Ghost of the Gods - 02 (34 page)

The snowfall was increasing. The sky had grown darker. As they neared Flagstaff, Mark climbed into the backseat and pulled the pillowcase off Mustafa’s head. The old man looked alert and a little nervous. Ralph growled in a soft, menacing tone, clearly expressing what he would do if no one else was around. Ralph’s continued aggression did not surprise Mark. After all, Ralph and Sarah were linked at various levels. The flow of information was predominantly from Ralph’s senses into Sarah, but there had to be some backwash from Sarah to Ralph as well. Even before Sarah’s brain had been hybridized, her emotions had always affected the big dog. With the added n-web connection and its backward leakage, Ralph was in a very real way an extension of Sarah.

“Listen carefully,” said Mark. “That dog would love to rip your throat out. I know you can sense this is true. If you don’t follow my instructions, you’re dog food.”

“What is it you want?” asked Mustafa. His accent sounded thicker and carried a tone of defeat blended with disgust.

“The people in this town know me and Sarah very well. We’re considered good people. These folks will not treat you kindly if they think you’re even a tiny menace to their way of life. Got it?”

“I understand.”

“Now get on the floor and stay there. Not a sound.”

Mark piled some blankets and supplies on top of their captive. He could not take the chance of Mustafa doing something foolish as they drove through the entrance to Flagstaff. With his hands bound behind his back and on the floor, he could not get up on his own. Mark would be very happy when they were rid of this unwanted baggage.

Sarah drove directly to a motel where they were known, but not by their real names. No one in Flagstaff knew their real names. With the exception of one or two items, they would stock up on supplies tomorrow. The motel they’d selected was actually two blocks of houses that had been divided up into rooms. Sarah registered, selecting a house they’d stayed in before. The room she picked was entered from the rear and had been a kitchen before the house was sectioned off into rooms. The rear was shielded from view by a tall redwood fence and evergreens so they could do what they wanted, undisturbed and unwatched.

Sarah pulled the Humvee around back and parked close to the door. Mark could tell by the patterns of radiated emotions and leaked thoughts that no one was nearby. He roughly dragged Mustafa inside by the arm.

Sarah went out and returned to the room later with dinner and two pair of handcuffs. Mustafa was blindfolded with the pillowcase and secured to some exposed plumbing in the converted kitchen. Ralph stayed close to his object of hatred.

The food Sarah had bought tasted extravagant. Mark ate far more than he should have and began feeling tired, yet wanted more. An assist was tracking residual amounts of COBIC in his immediate environment that was migrating into his body. It was not nearly enough to reach critical mass. He ate a little more and was soon asleep.

In the middle of the night Mark dreamily awoke to Sarah caressing his chest. The room was full of dim shadows. She was spooned behind him in their bed. Her fingers moved lower. He knew she could sense he was awake. Mark had been dreaming about Pueblo Canyon and was awash with terrible guilt. All his emotions were amplified. Maybe they would stay at these extremes forever. He gently stopped Sarah’s advance by holding her hand. He immediately felt emotions of confusion and hurt radiating from her. He had never refused her sexually. Causing her this pain was added to his guilt over Pueblo Canyon. He felt like a Gordian knot of emotions. He turned over and held her in his arms to soothe her injured heart and his. In minutes they were making love.

Sometime in the night, he slipped away from Sarah and settled into an armchair after retrieving some leftovers. Ralph followed him into the room and settled down by his feet. Apparently, leftovers were now more important than intimidating Mustafa. Mark felt disoriented from their lovemaking. Now that they were equally empathic, each had experienced the other’s emotions seamlessly enfolded into their own. There had been moments when it became impossible to separate their feelings and even their identities. Under different circumstances this would have been a life-changing experience, but the heights of these new shared passions now only served to leave him feeling even more unsettled and anxious. He invoked the god-machine interface and moved into the timeline program. He was going into uncharted regions. Experiencing someone else’s emotional life and touching their essence had left him evermore thirsty for answers.

Mark soon learned his control over the timeline interface was greatly enhanced by the transformations occurring inside him. He was set afire by questions about near-death experiences and life after death. The massacre he’d relived at Pueblo Canyon had done more than cause restructuring of his nervous system. It had cracked open his soul so that his emotions now poured out. He thought about Sarah almost dying. He thought about Pueblo Canyon. He thought about all those who died in the nanotech plague and the aftershocks. There was so much spilled blood in this world. He was craving solace in any shred of evidence that death was not oblivion.

Mark began by searching for memory fragments from people at Pueblo Canyon that he might have missed. Now that more of his brain had been converted, he was able to search for memories not just by thought patterns, but by emotional fingerprints as well.

He quickly retrieved a few short, ghastly memory capsules that were better off never discovered. There was nothing remotely like Sarah’s near-death experience. He felt uncomfortable trying to use the deaths of friends to answer these questions, but he had to know the truth. His new, entangled interface with the god-machine remained silent and enigmatic on this and other troubling questions. He decided to initiate broad searches back in time for close matches to the emotional or mental fingerprints of the people he knew best. He would only use fingerprints from the most detailed memories. He chose ten people, including himself, Sarah, and Kathy. The parallel searches would continue running until he stopped them. The volume of timeline material to be sifted was beyond comprehension. He felt as if he was staring into the infinite abyss of the universe. He realized even with the computing power of the god-machine these tasks could run for weeks. He would have to come back into the timeline program periodically to check for results. At some point Sarah would probably discover what he was doing. It was nearly impossible to hide something this emotionally charged from someone who could literally read your heart, but he would keep it from her for as long as he could. He did not want to have one more discussion with her about life after death until he found evidence one way or the other. Sarah’s near-death experience had convinced her that both an afterlife and reincarnation were real. For a multitude of reasons, he now mostly agreed with her and suspected her experience was genuine. This unsettled him because as a scientist, in the absence of evidence, he should not even consider theories as fringe as life after death when empirical, physical explanations existed.

Mark wondered if it was possible for consciousness to survive death by seeking refuge inside the same virtual reality created and inhabited by the god-machine. Nanotech seed architecture was obviously capable of hosting consciousness. After all, the consciousness of the god-machine existed within it. The rest of the question was more complicated. Could human awareness be transferred without loss of continuity or that ineffable spark of life? Mark could not see how this was possible. The human mind contained as much as a thousand terabytes of constantly changing data on top of which consciousness floated. At the moment of death there was simply not enough time to transfer all that data. In addition, there was no evidence that consciousness
—the observer
—was even contained within his or her memories. No, the only way for a person to survive physical death using the god-machine would be if their seat of awareness always resided within the machine and not their physical body. Mark realized for this to work, the brain would be nothing more than a transceiver with some local storage and the human body a remote sensing platform. As odd as it sounded, that kind of hybrid computer architecture could do the job. If the god-machine hosted human awareness, that could also provide a clean, workable mechanism for reincarnation.

Mark needed some fresh air. He went outside to sit on the stoop and gazed at the night sky. While all these ideas were intriguing and possibly true, none of them could adequately explain Sarah’s near-death experience. So there had to be some additional factor he was missing. They had both seen the same number on the roof of that parking garage from a vantage point high above. Now that all explanations based on known scientific principals seemed incomplete, he was left with the uncomfortable possibility that Sarah had in fact left her body behind, began to float away, and some type of nonphysical remote viewing was involved. When he had argued with her that the god-machine must have simulated her near-death experience using pre-canned data, he’d been wrong. There was a hole in that theory. The n-web did not reach into the air. The n-web was a ground based network, which meant there was no realistic explanation for how the god-machine could have live aerial views of a rooftop in its memory banks for use in creating a simulation. The number on the roof only looked as it had briefly after rain had deposited tar paper over the last digit in the address. Minutes later the illusion was washed away, while minutes earlier, the illusion might not have not existed. Could the god-machine have harvested memories from birds that had flown over the exact spot during that small window of time? Could the limited brain of a bird even retain memories long enough for it to land so the data could be retrieved? The god-machine did not archive every human experience. Why would it even bother creating a vast collection of aerial views from birds? When he considered all the possible arguments and explanations, none were more plausible than nonphysical life after death was an inexplicable reality.

Mark awoke to Sarah shaking him. He had come back in and fallen asleep in the chair. He rubbed his eyes and noted the sun was already up. He could feel his nanotech brain rising to full awareness. He had again dreamed of souls trapped inside the god-machine.
We live in the machine, an entire world of us in the space of a drop of rain.
He could tell from Sarah’s expression and the emotions radiating from her that she’d been inside the same dream. The last time they’d both experienced this dream, they had been dragged out of bed by their feet and taken prisoner by a commune.

“We’re not safe here!” said Sarah.

“It was just a dream.”

“Not the dream. Don’t you feel it?”

Mark did feel edgy, then noticed what was worrying Sarah. It was both weak and surprisingly close by. He felt the unmistakable attraction of a hive. He searched his memories for overlooked signs and was soon convinced he’d missed nothing before going to sleep. This could be a newly born hive and that was a very troubling thought. He’d never seriously considered hives might be multiplying. It was also possible that all the members of a hive were moving as a group. The singularity hosted within their brains would obviously move with them.

Mark stared at Mustafa, handcuffed and blinded by a pillowcase. Noah had said Mustafa was like a newborn. Could Mustafa have already reached the toddler stage and regained enough mental power to call for help? Mark went over and pulled off the pillowcase. The hunger in Mustafa’s eyes revealed that he sensed the nearby hive and thirsted to become part of it.

“We need to leave now!” said Mark. “We can’t risk any time for supplies. I’ll feel a lot safer when we can dump this excess baggage. Maybe we should just leave him here now.”

“Noah said without him we don’t have a chance,” said Sarah.

“And you believe Noah?”

“I can tell when someone’s lying and so can you. Noah was very serious about Mustafa and the relic.”

The Humvee was loaded and they were rolling in less than fifteen minutes. Both Mark and Sarah were damp from the sleety rain that had pelted them as they packed the Humvee. Mustafa was again placed on the floor behind the front seats. Ralph apparently liked the man’s submissive position. Mark grinned, thinking about the last time he’d glanced back there. The big dog was partially lying on top of the blankets that were piled on top of the old man.

Mark was driving toward the city’s exit as fast as he dared. He could feel the hive increasing in strength as his nerves grew frayed. How could this singularity be growing so rapidly? Sarah was feeling it too. Her emotions were pouring into him, making it harder for him to cope. A minute ago he’d been so distracted he’d almost hit a pedestrian. After driving another block, he suddenly realized what was going on and pulled to the shoulder.

“It’s not growing stronger,” said Mark. “We’re heading right at it.”

“Well, go around it!”

“I can’t… I’m positive it’s just outside the city exit.”

Mark sat behind the wheel of the Humvee with the engine idling. Visibility was mixed as the downpour of freezing rain grew heavier and lighter in waves. The rhythmic sounds on the roof would have been deeply relaxing in a different situation. The wipers were sluicing icy rain off to the sides. They were in a small public parking lot. The Flagstaff exit was half a block away, visible in the downpour. This was the only opening in the city’s wall. He could feel the hive’s agitation as if it were a swarm of killer bees. There was little doubt the hive was waiting for them to run. Mark could hear Mustafa softly chucking to himself.

“We have no choice,” said Sarah.

“I know,” said Mark.

“A hive got control of us before,” said Sarah. “Can a weaker hive do that?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Mark.

The ancient hybrid started chuckling again. Sarah reached over and gripped Mark’s hand. The Flagstaff police were not interested in cars leaving the city. They could get a running start and blast through the exit. Who knows what kind of hell was going to be unleashed on the other side of that wall?

Mark put the Humvee into drive and left the lot. Sarah took her hand back and readied her M4. Mark wondered if the hive took control over them, could they make her shoot him? He accelerated toward the exit. The attraction of the hive was increasing. He pushed the accelerator to the floor. The hive had to be in one of those houses he could just see through the exit.

Accelerating, they shot through the exit gate far above the 25 per hour posted limit. Police were motioning him to slow down. He was a half block past the exit when a blinding explosion erupted off to the right. A violent shockwave hit the Humvee. Mark lost control of the steering as the Humvee careened into the front yard of a house. He barely missed taking off the wooden front steps. He checked on Sarah. She had already managed to slide back her bullet-resistant window and was ready to open fire.