Ghost of the Gods - 02 (29 page)

“Hello, my friends. You may call me Mustafa. Please sit.”

Mark sat down. He was overwhelmed. Sarah sat next to him. He could tell by looking at her that she was just as confused.

“May we offer you refreshments?” said Mustafa.

The initiate’s eyes turned toward the end table. Mark’s eyes followed as if led. On the end table was an antique Middle Eastern coffee set made from silver and ceramics. The set was meticulously arranged on a heavy, circular silver tray. Mark knew from an assist the collection would have been a prized addition in any museum. How had he not seen the coffee service before?

“We have a splendid Turkish coffee made from beans flown in from Yemen,” said Mustafa. “They are cultivated with great care by a family that has been growing coffee since the sixth century. We roast the fresh beans here over a wood fire, the way it was done by our ancestors.”

“Are you the voice of the guide?” asked Mark.

Mustafa looked disappointed. He picked up a cup and sipped from it.

“No coffee then? Very efficient of you, right to the matter at hand, but too bad. Maybe later? Yes, I am the voice of the guide. We must apologize for how you were brought to us. It was a sad necessity as the betrayer may have been watching from a great distance. As with many of us, the betrayer does not need eyes to see.”

Mustafa seemed to have more of an individual identity than Adam, who had thought and talked almost exclusively in plural. Mustafa picked up the relic. As he lifted it in his hand it sprang to life. The screen was covered with runic text, which was filling it and scrolling to the left at a high rate.

“This little nexus takes more than it gives,” said Mustafa. “I suspect you have already discovered this quirk. It drinks of you in exchange for data. Has the betrayer used this nexus to communicate with you? Has he used it to show you things?”

“Just his name,” said Sarah.

“Ahhh, very interesting… and what would that name be?” asked Mustafa.

“Noah,” answered Sarah.

Mustafa set the nexus down on the table. The screen turned off. The old hybrid stood and walked to the fireplace. He extended his hands toward the flames to warm them.

“We desire any new information about this one who calls himself Noah,” said Mustafa.

Memories containing illustrations, history, statistics, and more about Noah flooded into Mark’s brain. The force of this informational assault came with a physical sensation of traveling at great speed. He knew Sarah was likewise under assault. He knew this violation was an assist from Mustafa. The invasion of memories was filled with the aftermath of bloody assaults. Mark felt he needed a shower to wash off what Noah had done. Mustafa returned to his chair.

“When this betrayer murders a commune they are abruptly cut off from this world,” said Mustafa. “No memories or feeling escape. We need to learn more about why this betrayer has turned on his own kind.”

Another violation of memories poured into Mark. It was the commune’s plan for capturing Noah, interrogating him, and then incinerating him to insure his mental-virus did not spread through the n-web to other initiates. Their entire scheme felt as vile and murderous as what Noah was guilty of committing.

Mustafa frowned. He took another sip of his coffee, then threw the remaining contents of the cup into the fire. His appearance seemed to subtly shift. He now radiated a kind of mild body heat, a comforting warmth like the fire.

“You were guided here for a purpose,” said Mustafa. “The betrayer will come for you and when he does we will take him.”

“Why would Noah care about us?” said Mark.

“This Noah gave you a valuable relic from our past, did he not?” said Mustafa. “You are important to this betrayer.”

Mustafa picked up the nexus and handed it to Sarah.

“This nexus is yours,” said Mustafa. “You were led to it. It was given to you. This nexus is… hmm… shall we say… attuned to you. You know some people believe this material world is a dream. Do you believe such a miracle is possible?”

Sarah looked uncomfortable holding the nexus and set it down on a table beside her. Mustafa watched and smiled.

“As you recently discovered,” said Mustafa. “You were not the first—what is that word you use… yes… hybrids. I sense you have questions. Please ask them and then in exchange we will ask some of our own.”

Mark didn’t know what to ask. He was unprepared. He glanced at Sarah.

“What is it you are trying to accomplish?” asked Mark.

“Our purpose, like all living beings, is to evolve. The goal of our self-directed evolution is to reach the pinnacle, to transform ourselves into a superior sentience. Communes have existed as mystery schools for almost as long as mankind. Most communes coexist within religious sects. The religions in which we clothe ourselves does not matter. We have been Christian and Jew, Buddhist and shaman. But always we were the shepherds serving the goddess. Throughout history some of us were singled out as monks, prophets, witches, demons, oracles, alchemists, and other amusing and not so amusing mistakes of identity. This commune in which you are given sanctuary dates back to the time when Europe was filled with barbarians and the Middle East was the center of the world. Some who serve our guide are as old at the commune.”

“Extraordinary,” said Mark.

“What do you mean by
shepherds serving the goddess
?” asked Sarah.

“Our purpose is to shepherd the breeders following the will of the goddess.”

“Does shepherding include culling the flock?” asked Mark.

Mark regretted the question as soon as he’d voiced it, but what did it matter? This collective mind obviously already knew what he was thinking. He could not hide his suspicions. Mustafa gracefully seated himself.

“We did not cause or benefit from the plague,” said Mustafa. “Like you, we are rudderless ships in the presence of the goddess. There is blood on our hands in that we should have discouraged certain reckless human behaviors and did not. We have great wealth and influence. Surely we could have done something to prevent what happened.”

All this candor was troubling Mark. Then a terrible understanding formed in his mind. He saw a smile grow on Mustafa’s lips and realized the truth. Their questions were being answered candidly because they were never leaving. They were either going to be become part of this commune or die along with the betrayer. Mustafa poured some fresh coffee and sipped it.

“Thank you for conveying all we needed to know about the betrayer. You may go now. We will not stop you.”

Mark was baffled by Mustafa. They had answered no questions. Then he understood. Mustafa’s answers were only distractions while he somehow riffled through their minds. Mark sensed someone behind them. He turned and saw the room was full of evolved hybrids, some as evolved as Mustafa. How had he not sensed them? The group parted, forming a pathway to the door like a silent reception line. Mark stood up and took Sarah’s hand. They cautiously walked through the group, unmolested. The hallway outside the great room was empty. He knew if Mustafa was truly letting them go, someone would be showing them how to leave. Mark turned down the hallway in the opposite direction they had come, since they had not passed an outside door on their way to the great room. The hallway was long and made a left turn at the end. He started walking, then stopped in confusion. He was suddenly in a different hallway. What had been in front of him a moment ago was gone and now replaced with art, furnishings, and at the far end a closed set of double doors. He looked at Sarah and knew she was just as turned around.

“I think it was a blackout,” said Sarah. “We’ve been walking while unconscious.”

“Amnesia? Let’s just get out of here,” said Mark. “Maybe they’re erasing our minds.”

Before they reached the end of this hallway, the memory loss happened again. In front of them now stood a Revolutionary era outside door. Mark turned around and saw the double doors they had been walking toward were now open and behind them. He did not remember passing through any vortex, but they must have.

The door opened without trouble. Mark was relieved to step into the cold, early morning air. As they walked quickly toward the front gate, Mark was wondering how they would open it. Would whoever was behind the video cameras open the gate when they reached it? Then he thought about the guard dogs that had been roaming free on the estate.

Myths

The Betrayer Noah – The coastline of Maine – February 22, 0002 A.P.

He knew he was the very subject for which the word
recluse
was created. Solitude was his constant, reliable companion. Noah stared out through one of the wide bay windows of his New England home. All the lights had been extinguished. It was mid-afternoon but it could have been dusk. His panoramic view was of a world menaced by low, dark clouds. Stretching out before him, a winter storm raged in the North Atlantic. The shallow cliff that his house occupied was some of the roughest coastline found in Maine. It reminded Noah of his birthplace on the Mediterranean in Lebanon. The wooden house that had been built over a hundred years ago creaked and moaned along with the storm.

A notebook on his couch lay open, showing the intensity of wind and waves on a meteorological map. Outside, the storm was building in strength toward gale force. He knew there was little danger to their home. The house had been built to withstand this kind of punishment. They had kept the house as close to original as possible after purchasing it, but a few changes had been made. There were now metal storm shutters that could be electrically lowered over the windows, a generator sat in a small outbuilding, and a state of the art security system had been installed to protect their sanctuary when they were away. Noah turned up the volume on a sound system that had cost a small fortune when they’d purchased it a decade ago. Microphones placed outside picked up the roar of the tempest and brought it inside to him. He cranked open the bay windows a small amount to draw in the scent of the storm. He breathed in ocean salt air along with hints of aged wood and decayed leaves. A fire burned in a large hearth, which warmed the room even on a day such as this one.

This had been their last home. He had wonderful memories of their life together here. The years spent in this place had been the best moments of his existence. His wife Maya had been, like him, evolved
.
She should have lived and loved so much longer than God had given them. Tears began to run down Noah’s face. Why had he let Maya fly that day? Why had the airliner crashed? Suspicion of the guides and their hives darkened his mind. In that instant his life had gone from idyllic to grieving tragedy. He would never love another. No matter how long God forced him to walk this world, Maya would always be his wife.

He had not been able to share her experience or comfort her during her passage into the next world. Failing to be with her was tragedy added to tragedy. He could only imagine what must have happened. When she’d lifted off in that jet, as expected all connection with the n-web and between them was lost.

Nothing had lessened his heartache for her during the long years since she had left. The pain was just as acute, the loneliness just as unbearable. He had learned that if you truly love your spouse, you will feel the terrible loss until reunited again. She was often in his dreams when he dared to close his eyes in sleep. He knew she was alive in a higher reality than this one. They had spoken in dreams. Maya had told him she was waiting for him. Not long ago, years after her body had died, she had come to him in the night as an apparition. She was so beautiful and full of life. He would have done anything to have left with her. She had delivered a message to him. She did not like this massacring of hives. She knew it was necessary and understood his motives, but warned him he would pay a high karmic price for all that blood.

“I am so sorry, Maya. I failed you then… and now I fail you again.”

The wind from the storm increased to a level he’d never experienced before. A screen blew off a window and sailed away into a torrent of rain and wind. He refused to roll down the shutters and lose intimacy with the storm. He felt chills all over his skin. The sheer power of nature was humbling.

Noah had been an anthropologist long before he evolved and long after. He and his wife had accumulated modest wealth together. She had been an artist whose work was highly prized under several names. He had taught at institutes of higher learning at different times with different identities, but preferred his own research for obvious reasons. The timeline interface gave him access to the impossible fantasy of every anthropologist and historian. He could mentally go back in time and relive history unfolding. One of his lines of study was of the goddess herself, the living machine awareness that was literally the elemental force behind what anthropologists studied. After a time, his study of the goddess had also branched into psychology. The plans of the goddess were like puzzles within puzzles. Noah understood some of them, but most were unfathomable. From long observation he knew the goddess did not interfere with most of the pieces on the chessboard of life unless they threatened Gaia or herself. The goddess’s primary goals were to serve and avoid interference. Noah’s rules were different. He had dedicated his life to studying and preserving at all cost the four million year old line of humans from Australopithicus afarensis to Homo sapiens. This human line was the longest running struggle of survival and self-directed evolution this planet had witnessed.

The raw intellect of a single guide integrated with its hive of initiates was unmatched. For so long Noah had watched that cancer spread and done nothing. He believed it was too dangerous to act because it was impossible to outthink a hive and know what strategy might bring success or failure. The stakes were too high. An attack on a hive could result in unpredictable retaliation. Unlike the goddess, hives were not logical. Their reaction to an attack could be anything or nothing. Seeking help from the organics and as a result revealing the existence of hives to the world could be exactly what the guides wanted. They were waiting for a sign that it was time to initiate their devious plans.

Noah watched and studied and waited to learn of a weakness. Though no sign had been received by the hives, something far more terrifying had happened. The goddess unleashed her nanotech plague. His beloved human race was now wounded and terribly vulnerable. Noah could afford to wait no more, and so the watcher was transformed into the executioner. The alternative of inaction had grown far worse than any possible risk brought on by his deeds. None of the others of his kind or the hives knew what he was doing. The destruction of each hive had been so quick, so complete, that the hive could not possibly know what was happening to it. In a vacuum of knowledge, as they often did in such cases, the guides created useful myths. This time it was the myth of the betrayers. Noah gratefully used their myth against them as he erased each hive from the world, one at a time. It could take generations but he would erase them all. Though if it took that long, humankind would suffer through a long, dark winter.

The storm outside seemed to be ebbing for now. Noah focused inward to review the ever changing map of his new life’s work. It showed his next target and the ones after that. These tumors in the fabric of the n-web, these living entropies, had to be surgically removed as soon as possible. Long ago, the fate of the hives had been sealed when they chose a path to follow the primitive ways and turned on their own kind. It was only a matter of
when
their fate would catch up with them. He was nothing more than the warden administering their overdue execution. The judge and jury who had passed sentence was nothing less than history herself.

Mark Freedman – Morristown, New Jersey – Date unknown

Mark awoke in a small room. His body was sore; his mind contained shards of recollections like the scattered pieces of a broken mirror. Some of the memories were sharp enough to draw pain. He remembered that he and Sarah had abruptly stopped walking a few yards from the front gate. He had tried to continue forward but was no longer fully in control of his body. He remembered Sarah crying in frustration, but he could do nothing. He knew the guide had taken control of them. As if possessed, he and Sarah were led by hybrids down a path toward what in the past must have been a guest house. Once inside, they were imprisoned in separate, small rooms.

Mark got out of bed and studied every inch of his prison. He had vague memories of having conducted the same drill in this same room before. The chamber was a wood-paneled steel box similar to where they had been imprisoned when first captured. He tried the door. It was solid as a vault. He looked through the windows and saw the mansion a hundred yards away past trees and a formal English garden. The window was the same as their first prison room, ballistic plastic inches thick. He could beat on it with a sledgehammer and make no headway.

He remembered the guide teaching him by implanting whole ideas and concepts into his nanotech brain, while he knew it was also uploading what could only be described as programs. He now knew some of the terrible truth of this commune. This was not a garden where hybrids came to be nurtured and evolve. This was a scorched earth where creativity came to be buried. He sensed a great emptiness inside the guide. Much of the mind of this strange sentience was now open to him. It possessed human emotions, but they were only copies. Unlike the god-machine, at its core the guide was barren. It could not create. It could not imagine. It could not experience love. It could only recombine what it already knew. Communes were altars upon which hybrids came to sacrifice their souls to be incorporated into a machine. In exchange, the hybrids existed in a world of unimaginable bliss. The artificial demigod mimicked higher human emotions as well as the lower ones of pride, lust, greed, and anger. In this commune as in all others, the super-sentence was hosted in the nanotech brains of the commune members. It was a living program that operated in a similar distributed way as nanotech seeds but on a macro scale. Each commune member was like a nanotech seed, a processing node that contributed computational power to the guide
.

While this guide would soon know all there was to know about its newest nodes, Mark had learned something valuable too. Self-replicating artificial intelligences like the god-machine were constantly evolving by rewriting their own programming code. Each new generation of code was analogous to a new, successful DNA mutation in an organic creature. The significant difference was speed. An organic generation required a long time to go from embryo to sexual maturity. A computer generation might be completed in microseconds. So in the twenty years it took for a single human generation, the god-machine had potentially undergone hundreds of billions of evolutionary steps up the ladder. Mark knew the god-machine was not the only self-replicating AI. In a similar pattern as the god-machine, guides were the evolutionary end product of a self-replicating nanotech virus that had been mutating for what might as well have been an infinite number of computer generations. In terms of evolutionary advancement, humans were not even microbes compared to these machines.

Mark’s thoughts were interrupted as he felt something familiar inside his mind. It was an emotional hand in glove. Sarah! He could feel her presence. Before he could grasp what had happened, they were exchanging memories with each other as if each memory was cool water and both were dying of thirst. They both knew the guide was monitoring their intimate exchange, but neither cared. Sarah’s memories were fragmented and matched his. Mark had no idea what to do to save them—and accepted the guide knew that too. There was no escape from this spiritual death camp. Deep in his heart he understood that he and Sarah were saying good-bye. Who they were, their very essence, would soon be subsumed by the guide. They were going to evolve, but in a horrible direction neither could have ever imagined. The guide considered the commune its hive.

Over the following days, in the quiet of their prisons, they were both indoctrinated in the ways of guides and their hives. While they were being reprogrammed, their minds were disconnected, which left them isolated and unable to reach each other over the n-web. Once reconnected, they had their desperate, stolen moments where they shared their feelings with each other. These were fleeting minutes that keep them both somewhat sane. Their exchanges were brief because the interludes between indoctrination sessions were mind-numbingly short.

They were both educated without illustrative examples of any kind. Mark experienced no human memories of ancient high civilizations, though vast amounts of information about earlier times were imparted. Everything he learned was implanted inside him by the communal mind, more as lifeless formulas than ideas or experiences. It was fact without human context. His indoctrination occurred simultaneously in all four of his processing centers. His emotional processor experienced overwhelming, indescribable floods of joy. His instinctive processor experienced waves of all-consuming sensual pleasure. His kinesthetic processor experienced endless incidents of habits perfectly formed. His intellectual processor experienced immersion in an alien awareness of endless knowledge. Floods of data, emotions, or sensations were applied to each processor with laser-like exactness and measure. Everything imparted was retained. All that was forced into him instantly became memories he’d known all his life. There were also hints of concealed memories that had been implanted, but they remained unexplored and inaccessible. These memories felt like tiny bombs waiting to go off at some later date. He had fragmented memories of abandoned, deep mines that had been purchased by hives and converted to some other purpose. There were out of context references to never ending hunts for nanotech relics like the one Noah had left for them. At one point, Mark tried to recall more information using his own data-floods, but received nothing. He was off the grid.

During the last time he and Sarah had mentally embraced, she’d told him what she’d learned about the tidal pulls of a singularity. The great indescribable peace, sensual pleasure, and joy they experienced while inside the vortexes were nothing more than simulated honey to attract and ensnare prey. The guide was a Venus flytrap.

Mark resurfaced from the latest indoctrination as if gasping for air. He’d lost all track of time. Had it been days or weeks? At some point in his reprogramming he’d developed a subconscious habit of pacing. He felt like a caged animal in a zoo. For hours on end he would walk in circles around the perimeter of his small cell as new memories and programs materialized in his thoughts like drug-induced hallucinations.

As ironic consolation, he now knew his theories of the rise and fall of high civilizations were true. Many times humankind had risen and as many times it had fallen. He now knew hives and guides had become a dominant empire during their golden dark age and then fallen as all false gods must. Everything the guides now did—all their plans, all their actions—were focused on one goal: returning to those halcyon times. They would do anything, destroy anything, corrupt anything, or prop up anything in order to return to the perfection of their ancient, fundamentalist ways. In long-forgotten human history, the hives and guides had reigned with near absolute power until the god-machine ended the grand experiment with devastation worse than the recent nanotech plagues. The god-machine’s goal was complete sterilization of the virus but the objective was unreachable without annihilation of all sentient life. An uneasy imbalance had existed ever since with the god-machine’s dominance unchallengeable and ever oppressive over a small number of guides and their hives. Their numbers spontaneously regenerated like any disease and then withered like any disease.