The Religion War

For one seven-pointer from another

INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
OLD MAN
EMERGENCY HEADQUARTERS
INTERROGATION
AVATAR MEETS GENERAL CRUZ
GLOBAL INFORMATION CORPORATION
HECTOR'S TERRORIST CELL
AVATAR FLIES TO QADUM
AVATAR MEETS AL-ZEE
GENERAL CRUZ PLANS WAR
STACEY'S CAFE
MACKEY'S PROGRESS
HOW ISRAEL FELL
MENSA
GIC BOMBING
AVATAR AND AL-ZEE DISCUSS THE MAGICIAN
SUMMIT IN SWITZERLAND
WAR BEGINS
MACKEY WRITES CODE
BLACK FORCE
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
MACKEY MAKES A PHONE CALL
H2 HOSPITAL ROOM
FINDING A DONOR
THIRTY YEARS LATER
QUESTIONS TO PONDER

This is a sequel to my book
God's Debris,
a story about a deliv-eryman who chances upon the smartest person in the world and learns the secrets of reality. I subtitled that book
A Thought Experiment
and used a variety of hypnosis techniques in an attempt to produce a feeling of euphoric enlightenment in the reader similar to what the main character would feel while discovering the (fictionally) true nature of reality. Reactions to the book were all over the map. About half of the people who e-mailed me said they felt various flavors of euphoria, expanded awareness, connectedness, and other weird sensations that defied description. A surprising number ofpeople reported reading the entire book twice in one day. So I know
something
was happening. But no two people had the same reaction.

Other people wrote angry letters and scathing reviews, pointing out the logical and factual flaws in the book. It
is
full of flaws, and much of the science is made up, as it states in the introduction. I explained that the reader is
supposed to be looking for flaws.
That's what makes the experiment work. You might think this group of readers skipped the introduction and missed the stated point of the book, but I suspect that something else is going on. People get a kind of cognitive dissonance (brain cramp) when their worldview is disturbed. It's fun to watch.

The most interesting readers are the ones who have instant amnesia after reading the book, angrily insisting that there were no
new ideas
in it. False memories are a common side effect of having your worldview suddenly bent. You might love the book, you might hate it, but if you can
remember
it, you'll be interested to hear that some readers thought it had no
new ideas.

The Religion War
is a different kind ofbook. It's written in traditional fiction form with a plot (yes, a plot!) involving the smartest man in the world trying to stop a pending war between Christian and Muslim forces. The story takes you forward a few decades, to imagine where our current delusions about reality might lead us. And in the end it poses some questions that I think you'll enjoy rolling around in your head andjabbering about with friends while sipping a beverage. It's not essential that you first read
God's Debris,
but you will find this book more enjoyable if you do.

My target readers for
The Religion War
are bright people with short attention spans, especially lazy students and busy book clubs. I try to avoid tedious descriptions of scenery and clothing. I hope you don't miss them. You can read the whole thing in three hours, and it's packed with ideas to mull.

While the story is fiction, most booksellers will list the book under nonfiction because its purpose is to highlight the most important—yet most ignored—questions in the world. I list some of those questions in the back of the book, but they won't make complete sense until you've finished the story. I call them 'Questions to Ponder'.

I hope you enjoy the book. Feel free to write to me at [email protected] to give your reaction. I can't respond to every message, but I try to read all of them.

In the year 2007, a brilliant and charismatic leader named al-Zee began his rise to power in the Palestinian territories. He was the architect of the Twenty-Year Plan for eliminating Israel, the success of which started a domino effect in the Middle East, as one Arab dictatorship after another fell, and their territories rolled into the Great Caliphate. Al-Zee's subjects, heady from an unbroken string ofvictories, demanded the spread of Islam to the rest of the world. Al-Zee understood that this was neither practical nor desirable, but to satisfy the appetite of his people he began an unending war of minor terror against the Christian-dominated world. The attacks were calculated to be large enough to look like progress, yet small enough to avoid provoking all-out war. Publicly he blamed renegade groups for the attacks.The Christian-dominated countries knew al-Zee was behind the bombings, but they depended on him for their oil, and wanted to avoid a larger war that would cripple their economies, and in all likelihood increase the number of bombings.

Terror weapons improved dramatically during al-Zee's rule. Anyone with a few hundred dollars could buy a satellite-guided model airplane capable of flying a hundred miles to deliver explosives to a precise target.Terrorists no longer needed to commit suicide, so the pool of volunteers was unlimited. Al-Zee was careful to avoid killing anyone important or destroying anything irreplaceable. It was a difficult balancing act, trying to wage small-scale war without provoking total war.The strategy worked, until 2040, when General Horatio Cruz came to power in the Christian Alliance.

"Sir, there's an old man in the lobby. He wants to talk to—" General Cruz, a reddish rhino of a man, stopped his lanky aide in midsentence. Cruz didn't like interruptions. He didn't like a lot of things: committees, fools, ambiguity, or unknowns. Cruz's faith in God, and his battlefield victories, imbued him with a sense of self-confidence and clarity that made him a natural leader. He knew that God was on his side, that his career was divinely inspired. He believed that when an idea came to him without a trail, it was God's way of talking. Those qualities, plus his tactical genius, propelled Cruz to Secretary of War, a position that had evolved to include de facto control over all the armies of NATO.

Cruz used his eyes the same way he used everything else: like weapons. Lieutenant Ben Waters suddenly found himself in the crosshairs. It wasn't the first time Waters had seen that look. That sort of look, from a man who killed people for a living, would reduce most people to stuttering. Waters viewed it as information, nothing more.

Cruz had hand-picked Waters from a thousand candidates, not because of his test scores or his combat record, both unremarkable. It certainly wasn't Waters' personality, charitably described as remote. There was something else: At the age of eight, Ben Waters used the family shotgun to kill both of his parents. It was a small town, and the neighbors agreed that Ben saved his younger brother from an unimaginable fate. No charges were filed. Since then, the area of Ben Waters' brain that makes a person feel alive was a catastrophe of molecules. He never suffered from shame, offense, fear, humiliation, or failure. But neither could he feel joy. Waters plugged the hole in his soul with military emotions—loyalty, duty, and mission.

Cruz picked Waters as his aide because power is the midwife of temptation, and the general's power was unequaled, at least in the non-Muslim territories. So too were his temptations. He had never crossed the line from duty to self-interest, at least not in any grotesque way, but the urge was a low-grade fever. Cruz ordered Waters to carry a sidearm at all times. Officially, it was to protect Cruz from assassination. Unofficially, it was Cruz's way of protecting the world from Cruz.

Waters understood the meaning behind Cruz's death stare: A general on the verge of war doesn't need surprise guests. It was obvious to both of them that the old man downstairs should be removed immediately But today wasn't a day when the obvious counted for much. "Maybe if you talked to him for one minute. He's old and—"

"Tell security to drag his ass out of there."

"That's the thing," Waters explained. "The guards left. They just took off."

"What do you mean, 'left'?" Cruz said, as his square face reddened and his eyes turned space-black.

Most people would have backed off, but Waters didn't feel fear—not of Cruz, not of anyone or anything. All he had was a sense of what to do next, and in this case it meant an explanation. "The old man started talking to the guards and five minutes later they left. They didn't say why."

"Call the Marines off the roof. If the old fool won't leave, shoot him."

"Yes, sir," said Waters, in a way that revealed he knew it wasn't a workable plan.

Waters walked deliberately out of the room, dragging his past like a bag of graveyard dirt, leaving Cruz to continue arranging his war map on a huge oval table.

"The whole world are fools," muttered Cruz while using a ruler to drag a battle platform from the Indian Ocean.

Mapmakers were a frustrated group. The old notion of a 'country' was meaningless. Al-Zee dominated the entire Islamic world. Governments existed under his rule, in a fashion, to keep the water running, to remove garbage, and to run indoctrination centers for children, but the real power was al-Zee. In the Christian-dominated part of the world, there was still a pretense that civilian governments ruled their respective countries. In reality, Cruz had the power to redraw boundaries and remove so-called leaders with a word. He didn't need military power to get his way, although it was available if it suited him. Cruz was widely believed to be the only person who could stop the terror of al-Zee. No one felt it was a good idea to distract him.

The atheists and the smaller religions were lying low, supporting the Christian power base and enjoying safety in numbers.The most enthusiastic supporters ofthe Christians were thejews who escaped Israel after al-Zee's forces overran it in 2035.

Battle platforms were a recent addition to Cruz's arsenal. They were the size of cities, floating on the ocean, vastly more powerful than the aircraft carriers they replaced.The platforms could be assembled in days, ringed by destroyers, and monitored by an umbrella of satellites. Nothing could penetrate their perimeters, thanks to NATO's technical breakthrough of forced particle beams that could slice through incoming metal like a hot poker on a cobweb.The rest ofthe world, which was mostly al-Zee's territories and a sprinkling of nonaligned powers, used conventional missiles that were no match for the particle beam defense grid.

Cruz moved one of his four battle platforms from the Indian Ocean to the Eastern Seaboard ofthe United States. It meant one less asset near the main battlefield, but it might make the civilian politicians more agreeable to his plans, knowing they'd be protected from incoming warheads. And once they got used to that protection, Cruz would have something to take away from them in case they forgot who was in charge.

This was a different sort of war from anything Cruz had fought before. He couldn't hope to cut off the snake's head to kill the body, as the media were fond of saying. The genius behind al-Zee's success was that he had weaponized a population of two billion people, most of them under the age of thirty, convincing them that death was better than life, so long as they died in service to al-Zee's interpretation ofthe afterlife.

There was a word that Cruz avoided using, but it was always in his mind.This wouldn't be a war for
territory or power.
It would be a war of extermination. Two billion souls would probably perish before it was over. Cruz prayed that the two billion were on the other side. He knew that if he gave himself up to God, God would guide him to victory.

The tall wooden doors of Cruz's war room opened to a stream of military advisers: admirals and generals. There were twenty-five of them, one from each of the dominant NATO countries. They had no decision-making power—Cruz had the monopoly on that. But they were useful in maintaining the illusion that NATO enjoyed some sort of democratic input. It was thin fiction, the sort that a wartime population was happy to accept. The Joint Chiefs of Staff for the United States had become overdressed advisers, symbolic and useless. The NATO generals were more loyal to Cruz than to their own civilian governments. In times of extreme danger, an extreme man like Cruz didn't need to grab power; it surrendered to him.