Ghost of the Gods - 02 (36 page)

The edge of Barringer crater was strewn with large boulders. The depth and breadth of the crater was both a humbling and awe inspiring testament to the power of nature and the vulnerability of civilization. The current, best theory was that a piece of nickel-iron fifty yards across had inflicted this damage. The impact and air blast combined was equal to about ten modern nuclear weapons. An assist was geo-projecting all kinds of data for Mark out onto the crater. This place seemed to be of unusually high significance to both the god-machine and Mustafa.

Mark was picking up nervous emotions radiating from the ancient hybrid. Mustafa’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was trembling. Mark was pleased to see the reaction. It was everything he could have hoped for. He had no idea why the sight of this ancient destruction unnerved the hybrid so much, but he would use it. This place was forcing Mustafa to think about something he wanted to keep secret, and Mark was about to get some answers.

“What are you scared of, old man?” asked Mark.

Mustafa seemed to hear nothing.

“
Tell me
!” shouted Mark.

Mustafa flinched but then closed down tighter than before. Mark felt an insane impulse to throw this useless baggage over the edge of the crater and watch it fly.

“Sarah, can you hang onto him while I get the nexus?” asked Mark. “You never know. He may get suicidal on us.”

“Why stop him?” said Sarah.

As Mark unzipped the top of his backpack a strong feeling of déjà vu overwhelmed him. He studied the crater, the buildings, and the surrounding desert landscape for clues. He’d never been here but he knew this place—not now, but a long time ago. Mark had learned the previous night of a method to search back through timeline records for events that occurred in a specific location. He was now oddly certain someone was watching and recording when this hammer fell to Earth.

He wasted no time following his intuition into the timeline archive. The restructuring he was undergoing made his progress so much easier. It was as if he’d been granted unlimited access. The training wheels were off. Instantly, he was before the timeline interface and moments later confused. He was floating in the white, empty space of what he now thought of as the hall of records. The archive he had accessed contained a mountain of disjointed human memories recorded for this area 47,293 years ago on what would be October 30 in the Gregorian calendar. All the memories were cut off at the same moment. He began sampling the records. He knew he could spot check thousands of these memory capsules, while time in the material world would have advanced mere seconds.

By piecing together archival records with guidance from his entangled interface, Mark soon understood a great wound had been opened here. This trauma marked the end of a golden age for humanity, which had flourished in the Pleistocene epoch. He’d relived countless snippets of memories of a progressive society that was technologically advanced. This would have shocked him two years ago, but now it was only more confirmation of what he knew lay buried in the shallow grave of human history. He had a sense he was exploring a society that was more spiritually and emotionally advanced than industrially advanced. The civilization was a one-world society—one language, one regime governed by direct votes mediated by a hierarchal family of moderators. The entire population, except for a scattering of explorers and primitive tribes, lived in what was now called North America. The remainder of the world, 84 percent of the landmass of Earth, was left untouched and wild. The memories he experienced from North America could have been recorded in any contemporary city of a developed country before the plague. This realization was for some reason deeply unsettling. He’d expected past civilizations to eclipse contemporary society. It made everything all too surreal that this ancient society had not survived intact much beyond the point where the modern world was currently teetering.

Mark kept digging, following promising threads a day or two further backward in time from the moment of impact. He soon struck gold: an ancient memory from a member of a hive. Opening this doorway into the past began to explain what had happened. This Pleistocene human civilization was a grave threat to the hives. In this era, the hives and their ways were an established dynastic order reaching into prehistory. This upstart civilization was intolerant of hive members. Hives were seen as a kind of superstitious mental illness in the web of sentient life. Hives were considered antithetical to life, and societal support was not extended to its members. The number of hives had always been small since the original purge by the goddess, but now this culture had marginalized them even more through indifference. The timeline memory abruptly ended 47,293 years ago on October 30, as did most of what Mark sampled. He began more digging, going back another full day. He found memories about hybridization and hives through the eyes of outsiders. One out of every three hundred people in this civilization was a hybrid. Often hybridization was not achieved until old age, after a lifetime of dedicated work. Only a tiny fraction of those hybrids joined hives. The prevailing view was that hives were an ancient religion whose members wore silly costumes and worshiped intelligent yet irrational machines, which were plainly inferior to the god-machine.

Now back three days in time from the impact, Mark was unearthing long, detailed memories for the first time. This civilization lived in passive solar-powered structures that looked like modern glass skyscrapers. The population was tiny for an advanced civilization, numbering in the tens of millions. With their one world language, Mark was reminded of the legend of the Tower of Babel before God scattered the people. What he was finding was a healthy society that had removed all excuses for greed and crime. Art was as important as science.

Their spoken words sounded like a Middle Eastern tongue. Their speech was translated by an assist. They called themselves something that sounded similar to
Arkadins
. Their formal writing looked like the runes he had seen so many times in the god-machine. Everything they built was a seamless extension of the biosphere, with extensive use of passive solar and geothermal sources of power. Everything was renewable and very little was wasted, from human thoughts to energy sources. To these people, waste of any kind was the highest moral sin. Many of the structures and technology were nearly inseparable, symbiotic parts of the surrounding environment. Mark felt in his gut this was the great lost empire of mythology. This was the seed that had germinated and seeped into the confused subconscious minds of man, only to emerge as legends of the Tower of Babel, Atlantis, and a dozen other names of great, lost city civilizations.

A catastrophe had occurred at the time the Barringer crater was formed. The archive contained no record of the destruction and nothing helpful emerged from his entangled interface. Mark discovered an utter absence of records in the timeline archive. A mountain of memories cut short 47,293 years ago and then nothing for hundreds of years!

Bits and pieces of much later memories revealed that the aftermath extended almost four hundred years. The landscape was dotted with half buried mounds, once great structures, which were now heaps being picked over by survivors to build their dark-age civilization. What flourished was a primitive, Luddite society that vaguely remembered its downfall at the hands of evil gods wielding high magic. Any object found that appeared like it might contain some of this godlike magic was immediately destroyed by holy fire.

Almost all hive members had perished except for small pockets of survivors on other continents. The world had been smashed and crumbled into chaos. In the following generations, a once united one-world-people developed different tongues, different ways of scraping out an existence, scattered, and eventually became us. Because of the Arkadins’ preference for
recyclable materials and with human scavengers doing their part, in a thousand years there was nothing left of the Arkadin civilization for modern archeologists to find. This crater was the sole monument commemorating a world lost to a terrible catastrophe.

Mark felt a strong kinship to the Arkadins. If he could find out what had happened here, he would know what Mustafa feared. Memories invoked by this place certainly looked like the tool he needed to split the old hybrid wide open. What destroyed Arkadins and hives alike started right here almost beneath their feet.

Mark knew if there was any hope of finding an explanation in the archive, he needed to go back to the exact time of the impact and extend his timeline search geographically out beyond the affected area. Why was he receiving no useful help from his new, entangled thought-interface?

The results came grudgingly. Mark again found an unusually large amount of disjointed human memories, but they added nothing to what he already knew. All he could be certain of was that something far worse happened at Barringer crater than the impact of a nickel-iron meteorite. He was working feverishly and soon reached his internal memory limits. Retrieving and retaining useful information became more like dream recall. As he focused on one part, other parts would dissolve. It was like trying to grasp hold of smoke. He finally came away with one more piece of information. The impact crater was the result of something man-made that permanently destroyed every piece of Arkadin technology. It was like a colossal EMP weapon, but different. Some wholly unknown technology had been detonated for the first time. Mark suspected this was the purpose of the cylindrical device he’d seen on the nexus; this was what Mustafa had been thinking about. A great war had begun and ended in seconds. An EMP-like weapon also explained the void in the timeline archive as well as the god-machine’s memories. The supercolonies that hosted the god-machine were deeply buried under water or earth, which would shield them from an EMP detonation. On the other hand, the nanotech circuitry of the n-web, which was mostly on the surface, was readily vulnerable to weapons that attacked electronics. The god-machine had been blinded in this half of the world. Mark’s heart sank as he saw how this explained the fragmented memories he’d retrieved. It all now fit together into a whole that made sense. He might never know whether the hives or the Arkadins
were the instigator, but what was clear was that Barringer crater was a single knockout blow for all of North America.

Mark completed what seemed like hours of research but had been gone only seconds. Sarah had a solid grip on Mustafa by the chain between his handcuffs. From her radiated emotions, Mark felt—for the first time—how much she truly detested the hybrid. Mark also knew that neither of them had any clue what revelations he’d uncovered. He sent Sarah a memory capsule sharing what he’d learned about an ancient war and people. He retrieved the nexus, then walked up to Mustafa and stared him in the eyes while brandishing the device.

“Why were the hives so terrified of the Arkadins?” asked Mark in a quiet voice.

Through a medical assist, he saw his words registered within Mustafa like a physical blow, yet the hybrid remained tranquil on the outside. His ancient eyes were open and unblinking as he calmly stared directly back into Mark’s gaze.

“This means nothing to me,” said Mustafa.

Mark was prepared to use the nexus right now, though Mustafa probably thought it was a bluff. Using the nexus was a risky option, one Mark wished to avoid, but he knew that was unlikely. Turning on something that could draw a reaction from any nearby hives was bad enough while in a moving vehicle. Drawing that reaction while sitting in a perfect ambush spot was insane, but he was certain this place was the catalyst he needed to break Mustafa.

“The Arkadins treated hives with indifference,” said Mark. “Why did the hives start a world war?”

He had no idea if this was true. He was gambling with fifty-fifty odds. This was his last chance to avoid using the nexus. Mustafa’s face turned red. He spit on the ground near Mark’s feet. All his pretenses were dropped in an instant. The hybrid was now radiating fear and anger. The bravado was a pointless show that forced Mark’s hand. He switched the nexus on and swept it over Mustafa’s body like a metal detector. He was looking for the ideal spot by gauging how rapidly data scrolled off the screen. Not surprisingly, the man’s forehead gave the strongest reaction. Mark forced Mustafa to lie on the ground to make it easier to keep the nexus in place. He then tied a bandana around Mustafa’s head and the nexus to hold it pressed against his forehead. Sarah stood with her M4 aimed at the hybrid.

“If he tries to shake it off,” said Mark, “shoot him but don’t kill him. Just hurt him.”

“Easy,” said Sarah. “Maybe I’ll start with what he’s got between his legs.”

The sun had barely moved in the sky. Mark was frustrated and almost out of time. A trickle of sweat ran down his back. He’d been questioning Mustafa for fifty minutes. He suspected it was only his imagination, yet he felt like hive members were swarming toward them from every direction. He’d judged the most they could risk here was an hour. Mustafa had given them little more than corroboration for what Mark had already learned in the archives. Maybe that was all this place would ever extract from the ancient hybrid. The stubborn man had not uttered a word, but the nexus had displayed what he could not stop himself from thinking. An assist had translated what was on the screen. They amounted to meager crumbs. There was no doubt in Mark’s mind he was digging out the truth, but so far this truth added nothing to the puzzle. Mustafa was radiating an increasing degree of fear. He was clearly scared of revealing something. Mark’s gut was telling him Mustafa knew critical details from the period before and after the god-machine had been blinded… but it was time to go and there would be more opportunities now that he knew how to use the nexus.

Mark Freedman – Santa Fe, New Mexico – March 1, 0002 A.P.

After Meteor Crater they drove in directions that took them away from all hives as much as possible. They were looking for voids where they could no longer feel the presence of hives. Their route took them northeast into New Mexico. As they neared Santa Fe, the attraction of a distant hive ahead on their path began to grow stronger. The city of Santa Fe looked like the safest port in this storm. Mark had not used the nexus. As much as he wanted to learn what Mustafa was hiding, their safety was more important. After Pueblo Canyon he was feeling even more protective of Sarah. Everything was so emotionally charged right now.

The late afternoon sun was lost in clouds as Mark turned off Interstate 25 into the suburbs of Santa Fe. He headed toward the historic city square called the Plaza. He had been to Santa Fe many times over the years and had once spent a six-month sabbatical living in a house three blocks from the Plaza. The city always left him directionally challenged. None of the old streets were aligned to a compass bearing, but there was also something more. Maybe it was just the unusual energy of the land. The god-machine was feeding memories full of information about Santa Fe into him through the entangled interface. One memory seemed like a statistical summary taken from a tourist guide website. He now knew how many operating restaurants, hotels, and bars were in the city. He knew the population was currently estimated at thirty thousand and that its pre-plague population was fifty thousand. For the second time today Mark found himself wondering if the god-machine had somehow gained access to the Internet.