The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (62 page)

“Ha! It looks like I found my four-leaf clover,” I laughed, shouting at his fallen body, squeezing the key in my clenched fist. “Score one for Clan Kelly,
you fuck!”

I bent over, staring into Loren’s open, droopy eyes. Then something happened to my head. I felt a wave of dizziness gripping my skull, pulling me to the ground. It felt like I was in the middle of a giant black hole, being sucked down by an unimaginable source of gravity. I closed my eyes, willing myself to stay upright, but as soon as my eyelids shut, I was greeted by a vision…Loren moving his fingers…Paul standing up again. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any scarier…as my head hit the floor…as I opened my eyes…as I saw Paul hovering over me…

He winked.

I’ve been pacing around my tiny, shitty apartment all day, banging my head into the plaster walls, wondering whether to write this all down, whether any of it could possibly matter, now that I’ve taken a good, long look into the crystal ball and can see the tide that’s rising, inevitably, irresistibly, crushingly towards us. Us, not me. I won’t be alone when the tsunami comes crashing down. No one will be spared from the onslaught. Even if some stragglers manage to hide in caves, it will all be waiting to greet them when they emerge. It is coming. It cannot be stopped. And afterward, nothing will be the same.

I’m not talking about the
Becoming
, though Paul insists its inevitability is bound to the same timeline of the thing I fear even more than the prospect of the God O’Paulo. Maybe he can still be defeated. Johnny and Rose and Martin could succeed, with or without my help or opposition. Paul, or at least his body, could be killed, unlikely as that seems, particularly if I have to be the triggerman.

Science is what I fear.

When I woke up today, it was the farthest thing from my mind. All I could think about was Paul, his wealth, and my new identity. I went back on the web, now that I had a filter to sift through all those Paul Kellys. Tetron. Paul’s cutesy contraction of the Tetragrammaton. A perfect name if you’re in the God-building business. My search paid off quickly: “Tetron CEO raises millions for Policemen’s Benevolent Association at Metropolitan Museum gala.”

There was a picture of him in a tuxedo. Paul Kelly. My father. The saint.

Digging up more on Tetron was difficult. As a private company, it had few disclosure obligations. I kept clicking around and found a few more links associated with fundraising events for the police and fire departments. Next, I tried searching for Tetron subsidiaries.
Bingo!
I found a company called Intragon, a pioneer in stem cell research.

Stem cells are strange. Normal cells—that is to say, specialized cells—divide about fifty times and then
pfffft,
they’re done. So in a very real sense, your body is always dying, and always being born. But stem cells keep dividing endlessly. In science jargon this is called “pluripotency.” Very plural, very potent. Immortal.

As I was reading about stem cells, I came across a very interesting piece of information. When a group of scientists isolated the protein that controls the self-renewal process of undifferentiated stem cells, they called it “Nanog,” after the mythological Celtic island of everlasting life: Tir nan Og. Land of the Ever Young.

Intragon. Tir nan Og. Nice anagram. But why would Paul care about stem cells as a path to life-extension or rejuvenation? He’s clearly perfected his own beat-the-reaper system. Was he trying to build organs from scratch? Spare parts? I knew it was theoretically possible, but that kind of technology was probably decades away. Then again, time was another asset Paul possessed in abundance. Maybe he’s building a better mousetrap. Or an entirely new mousetrap. That gave me an idea and I searched for bio-engineering.
Bingo
, another hit…a company called Ogamete. I did a patent search and found several awarded to Ogamete for gene-sequencing and splicing. Then I hit the jackpot with another Tetron holding called Quadcom. It has four divisions (natch): computer technology, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. The computer sector is pursuing highly experimental research into biological and quantum computing. Bio-computing utilizes molecules like DNA and proteins to store, retrieve and process data. Quantum computing makes the miniscule molecular scale look colossal in comparison, using atoms to make all those little 1s and 0s. I’m quite sure the nano-technology sector contributes significantly to both less-is-more approaches.

Moving on to the robotics and AI divisions, I ran across an article by the
former
Quadcom head of AI R&D. Former? He quit working for Paul and he’s still alive? That in itself was amazing, but the article had my brain doing flip-flops. It was all about the Singularity. I heard Paul throw the term out along with a handful of other hokey sounding initial-cap spectacularisms, like the
Becoming
and the
Turning
, so I didn’t pay much attention, but after reading this and everything else preceding it, I was scared shitless. The article talked about an explosion in super-intelligence that would occur after computers became smarter than humans. He called this tipping point the Singularity—after which computers would design more and more intelligent iterations of themselves at an exponentially rapid pace, resulting in…

Nobody knows.

Not
nobody knows
in the sense you can never tell what the future will bring. Nobody knows because after the Singularity it will be impossible to predict
any
foreseeable future. In a post-Singularity world, humans will be unable to even
imagine
the intentions or capabilities of the emerging super-intelligence. Terminators? Maybe. Extinction of the human race? Very possible. Entirely new cyber-bio life forms? Why not?

Sounded a lot like the
Becoming
to me. And Paul being Paul, I was quite certain that his scientist minions were working around the clock to ensure that when the Singularity occurred, Paul wound up in the driver’s seat. How? The super-
intelligence
would have to be integrated in some way with the
Paulence
. That outcome, and that alone, must be the true mission statement of Tetron.

I couldn’t wait to see Paul and hear it all from the horse’s mouth. But he wasn’t downtown or at The Plaza. I couldn’t
see
him anywhere. Then suddenly, I realized I didn’t need any hocus-pocus to track him down. Today was St. Patrick’s Day.

The parade had barely started when I saw him ride by on a float with the police commissioner. He was standing next to him, waving to the crowd, his hair pulled back in a ponytail again, wearing a black-and-red tartan. I watched him wave and smile as I walked along the sidewalk crowded with blind-drunk shamrock wearers, moving at the same pace as the float. It was easy. I just had to avoid stepping in the puke.

He didn’t seem to see me. But I noticed something curious. Some of the people were waving back at Paul more enthusiastically than the rest. Trying to get his attention. When they got it, they seemed grateful
,
like they had touched the Pope’s robe. Then I noticed something even stranger. All these sycophants, many of them cops, were wearing a ring. The same ring. A golden serpent band with the wings and head of an angel. As I passed, I asked one of the cops where he got his ring. He looked at me like he was going to slap on the cuffs and haul me away. I shut my mouth and kept on walking alongside the float. But the cop began following me. That’s when Paul saw me. And winked. He caught the cop’s eye and waved him off. The cop nodded, tipped his hat and backed away.

Paul gave the Commissioner an elbow in the ribs and pointed to me. I could read his lips. “That’s him. That’s my boy!” The commish gave me a big wave and a smile to match. Then he took off his hat. To me. I flushed with embarrassment as Paul waved for me to join them on the float. I felt too shy, so I walked alongside the entire parade route and watched all the other ringed attendants (disciples? soldiers?) waving. There were so many.

When it was over, Paul took me out for a drink…at a dingy Blarney Stone. He sure likes slumming it. Green beer and Bushmills flowed like twin waterfalls. The place was plastered with shamrocks and crowded with plastered Irish and Irish-American drunks. About two-thirds of them wore spiffy angel rings. When an Irish-wannabe couple wobbled in drunk from the street, they wobbled back out before they had a chance to order a drink. There should have been a sign posted on the door: CLANSMEN ONLY

Paul and I settled into a booth in the back. He was getting stinky again, so I leaned as far back as I could. The burlier ring-wearers sat at the tables and booths surrounding ours. Paul’s royal retinue? They made a big show of not looking in our direction, not even listening in our direction. Paul didn’t seem to notice them at all. I didn’t care. Instead, I dug right in, asking if my theories about Tetron, the Singularity and the
Becoming
were true.

His reply was terse and terrifying: “More or less. But you have the general picture.”

“When is all this supposed to happen?”

“According to the prophecy…2031. But at our current rate of development, we’ll shave off a few years. Let’s say 2029.”

“Then what?”

“The future is a probability curve that can’t be analyzed with any certainty. Combine that with what you’ve already learned about the unfathomable nature of the post-Singularity
Intelligence
and your guess is as good—well, not nearly as good as mine. But don’t waste a minute fretting over the infinite destructive possibilities. Think of all the fun we’re going to have along the way! It will all be one glorious adventure, start to finish!”

As much as I wanted to keep pumping him for more info on the pending Armageddon, Paul unexpectedly steered the conversation in another direction. “What’s the biggest problem with immortality, from the Hindu perspective?”

I wanted to get cute and say, “The saris,” but I could tell he was about to throw me a big bone, so I answered, “You can’t remember anything when you reincarnate, so it doesn’t make any difference that you live forever. You have to do the same shit over and over, making the same dumb mistakes a few hundred times—or become enlightened and get kicked upstairs to the divine realm.”

“The dreaded karma. Memory is the key to everything. Not just identity. Everything. It’s all there, in the DNA. The whole story, every word of it. From the first trace of slime to all the slime in this bar, everything came from the same source code. We know proteins talk to each other, but how do they know what to say? Cellular memory. Without words, they know. Soon we’ll have the whole script. Science will lead the way.”

“The way to what?” I asked, seriously intrigued.

“To the end.” He paused a moment, then said, “I’m going to tell you a secret more arcane and profound than the legend of Solomon’s ring and his captured genies, a true story by the way, though trashed up in more of that
Arabian Nights
crap than I care to endure.”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to hear more about that but asking, “what’s the big secret?”

He looked around the room theatrically, then cupped his hand to my ear and whispered, “Science is magic.”

“Science is magic?” I asked, not sure why I was whispering too.

“No. Science
is
magic. See the difference? They are one and the same. Ask the best minds in every field—mathematics, chemistry, biology, physics—they’ll all tell you.”

“Tell you what?”

“That everything we see and know and believe to be so solid and dependable is at its core more unfathomably complex and ineffably mysterious than all the Gods or daimons that have ever been invoked since the dawn of time. But in the end, we will know…or at least, I will. And between what we’ve already discovered and what will soon be revealed, it won’t be long before we won’t need these time-consuming rituals, or women to make the vessel.”

“The ‘vessel’? What’s the vessel?”

“
Who,
not what. If you want to live forever with your memories and identity intact, you have three options. The first two we’ve discussed and they comprise the Apostolic mode of succession: first, train willing and dedicated disciples and take possession of their physical bodies in much the same way as I have already demonstrated to you; and second, reincarnate and have your loyal followers search for your new body, as they do with the Dalai Lama, then through the use of some very non-Buddhist ritual magic, awaken the memories of your past lifetimes. The third, and by far the most effective and powerful approach, is to train your own biological descendant and awaken the cellular memories already encoded in their DNA during the act of soul transfer—the Dynastic mode of succession.”

“The
Turning
,” I said with not a little awe.

“That colloquialism has been applied to all these approaches. But it became clear to us that biological successors held so many advantages over the other methods that those options were abandoned entirely, except in cases of dire emergency, which occur with much greater frequency than I care to admit, but are not unexpected.”