Ghost of the Gods - 02 (21 page)

Mark gave up trying to self-censor, partially because there was little point to it and partially because he saw that at worst Adam believed his statements, even if he might be wrong. Mark began freely exchanging mentally with Sarah. He and Sarah both saw the communes as a glimpse of a possible future and that future was unexpected and confusing. They both no longer felt alone, which was a wonderful change. Mark was not sure if this feeling was genuine or some kind of seepage from the guide, but maybe it was all right either way.

“The second part of our offering is a very old prediction,” said Adam. “You might even call it prophesy or legend. It is known as the
lifting of the veil
. We are told this legend comes from a time far before our current civilization’s written history. It comes from a previous human epoch, which had reached great heights and then fallen. Many guides believe our current time is the epoch described in the lifting of the veil. If this is true, violent changes are coming to our world. Things even more violent than what has already so deeply scarred us may come, but out of this violence can finally emerge enlightenment and harmony. The lifting of the veil can lead humanity to truly begin to know
we are all gods and goddesses
. To honor this realization of the inner god we must tirelessly reach toward our fullest potential. The communes are agitated by this terrible approaching storm. The outcome is uncertain. The first chapter of the prophesy was the nanotech plague. The catalyst for the second and final chapter is unknown. One thing is certain: The betrayers stand in the way of this global awakening. Either an evolving paradise on Earth or an infinite de-evolution will emerge from this clash of betrayer and commune. Chaos or order… entropy or negentropy.”

Adam abruptly stood up. His face showed surprise. He seemed at a loss for words and then composure returned.

“It is time for you both to leave. There is not a moment to waste. You must fully awaken the lower mental processor in each of you. Once you have fully awakened that awareness processor, you can benefit from each commune in turn. Follow your instinctive and emotional processors, which are what guided you here to us. These processors can lead you to any commune you need. Once you have fully awoken the lower mental processor, you will know which commune teaches what you are ready to learn. You will always be welcomed back by our guide. We will speak again.”

As Mark was ushered through the innermost vortex he felt terrible sadness, as if a lover had died. The middle vortex left him mentally dull witted as if exhausted and ready to fall asleep. It was as if Adam was somehow pushing them out instead of simply walking with them.

Soon the huge wooden front door loomed before them. Mark did not reach to open it. Adam turned the latch and pushed it open. It was nighttime. How had he lost track of so much time? A gust of cold air buffeted Mark’s face. He and Sarah stepped outside. The door closed behind them and locked. It was only at this point that he realized he was squeezing Sarah’s hand. They stood there, unable to move with a light snow swirling about them. He took a deep breath of the night air and stepped forward. Sarah was in perfect sync with him, one step and then another. Soon they were through the arched passageway and onto the street. He could sense the final vortex in front of them like a membrane. They had passed through this kind of outer vortex in Chicago many times.

“Why is it so much harder to step through it this time?” asked Mark.

“Maybe part of us now knows what we’re leaving behind,” said Sarah.

Stepping through the outer vortex was surprisingly draining and physically painful. He knew through their mental sharing that Sarah firmly believed these communes were an incredible opportunity. He still had very real doubts these communes were what they seemed to be. He knew Sarah had received his thoughts and doubts. With each step the seductive pull of the singularity faded a little more.

Mark heard in his mind a projected thought:
Forgive me...
He turned toward Sarah in confusion. Her eyes echoed his uncertainly. Where had that thought come from? There was an odd sound, as if dozens of sizzling line drive baseballs were converging on them from overhead, then a loud click. A terrible roar of heat and pressure bodily picked him up and threw him across half the roadway and onto the sidewalk. The world grew impossibly orange and hot. Assists were shouting at him to roll. His hair and the back of his coat were on fire. He rolled in the melting snow.

The air was full of smoke and ash. Mark stood up on wobbly legs, stumbled and then got up again. Pain receptors were screaming. He focused on them to block the signals. He could feel COBIC racing to the sites of damage and knew healing was under way. He recognized Sarah was uninjured. Her face had black smudges. Her blond hair was a mat of tangles, dirt, and burned ends.

They both stared in shock at the huge, smoldering mound that had been the institute. Surrounding the mound were short spans of broken stone wall that had an eerie glow of molten lava at the inner edges. Heat waves could be seen in the surrounding air. There was no snow, only steam. Tiny bits of stonework were scattered everywhere. Some of the scattering had glowing dull red centers like cooling drops of hell. Mark thought about the Chicago townhouse. The stray thoughts he’d picked up from rescue workers about an unknown kind of thermobaric weapon echoed inside him. An assist analyzing this explosion showed how closely it matched the one in Chicago.

Mark felt that familiar tug at the back of his mind. In unison both he and Sarah turned toward a covered doorway half a block away. Assists revealed the ghostlike hybrid god from the other night. His entire body overlay by an assist was colored orange. Mark again marveled at how every inch of this being seemed infused with nanotech. He wore the same greatcoat as the previous night. In his hand was a small object that looked like it might be a cell phone. Sarah was already closing in on the hybrid. She had her Beretta firmly gripped in her right hand. The gun was unobtrusive as she kept the weapon pointing down. Part of her hand and the gun was hidden inside the sleeve of her coat. Mark yelled for her to stop. He knew with every cell in his body she was provoking a fatal attack. He began running after her before he even knew what he was doing. The ghost remained utterly motionless for what seemed like an eternity, then turned and walked away with an unhurried, long gait. The hybrid went down into a subway entrance. Sarah broke into a full run. They were less than twenty seconds behind this superhuman thing that could probably turn and kill them with the same ease they might swat a mosquito. As they reached the train platform, Mark realized the hybrid had vanished. There was nowhere for him to have gone in the lead time he’d had. The platform was mostly empty. Sarah slipped her Beretta into a pocket. A train emerging from a tunnel was squealing to a stop at the platform. Nothing had recently left.

“The betrayer’s gone!” said Sarah. “How?”

“How can you be sure he’s a betrayer?”

“What the hell else could he be?”

“What do we really know other than we’re caught in the middle of a war between some highly evolved humans who are very good at keeping secrets?”

“My intuition tells me we’re on Adam’s side. For fuck’s sake! He was just murdered.”

“What do we really know?” said Mark. “What if the singularities have some kind of regulating effect that is holding back a new plague? This ghost we’re chasing could be attempting to trigger another genocide.”

“Exactly!” shouted Sarah.

“But what do we really know?” repeated Mark. “The opposite could also be true. There could be no betrayers. What if these guides somehow caused the nanotech plague? This ghost could be trying to prevent a new plague.”

“God, you over think things,” screamed Sarah. “You just don’t get it! You—”

Mark picked up agitated stray thoughts chattering about terrorists. He felt eyes intensely focused on his back. Sarah must have felt it too because she had stopped in mid-word and turned with Mark. Tromping down the stairs were five Canadian soldiers. They were in full body armor and helmets. Their submachine guns were equipped with laser pointers. All of them were staring directly at Mark and Sarah. Their submachine guns were not exactly aimed at them yet, but the red lasers were all quickly converging on his and Sarah’s chests. Mark could almost feel the entry wounds.

“You two…
stop
!” shouted one of the soldiers. “On the ground,
now
!”

Lions

General McKafferty – Washington, D.C. – February 13, 0002 A.P.

General McKafferty was furious. The whine of the Air Force
C-37A
changed pitch as they leveled off and accelerated on a northern heading. The C-37A was a military version of the
Gulfstream V
business jet. It was a small, fast sixteen seat transport designed to carry generals and flag officers as well as government officials. The cabin was empty except for himself and two of his aides. A special air mission flight attendant came aft to take his food order. McKafferty demanded bourbon straight up. Someone he’d never heard of named Richard Zuris had summoned him to report as if he were a subordinate. This Richard Zuris was not POTUS and not a senior military officer. Who was he to be ordering a three star general to appear? McKafferty had questioned his orders and learned one thing, that Richard Zuris had immense power. McKafferty had then checked and found none of the alphabet soup agencies like NSA or CIA had a file on Zuris. An Internet search for Zuris turned up nothing.

Just before his flight McKafferty’s superiors had given him a background file on Zuris that was to be destroyed after a single reading. He pulled up the top-secret SCI report on his tablet and began devouring it. Two bourbons later McKafferty had learned a great deal. Through a chain of holding companies, Richard Zuris owned over 50 percent of the largest surviving multinational corporations. The man was a modern-day Howard Hughes, a financial titan who was a reclusive ghost. Adding up the listed assets easily made Zuris the wealthiest person in the world, far richer than his peers by an impossible factor of ten. Where had this man come from? There was a great deal missing from the report. McKafferty almost learned as much from what was omitted as what was written. Someone like Zuris, with old money and a dynastic family. did not just emerge out of nowhere. The report drew a portrait of a man who had ruthlessly devoured his competitors using chaos from the nanotech plague as a tool. He benefitted from bloody coincidences that began to add up to a pattern that defied normal odds and emerged from the chaos vastly wealthier than before. It was Zuris who was behind the construction of the protectorates. It was Zuris who owned the private security company that ran the Peacekeepers. The man ruled like a Caesar. As a result of the top-secret executive order TSEO8270, Zuris was now not only the richest person in the world, he was also the most powerful. This last page of the report left McKafferty speechless and caused him to refuse his third bourbon.

McKafferty securely erased the top-secret file and then slipped the tablet back into his bag. If the population only knew the levels to which his beloved county had sunk, they would take to the streets with pitchforks and torches. TSEO8270 invoked martial law, suspended much of the Bill of Rights, removed all business regulations, and transferred significant presidential authority to Richard Zuris. It was a deal done with the devil to gain full support from Zuris for the USAG. This support was needed because the man owned almost all the heavy industry and defense contractors still operating on the American continents. If there was any consideration given to nationalizing anything Zuris held, these were likely tempered by fear of retaliation by the private security corporations owned by him. These corporations had over two hundred thousand highly trained mercenaries in their employee on U.S. soil along with the best equipment and weapons money could buy. These companies employed the cream of the Special Forces crop. Until he’d read this report McKafferty had thought Peacekeepers and other NGO security forces were the result of privatization to save money. He now knew better. McKafferty was no constitutional scholar, but he was confident that TSEO8270 was wildly illegal. TSEO8270 was a giant step toward transforming his America into a state run by the biggest corporations. This was not a government and private sector partnership. This was a bloodless coup. There was a name for this and it was fascism. What will happen when the next election arrives in three years? Will there even be an election or just a board of directors meeting?

General McKafferty – Dallas, Texas – February 13, 0002 A.P.

The Gulfstream jet swung a wide circle around the Zero-G campus as it lined up on the private runway. Even after reading the report, McKafferty was unprepared for the gigantic scale of this site. It was humbling to think this entire complex was only a small table crumb of this man’s empire.

Zuris lived on this twenty-five thousand acre campus, which was located nineteen miles outside of the Dallas Protectorate. The property was bordered by a major highway, a heavy rail line, and a river. Zero-G Industries was a top defense research and development firm.
McKafferty knew
Zero-G very well and the shockingly advanced weapons they’d developed, but had never heard the name of the man who owned it through several layers of shell corporations. Looking out the window, McKafferty took measure of the M1 tanks emplaced around the perimeter of the compound and the oversized private airfield that hosted Apache attack helicopters, a 1.6 mach supersonic private business jet, and up-armored UH-60 Blackhawks. A mix of private security forces and USAG military guarded the perimeter formed by the miles of solid blast-proof concrete walls that ringed the campus. The awesome strike capability of the military forces camped on this private land was one more symbol of the overwhelming influence and power being wielded.
The campus was a complex of four office towers, a Westin hotel, two high-end restaurants, a theater, and countless outbuildings. A pair of natural gas turbine power plants provided twice the electricity needed by the small city. The campus served as both Zero-G HQ and residence for the families of the top executives and mission-critical workers. What looked like an empty field located five miles from the high-rise complex marked a top-secret research bunker as impenetrable as anything the military operated.

Zero-G’s employment was back to its pre-plague levels. Employees that did not live onsite were required to reside in houses and apartments within a few miles of the campus. Zero-G Industries provided overwhelming private security for the entire area. Peacekeepers ran patrols day and night though all the surrounding neighborhoods.

The
C-37A hit the runway with a screech. Following Air Force combat procedures, the jet taxied as fast as possible until it reached its hangar. McKafferty climbed down the steps and was greeted by an attractive, very businesslike female executive. A black limousine was idling a few feet away. In minutes McKafferty was ensconced in a hotel suite on an upper floor. He was impressed. There seemed to be no way to run this operation any smoother or more efficiently.

Precisely two hours after arriving at his hotel room, McKafferty and his aides were buzzed into an outer office for his first meeting with Zuris. The gold nameplate on the door simply read
Private Office
with no name. Flanking the inside of the door stood linebacker-sized guards in paramilitary uniforms armed with Heckler & Koch UMPS that looked to be cambered for .45 caliber. A fitting choice of weapon, thought McKafferty. It was small, efficient, and a powerful man stopper. A young woman greeted him by name and escorted him to a large rear door while his two aides were seated in the outer office. There were no head games of making him wait. A one foot thick door swung open to reveal a magnificent corner office flooded with sunlight. A man dressed in an expensive business suit rose to greet him. He was a little taller than McKafferty and spoke with a European accent. His large forehead and thick eyebrows made him look vaguely Russian.

“Please sit down,” said Zuris. “Can I offer you anything to drink?”

“Coffee, black.”

“Cindy, would you get the general some coffee? I’ll take Voss.”

The door closed and McKafferty felt his ears pop. The office had positive air pressure, a feature commonly found in NBC bunkers. He studied the floor to ceiling glass windows and realized they were not real but a very clever visual effect. He was inside what might as well be a bank vault.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” said Zuris.

“I was ordered.”

“Yes, you were, and I suspect you don’t like that very much.”

“That would be correct.”

“I would like to make you an offer that will change everything.”

“What exactly are we talking about?” said McKafferty.

“Good… To the point... I like that. I am offering you a promotion to four stars, command of USNORTHCOM, and direct command of a top-secret USAG surveillance and interdiction agency called CIT.”

“I believe only the president can offer me that kind of promotion.”

“You are correct. Everything is arranged.”

“What do you get out of this?”

“I want you to run CIT the same way you have run BARDCOM. The mandate of CIT is to ensure we remain the dominant species by controlling any competition. I know you are unaware of the extent of this problem. CIT has been surveilling and arresting individual hybrids as well as groups for some time now.”

“What do you mean, groups? We know of four hybrids and some unconfirmed rumors that are probably hogwash.”

“If you accept the offer, you will learn what I mean.”

McKafferty decided to play along. “Why me?”

“Decades ago big industry stopped rewarding creativity and research, and started rewarding planned obsolesces and incrementalism. My companies are not like that. We plow half our profits back into research and development every year. It’s a safe bet some of those seeds are always fertile. We harvest many fantastic new ideas every month.”

“So am I one of these fertile seeds?”

“You are a man who I can trust to do this critical job efficiently and unemotionally. All I care about is CIT. Command of USNORTHCOM is yours to run as you see fit. With martial law in effect, this promotion will effectively make you the most powerful man in the government below the top executive and cabinet.”

McKafferty felt manipulated and combative. He did not like this man and did not trust him. It angered him even more realizing he was being successfully seduced with an offer he would be insane to refuse.

“I’ll lay my cards on the table if you do the same,” said McKafferty.

Zuris nodded for him to proceed. The man seemed amused and far more alert than when McKafferty had walked in the door.

“I am careful about who I get into bed with,” said McKafferty. “I want to make sure I always have proper protection. How could your companies have been so ready to step in and consolidate power after the nanotech plague? All that prepositioning of assets, all those ready to go plans, protectorates, Peacekeepers, and all that high tech civilian surveillance gear. You still have one or two surviving competitors. Do we have any more
chaos
I’ll need to worry about in our future?”

“Survival demands a good strategy for every contingency,” said Zuris. “That’s what successful multinationals do. We make sure we are ready to step into any power vacuum that opens and make sure we are fully capable of exploiting it. Yes, we took advantage of a horrible situation and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. If we hadn’t, some other company would have. The military has their version of shock and awe as do multinationals. Some call it the
shock doctrine
. I am no saint, General, and neither are you!”

The room was silent. Zuris had an expression on his face that McKafferty knew well. He regretted opening with an insinuating right hook now that he recognized the steely look of a murderer in the tycoon’s shiny gray eyes. A large private army was surrounding McKafferty right now, including armed bodyguards in the very next room. Zuris could make him disappear.

“True enough,” said McKafferty.

“I trust you understand from the report your superiors gave you that I am de facto running this country?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I don’t mind being challenged as long as my orders are followed.”

McKafferty did not trust Zuris. He’d just had a small peek behind the mask and saw what might be a psychopath. Too many details did not fit. There was far more going on here, and McKafferty was not at all sure it was in the best interests of his country, the America he knew before this goddamn USAG was formed. Still, he’d take the job after he played a few more cards. What choice did he really have?

After McKafferty had accepted, Zuris immediately called a briefing on CIT. His son, Alexi Zuris, was heading up the briefing. The meeting was convened in a secure situation room with a wall of video screens and global communications consoles that made McKafferty envious. A personal tablet was arranged on the conference table in front of every seat. A waiter took food and drink orders. Alexi immediately called the meeting to order. The family resemblance to his father was prominent. Alexi was husky and dressed in a camouflaged Peacekeeper field uniform with the rank of a four-star general. According to the report McKafferty had read, Alexi was thirty-six years old, the son from Zuris’s third and current marriage, and the only child Zuris had spawned.

“CIT has been observing what we call communes for some time,” said Alexi. “Communes are groups of ten to fifty hybrids living in the same house or compound. We suspect these communes were in some way an instigating factor in the plague unleashed by the god-machine. As far as we can tell, but cannot confirm, they have been in existence for a very long time. Some communes may have been in continuous existence for hundreds of years. Many communes have extreme wealth from accumulated money. They all seem to be involved in ownership and renovation of abandoned mines and other deep underground structures. The working theory is these structures are shelters where they hid during the plague. This means they either had advanced warning or played a role.”

“If there’s evidence they’re in any way responsible for that atrocity, why haven’t we arrested or killed them?” growled McKafferty.

“We suspect there are many more communes than we’ve identified. We need to tread lightly. We need to be sure we’ve uncovered them all before we raid them all. We also have circumstantial evidence that a type of fail-safe balance must be maintained. Too many communes and they grow in power, which may provoke the god-machine. Too few communes and a vacuum results, which may also provoke the god-machine. We need to know more before we act globally.”

“Your fail-safe idea sounds like a fantasy,” grumbled McKafferty. “I want a full written report on all known communes, evidence of any ties to the plagues, and evidence supporting your fail-safe theory.”

The room grew tense. Alexi looked at his father as McKafferty stared at what he considered a fraudulent four-star general.

“McKafferty is in command,” said Zuris. “Follow his orders.”

“Continue,” said McKafferty.

Alexi stared coldly for a long moment at McKafferty, then went on.

“In the last several months something unexpected has begun happening. We now have some unknown group hunting the communes. Take a look at this video from a Canadian surveillance operation CIT has been running. The surveillance is of a commune compound. This video was recorded earlier today in Montreal.”