Accidental Gods (24 page)

Chapter 44

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

—Frank Herbert,
Dune

It felt like she was drowning. She choked and tried to breathe. Her heart raced, and every part of her wanted to run or pound on something to make the world let her breathe. She knew at any moment she would die. Then she expunged the liquid from her lungs in one wet, heaving cough. She couldn’t stop coughing, but air finally entered her lungs. She wiped her mouth clear of the spittle she had expelled. She opened her eyes, confused. The hand she had just wiped her mouth with was covered in blood.

Her eyes adjusted slowly to the light.
Is this a dream?
she wondered.
Or am I in the Darkness?
Everything was blurry. She couldn’t tell where she was.

Then her last moments came flooding back to her: being tied to the altar, her curse, the searing pain as the dagger had pierced her body, and the loud clang of the dagger hitting the stone after it had passed through her. The Darkness. She was dead.

Her vision was still blurry, but above her heart, she could see a cut through the cloth. And yes, her tunic was covered in blood. She slid her hand under her tunic and inspected her chest, running her hand across where the dagger had hit her. There was no puncture wound, only a strange, barely visible scar. It was not the scar she would have expected the dagger to leave.

So it wasn’t a dream,
she realized.
Do they just repair your body when you arrive in the afterlife?

She heard a noise nearby and sat up. The padding, punctuated by an occasional clicking sound, came closer. She rubbed her eyes and blinked, until finally she could see a little better. She realized then that she was in her old room. Muu Muu was there, walking toward her, his claws clicking on the wooden floor. He appeared confused and disoriented, too.

She tried to go to him, but as she stepped off the bed, she fell to her knees. She was so weak that she barely managed to crawl across the room, meeting the large cat halfway. He nuzzled her, and she hugged him.

It took her several minutes to build up enough strength to finally stand. When she did, she walked on wobbly legs to the stairs, partially supporting herself on the cat, and started down, clutching the railing. The smell was horrific, but she had to know. When she entered the courtyard and saw them, her dead parents on the blood-soaked tiles, she turned and stumbled back into the house, out the back, and to the end of the dock—where she then collapsed.

It was eerily quiet on the river. The river had always been her friend. It had helped her relax. She was glad to see that it still flowed, which she took to be a good sign, and that helped her find her center again. At least she wasn’t in some frozen hell where time stood still. After she had cried for a long time and her vision had almost fully returned, her gaze was inexorably drawn to the pyramids. They were different.

She wiped the tears from her eyes and studied the pyramids more closely. It took her a minute to realize the differences. The newest pyramid was not there; only a crater remained where it had been. Wisps of smoke billowed up from the hole. Several of the older pyramids were damaged. Chunks were missing from their sides. One’s top looked like it had been swept off by a great hand.

Did my curse come true?
she wondered.
Or is this a trick of the afterlife?

Seeing the smoking crater girded her will, and she rose. Going to the palace was the only way to find out what else had happened.

***

Thomas, Mike, Ajay, Lisa, Larry, Jenn, and Ross sat in the primary rendering room analyzing logs. They were mostly trying to figure out if anything weird had been going on in the Alpha world.

First, they went to see what Stephen had meant when he had said, “She was sacrificed to consecrate the pyramid of the current ruler.”

So they saw her sacrificed on the pyramid. They saw her shout the curse.

“Oh my God,” was all anyone could say.

After a few moments of silence, Thomas finally asked Jenn, “Can you pull up a list of all access to the SU for the last three weeks?”

“Well, sort of. I can pull up everything that was shown in rendering rooms, but not necessarily who watched what. We’re a little lax on that. You have to go through a lot of security to get into this section of the building, but once you’re here, you don’t have to do anything special to access a rendering room.”

“But you have to log in to access Coliseum or Nefirti, right?”

“Yes. Coliseum logs everything to specific users. We can figure out anything anyone did with it.”

“OK,” Thomas said, more to everyone than just Jenn. “Let’s look at all world viewing first and Coliseum second. I don’t think the Nefirti system is going to tell us much, since it wasn’t working until the day all of this happened.”

“Got it,” Jenn said.

A string of dates and numbers appeared on the north wall. It showed the most recent date first.

“Are those numbers next to the dates coordinates?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Jenn said.

“Any chance you could turn them into locations?”

“I can, but it will take a few hours.”

“OK, how about this: just show activity between eleven p.m. and six a.m.”

Jenn hit a few keys, and the list changed. It was still long.

“Hmm. I guess we’ll have to wait.”

“Hang on,” Larry said and walked closer to the list.

He tapped the most recent time stamps, all of which were between 2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. on the night of Stephen’s death.

Larry glanced back at everyone else. “How is he looking at multiple time periods in the SU at the same time, in the same rendering room?”

“I’m not sure,” Jenn said. “Let me check the Coliseum activity.”

Another list, this one showing time and date stamps with commands next to them, appeared on the west wall.

Jenn said, “Interesting. It looks like he’s been buffing up Coliseum.”

“Really?” Thomas asked. “How so?”

Jenn tapped one of the lines. “Let’s see. Ah, here, it looks like he was running something akin to picture in a picture to allow him to see two times at once.”

“Interesting. Did you ever see that, Mike? Did you use it for the translation work?”

“Nope, but it might have been helpful.”

Thomas asked Jenn, “What did he do while the PIP was open?”

“Let me see.”

“Where on Alpha was he?”

Jenn tapped on the keyboard again.

On the east wall an image appeared. It was the sacrificial altar on top of the sixth pyramid. Nefirti’s body was there.

“What was he up to?”

“I don’t know, but this is what he was looking at when he opened the second window.”

Jenn used cut and paste to copy the commands Stephen had used from the Coliseum log.

A new image replaced the rendering log files on the north wall. It showed Nefirti before she made the curse.

“So he was looking at Nefirti, dead and alive?”

“Yes.”

“Then what did he do?”

Jenn and Larry both studied the Coliseum log.

“Holy shit!” Larry exclaimed.

“What did he do?” Thomas asked, irritation creeping into his voice.

“He did what was effectively a copy and paste from the living Nefirti to the dead one. It looks like he was trying to repair her. It looks like he even opened a console window to manipulate the world directly.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

Jenn studied the commands again.

“I’m not sure. Let me keep looking. I’m going to lock the camera positions and run it forward again.”

They watched as the dagger fell from her chest, with almost the entire blade missing.

“Oh! OK, so this is when he did the initial cut-and-paste. He replicated the area of her chest just before the dagger penetrated it and then pasted it back right after. That basically cut the dagger off and put her…um…put her back together, I guess is the best way to describe it.”

They continued watching, but for a few minutes, nothing appeared to happen.

Jenn kept narrating, “So we aren’t seeing anything now, but it looks like he’s doing something directly in the console.” She felt like the doctor performing an autopsy in one of those crime scene dramas.

“What was he doing in the console?” Thomas asked.

“Interesting,” Jenn muttered, apparently to herself, as she looked at the console activity. “It’s hard to tell. He was really deep. But my best guess is that he was cleaning up the edges around where he performed the cut-and-paste to make sure she was whole again.”

“Wow,” Ross said. “That’s bizarre.”

“Yeah. It probably left a really strange scar.”

Her shirt fluttered as if something moved underneath it. Then she disappeared.

Mike asked, “Where did she go?”

The east wall erupted in an explosion of light and sound. Thomas, Mike, and Ajay instinctively hit the floor, Larry and Ross turned away from the blast, and Jenn shielded her eyes. Then the explosion was over. The camera was still in the same position, but the altar wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the pyramid.

“What the hell?” Thomas asked, getting up.

Jenn said, “Let me try that sequence again, copying everything he did.”

The dagger fell from her chest, clattering to the ground with all but the stub of its blade gone in a cut-and-paste. A few minutes passed. Nefirti’s shirt fluttered. The east wall, holding the other image, changed to the same view of the altar. Then the north wall changed to a room. It looked like a typical Alphan bedroom. Then her body disappeared from the altar. The main view shifted to the same bedroom, but Nefirti’s body was lying on the bed.

Jenn mumbled, “It looks like he’s using coordinate markers to jump around. He moved her body from the altar to this room.”

Ross asked, “Why didn’t he just copy her from before the sacrifice and move her into the future?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe he wanted her to remember everything that happened?”

Thomas sighed. “I guess in some crazy way that would make sense.”

Ajay added, “Or maybe he was worried what ramifications moving her into the future might have. He was, after all, a scientist.”

The view went from her room to the pyramid where the camera sank into the rocks. Then the explosion occurred again. The camera returned to Nefirti’s room. It went down the stairs and into the courtyard again. Time jumped backward. Muu Muu was lounging in the sunlight in the courtyard. The other window still showed Nefirti’s bedroom. A snoozing Muu Muu appeared on the floor of the bedroom. Then the view changed again, to outside the palace.

“I guess he didn’t care whether Muu Muu remembered the events.”

Ajay frowned. “He’s playing a dangerous game here, too. Doing stuff like this could have a huge ripple effect, possibly destabilizing everything.”

“Jenn,” Thomas said, “mark time before he made the changes. Once we get the resources, we’ll try running a parallel universe and see how much they diverge and if we can identify any problems from the manipulation that occurred here.”

Ajay nodded, intrigued by the idea of the experiment. “That could be really interesting,” he said out loud before realizing it but then exploited his momentum and continued, “What is the impact of a singular event on the evolution of societies? Or would it be civilizations? Anyway, it could be really interesting to see how much things diverge. It makes you wonder how our world would be different if some key events or people had been slightly changed in our world—like if Hitler had died in a car wreck before rising to power or if Jesus had not been born.”

The north screen still showed movement, displaying a scene that looked as if someone were walking purposefully through the palace.

“What’s he doing now?”

The screen showed an opulent bedroom suite, guards arrayed throughout the room. Two men stood in the center of the room, engaged in a heated discussion.

“The one on the right is the pharaoh,” Mike pointed out. “The other one is wearing the high priest’s garb, but he doesn’t look like the last high priest I saw. Maybe he’s new?”

The high priest collapsed.

“What happened?”

“Looks like he dropped dead,” Ajay added helpfully.

Jenn said, “There was a Coliseum command used at the exact moment he dropped.”

One of the guards who had spoken to the pharaoh dropped to the ground. The pharaoh cowered in the corner.

“Same command,” Ross said. “It looks like he created a Coliseum command to kill people.”

One of the women on the bed died and then the other. Then the guards arrayed throughout the room died as well.

Thomas cupped his head in his hands. “One of the last things he said to me was that it is easier to kill people than to save them.”