The Soul Continuum (22 page)

“Of course not,” Qod says.

Salem narrows his eyes, then turns back to me. “Have you noticed anything unusual since you last came out of the WOOM?”

“I—”

“Any nausea, exaggerated feelings of dread, or hallucinations?”

He comes close now, invading my personal space. There is a scent there, an aroma I am not used to, like burnt oil or the remnants of a smoldering fire.

“Qod found an anomalous region in my prefrontal cortex.”

Salem backs away. “Anomalous? Qod”—he looks up again—“explain.”

“Yes, please do,” I say, “and while you're at it, please tell me what in the name of sanity is going on. An hour ago I was all alone in the universe and now, after being told I am both alive and dead, I'm presented with . . . him!”

The other Salem darts a look of frustration at me before talking to Qod again. His calm and enigmatic aura is now gone entirely. “You said you would warn me before I met another deviation.” He points at me without looking.

“He isn't a normal deviation,” Qod says. “Something else has happened here, something I'm only just now starting to understand. This Salem has been subjected to a very complex artificial neural algorithm. Watch.”

Above us, Qod fashions a large globe to serve as a viewing screen, but all it shows is static.

“What are we supposed to be looking at?” I ask.

“Wait, please. I am attempting to clean up the image. As soon as I discovered the anomaly in your brain was protected, I began to look for anything else external to you that might be suspicious or relevant, and I found that your immersion into Salomi's life was interrupted. Someone pulled you out while I was gone.”

“Who?” the other Salem asks.

“Just watch,” Qod says. “I think I have it.”

Salem and I gaze at the ball of blue-and-gray static and suddenly the particles freeze. There is a faint image, a vague impression of two figures, and then another surge of energy floods through the globe and the image is enhanced, just enough to see who they are. One of them is me, the other is a beautiful woman I don't recognize. She is tangled in a nest of cables connected to the genoplant booth, and she looks like she is in pain.

“Oluvia Wade?” the other Salem Ben looks aghast. “That's Queen Oluvia Wade. What was she doing here?
How
did she get here?”

“A very good question,” Qod says, “but she went to a lot of trouble to remove any evidence of her presence here. It took a very invasive data scan for me to find this remnant image in the wiped scanner recorders. It is plain that Salem will not remember anything that happened because the neural flush would have mapped his mind back to the same state it was in when he entered the WOOM, with the exception of Salomi Deya's recorded life experience, of course. This new algorithm in Salem's brain was protected from the flush, however. The point is that it was all very carefully orchestrated. Oluvia wanted to keep this a secret.”

Oluvia Wade, the famous leader who rescued the human race from the Chaos Wars after the introduction of the Codex, and the same person who abandoned humankind to escape genocide at the hands of the Great AI. A hero and a monster. A person I am sure I knew once but chose to have erased from my memory. Though I am always curious as to why, I have done this on many occasions and learned the wisdom in not treading old paths to find out my motives. And though this Salem Ben seems to know her, I feel sure, absolutely sure, I should not probe too deeply into this event she went to so much effort to cover up.

“And we should leave it that way,” I tell Qod.

Qod is silent, and the other Salem turns to narrow his eyes at me. “And why is that? Don't you want to know what she stuck in your head?”

“I
do
know what she put there,” I tell them. “It's an instruction to collect information on Keitus Vieta. It's like a mental compass. Everything I do seems to bring me toward finding out about him. If I make a decision that gets
me closer, I feel instinctively that it's correct, but if I think about doing something different, it feels wrong, painful even.”

Salem snaps his fingers. “Could Oluvia's appearance be connected to the prime aberration? It would make sense, as this Salem was closest to it.”

“That was my reasoning, too,” Qod says.

“And what's the prime aberration?” I ask.

Salem sighs and nods. “It's the iteration of the Soul Consortium where one of us died. That's why the empty slot you and I have been obsessing over for so long has been filled. It's where—”

“This Salem knows all of that,” Qod says.

I shake my head and shift in my seat. “Okay, but what does that have to do with Oluvia Wade?”

“Oluvia was helping Salem trap Keitus Vieta,” Qod says. “It is why I vanished. I was analyzing that abomination Keitus Vieta had grown. He called it his daughter, so needless to say he was less than pleased I had taken her from him, and he was powerful enough to erase me after I tried to resist his efforts to find out where I'd taken her. I only just managed to hide the Soul Consortium's location in time, but when you—that is, the other Salem Ben—came out of the WOOM and started to investigate what happened to me, he got Vieta's attention, and Vieta brought me back in the form of Oluvia Wade as a bargaining tool: my life for his daughter's.

“And as I told you earlier, that didn't go so well for Vieta. We trapped him in a never-ending loop of your life.”

“And Oluvia?”

“My consciousness, or a small part of it, was contained in Oluvia. I had to upload it back into the Soul Consortium Control Core and use it as a bridge to transition back to my original state. But of course, in doing that, the body of Oluvia Wade would have died. What this Salem is thinking is that she somehow managed to resurrect herself again in the genoplant here, in your version of the Soul Consortium. It is a possibility, but there are some gaps in that theory, such as the range of transmission, and it doesn't explain why she died so quickly without a subsequent resurrection. It's as if she reached out to you as a final gesture.”

“But why would she do that?” I ask. “The threat is gone if Keitus Vieta is trapped in the WOOM of the other Soul Consortium, right?”

“No,” the other Salem says. “The threat is far from over. That's where I come in, and probably where you come in, too. The source of the problem—the reason Keitus Vieta came here in the first place—needs to be addressed.”

“Of course,” I say. “The rift in the Promethean Singularity is still open.”

“Exactly,” Salem says. “Every time a new iteration of the Soul Consortium rips itself away from its gravitational grip, the shortfall of matter has to come from somewhere, and that's how the rift was created. It's like the universe has an open wound.”

“So how do we heal it?”

Salem arches an eyebrow and whispers to me. “Bad question. She's . . . tetchy about that.”

“I am not tetchy,” Qod says, obviously tetchy. “I have no lasting solution yet, but I was able to introduce a temporary countermeasure against possible threat. When Keitus Vieta first erased me, he did not entirely succeed. I allowed him to think he had, of course. I simply withdrew deeper into the subatomic folds of quantum space.”

“You hid?” I said.

“Yes,” Qod says, “but while I was there, I set to work on a quantum virus to protect us from any future threat.
It was too late to do anything about Vieta at the time, but I was able to use sample material from his ‘daughter' as a baseline.”

“Like a vaccine,” I say.

“A what?” says the other Salem.

“A vaccine,” I tell him. “It's an ancient form of protection
against disease. A dead sample of a viral strain is injected into a host to stimulate protective antibodies. It sounds like Qod has done something like that but inside the atom. If
anything comes through that matches Keitus Vieta's quantum signature, it is killed off before taking form. Correct, Qod?”

“Correct,” she says, “but it is far from perfect. The real solution must be to close the rift and cut this problem off at the source. Already I can feel something testing my defenses, trying to force itself into our universe through quan
tum space using the rift as a focal point, and whereas Keitus
Vieta was pulled directly through the rift by accident, I can sense
something far more dangerous and infinitely more powerful than him trying to push through. Eventually it will succeed.”

“I know,” I say with a sigh.

The other Salem gives me a look. “You know?”

“Well, not exactly, but I just lived the life of Diabolis Evomere, who—by the way—just so happened to be the genesis of Keitus Vieta's daughter. She, it, he, or whatever it is, Diabolis, hinted at the same thing.”

“Keitus Vieta's daughter?” Salem looks horrified. “You actually found that life and lived it?”

“It's not something I want to do again, believe me, but it did reveal a lot about Keitus Vieta, and plenty more besides.”

“And what did you find out?” Salem asks.

“Vieta is some kind of—”

“Please don't!” Qod says suddenly, her voice booming out.

Both of us flinch at the unexpected volume and offer each other an uncertain glance.

“Why, Qod? What is it?” I ask.

“If you have knowledge about what Keitus Vieta truly is, then I would rather you did not share it. Not with him.”

“Why?” says the other Salem. “You can't just say something like that and leave it unresolved. We have to know what these entities are that we're dealing with.” He directs his gaze at me, and the golden nimbus that has followed his movements shines over his face. “You're going to have to tell me.”

“If he tells you,” Qod says, “it will change everything.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

Qod goes silent again, and because of that, because my response suggests that her fears are unwarranted, I suddenly understand her objection. My one obsession for most of my life has been to tear aside the veil separating life and death. Physics taught us that there is nothing beyond. It taught us that death is final and absolute, that there is no reason to believe any of the old myths and superstitions about an afterlife. Yet those stories cling so strongly. They itch at the
human soul, teasing it so keenly, that even with the understanding that it is simply an evolutionary drive for self-perpetuation
and progression, humanity could never let it go, and eventually they embraced it, one by one accepting the Reaper's invitation.

I, however, tore up the invite. My fear that there is nothing beyond has always been greater than the malaise brought about by pointless existence. Qod is worried. She knows what Keitus Vieta is, what he represents, and while her worry is unfounded, I had forgotten just how horrifying the truth is. Salem could take it, no doubt, but he does not have the benefit of receiving that knowledge through the gradual revelation of a WOOM life as I did.

“I'll answer my question for her,” I tell Salem. “Qod thinks that if you find out what Vieta is, you will go mad. She's confused now because I obviously
do
know, and my mind is still in one piece.”

“I am never confused,” she says. “I am . . . considering.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” I say, “it's got you stumped.”

She doesn't answer, so I get out of my seat and offer it to the other Salem. “It won't drive you insane or destroy you, but it will be a shock, so I suggest you sit.”

Salem looks at the chair, then back at me. For a moment he seems indignant, as if sitting down while I stand somehow makes him inferior, but then the nimbus lowers in intensity, and he resumes the look of humility he first adopted when he came on board, and he sits. “Go ahead.”

I take a moment to gaze out into the fledgling universe, considering the strange old man and the impact he has had on us, then with a deep sigh, I turn my attention to my counterpart. “That inner instinct I know you have, that . . . feeling that there might be something beyond death? Well, it's more than just an instinct. It's real. I don't know where we go or what happens on the other side, but the rift we created in the Promethean Singularity is a bridge from that place, and the shortfall of energy on this side is pulling those souls back through. It's acting like a white hole.”

“That's an interesting theory, but—”

“It's no theory. I just found that out in the life of Diabolis.”

Salem lifts his palms in submission. “Fine, but it still doesn't tell me what Keitus . . . oh!” He sees my meaningful stare, and I think he understands.

“Keitus Vieta is a human back from the other side?” he says. “These entities trying to get through are like . . . ghosts?”

“No, it's not like that at all. Vieta is
all
humans from the other side. He's some kind of corrupted gestalt consciousness possessing the body of a monk who once lived on Castor's World.”

Salem seems to lose his breath as he considers the implications. I am still processing it myself, realizing that mixed somewhere in that old man's soul is my entire family. All my deceased ancestors, all my friends, all my enemies,
everyone I ever loved and hated, everyone I ever respected
and admired. Some part of their personality, though warped and damaged, is inside him. And for all I know, given the strange properties of physical laws, if I die, my own soul could be eternally entwined with his, too.

I study Salem as he stares into the middle distance. I know myself well enough to understand what he is feeling. After a time, he opens his mouth and holds his expression as if waiting for the right words to come.

“One of us might be in Keitus Vieta too,” he says. “Did you know?”