Immortality (65 page)

“What makes you think that?” asked Kathy.

“Trust me,” said Mark. “I’m not wrong about this. We need to evacuate the areas surrounding every known kill zone.”

“We’re a known kill zone,” said Kathy.

“I know.”

Mark looked across the room and saw Sarah leaning against a far corner. She was quiet, almost invisible. Her pupils were dilated. She was looking at the wall map. Her attention shifted. As her gaze came to rest on his eyes, he felt a palpable energy tugging at him. It felt like he was being absorbed into her gaze and into her mind. Her lips turned up in a barely perceptible smile that seemed like the acknowledgment of a co-conspirator; then her gaze moved on, and with it, the tug of her attention evaporated. He suspected she was seeing and experiencing everything in the same way he was experiencing it. She saw the same maps, the same strategies. She knew what he knew and probably far more. Maybe she was concealing important information. He wondered if he could trust her. He looked up, feeling a kind of tug, and saw her dilated stare had returned to him.

~

Midnight was marked by the guards changing shift throughout the facility. Mark was lying awake with Kathy in his arms. She had passed out after taking a sedative. The cycle of kill zones had quieted hours ago. The constant barrage of bulletins and news coverage had drained the life from everyone at the facility. Everywhere he’d looked, he’d seen faded ghosts instead of the people he’d come to know and work with. His mind was surprisingly free of the confusion that he’d read psilocybin could leave in its aftermath. At the same time, the stimulative side-effects were keeping him awake, even though he was feeling mentally dull. He’d now gone almost two days without sleep. Out of confusion, earlier he’d almost accidentally talked with Kathy about how he was trying to learn about interfacing with the god-machine. That would have been an awful mistake. She would have done anything to try to stop him – maybe even get their military-minders involved. He would have done the same if the roles were reversed. It was more than reasonable to have doubts about someone who was taking dangerous drugs. It would be normal to demand they stop and get examined, to make sure no damage had been done. But these were not rational times; these were extreme times and options were running out. The frequency of kill zones had accelerated to an even more frightening level. If nothing was done to slow or stop it, in a month the sterilization of mankind might be complete.

If he permanently damaged himself but uncovered a way to end this mass murder, that seemed a more-than-reasonable tradeoff. In addition to his search for a shutdown command, he’d come up with a second idea for possibly stopping it. If he could discover what triggered this genocidal program in the first place, then removing the cause might stop the effect.

Mark slowly untangled himself from Kathy and got out of bed without disturbing her. He slipped on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. Inside a locked drawer in his office was half of Sarah’s psilocybin. The small baggy of capsules was waiting for him. He’d taken three last night and three late this afternoon. With each dose, he’d learned more about the machine but not a hint about how to stop it.

Clarity came in waves; and when it came, it was odd how lucid his thoughts could be after almost two days of sleep deprivation and drugs. Mark had been thinking about ways to enhance the thought-interface, as he now called the connection between his mind and the god-machine. He needed clearer information from the machine; and more importantly, he needed control over the flow of information to him. Trying a more powerful drug like LSD seemed promising, but he had no idea how to get hold of it quickly. Even in this time of perpetual urgency, a medical request for a controlled substance like that would raise more than a few questions. He had read theories that hallucinogens like psilocybin broke through the normal wall between waking and dream states. This meant the drug was most likely opening an unimpeded pathway to his subconscious, which he knew was where the seeds’ roots were at their thickest. This was the location of greatest connection between his organic brain and the nanotech machine. He was convinced that psilocybin opened a way for machine information, in the form of implanted memories, to leak back from his subconscious into his conscious.

From his last psilocybin-induced experience, he had retained a fading collection of implanted memories, of which a few had one thing in common: they contained information about a more powerful method of communicating with the god-machine. The memories were about a second kind of thought-interface, one that was under control of the conscious mind instead of the subconscious. Some of the memories contained fragments about how the direct pathway was opened by restructuring neural connections between the host’s brain and the seeds. He had no idea what that meant, and had no memories which provided details on what restructuring actually involved or changed; but he did have several memories of how the restructuring process was initiated. What he had to do was increase the subconscious data inflow until it reached a critical threshold, at which point restructuring would commence of its own accord, and a direct pathway to his higher brain functions would be established. In a way, exceeding this threshold was a kind of test. If his mind was powerful enough to consume vast amounts of information, then it was ready for the next stage.

He had been thinking about Sarah’s attempted overdose and why she’d come through it in one piece. The seeds were programmed to heal traumas. He was convinced that injuries repaired by seeds resulted in biology that was better than new. He wondered if the improved connection to the god-machine that he and Sarah were already experiencing was caused by small, drug-induced brain traumas which were then repaired, better than new, by the seeds. Was self-inflicted damage one way to prepare for a data flow that exceeded the critical threshold? He was beginning to think so.

One complication to his plan was that he had no reliable way to know how much pure psilocybin was in each capsule, and no way to gauge how many he could take before it became dangerous. The seeds were able to repair some amount of damage, but there had to be a point beyond which repair became impossible. He knew the seeds would not be able to bring him back from a bullet to the brain, but between that extreme and a human bite to his shoulder was a very wide range of possibilities. His only guideline was that Sarah had taken over a dozen capsules of psilocybin and was fine. He’d made some rough calculations, based on their differences in body mass, and concluded an equivalent dosage for him was twenty capsules.

A search on the Internet had turned up a number of research papers which explained methods of enhancing the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Much of the work had been done decades ago, and with LSD not psilocybin; but the same methods could yield similar gains. Several papers dealt with combinations of sensory deprivation and LSD. Apparently, even small amounts of deprivation, like sitting in a pitch black room, increased the impact of the LSD experience. Using what he’d learned could turn his twenty capsule overdose into a larger overdose without increasing the medical risks. Mark’s plan right now was simple brute force. He would try ever-increasing overdoses during the next few days with as much sensory deprivation as possible.

~

Mark locked the door to his office at 2:00 a.m. and returned to his desk. Sarah had wanted to be present, and had argued with him; but his mind was made up. Her presence would be a distraction. She had her own reasons for wanting to be there when he tried for a direct interface with the machine, and he suspected they had little to do with looking after him. It was not important right now, but he intended to uncover her real agenda. He didn’t suspect her motives were bad or dangerous, just benignly self-serving. Sarah had instructions to bring help if he was still locked in his office by one o’clock in the afternoon. He was comfortable trusting her to do that if it became necessary.

Mark swallowed fifteen capsules of psilocybin, washing them down with fresh coffee. He turned out all the lights, closed the blinds, and lay back on his couch. The darkened office was his makeshift sensory deprivation. The world felt still…

Light shined in his eyes. He wasn’t sure if this was hallucination or real. He had no memory prior to this moment. The last thing he remembered was lying down on his couch after taking the overdose of psilocybin, nothing past that point. He sat up on the couch and looked around his office. Everything appeared normal. He looked at a clock: 7:48 a.m. Morning light was poring in through his windows. The blinds were open, but he knew he’d closed them. He got up and checked the door. The knob was still locked. He looked around the office for other clues that he’d been moving around. The coffee pot was empty. It had been full last night. The bathroom door was open and the light was on. He sat down at his desk. There was an open document on the computer screen. The paragraphs looked like his wording, but he had no memory of writing it. The document contained lab notes about the results of his psilocybin overdose. He read that he had zero memories from the experience and that it was a complete failure. The notes theorized a bit about why the overdose might have failed and listed some variations to try. Fear was creeping through him. His breathing was shallow and rapid. He looked at the empty coffee pot and then the bathroom door. Had he damaged his brain? Was his short term memory destroyed?

Mark gasped air. His lungs burned as if he’d stopped breathing. He’d been slouched over his desk. The room was dark except for the glow of the computer screen. The on-screen clock read 5:22 a.m. An empty document was open on the screen. The title of the document was the same as he remembered reading hours later – or before? He remembered what he’d read. Was he trapped in some nightmare of brain damage which caused memory failures and time lapses? His frustration was building to a scream. He slammed his fist into the desk. The entire room disintegrated with a flash of heat. The world was bleached into white light. There was no shape to anything, no sense of anything; even his body was gone. He had been reduced to pure thought, a single living point of focus. He was disoriented; then, slowly he began to understand. He was inside the super colony. This was the god-machine. His entire awareness had been transferred here; but unlike the last time he had been drawn inside the bubble, this time he remained awake.

Was this it?
he wondered. Was this direct conscious control of the interface? He focused his mind on a single thought, a single carefully phrased question,
Why are you terminating the lives of homo sapiens?
For minutes, then hours, there was nothing other than whiteness. He kept his mind focused and repeated variations of the question over and over again.

The whiteness flared like a camera strobe, then faded. He was back in his office, sitting at his desk. The on-screen clock read 7:50 a.m. He saw the same document on the screen; but, unlike in the flashbacks he’d been experiencing, his memories were now complete and arranged in proper order. He remembered writing the document. He remembered finishing off the coffee. The doses of psilocybin were clearly hurting him. He could feel the seeds were repairing the damage, but not as rapidly as he was accumulating mental and neurological scars. How many more times could he try this before he failed to come back?

Mark got up and walked to the open window. He had no memory of actually receiving information from the god-machine but, as before, new information was present as implanted memories. There were deep volumes of fading information for which he had expressed no interest, intermixed with a few crumbs of relevance. It was clear he had failed to restructure the thought-interface.

While there were no memories answering his question about why the god-machine had started its genocidal program, there was an implanted-memory of a vague sense of confusion surrounding the question itself. Mark’s strength failed him as his recall of the memory improved. This was impossible. He leaned on the windowsill and closed his eyes. The god-machine’s confusion was because his inquiry was incomplete; he’d made no selection for which extinction cycle he was asking his question. The implications sapped what little optimism he’d managed to keep alive. Could the god-machine have all but wiped mankind off the earth before? He couldn’t help thinking about legends of terrible destruction like Noah and the great flood.

Mark opened his eyes in a downpour of water. He had no memory of how he got here or where he was; he saw only pitch black. He was sitting on the ground. He felt rivulets of water running down his face and body. His ears were filled with the patter of a hard, falling rain. His face and clothing were soaked. The water was almost body temperature. The rain neither felt warm nor cold. In his mind, and silently with his lips, he was still repeating the question, the refined question whose answer he’d sought for days, the question that would be his first over a direct pathway if he could only open one:
Why are you terminating the lives of homo sapiens during the current extinction cycle?

His throat and mouth were dry, to the point of soreness. He turned up his head into the starless night. The rain was hitting his face straight on. He opened his mouth and drank some of the rain. He tasted a flat chemical flavor unlike any rain he’d swallowed before. He reached out his hands and found wet, smooth surfaces only feet away. He lifted himself up. He turned in every direction and felt smooth walls. He pushed on the walls. One gave under light pressure. Carefully he stepped through the wall and out of the rain. His sneakers squished. Looking down toward where his feet should be, he started into the blackness, searching for any hints of obstacles. A few feet away, a glowing strip of light was embedded in the ground. Suddenly, he felt his brain turn right-side up. He recognized he was looking at light coming in from under a doorway. He found the knob and opened the door into blinding light. He covered his eyes until they adjusted. He was staring at his fully lit office. The rain had been his shower.