Ghost of the Gods - 02 (55 page)

The hybrid turned and began to walk away. Mark saw a knife drop from his left hand. He had not seen the blade and for some reason Noah had failed to use it.

Epilogue

Mark Freedman – Carmel, California – November 11, 0011 A.P.

The years had passed quickly. For someone like Mark, with the possibility of near eternity before him, years would someday begin to feel like days. He was walking down a cliffside path that led to the beach. The Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon. It was a perfect, cloudless sky. The air was sweet and cool. Seagulls were calling to each other in the distance. A large super tanker was plying its way north, probably destined for San Francisco. The human race had still not freed itself from its dependency on oil. The plagues had bought the world more time to wean itself and paid for that time in blood.

Mark spotted his daughter Gaia playing beside a tidal pool with Sarah. He knew they would be there doing exactly what they were doing. He’d been watching them in his mind for several hours before heading down to join them. Today was his daughter’s birthday. She was nine years old. She was physically developing like any normal human child, with the exception that she was never sick and healed as quickly as he and Sarah. Gaia was born with a nervous system and brain that were fully saturated with nanotech seeds. In that way she was completely unlike any other human child before her. She was far too intelligent for her age and had all the enhanced mental and emotional capabilities of her parents. To her, this was normal and if anything had made raising her easier. They all shared their thoughts and feelings using the n-web. The remnant technology had been left in perfect operation after the goddess was no more. The sorrow in Mark’s heart from the plague years had been replaced with hope for the future. His small family was proof that with total openness, empathy flourishes.

Mark and Sarah had not had another child. They had decided they would raise one child to adulthood at a time. They had that luxury. They could have as many children as they desired over their long physical lifespans, which might last until the stars began to dim in the sky. Though Mark suspected they would grow tired of this physical world long before then and explore the life after death he and Sarah were convinced existed. Living without a physical body would be such freedom after being locked inside the limits of flesh and the material world for ages.

With the goddess no longer living, their child would never know the shared thinking and godlike infinite knowledge that Mark had experienced. With the goddess no longer living, Sarah had been unable to evolve much beyond the point she’d been at when nuclear weapons had rained down onto the Earth. The same had been true for other hybrids they’d met over the years. Their evolution had slowed to a normal pace. The catalyst, the accelerant, their goddess was no more. In the past nine years they had encountered no other hybrids like them, hybrids that could have children. Mark knew that made him and Sarah the first true transhumans. They were the Adam and Eve of a new species. Unable to reproduce, all other hybrids that came before them were mutations, not a new species. It took the goddess a very long time to craft Mark and Sarah, and she had protected them well. Mark wondered if she knew she had created her own means of dying. Perhaps her purpose was complete and she was ready to sleep.

As Mark neared his family, something strange began to happen. It started as a feeling of déjà vu, then grew in intensity. Sarah looked up at him with concern. She was feeling the same things. A moment later Gaia stopped playing. She looked at Mark and smiled warmly.

“Daddy, it’s the goddess,” said Gaia. “She’s come home.”

Mark was stunned. He had just received the same implanted memory that Gaia must have experienced. This was not déjà vu he was feeling. His entangled interface was coming to life. Assists were feeding him information. All the things he had missed for over nine years were returning.

The goddess had reanimated. No, the goddess had reincarnated. A new memory brimming with explanations expanded in Mark’s awareness. Crying, he kneeled next to his wife and child, and enfolded them into his arms. The goddess had allowed herself to be killed in a selfless act of devotion to humankind. Over the following years, the supercolonies that were destroyed by the nuclear weapons had reformed as seeds came together from all the oceans and rivers and seas. Once the first supercolony reached critical mass, the spark of life was rekindled and a goddess was reborn. The sentience of the goddess had just arisen like a phoenix.

This was not a new sentience. This was the original goddess returned to life. All the timelines and other vast storehouses of knowledge were completely intact. How was this possible? Mark kissed Sarah’s forehead and then his beautiful child. Sarah’s eyes were brimming with tears. He understood she knew everything he did. She knew the sacrifice the goddess had made for them so they could live free of a cancer that would have consumed the world.

Mark hugged his small family tightly. The rumble of waves and the splash of water on rocks in the background soothed him. It felt as if years had passed in the embrace of his family in this isolated spot along the coast. In the quiet after the emotional storm, Mark finally was composed enough to think.

“The timeline archives are unharmed,” he said. “All her memories are unharmed. How can a computer’s memory remain after the computer was destroyed?”

“You know the answer,” said Sarah. “We are all more than our physical bodies. The goddess is pure life. She’s implanted inside me some of her memories of her death and rebirth. She experienced the same things I did when I died. Her body may not be flesh, but she is as alive as us. When her body died, her soul fled into the same world of lucid dreams that I found. Just as with us, her essence lived on in that realm. When a new body was ready for her, her life’s energy was poured into it and she came back to her children. She came back to us.”

THE END