The Religion War (6 page)

Cruz stayed quiet, trying to reveal nothing with his look or his tone of voice. His silence was an invitation to elaborate.

"Yourplan is extermination," said the Avatar.

The word hit Cruz like an electrical shock. It was his private word—the one he used only in his thoughts.

"First your armies will knock out communication in the war zones. The media will be banned. And then you will systematically annihilate the civilian and military populations."

Cruz needed to change the direction of the conversation. The Avatar's predictions were rocking his confidence. Was it that easy to guess his moves? If so, did al-Zee already know? Then it hit him. "That's enough about me. Tell me what al-Zee plans to do after we attack. Ifyou're so smart, you must know."

"As we speak, al-Zee's sleeper cells have moved massive amounts of biological weapons into every major American and European metropolitan area. They're operating independently now, having already received instructions that when your bombers make their first run, they'll unleash their weapons, destroying much of Western civilization in less than a week."

Cruz's face went pale.That wasn't even a scenario his planners had considered. The long absence of chemical and biological attacks had made everyone believe that that sort of thing was behind them. "If al-Zee has that capability, why wouldn't he have used it already, or at least threatened to use it?" asked Cruz.

"Al-Zee understands that a few bombings a week are good for morale on his side. But a massive biological attack on the West would bring certain annihilation to his people, his family, and himself. He's saving the final move until there's no other option. He's betting that your army will stop cold when your people realize their homelands have been decimated. And if he stops you in your tracks, with your one-hundred-to-one advantage in firepower, as you say, his prestige and power will reach new highs. He will become a superpower overnight."

Outside the door, Waters strained to hear every word. He was mesmerized, but unlike Cruz, he was not worried. Waters didn't have the capacity for worrying.

The Avatar continued, "Humanity is like a huge organic computer. The hardware is functioning fine—reproducing more humans, creating food, learning—but the software is broken. Beliefs are our software. When the software works properly, our beliefs help us survive. Sometimes there are glitches in the software, in the form of delusions that are harmful. My job is to remove the glitches."

"What can one old man do to change the minds of every person on the planet?" Cruz challenged.

"I only need to change one mind," said the Avatar.

"If you mean me, you're too late. I'm not changing my battle plans because of your nutty predictions," said Cruz.

"No, all I need from you is some extra time. I have introduced some doubt into your plan, and now you will try to find out if I'm right. You will delay your battle until you can check out my version of al-Zee's plans. And that is all I ask of you."

Cruz sat down in a small visitor's chair. Somehow this old man had indeed done what he said he would do. He had introduced doubt. And it would make Cruz pause. He would send out his spooks and Special Forces and try to find out if there was any way the Avatar's guess about al-Zee was right. Cruz was angry, but that feeling was starting to seem normal.

"How do you plan to change the minds of a billion people?" asked Cruz.

"It's several billion, actually," corrected the Avatar.

"Same question."

"Everything that humans create is in their own image, in some way. The purest example is the computer. Even in the early days, computers had memory, as people do, and they could do math. Now computers have been programmed to think, play chess, create art, hear, see, touch, and hold conversations. More to my point, every computer, no matter its purpose, has a reboot switch for when the software gets locked up. One button."

"You plan to reboot several billion people?" asked Cruz.

"I have to find the one person who is the equivalent of the reboot button," answered the Avatar.

"I'm the closest thing you're going to find," said Cruz.

"No, I'm looking for the one who has the most influence on people's thoughts, and that person is unlikely to be a world leader. Everyone has at least one influencer in his life, someone who can change your mind simply by expressing an opinion that is different from your own. And that influencer in turn is influenced by at least one other person, and so on. This vast web of influence connects every person, including the dead, but we're unaware of its reach and extent. We know of our immediate influences, and nothing more."

"You're saying there's one person on Earth who can change the mind of everyone else on Earth?" asked Cruz.

"Yes. And that person is probably not aware of it," said the Avatar.

"How do you know such a person exists?" asked Cruz.

"The universe has favored patterns," said the Avatar. "You need only look at what people build to know how humans are designed. Every computer has a reboot button. Of all the things humans have built, computers are the most like us. And so it follows that somewhere there is a human reboot button, one person whose opinion can reset the opinions of all of humanity."

"You know that I can't let you leave, don't you? If half of what you said is right, you're too valuable to risk capture by al-Zee's men. And even if what you say isn't right, you've been to I-Wing. I can't let you leave."

"What I know is that you will escort me to the front gate. And sometime in the next few weeks, when I need your help, you will give it," said the Avatar, standing to leave.

"What makes you so sure?" asked Cruz.

"I've studied your biography. You played chess at the Grand Master level when you were ten. You developed your tough side as a defense against the other children, especially the older ones, who considered your chess skills a topic for ridicule," said the Avatar.

"You didn't find that in any biography," challenged Cruz, who knew every word that had ever been published about him.

"I read about your chess skills. The rest is a familiar pattern. But to your earlier point, you are a man who understands strategy and risk.That's why you are where you are today You listened to my story and judged the odds of it being true to be somewhere in the range of one percent. And you did an expected value calculation, multiplying the number of people who might die in the war by one percent, and set that aside as the number of people whose lives hang in the balance, statistically speaking. And being rational, you are now deciding that letting me continue my journey is worth the risk."

"You're clever, that's for sure. But you have no idea what al-Zee's thugs could do to you if they caught you," said Cruz.

"Lieutenant Waters knows," said the Avatar.

Cruz turned toward the door and looked at Waters standing just outside. Waters reached into his pocket and took out the note. Cruz extended his hand in a silent command.Waters complied. Cruz read the note describing the dead interrogator and the dead guard at I-Wing. He looked at the Avatar, folded the note, and put it in his pocket.

"Follow me," Cruz said, as he turned to exit.

Cruz passed by Waters at the door. The Avatar stopped and looked at Waters, peering deeply into the lieutenant's unyielding eyes. Anyone else would have been unnerved. Waters just looked back.

"We'll talk again," said the Avatar, before following Cruz to the stairwell, through the guarded lobby, out the security perimeter, and through the main gate.

The Avatar walked a half mile to the nearest hydrocab taxi sensor and stood on it. For the past five years, taxis had been the only form of four-wheel street travel, all Fords, all hydrogen engines. When al-Zee's forces started bombing the United States and Europe on a weekly basis, it became unthinkably unpatriotic to drive a gas-guzzling car. Soon, it became unpatriotic to own
any
car. The Green Party had become a major social force, arguing successfully that every time you filled the tank of your SUY you paid al-Zee to bomb your neighbor.

The last holdouts, mostly the rich and the cynical, were converted when American ultranationalists took matters into their own hands and started dynamiting domestic automobile factories. Of the American carmakers, only Ford survived those years, barely, thanks to government loans and a promise to make nothing but hydrogen taxis.

The taxi sensor below the Avatar's feet sensed his weight, registered two points of pressure, and relayed the information "one passenger" to the global taxi satellite system, which broadcast it back to Earth along with geographic coordinates. It wasn't possible for most people to call a taxi using their phones, or indeed to call anyone who wasn't a business associate or family member. To fight terrorists, the phone network was programmed to allow only authorized calls. Every citizen was required to submit a list of friends and business associates to the Department of Communications. Only those calls were allowed.

Three taxis were available and nearby, they snapped their engines into drive at the first indication on their navigation screens that a potential passenger waited nearby. Hydrocab profit margins were kept artificially low by the government, so only the most aggressive operators survived.

The first hydrocab screeched around the corner and came to a noisy stop in front of the Avatar, just as the second and third appeared a block away. The Avatar leaned down and examined the driver, an unpleasant-looking fellow named Arun Singh, according to his operating license, which was prominently dis-played.The Avatar smiled and motioned to the driver to continue on without him. Singh snarled but didn't wait around to argue, burning his tires in disgust. He had become accustomed to older customers waving him on because they mistook him for a Muslim. He hated this country lately, but it was not his day to change it.

The second hydrocab saw the opportunity and pulled up.The Avatar smiled to the driver, a woman in her fifties named Noriko Yamamoto. She returned a dead stare, expecting him to get in. The Avatar waved her off. Her blank look became anger as the cab pulled away.

The third cab approached and the Avatar looked inside. The driver's license said Hector Rodriguez. Hector was a young man, early thirties, with dark friendly eyes and a well-manicured mustache. He was smiling.The Avatar opened the back door and got in.

"Destination?" mumbled the driver.

"Do you know where the GIC headquarters building is?" asked the Avatar, referring to Global Information Corporation, a household name by now.

"Si."

As they drove, the Avatar felt a pattern forming. He remembered a time before he became Avatar, when patterns were largely invisible to him. But after years of practice, he had developed an additional sense, finely tuned to pattern recognition. Often the patterns aborted before becoming fully formed, evaporating as false signals, reverting back to chaos and waiting for the next energy surge. Today the Avatar noticed the spring weather, seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit according to the weather display in the hydrocab. No wind, perfect for being outdoors after several days of rain. He remembered the radio that was playing when he first visited Cruz's headquarters; it was tuned to a baseball game. It was four o'clock now, only a few more hours of natural light. School was out. Baseball was in the air. The Avatar noticed the homes in the neighborhood as they passed, the price range entirely appropriate to young families with children. In this economy, most minors were unsupervised while their parents worked. Senior citizens, most of them retired without savings, lived in special economical housing zones too far from where the kids lived to be useful babysitters. The older children babysat for the entire block, and they had their own agendas, with attentive-ness near the bottom.

"I might tell you to stop quickly. Will you do that for me?" asked the Avatar.

"Si," said the driver.

"I don't mean when we get to GIC I mean in the middle of the street, and you won't have much warning. I will compensate you well if you do as I ask."

"Si," said the driver.

The Avatar cracked open his window, listening to the sounds of spring, the commotion of air around the cab, the tires on pavement. He heard the distinctive and nearly ubiquitous sounds of distant hydrocab horns, an occasional bird, and then the sound of young laughter, boys shouting, joking, and playing. The patterns always started incomplete, waiting until somehow his subconscious filled in the important pieces. It was like a musician who knows the next note but doesn't know how he knows, or the math prodigy who knows the answer to the equation without being conscious of doing the calculation. The Avatar had developed this skill as a side effect of reaching the fifth and highest level of consciousness, a place that he alone inhabited.

"Stop now," ordered the Avatar.

Hector glanced briefly in his rearview mirror, first to see if anyone was following him too closely, second to see the eyes of the old man. Then he hit the brakes, hard. He waited a beat, expecting the explanation, and it came, indirectly, in the form of a ten-year-old boy darting out from behind a shrub, running directly into the path of the cab, chasing a baseball, in what could have been his last moments of life. The boy looked upjust in time to see the hydrocab, scaring him witless before he realized it was at a full stop.The boy let the ball continue. He stood bolt upright and looked into the hydrocab, and into the eyes of the Avatar. The Avatar smiled, partly in amusement at the boy's reaction, partly out of smugness for having identified a particularly subtle pattern before it formed.

Hector was stiff, his eyes wide as saucers. He looked at the old man by mirror, unable to blink.

"You may continue," said the Avatar, as the boy stepped to the curb, still shaking.

One day the boy would be a surgeon, pioneering a procedure for partial spinal replacement. During every operation, as his hands expertly worked his patient's central nervous system, saving a life that would otherwise be lost, the surgeon would always remember this day, and the eyes of the Avatar. And he would wonder how the hydrocab had known to stop. It would be the greatest puzzle of his life.