Ghost of the Gods - 02 (5 page)

She heard McKafferty shouting, “Goddamn it, Kohl, stand down!”

The carnage went on as the helicopter banked away, gaining speed and elevation in what felt like evasive maneuvers. Her view of Pueblo Canyon was replaced with peaceful red stone formations and trees. Kathy banged her fist against the glass one last time. She turned her burning eyes on McKafferty.

“You bastard… Why couldn’t you have left us alone? No one had to die. No one!”

“I’ve been onboard this chopper sitting on the ground for over an hour,” he growled. “That made me a nice fat target, but no one took a potshot until you came onboard. That missile was from your friends. I’d say it had your name on it, not mine. Is there something else you’re holding back that you want to tell me?”

The Singularity

Mark Freedman – Illinois border – January 18, 0002 A.P.

In the morning after breaking camp Mark and Sarah had gone their separate ways. By late afternoon they had met back up several hundred miles farther down the road. The day’s work had revealed nothing new, which was a very good outcome. It meant the singularity had made no additional bewildering changes in bearing as it had on prior days. The singularity still appeared to be somewhere in the greater Chicago area.

For the second night in a row they were sleeping outside. In this desolate part of the Outlands it was far safer to be outside than in an abandoned building. Scavengers had long ago turned many buildings into traps of one kind or another.

Their evening’s camp had been quickly set up. Mark was walking near the edge of the clearing, scouting for spots to lay down a security perimeter. They were holed up several miles off the nearest paved road. A disused logging trail of dirt and rocks had brought them to this site where buildings once stood. The spot was isolated and looked like no one had been here in decades. The ground was dry and offered up plenty of fuel for a fire, but unlike yesterday, concerns of attracting attention ruled out the luxury of a fire. One side of the clearing ran down to the edge of a small lake. Their two armored slant back military Humvees were parked on either side of the campsite. The Humvee’s non-reflective smoky black paint would soon blend the hulking vehicles into the coming darkness. This next generation armored Humvee was a model that was far closer to an armored fighting vehicle in terms of survivability than prior up armored versions.

Mark was thinking about the day’s work as he mapped out the campsite perimeter, taking mental notes of the positions of large trees and exposed boulders. The key to finding the singularity was digital triangulation. It was truly an engineering feat of the n-web how he and Sarah were able to physically sense the direction of the singularity or, for that matter, any signal. In the n-web peer to peer network the same data packet was often echoed from many directions. Redundant routes were the cause of the echoes. A data packet was picked up by one seed, then relayed to one or more seeds farther down the route and so on until the packets reached their final destination. Each seed could transmit a few feet at the most, so a packet traveling halfway around the world ended up being relayed by a huge number of seeds. The result was an amazingly complex, redundant, and ever changing set of routes for every packet traveling the n-web.

Mark sat down on what looked like the remains of an old stone foundation. He brought up an assist
that displayed the architecture of the n-web by geo-projecting it three dimensionally all around him. With this tool he could study any part of the n-web from raw data to the actual routes passing by his feet and so much more. He could even see the data flowing in tiny information capillaries across his skin. He turned his hands over in front of him, staring at the glowing threads carrying intelligence.

Responding to his mental requirements, the assist projected a large globe of the world in front of him. Mark rotated it with his fingers as he gazed at the collection of pathways spanning land and sea in a spiderweb of continuous data flows. The network was adaptive, self-healing, and forever in flux. It was a living thing. There were express highways that were fixed in position for long periods of time. On those highways, packets travel at high speed over great distances. Feeding the highways were local access roads that appeared and disappeared in hours or days as traffic waxed and waned. Under it all, supporting the highways and local roads, was an unstructured mass of cross linked seeds. The entire structure reminded Mark more of the vast complexity of interconnected neurons in a human brain than a wireless computer network. Yet at a nuts and bolts level the n-web was eerily similar to the Internet. Found in each n-web data packet were control counters, which acted very much like the Internet’s TCP/ip hop counters. The n-web counters limited how many parallel routes would be taken and how far a packet would be relayed. In addition to counters, each packet contained a form of geotagging without which packets might travel in circles forever, never reaching their destinations. The value of a packet’s hop counter plus geotagging could be used to determine the distance any packet had traveled from its source. Mark knew it was subconscious processing of this incredible mass of information that created his tactile sense of direction and distance to any node, be it the singularity or a person. Inside his nanotech brain, circuitry was constantly picking up n-web data packets and relaying them on their way. Because of the unusually high number of packets that were being diverted toward the singularity, Mark felt something akin to a river’s current pulling on his body. He zoomed in from the globe to the area they were searching. “Where are you?” he thought. “Show yourself.”

Mark sipped from a metal coffee cup while staring at a sunset. The lake was being transformed into a fiery cauldron. The water should have been frozen this time of year but there was not even the thinnest skim of ice. Their dinner was simmering in a cast iron skillet over a propane camp stove. He looked over at Sarah, who seemed lost to the sunset. She invoked so many conflicting thoughts in him. She wore bulky Special Forces issue clothing and body armor. An M4 assault rifle was propped up next to her, and a pair of .45ACP Berettas were strapped to her body in leg holsters. She’d served on police forces before the plague and after. She had evolved into a lethal warrior yet was deeply empathic and sensitive. Mark could not understand how she could make those two pieces fit into one person. He, on the other hand, preferred less lethal weapons though he did carry a handgun. Since the end of the plague, he had become passionate about avoiding violence. Too many people had died in the nanotech plague. Even in self-defense, he did not want be responsible for one more violent death.

Earlier in the day, he had seen fresh evidence along the highway of gang activity, including several recent attacks. He hoped the odds of being disturbed this far off the road was close to zero. He had set up perimeter security using an Army MSK-II computerized sentry. A lot of military hardware was readily available both legally and on the black market. Shortly after the plague, industrious gangs had lucked upon military supply depots guarded by dead soldiers. These feudal entrepreneurs were now earning a good living selling gear to protect people from gangs just like themselves. The MSK consisted of camouflage colored intruder detectors that were the size and shape of a prescription pill bottle. Each detector contained a directional long range PIR motion sensor, a GPS chip, medium resolution infrared camera, and an encrypted radio transceiver. The detectors were networked to a ruggedized special use tablet.

Mark glanced over at the tablet, which was sitting on top of a half empty case of freeze dried camping food—tonight’s dinner. The tablet used radio signals from the intruder detectors, GPS, and sat images to display a detailed topographical map of the perimeter. If anything large tripped a motion detector, the MSK would instantly display on a map the intruder’s location along with approximate size, numbers, and direction of travel. Video feeds from triggered infrared cameras were displayed as overlays on the map. For now the map showed a series of overlapping green shaded zones that demarked the motion sensor coverage. The green would change to various shades of orange and red if anything was detected.

Mark and Sarah ate in silence on steel mess kit plates. Ralph was sniffing around for handouts. There was no need to discuss the day’s work. Mark had relived Sarah’s experiences of the day as she had relived his. The ability to share over the n-web entire encapsulated moments of life had been first discovered by Sarah. The breakthrough had been made only moments after she had awakened as a hybrid over two years ago. In the god-machine’s catalog of commands, this communications mechanism was called
memory capsules
. Mark thought a more accurate name would have been
telepathy
. At its essence, the n-web mechanics supporting this telepathy were very understandable science. Thoughts and experiences form memories, which are recorded into data packets by the nanotech computer in the sender’s brain. The packets travel over the n-web as radio waves. The nanotech computer in the recipient’s brain receives and converts the packets back into memories of human thoughts and experiences. The memories are relived with the same intensity as if they were your own. To Mark, the final result was nothing less than technology assisted magic. It was a means of communicating far beyond the spoken word. It was sharing pure, unfiltered life experiences. Lying and mischaracterization in a capsule were impossible. Every mental and sensory aspect of the life experience was included in a capsule: thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, vision, and more. At different times throughout the day, Mark and Sarah sent each other streams of these capsules. The only limitation was the same drawback present in all higher level god-machine functions. The information was not real-time and was received as implanted memories. The delays were from processing and network transmission. These delays made memory capsules an adjunct but not a substitute for good old fashioned conversation.

Sarah turned off the camp stove. It was a calm twilight. The only sounds were the wind and a soft lapping of water from the lake.

“Mark,” said Sarah.

“I’m listening…”

“I feel so free when I’m away from Pueblo Canyon,” said Sarah. “I’ve decided you can go back, but not me.”

Mark sighed, then realized from Sarah’s expression that she’d picked up on his radiated emotions immediately.

“I understand,” he said. “I do. People there fear us and want to become like us. It’s confusing but the choice is simple. You can live where people know you or you can live in the closet. Choose your poison. I like Pueblo Canyon.”

“That’s not it,” said Sarah. “It’s the ones who almost worship us that I can’t stand. I don’t want to hear about one more idiot overdosing on cooked up LSD trying to become like me. I don’t want to be hurt by emotions radiating from one more person blaming me when some idiot they love ends up a vegetable.”

“I’m just as haunted by those mental suicides,” said Mark. “If becoming a hybrid was as simple as frying your brain with overdoses then we’d have a planet full of evolved ex-hippies and ravers. They all think they’re the one in a zillion recipient of a recessive gene mutation that makes them like us.”

“We don’t know how many people have our mutation,” said Sarah. “Do we? Maybe we’re the only ones?”

“The god-machine has to know,” said Mark. “It engineered that mutation into both our gene pools. You know it keeps track of what it does. It’s a computer. We’ve both searched for that information and found nothing. Now that question may just get answered when we find this singularity. Life is unpredictable.”

“Is it really unpredictable?” said Sarah. “Why isn’t the god-machine helping us find the singularity? With an assist we can pinpoint anything using the n-web as if we have built-in GPS but not this singularity. Why does everything all of sudden feel like a goddamn test?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the singularity is alien to the god-machine? Maybe it’s a random mutation in the n-web? That could explain why assists aren’t helping. If the singularity is something beyond the original design, then nothing is programmed for it.”

“Just admit it!” snapped Sarah. “The god-machine is screwing with us. It brought you and me together during the plague. Maybe the only two living people in world with the right gene find each other in the middle of a war zone. What are the odds of that?”

Sarah Mayfair – Chicago suburbs, Illinois – January 21, 0002 A.P.

In silence, Sarah stared out the thick windows of their armored Humvee as Mark drove. She was anxious. In the distance she could see the skyline of Chicago. Two years ago the city had once again been gutted by a great fire and once again was healing. Mark was driving fast, since the highway was empty of traffic and debris. The shoulders were littered with pieces of broken cars and trucks. It was like following the entrails of a lost world. The landscape they were racing through was gray and returning to dust while Chicago looked like a bright future on the horizon. Sarah frowned, knowing that future was only an illusion.

They had been to the edge of the city the prior day and were now returning with plans to finish their search. The ethereal tides flowing through the god-machine’s wireless web that had been pulling her toward Chicago were now so intense they were a physical sensation. Sarah feared that when she and Mark followed the currents to their source, they would be caught in an inescapable whirlpool of some fearsome black hole at the center of the tides. Instead of water, the whirlpool was drawing in rivers of data from the n-web. She sensed it as a hungry emptiness of thought and emotion, a vacuum that could never be satiated. It was difficult to remember that normal people did not feel the singularity. It was difficult to believe the sensation was only a ghostly wind felt in the center of her nanotech brain.

When first starting on the hunt sixteen hundred miles from Chicago, they had been drawn in varying compass directions, most of which pointed toward Illinois. At times it seemed like the singularity was moving. Mark suspected it was stationary but projecting false shadows or echoes of itself—chimeras that could draw them in wrong directions if they were not careful. Sarah was less sure, wondering if more than one magnet was affecting their compasses. In the end, the pull had grown stronger and stabilized as they advanced. Soon it was so irresistible they had both gone without sleep until reaching the Chicago outskirts. Yesterday they walked for long hours along the protectorate’s wall and made their plans. Their hybrid bodies gave them great endurance as long as food was taken, but today they were both losing mental clarity and as a result badly needed rest. If all went well, tonight they would finally sleep inside the Chicago Protectorate after finding the singularity.

Mark exited the highway onto a surface road. Most of the buildings were gutted on either side of this road, which traveled through the final stretch of Outlands between the highway and a well-guarded entrance to the protectorate. Bullet holes pockmarked the few walls that had stood the test of time and rage. Sarah caught occasional glimpses of people going about their lives. Long gouges in the pavement showed the marks of plows that had scraped the wreckage of a declined civilization from the road so others could pass. She had seen the same gouges many times all the way back to the beginning of the plague, when she’d left her home in New Jersey. Now for the first time since this darkness began, she was being drawn to something instead of fleeing.

Alerted by Mark’s emotions, she found herself staring at a two story house that stood out from the rest because it was in good repair. Even the paint was fresh. It looked more like a dream than real. A man and woman were sitting on the porch. Two small children bundled in brightly colored coats were playing in a front yard strewn with toys. The man had an assault rifle within easy reach, and the yard was fenced with wrought iron bars. The children were playing with colored plastic shovels and pails, trying to make sand castles on a pretend beach without a shore. Sarah captured faint wisps of childhood joy as they drove past.