Ghost of the Gods - 02 (33 page)

He could feel the seeds inside him rapidly dividing, increasing exponentially in numbers and raiding his flesh for raw material. They were spreading throughout him, converting his entire nervous system, including his brain, to nanotech. The free-swimming colony of COBIC within him was also struggling to grow. He felt strong impulses to seek out COBIC bacteria. Like metal filings drawn to a magnet, tiny amounts of COBIC were reaching his skin from residue trapped on the surface of the frozen ground. It was not nearly enough to meet his body’s hunger.

He was hyperaware of so many things going on both in his surroundings and within himself. Through the n-web he shared the consciousness of a bobcat stalking its prey and the consciousness of the prey. Teased from the primeval awareness of a hawk, he perceived the world visually around him in shades of desire, then lost the connection when the raptor took flight. He experienced Sarah’s subconscious kinesthetic sense of her own body and then his own. This expansion of awareness was akin to a religious experience. When he then realized he was fully thinking in parallel, he became unhinged. His consciousness had divided into multiple instances, each a fully aware replication of himself. His nanotech brain was now capable of parallel intellectual and emotional processing at an impossible level. He could focus on one instance of awareness and then switch to another. When an instance ended, all that it was and had become, collapsed back into the original Mark, enriching him with new experiences.

An assist implanted memories within him. The memories helped him understand he was changing into a nanotech-saturated being similar to Noah and Mustafa. This transformation could take days or weeks. He would be complete as soon as the conversion of his nervous system was total and the swarm of COBIC inside his flesh had added sufficiently to their numbers to reach their own critical mass. He knew he partially had the hive’s indoctrination to thank for this transformation. The damage the hives had caused had left him poised for this kind of restructuring. His mind, under strain from these terrible emotional floods, was forced to adapt, and part of that adaptation including repairing the damage caused by the hives to better than new.

The earring slipped from his fingers into the snow. No more than a few seconds had elapsed since he’d picked it up. He looked back at Sarah and felt her emotions radiating into him like waves of sunlight. He was staggered by them. All his emotions were amplified. He could tell Sarah knew cataclysmic changes were occurring within him. He looked down where the earring had fallen. The snow around it was stained with drops of his blood. He knew instinctively that far more blood would soon be spilled. He knew in his heart that the pain of losing all these good people would never dim. The senseless bloodshed would remain fresh; perfectly recalled memories inside him until the end of time.

He closed his eyes as he heard Sarah’s feet crunching in the snow as she approached. It was almost as if he could hear each ice crystal breaking under each of her steps. She wrapped her arms around him. He could feel deep pain from this massacre hollowing out her soul as he knew she could feel the warring emotions inside him. They were now lovers who could read each other’s hearts.

A breeze stirred and with it came the first hints of snow. Soon this bloodshed would be covered in a blanket of white. Mark looked at the remnants of destroyed lives surrounding him and thought of McKafferty. Something unknown and dark and dangerous stirred inside him. A self-contained insect-like awareness within his instinctive processor had awoken. The awareness had evolved to where it could trigger very small kill-zones no bigger than several yards in diameter. These kill-zones were a seamless, autonomous extension of his immune system. They would attack external threats to his body just as white blood cells destroyed internal threats. Since all living things contain COBIC, the immune system could potentially protect him from any biological threats other than hybrids. These micro kill-zones were engineered to happen automatically when the body perceived a threat. However, Mark knew they could also be consciously triggered. All that was required was to deceive the instinctive processor into thinking the body was in danger. He now understood exactly what he‘d seen on that Chicago street when all those Enforcers had died.

“What do we do now?” asked Sarah.

Mark thought about her question and realized the nature of his thinking had changed. He suspected it would continue to change as more of his nervous system was transformed. He realized he no longer needed data-floods to retrieve information. All his thoughts were now tightly integrated with the artificial god, as if his cerebral cortex and the machine were quantum entangled. If he did not have information he needed, he near instantaneously remembered it along with an ocean of associated facts. It was disturbingly difficult to distinguish his thinking from the god-machine’s. The clearest distinction was a small, unnatural delay, which was a telltale that a memory came from the entangled thought-interface. The other distinction was that the machine’s memories were just too perfect to have been forged in a human mind.

“Mark, did you hear my question?... Mark!”

“Yes… Yes, I… I don’t know what to do next. This is so strange. The god-machine is doing part of my thinking for me. New memories appear and old memories are lost to make room. I have no control over it. The memories are all free associations to anything I think about. It’s like an information chain reaction.… It’s… It’s…”

It was too much. He was racing out of control. He desperately tried to stop his thoughts by focusing on
nothing
, as if meditating. It wasn’t working, then an assist began automatically tamping down distractions and stray thoughts. With that help,
he succeeded enough so that the overload slowly abated. Sarah stared at him for a long time. Snow was landing on her hair and coat. She picked up both his hands and looked deeply into his eyes.

“You are still the same Mark,” she said. “Listen to me. Who you are has not changed.”

Mark was so deeply touched. In that instant he felt overwhelming love for Sarah. Every sensation and feeling was crushingly intense. He looked into her eyes and wanted to immerse himself in her. What he unintentionally radiated out over the n-web and received back took both his and Sarah’s breath away. His emotions shifted as unnaturally fast as they had swelled. Each emotion was unpredictably invoking others. There was overlap and blending that resulted in impossible feelings: love, pride, agony, remorse. The results were confusing him, tugging on him. He was growing paralyzed from the emotional chaos just as moments ago he had been overwhelmed by the mental chaos. A renewed, intense hatred for the hives and Mustafa was added to the mix. Nearing a crisis point, he could feel Sarah trying to help. She showed him how to focus emotions and turn off all that was peripheral to the point of concentration. He focused on his last feeling, Mustafa. Before he knew what was happening he had walked to the Humvee, opened the rear passenger door, and dragged the man out. He wanted to punish him for what he had done to them and what the hives planned to do to all of humanity. Mark pulled off the pillowcase. Mustafa looked at him with a thin smile on his lips.

“I can tell you are now like the fiend, Noah,” said Mustafa. “I can see it in your eyes. His cancer is stirring inside you. You now have powerful connections to the goddess, but you are broken without a guide. You do not scare me. Are you now going to kill me like a good betrayer?”

Mark was burning with rage at this arrogant man and the hives. He could remember all that was freshly implanted during his hive indoctrination. So much of it was damning. They would do anything and destroy anything to return to their ancient, fundamentalist ways.

The heat of his rage was fanned ever higher. He was convinced that even if the hives had not directly caused the plague, their fingerprints were all over it. Their hands were drenched in blood. Staring into Mustafa’s eyes, he could see a gleam, a hint of the conceit that was needed to inflict a heartless tyranny upon humankind forever.

“Tell me about the plans!” bellowed Mark.

The ancient hybrid shrank back. Mark had a clear sense the man was looking for a way to escape. Mustafa wet his lips, then spoke in a quiet voice.

“What plans?”

“The plans for spreading your mind-control cancer!” yelled Mark. “I know the god-machine won’t start a plague for you, so what is it? What is your plan to dominate us? What power do you think you have?”

“There is no plan. You are paranoid and insane. You are doomed unless you are quickly accepted into a commune. Your separation from the guide is driving you mad. The betrayer understands this. You should be asking, What are his plans for you and your woman?”

“What about you?” bellowed Mark. “Why isn’t separation driving you mad?”

“It is affecting me, but I will take much longer to damage. You two will be insane and drooling while I will walk away before it is too late for me.”

“That can be fixed,” said Mark.

He pulled his .45 and pushed into Mustafa’s forehead. He could feel Sarah’s emotions in turmoil. He knew she would be fine if he pulled the trigger; part of her was hoping he would. Mustafa’s facial expression changed from arrogance to uncertainty. Mark could see in a medial assist that Mustafa’s heart was pounding. Mark had no idea if he was going to pull the trigger.

“Can your COBIC bioengineering fix a bullet to the brain?” asked Mark.

“You can’t do this,” said Mustafa. “It is against your nature.”

Mark squeezed down halfway on the trigger. He wasn’t sure at what point the gun would fire. Mustafa peed himself. Mark looked at the pathetic creature and his
anger quenched itself as if it were molten iron poured into water. Shame mixed with steam within him as he turned and walked away. The gun slid from his fingers to the snowy ground.

Mark wandered for what felt like hours. He thought about the possible outcomes from his rage at Mustafa. All of them would have been negative for him or Sarah. While wandering down trails he had taken many times before, he was slowly distracted by other thoughts. These changes going on inside him made him feel unhinged. Some time ago he’d learned from the god-machine that an individual’s expectations play a powerful role in shaping seemly independent events. Carl Jung would have agreed. There were no random coincidences. We are all connected. Our free will gives us control over part of our lives while collective echoes influence us all subconsciously. Using gentle subconscious nudges, the human collective unconscious manufactures big and small synchronicities that guide others along their paths. Mark’s father had a wonderful story about synchronicities. In the early part of the prior century a man carelessly gets into a small accident in his car, knocking over a road sign. A worker comes along and repairs the sign, but he is distracted and leaves it pointing in a different direction. Another person following the broken sign ends up lost and stops at a roadside diner for directions. The waitress captivates him. He asks her for date. They have found true love.

The man who knocked over the sign was the ex-husband of the waitress. The man in the car was Mark’s grandfather.

Mark realized he was by coincidence following a trail that Kathy had originally shown him. The trial led to a rock formation called Indian Foot. He knew what he would find there as he scrambled over a small fallen tree that blocked the path. The base of Indian Foot came into view. As he neared it, he could not take his eyes from the crevice at the base of the huge red stone formation. What he was doing felt unreal. Kathy should not be gone. He should not be retrieving this artifact of her life. He knelt down in the snow and reached into the opening. His fingers easily found the square metal object. He pulled out the IronKey thumb drive. It was on a lanyard. He hung the IronKey around his neck and tucked it inside his shirt. It was icy cold and felt like a talisman.

She would not remain one of the anonymous disappeared. He would see to that. He would publish her work. He realized he was following ripples in time that Kathy had set in motion long ago. There was no such thing as random coincidence.

Mark Freedman – Arizona – February 29, 0002 A.P.

Sarah drove the Humvee out of Pueblo Canyon while Mark sat with his eyes closed, deep in thought. He could no longer look at this graveyard. He could no longer look at the road leading into this graveyard. Pueblo Canyon had been a land of hope. Two years ago he had led colleagues from the CDC here, saving them from the nanotech plague. They had become his friends. He could have never imagined that he’d also led them to a mass grave.

Mark felt a familiar bump in the road and opened his eyes. He was surprised they had already reached the highway. They were on their way to Flagstaff, Arizona to resupply. After that their plans were undecided. Mark halfheartedly stared out the windshield and occupied his mind with their destination. If it had not been snowing, he would have been able to see Mount Humphrey Peak rising to over 12,000 feet in the distance. Mount Humphrey was one of several extinct volcanoes in a chain that had violently erupted when early humans walked the Earth. Overlooked by Mount Humphrey and its sister peaks, surrounded by a forest of Ponderosa pines, was their destination. Flagstaff was a city the plague had largely bypassed. While located in the far Outlands, the city had stores, trading posts, motels, a university, restaurants, taverns, and a very well-armed, near legendary police force. Many times marauders had not just been turned back but massacred by the Flagstaff force. Thieves were often shot on sight. It was harsh justice but it worked for this harsh world. Since the plagues, the city had been walled off like a feudal stronghold. There was only one entrance to Flagstaff and it had been tightly controlled by the force until recently. The entrance was still guarded by heavily armed officers, but foot and car traffic was now routinely waved through. Both Mark and Sarah knew the city well. This was always the first stop when heading out of Pueblo Canyon in search of any tools or supplies. Flagstaff had become the best known free trading zone in this region of the Outlands.

Mark was becoming intensely hungry, which was very odd. Hunger pangs had been pestering him since Pueblo Canyon. He had a sense it stemmed from the transformation happening inside him. The seeds needed more raw materials to replicate. He thought about the experiments he and Kathy had performed at the BVMC lab. When COBIC bacteria had been placed in an optimal nutrient-rich environment, the seeds replicated and infected new COBIC.