Biblical (47 page)

“What about the hallucination of the parting of the Red Sea? Moses really did wave his magic wand and divide the waves? That what you’re saying?”

It was Mora Ackerman who answered. “Back in 2010, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research created a computer simulation to measure the effect of what meteorologists call a wind set-down. And guess what? A land bridge was formed
across the Red Sea – at exactly the point the massacre took place last year. It’s also geologically unstable, right where the Arabian and African Plates meet. From the accounts of the soldiers, there was some kind of seismic event as well, which would have added to the drama. There’s your biblical element, your Hand of God: plate tectonics and bad weather.”

“Basically, time is folding in on itself,” said Gillman. “These aren’t hallucinations … what we’re experiencing is the quantum collapse, the shutdown, of our universe. You’re the only person who can stop it.” He reached into his pocket, took something out and laid it on the low table in front of Macbeth: a key with a numbered fob.

“What’s this?”

“The means to destroy Project One. The key opens a left luggage locker at the Reventlowsgade entrance of Copenhagen Central Railway station. Everything you need will be there.”

Macbeth looked at the key without picking it up. “You really think you’ve convinced me to become some kind of neo-Luddite terrorist?”

“You know this latest episode only started when your artificial brain became sentient. You know
instinctively
that what I’m saying is the truth. And most of all, as he did with me, because John Astor has given you a copy of
Phantoms of Our Own Making
. The full answer is in that.”

Macbeth stared at Gillman, confused. “No he hasn’t. I have no such thing. Everyone talks about it but I haven’t found a single person who’s actually read it.” Macbeth paused, thinking of Deborah Canning sitting in her room at McLean Hospital, convinced she only existed when others were there, looking through her window and into a formless void. “Well, perhaps one … Why would you think I have a copy?”

“Two reasons. Because you are central to everything that’s going on.”

“Me?” Macbeth made an incredulous face. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“Everything. You’ve an insight into what’s happening and I know that you’ve tried to deny that to yourself. All your life you’ve had experiences similar to what everyone has experienced over the last eighteen months. You know … know instinctively … that there’s something not right about this reality. And haven’t you noticed that the few remaining lingering hotspots of hallucination events just happen to be in Denmark and Northern Germany? It’s almost as if the residue of this so-called outbreak follows you around.”

Macbeth laughed. “You really believe that?”

“Honestly? No. I think the Boston event took place because the remaining element of the Prometheus Project – my modeling program – was up and running there. And I believe that the lingering episodes are happening near Copenhagen because of the work you’re doing on Project One.”

“And that’s why you think I have got a copy of Astor’s book?”

“That and the fact that your brother sent your computer in to Jimmy Mrozek at MIT to see if he could open up a phantom folder on your computer.”

“You have the same folder …” Macbeth remembered Casey telling him that Gillman had asked Mrozek to carry out the same investigation on his computer. He shook his head in disbelief. “That’s it? The folder contains Astor’s book?”

Gillman nodded.

“But how … ? How did you open it?”

“You don’t open it … it opens itself, when it’s ready. Or when you’re ready. I don’t know exactly. It just happens.”

“How did it get on my computer? In fact, when I changed computers, it moved from one to another.”

“Astor put it there.”

“Astor is alive?”

“I don’t know. He seems to have been around for ever.
Whether John Astor is one man or many, or just the sum of the recorded thoughts of one man, I just can’t tell. There’s a chance that he may simply be an emplaced idea – something encoded into the human experience. But I’m sure you’ll be able to get into the folder, to read the book, now. The time is right.”

The three sat in silence, the key lying untouched on the table, Gillman and Ackerman clearly eager for a sign that Macbeth was in agreement. There was no sign, because he wasn’t. He knew they were both sincere – but, under normal circumstances, his psychiatric assessment of them would be that they were fueling each other’s paranoid delusion. But these weren’t normal circumstances and he certainly wasn’t sure how he would stand up to psychiatric assessment himself at the moment.

In any case, Gillman had offered no real explanation, demonstrated no understandable mechanism between Project One and the collapsing of time.

As it happened, it wasn’t Gillman’s argument that convinced him.

“Oh God …” said Mora.

“Oh God …” said Macbeth as he was overwhelmed, consumed in a vortex of swirling déjà vu.

In an instant, something shifted in the world.

Suddenly and inexplicably, it was daylight outside.

Night became day.

It happened in a second. No sunrise. No gentle dawn. An explosion of intense, painful brilliance as the sky bloomed bright and the sun seared through the glass walls and filled the bar.

“John … what is happening?” Mora clutched his arm.

“It’s too bright …” Macbeth muttered. “The sun’s too bright. And it’s too close. Too big …”

Gillman stood up, shielding his eyes against the glare of the too-big, too-close, malevolently bright sun.

“It’s started,” he said. “We’re too late, it has already begun … God help us, we’re too late …”

Macbeth stood too, helping Mora to her feet and placing a protective arm around her. When he looked at her – just for a moment and despite the difference in hair color – he thought she was Melissa.

“It’s a hallucination,” he said to them both, to himself. “Remember it’s not real …”

He fell silent, hypnotized by the scene beyond the windows. The sky started to dim, as if a veil had been drawn across the too-big, too-bright sun. It wasn’t blue, but a sickly orangeygreen, like no other sky Macbeth had ever seen.

The glass walls of the Diamond had been designed not to be seen, but Macbeth knew that they were gone. A warm, thick breeze sludged across the bar and he felt its kiss on his cheek.

“Oh Jesus …” he heard Gillman say. The tables, the chairs and sofa, the bar, all faded, became transparent as if made of glass or melting ice, then disappeared. Rippling edges were all that remained, then they too were gone. The greatest panic came when the floor, and all the floors beneath it, the entire building, began to fade.

“We’re going to fall!” Mora screamed. Macbeth watched his feet as the floor rippled and shimmered, then faded.

“No we’re not!” He grabbed Mora by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “I can still feel it! The floor’s still there!”

Another shift in the light. Another dimming. The sun remained as big, but the air had become thicker, viscous.

They rolled across the sky like a tidal wave, coming in from every direction: fuming and billowing and roiling. Kilometers thick; dark, sulfurous-green. Clouds unlike any Macbeth had ever seen.

They closed on them, closed over the sun, turned the day dark again, the light dull and gray-green but not night. There was a stunned, terrified quiet. Like the others, it took Macbeth’s eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom after the searing brightness of the sun.

Macbeth looked down.

“Oh God … Oh, God no!”

They stood on nothing, suspended high above the Earth, except it was not the Earth any of them had ever known. Copenhagen was gone. The streets were gone. No cars, no lights, no buildings. No mark of Man on the Earth.

There was no mark of Nature, either: no harbor, no Baltic. No rivers, lakes, trees or grass. No animals, no life. There wasn’t even land, as such, but something in-between solid and fluid, the ground milling and churning, dark crust breaking as a thick, viscous sludge of molten rock bulged upwards. It stretched as far as they could see in every direction. The world was flat and featureless, an unending roiling of rock, magma and fume.

Occasionally, a hill would appear in seconds, a massive swelling of the Earth, domed crust-dark on top, glowing malevolently orange and crimson beneath, a great tumescence that would stretch and strain, eventually bursting into a fountain of lava jetting thousands of meters into the heavy air, showering the hellscape around it with glowing fragments of tephra. Elsewhere, creeping toes of fuming volcanic sludge, like giant steel-gray slugs, slithered their way across the broken, burning surface.

Hell.

It looked like every representation of Hell Macbeth had ever seen. The molten lake of fire promising an eternity of agonies.

The vertigo-inducing absence of a floor beneath his feet made him feel sick, exactly the same feeling he’d gotten every time he had tried as a teenager to play an arcade or computer game, and he swayed on his feet, clinging tighter to Mora. The air had become hot, thick and acrid. Each breath seared the mucous membranes of his nostrils, mouth and throat, exacerbated by his need to breathe rapidly, to pant. There was little oxygen in the air and whatever else there was in it was toxic. He looked at the others again. Mora was now on her knees, eyes rimmed red, mouth agape and strings of thick saliva trailing from her frothed lips. Gillman was clawing desperately at his collar.

This is going to kill us, Macbeth realized. This is going to kill us and none of it is real.

Squeezing his eyes tight shut, Macbeth immersed himself in a red-black darkness behind his eyelids. He held his breath, his oxygen-deprived lungs protesting. He closed in his consciousness, ignoring the soaring air temperature.

Just because I saw it, doesn’t make it real. Just because I saw it doesn’t make it real. Just because I saw it …

Reason.

He pressed his palms down on the floor. They had marble-effect tiling, he remembered. He felt the tiles cold on the skin of his palms, hard beneath his knees. They are still there, he told himself. I’m still here. He rebuilt the floor in his mind, letting his touch connect with his memory, shaping the room. He kept his eyes closed, clung on to the air in his lungs, focused on it. It’s ordinary air. I am not suffocating. I am not burning. The urgency went and he let his breath go, focusing, concentrating on the next he took in. The air felt like a drink of cool water.

A hallucination like the others a year ago, but this was on a scale and complexity like no other. This was a hallucination that could kill, that could smother and burn. Mora. I have to help Mora.

He heard her splutter and cough as she drowned in an imagined toxic atmosphere, her face blue-gray, her breathing labored, wheezing. She was on her hands and knees, staring down at the hell below.

“It’s still there!” Macbeth yelled. “The floor is still there! Listen to me, the floor is STILL THERE … you just can’t see it.”

Consumed by her own terror and deaf to anything other than the roaring of the turbulent Earth, she didn’t hear him. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he hauled her roughly to her feet.

“Mora, listen to me … this isn’t real!” He shouted to be heard over the screaming of the Earth. “None of this is really happening.” He shook her violently. “LISTEN to me!”

She looked at him with red-rimmed, inflamed eyes.

“Close your eyes!” he shouted, shaking her again. “Close your eyes and listen to my voice. None of this is real. Close your eyes …”

She closed them.

“You can breathe,” he yelled. “You can breathe perfectly normally … it’s just your mind telling your body there’s no air. Take a deep breath.”

She breathed in, but it was shallow; a desperate panting.

“Slowly!” he ordered. “Breathe slowly and normally. Listen to my voice. How come I can speak normally if there is no air?”

The thought got through to her and she opened her eyes and looked at him. She drew a long, deep breath. Then another. The rhythm of normal respiration restored. She wiped her mouth and nose with her sleeve. She was still terrified, but something had returned to her, a sliver of rationality pushed into her panic. But she looked around herself and saw that the Earth still boiled and fumed, that the bar and restaurant were still gone and she stood on nothing, meters above the fuming Earth.

“Give me your hand!”

He took it and guided it to where he knew the still-invisible table’s edge to be. He saw her hand form a c-grip around the table that was not there. She snapped her gaze back to him, her eyes round with amazement.

“See! It’s still there! It’s just that our senses are being deceived.” He leaned forward and brought his face kissing-close to hers. “Focus, Mora. Use your mind.”

He looked over at Gillman. The scientist was suffocating in a room full of air but had his eyes closed, forcing himself into a breathing rhythm, clearly carrying out the same mental exercise Macbeth had.

The Earth groaned again, this time with increased intensity. Macbeth felt himself being drawn back into the delusion as a massive swelling, filling all the space where Copenhagen should have been, bulged upwards, a filigree of crimson cracks glowing malignantly across its dark crust. The network of small glowing fissures opened into splits and ruptures as the Earth continued to bulge upwards and outwards.

It split open.

Macbeth stood transfixed. It was like a pyroclastic tsunami, a kilometer high, surging towards them: a rolling, boiling tidal
wave of rock, gas and lava, a billowing cloak of brown-black smoke reaching another thousand meters into the sky. It glowed yellow and red along the swell of its rolling leading edge, in which thousands of rocks, each the size of a city block, appeared like grains of grit. Macbeth watched it approach helplessly, knowing that no effort of will, no amount of logic, could banish this apparition or make its impact less fatal.

He heard Mora scream.

Just before it hit, he found the mental time to estimate that the wave of tephra must have been traveling at something close to five hundred miles an hour.