fool’s errand; but what kept him going were doubts, born from paranoia, that the god-machine may have implanted these defeatist ideas inside him.

Kathy arrived at the command center and came over to him. He knew she felt something had suddenly changed between them. He could tell she was confused and was acting oddly as a result. He wanted to explain what he was doing and what was happening to him, but his experiments were too premature. He had nothing useful to show and didn’t want her to think he was becoming unstable.

“This is never going to stop,” said Kathy. “This machine is going to keep on killing until we’re all dead.”

The NSA screens looked so harmless, just red circles growing in an overlapping pattern across a map. The image camouflaged what lay beneath the surface. Mark could almost see the people who were being murdered as they napped or watched television or ate. Each person was a complete world of imagination and dreams unto themselves; each death snuffed out an entire universe of possible creation. He felt a growing emptiness in his body as each murder carved that much more out of humanity’s soul.

Carl had commandeered a computer workstation. The soldier who had been using the workstation was standing behind him. Carl had on a headset and was talking with someone about evacuation along the path the kill zone was taking. The room seemed to fade in and out of focus. Mark steadied himself by leaning on the desk in front of him. Florescent medical schematics appeared superimposed over Carl’s body. Mark could see Carl’s heart laboring as it pumped blood through restricted arteries. Somehow he knew this was a heart problem waiting to happen. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he did. A faint orange blur showed at the base of Carl’s brainstem; but unlike what he’d seen on Sarah, it was smaller and there were no roots fanning out into the gray matter of the higher brain. Mark couldn’t imagine the power needed to process real-time medical information on this kind of scale. He was growing convinced that healing was closely linked to the original propose of the god-machine and that everyone was wired into the network, at least at some basic level.

Commotion broke out at another workstation. They were seeing precursors for a second kill zone; this time, Boston. A volunteer began shouting warnings into her headset. Suddenly, there were precursor signals flaring up all along the eastern coastline, from Maine to Delaware. Within minutes, names of cities were being wildly called out across the room. No one could keep up. Mark realized that every zone today had already been hit before. He stared at a huge wall map of North America. People walking back and forth left motion trails in his vision. He felt lightheaded; all his thoughts were becoming scrambled. The psilocybin was taking him away. He was overwhelmed with feelings of déjà vu; then stranger things began to happen.

The experience felt like a repressed memory from childhood coming back to the surface. Alien symbols which he couldn’t decipher were appearing on the wall map along with what looked like sets of radar range-circles, which varied in diameter from areas the size of a small town to areas that could be a hundred miles across. The alien symbols looked like a mixture of runic and cuneiform characters. He knew this information was being projected into the optic centers of his brain by an unimaginably powerful nanotech computer. There had to be a reason this was happening. He stared at the diagrams, trying to understand the meaning. Were the symbols coordinates and times? Some of the alien characters began to change into Arabic numbers, as if the machine was adapting the display to his way of thinking. The range circles were now marked with pairs of numbers; in most cases the first number was zero or one, but there were a few twos. He heard shouting that New York was being hit again. The number over New York changed from a one to a two; Los Angeles was already a two and so was Boston. The meaning became clear. He was seeing part of the god-machine’s strategy for genocide. The first number in the pair counted how many times an area had been hit. The second number ranged between two and sixteen. Mark suspected this second number was how many return attacks were planned. From the numbers and the encircled areas, it looked like the plan was to strike all the high population zones, inflict maximum damage; then, revisit as many times as calculated, to complete the murderous job.

“It’s re-striking areas already hit,” said Mark. “It’s going to do it again and again until each area is completely sterilized of human life.”