The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (28 page)

“’Time-Splicing’?” Anton asks for clarification,
sounding simultaneously enthralled and incredulous.

“In my origin-time, practical retrograde time travel
is only accessible through the characteristics of certain
sub-atomic particles,” Chang lectures him like an eccentric
professor, excited about his subject. “You can’t send people back,
you see. Not even objects. Nothing made of complete matter. You
can’t actually ‘send’ anything. But if you can isolate and
manipulate the right set of sub-atomic particles, you can connect
to an earlier relativistic time on a quantum scale. This
breakthrough allowed scientists to begin observing select past
events. I simply extrapolated based on some experiments that had
been suppressed for understandable safety concerns. Using
sub-nano-scale manufacturing techniques, you could bridge the gap
to do more than observe. You could create ‘seeds’ on a sub-atomic
level by using those particles to manipulate molecular matter on
the other side, painstakingly manufacturing nanites programmed to
build whatever you want in the past. And the nanotechnology of my
time is capable of building much more than drones.” He holds his
hand up and flexes his fingers as if to illustrate his point.
“Whatever you Splice back, it has to be done all at once, of
course, and there is only one shot, assuming it works at all.
Actually altering history is supposed to be impossible, of course,
but if it
were
to be done…”

He stops and lets out a short chuckle as if something
is amusing him, even though I can barely read his body
language.

“…the timeline would be immediately altered, and no
one knows what happens if time is altered, what becomes of your
present once you manage to change the chain of causality and
effectively rewrite your own past. No one has really studied the
paradox adequately, at least to my knowledge, as I imagine it is
even more impossible to observe. If you follow the paradox, you
would likely not be aware there has been a change to study if
everything is changed, including your own experiences. But what
happens to the original chain? Maybe my time still exists
somewhere, some when, unreachable, like a divergent track—there are
many theories of multiple dimensions. Or maybe it’s overwritten,
undone, like replacing a digital file in memory with another
version. Unrecoverable. Lost forever to the butterfly effect. Maybe
my whole reality—my whole universe—simply unraveled, destroying
everything and everyone, including myself, erased, only to be
re-woven…”

This thought seems to give him pause, even regret.
His featureless head shakes. “I do not pretend to have any real
idea,” he continues, more like he’s talking to himself. “Perhaps I
haven’t saved my own reality at all—it either still exists or has
been obliterated. But this one,
this
now… This one will be
different. I will make it different.”

“You recreated
yourself
across time from
nanites
?” Halley interrupts, no longer able to hold back
incredulous. Chang stands up, turns to her. I see her step back
reflexively, unsettled by the blackness of him, even though his
movements still aren’t threatening.

“The ETE—the ones the survivor descendents call
‘Jinni,’ or ‘Eternal,’ like they should be revered—they can rebuild
their bodies, repair themselves with the clumsy science they’ve
managed. The science of my time is—was—much further advanced. It
ensures
immortality: You can be entirely remade from the
slightest fragment, including your memories, your personality. You
can be almost entirely destroyed and return as you were from a
handful of molecules. All the nano-machines need is the material to
work with. The seeds and their programming can be created on a
molecular scale, like a single cell and its DNA made of quantum
particles, ready to reproduce, to grow the whole organism as
programmed. All that’s required is access to raw building blocks,
and part of their program is to seek those resources out. That’s
where I got the idea of using temporally relativistic particles to
create a nano-seed across time.
I
did not time-travel; I
simply rebuilt myself whole in this time, fully expecting my body,
my
self
, to be overwritten—to cease to exist or exist in a
totally different form—along with my origin time.”

“You made a copy of yourself in our time and got
killed or erased or whatever in yours when you changed the past?”
Rick distills the insanity with remarkable restraint.

“If you like,” Chang allows him, like he’s lecturing
a grade school class. “It isn’t that simple, though. There’s a
great deal of restriction on splicing points based on being able to
isolate the right particles, so I had to take what I could get and
make do. So I picked a target as early in the Martian colonial
development as I could, which was in 2045, several months before
the Second Expedition landed. It also takes a significant amount of
time to build from seed to final form after the transition,
relative to the complexity of the construct.”

He suddenly turns to face me again, as if he’d been
rudely ignoring his host, then hangs and shakes his head in
theatric regret—I wonder if he must be practiced at exaggerating
his gestures and body language because he has no facial expression
to read, like an actor who must perform behind a mask.

“Unfortunately for so many of you in this timeline,
my drones are much simpler and therefore quicker to build than I
was. I had programmed them to begin their mission without me,
assuming I wouldn’t grow to functioning consciousness until many
months behind them. But I failed to account for the difficulty my
personal seeds had in finding the necessary building blocks for
this body. My drones are simple, and raw materials for them are
common. Because of this, my drones became active fully nineteen
years before my seeds found all the necessary building blocks and
managed to construct me. They began their programmed mission
automatically, and their tactical AI operated without my oversight
for much longer than I had anticipated.”

“What was their ‘programmed mission’?” Tru cuts in
and asks with more than a little rage under her politesse.

“To stop us from developing something with our
nano-research,” I give Chang, letting him know I’m trying to follow
what passes for his reasoning. I can’t see his face, but I get the
impression he’s smiling at me by the way he nods.

“You understand me,” he says, making me regret my
little diplomatic condescension. “I so hoped you would. My drones
followed their programmed directives, their AI improvising as you
resisted. And given the lengths to which you resisted, the drones
exceeded all expectations.”

Chang begins pacing as he talks—not to me but to the
floor—continuing his monologue as if it’s for his own benefit, like
he has to make some kind of absolution.

“By the time I was remade, by the time my seeds found
enough materials to work with, by the time I came to consciousness
and discovered what had been done in my unexpectedly long absence,
it was all done, for better or worse. You see, I hadn’t anticipated
so much resistance on your part, or so much tenacity from the
corporations. I had assumed I would only have to destroy a few
facilities, enough to keep Mars economically unviable for research,
and it would be done—in my time as in yours, even the greediest
corporations were not willing to risk biological nano-engineering
on Earth. I thought I could just make it too costly, or if that
failed, frighten them off with a few tragic accidents. But I don’t
pretend to fully understand people, you see. Or economics. That was
my great mistake. You resisted, you persisted. My drones were
programmed to adapt and succeed, so they escalated,
calculated…”

He faces me again, like he needs to tell this to me
specifically: “I awoke to a nuclear wasteland, thousands upon
thousands dead by my singular deed—it was 2065, too late to
moderate the destruction, too late for reason or mercy. But my
future was certainly undone, the horrors awaiting our race… The
corporate research was stopped, the facilities all destroyed, the
people of the Earth too horrified to try again. I had
succeeded
. I had changed
time
! And despite everything
that was lost, everyone… It was worth the cost. It was
easily
worth the cost. You
must
believe this.”

“I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to believe,” I
reduce him. “You make very little coherent sense.”

“Coherent sense does not apply here,” the silhouette
says intensely. “Even what you know as cause-and-effect is a simple
lie told to protect unsuspecting children from an unimaginable
truth. But this is no time for ignorance, so I will try to make it
as simple as I can for you:

“What you must believe is that what was created here,
on Mars—the nano-engineered biology created by human greed and fear
of mortality—changed us as a
species
, too much and too soon.
We became immortal, superhuman. Gods. You have seen the barest hint
of this with your so-called friends the ETE, so you know that what
I tell you is possible. But what the ETE have made themselves into
is only a poor shadow of what we became; their salvaged research
and hack science is a sloppy fraction of what the Great
Corporations ultimately accomplished with their unchecked research.
Curing diseases was not enough. Stopping aging, defeating death
itself was not enough. Even making ourselves invincible… We wanted
more. We wanted to
be
more. And if there is a market, there
will be product to meet the demand…”

He pauses, breathes (I can see his outline inhale and
exhale), shakes his head sadly, like he’s grieving something. Then,
almost thoughtfully: “Tell me, any of you: What do you think the
human race would become and do if given true immortality,
invincibility? Would we be better creatures for it? Would we do
good?”

No one speaks, and I don’t answer him except to shake
my head.

“This is why I respected you, Destroyer:
You
always understood our nature. We made ourselves
gods
, a
whole planet of gods, and did monstrous things without the
slightest care. We turned our world into a nightmare, and when we
had done our worst with it, we began to take our madness to other
worlds, to play gods across the galaxy like horrible spoiled
children. We committed unspeakable atrocities… You—you were the
Ragnarok, the one who comes to challenge the powers that be and
destroy the established order because it has gone so completely
wrong—that is what you
are
. You spoke for reason, tried—like
few others—to give us a moral compass. But we could not be saved
from ourselves. And worse, we were about to commit the most
unthinkable horror: we were on the brink of something that would
have forever undone our humanity.”

His voice stays mostly calm during this rant, only
occasionally cracking, which is impressive in itself. But now he
has to stop and shakes his head like he’s trying to force something
out of his mind, deny something unspeakable. He breathes, gathers
himself, continues:

“I—and a few like minds—we tried to do something
about it, tried to stop it on our own, tried to return ourselves to
human, just human. But our weapon—my masterwork—failed at great
cost, great personal cost. And I should have died that day, but my
nanotech, my plague, it would not let me.

“So we struck upon an even more desperate gambit, to
use a new breakthrough technology—something that had only been
dared used to passively observe the past—in an unthinkable way: to
stop our horrible evolution where it began. But as I said, I forgot
that humans are resilient, stubborn. I had been born after most of
our race had already been converted. I had only known humans as
invincible spoiled pseudo-gods with no fear, no consequence to
dissuade them. I imagined that mortal men—vulnerable men—would not
dare risk precious life for something as base as a corporation’s
profits. But you didn’t give up, not even when threatened with your
own deaths. Or the deaths of hundreds. Or thousands.

“My drones were programmed to succeed in their
mission at any cost, and their tactical AI is impressive for such a
simple machine. When you persistently fought them off, shot them
down, they shifted strategy and exacerbated the conflicts you call
your ‘Eco War.’ They instigated violence between you that wouldn’t
have otherwise happened, sabotaged cease-fires and negotiations, so
you would destroy yourselves.”

I glance at Tru and she meets my eyes with a look of
shock and rage, her face flushing. And I realize that no matter how
insane Chang sounds, his story does offer a terrible but somehow
sensible explanation for everything that has happened. I can’t help
but consider that he’s telling the truth, or at least select parts
of the truth seeded in the fantasy he’s using to justify his
admitted atrocities. He may even be mad enough to believe that
fantasy.

“But you again proved yourselves resilient: You made
your peace, ended your Eco War,” he continues now as if he’s
telling us something inconsequential. “So my drones generated their
ultimate stratagem, using your own weapons against you for maximum
effect, determined to drive you from the planet entirely. I came to
myself only weeks after they’d succeeded in their attack, waking to
a world destroyed.”

He pauses to observe our responses, but his audience
has fallen into a numb shock. Their faces are a mix of horror and
disbelief, denial and revelation. The programmed rage I feel
burning in my veins is my own testimony: I believe him enough that
I want to make him answer for the thousands dead. He seems to sense
this:

“I would tell you I
am
sorry, truly sorry, but
you cannot imagine what I’ve saved you all from.” He sounds very
much like he wants to be forgiven, or at least understood.