Immortality (59 page)

“The staff has been quietly deserting,” said Carl. “I took an unofficial headcount yesterday and found we’ve lost twenty percent. If we lose any more, our research will bog down.”

“I talked with Cheryl before she disappeared two days ago,” said Kathy. “She told me that everyone feels it’s hopeless and that what we’re doing is having no effect. She said it’s in God’s hands.”

“They’re wrong,” said Carl. “God’s not going to help. It’s up to us. We’ve identified the cause. We’ve come up with tools to detect it and study it. We may not have a way to neutralize this thing yet, but we have what’s needed to make that breakthrough. I’m certain of it.”

“The problem isn’t science; it’s trust,” said Kathy. “How do we get them to trust us and stay?”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “What I’m wondering is how they’re getting past the military. We can’t leave. Someone’s got to be helping them.”

The lights went out. The television went black. Warning beepers starting sounding. A computer screen running on a battery backup was the only source of light. The screen cast a dim pattern onto a nearby wall. Kathy and Carl looked confused. Mark felt a faint rumble in the floor. The emergency generators were in their warm-up phase before coming online. A minute later, the building came back to life on generator power. The television resumed mid-sentence. A reporter was yelling so that she could be heard over the roar of a CNN helicopter winding up.

…
details are sketchy at this time. What we know is that a large kill zone has hit Atlanta. Traffic accidents have caused a total blackout of the city. Our CNN facility has been spared so far. I will be airborne in a few minutes heading out to the areas hardest hit.

“We can use the real-time NSA data to spot precursor patterns and call warnings into CNN,” said Carl.

“I’ll get their phone number,” said Kathy.

Carl’s fingers clattered on the keyboard. Mark came around to stand behind him. He had the phone receiver in one hand ready to dial. Kathy came over to the desk and punched in a phone number. Mark heard the line ringing but no one was picking up. Carl had Atlanta up on the NSA display. Mark felt the life draining out of him. He knew it wasn’t a diabetic swoon but it felt like one. On the screen, red circles were dropping all over Atlanta and its suburbs. Leading the red circles were flickers of precursor signals. Less than a minute elapsed between precursor and kill zone. It was hopeless. The path of destruction was erratic. There was not enough lead time to issue warnings.

“Oh god, it’s heading toward us,” cried Kathy.

“The containment lab,” said Mark. “The signal can’t be relayed into there. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

As Mark unlocked the office door, he felt Carl’s hand on his shoulder. Mark spun around. His mind was screaming
Run! There’s no time! Run
!

“We won’t make it,” said Carl. His voice was dull. “The airlocks take a half hour to cycle. The kill zone will be here in minutes.”

“Goddamn it!” yelled Mark. “Don’t you want to live?”

He looked back at the screen. A red circle dropped within a mile of the lab. Mark saw the speckled pattern of precursor signals forming in an area over the east side of the BVMC lab. Time had run out. Kathy’s eyes were filled with tears. He took her in his arms. She buried her face into his chest. His eyes were locked on the screen as he waited to feel her life drain away in his arms. He felt nothing but rage at this nanotech horror. He had to save her. He had to do something, but all he could do was stand motionless and hold the woman he now realized he loved. What they could have had was lost. He was again, too late…

Sarah had arrived at the deserted motel a day ago. The “Blue Moon Motel” was on the outskirts of Atlanta, only 50 miles from the CDC installation listed on her application. She felt irrational sitting at this motel when her destination was an hour’s drive away, but a fear grew inside her every time she thought of leaving. The same kinds of instincts that had originally compelled her to head south were now holding her back. She glanced around the room. The floor was covered in tan carpeting. The walls were painted in earth tones. The room’s ceiling had as standard equipment a king size mirror suspended over a waterbed. Ralph was lounging on the bed. Sarah doubted he cared about the dog sleeping on the ceiling above him.

Outside, the streets were pitch black. Sarah had a small light on, the curtains closed, and a thick blanket hung over the curtains to make sure no light escaped. The windows had bars and the door was made of metal. She almost felt safe. She was sitting cross-legged on a chair cushion in the center of the floor. She’d taken three psilocybin capsules on an empty stomach about thirty minutes ago. Based on her previous experiences, she knew the effects of the drug would start any moment now.

Sarah waved her hand in front of her face to see if any trails had started. Nothing so far, there were no hints of visual hallucinations. She’d already learned, by gradually increasing the dosage, that three capsules were enough to get full effect. She had hundreds of capsules, but she needed to stretch them as much as possible. The insights she gained were addictive in how they satisfied her thirst to understand. They were like clues to a crime, and the clues had started fitting together.

She now knew a small part of the god-machine was inside her head. She believed this small part enabled her to communicate subconsciously with higher mental functions of the living machine. She was convinced by fragments of implanted memories that psilocybin made the link possible by weakening the normal barriers between the evolved and primitive parts of her mind. She understood the machine had protected her inside kill zones for some reason, but she had no idea how or why. There were dimly recalled implanted memories of knowing so much more about why she mattered to the living machine; but all that remained of those dreamlike recollections was a feeling – a compulsive kind of knowing – that things would begin to make sense once she reached the CDC lab and encountered someone there, a man she knew only from scraps of images and voices in her mind. The man’s name and appearance had come to her as part of the blizzard of sensory fragments that were drawn to her like metal filings to a magnet. She’d had brief flashes yesterday and again today during which she’d perceived the world through this man’s senses – his eyes, his ears, even his sense of touch briefly became her own. The out of body perceptions were similar to how she’d remotely experienced kill zones through people caught in the midst of them.

Sarah had decided this man was a scientist from bits of overheard conversations and glimpsed encounters. She had seen the man’s face when he looked into a mirror and heard his name when a woman had addressed him as Mark. Sarah had sensed a chemistry between this man and woman; and for some reason, this troubled her. She didn’t know this man. He was old enough to be her father. She was not even sure he existed, but she felt an affinity with him. There was something that was supposed to happen once they met, and this other woman could be a complication.

Sarah waved a hand in front of her face and saw a trail forming behind it like a slow motion cartoon. This was it; the psilocybin was taking her on another journey into the machine. She focused her thoughts on why the god-machine was protecting her from kill zones. She’d learned that the machine could sometimes be guided into responding to questions if she concentrated on a single question only. Like a meditation or prayer, she would repeat the question to herself again and again. At some point, she would realize that the god-machine had responded. The response didn’t come directly as words or images, but as memories; all of a sudden she would just remember something related to the prayer as if she’d known it her entire life. She continued repeating the prayer to learn more about why the god-machine was protecting her. Occasionally, a feeling of attraction to Mark slipped unwanted into her thoughts. Sarah pushed the feeling away and focused back on her praying.

Sarah came harshly back to awareness from an endless pool of white light. She’d been floating in a world of tranquil nothingness for hours. She glanced about the motel room; then her existence snapped: she was catapulted into a scene of confusion. People were falling in their tracks. Chain-reaction car accidents were occurring. Windshield glass littered the ground. Moans of the injured faded into the silence of a graveyard. Was this real? Sarah looked over at a television attached to a wall unit. She got up and turned on the set. Atlanta was a war zone. News graphics and images flashed on the screen. She turned it off and closed her eyes. There were no tears left in her. She wanted to feel for these people, but all she felt was thankfulness. She now understood why her instincts had kept her at this motel. If she’d gone into Atlanta, she’d have been in the midst of another kill zone. She didn’t think her mind could have survived the horror one more time.

Mark stood holding Kathy in his arms. The kill zone was happening over a different part of the building. Death was just down the hall, ready to wash over them next. There was no physical sense of it. There should have been tornado-like winds or a terrible rain or a blinding flash – something, anything – but there was nothing. The killer did its work in utter silence. The NSA screen showed the zone was hitting one third of the building. Muffled cries filtering in from the hallway confirmed his worst fears. His chest was wet with Kathy’s tears. Her arms were tight around him. As long as her embrace held, he knew she was still with him. He watched as precursor signals flickered and the next red circle formed on the screen. This one was not over the building.

“I think it’s veering off,” cried Carl.

Kathy’s grip on Mark loosened. He looked down into her eyes. They were haunted.

“It’s definitely leaving, said Carl.

Mark led Kathy to the couch where they both sat in silence. Mark was drained of emotion. Carl stayed at the computer screen and tracked the killer as if it were a moving weather storm. In a few more minutes, the attack was over. News was starting to come in from CNN reporters in the field. The death toll would be unthinkable.

An hour later, Mark closed the door to his office and locked it. The kill zone had devastated Atlanta. In the BVMC lab, the living were tending to the dead. A morgue had been established in a subbasement. The news from Atlanta was bleak. Estimates cited up to eighty percent of the population were dead or injured. Electrical power had not returned to most of the city and, according to CNN, was not coming back anytime soon. The BVMC Lab was still running on emergency generators. There was enough fuel to last for 30 days; and more could be probably obtained, if needed.

Mark selfishly thanked god that Kathy was alive. The kill zone had struck the lab with a glancing blow. Only luck had kept it from sweeping over the entire campus. Inside the building there was a clear line separating those who survived from those who did not. Nearly everyone on the deadly side of the boundary was gone. In the facility as a whole, one out of every four people had died. People in one office were gone, while their friends in the next office were fine. The logic of it was savage and felt insane, even though the basic mechanics of zones were now well understood. Mark had his back against the door. He was alone for the first time since the kill zone had hit. He could no longer handle looking at the suffering faces that wandered this high-tech mausoleum. He covered his face with his hands and cried.

The morning light was painful in her eyes. Sarah walked back into her motel room. She’d just loaded the last of her things into the Buick. Thanks to an abandoned gas station across the street which still had power, she’d filled the tank for free.

She was still feeling the effects of psilocybin. Rapid motions caused trails. Bright lights left afterglows lasting for minutes. Sarah lay back on the waterbed and stared up at her reflection in the ceiling mirror. She studied her body. For minutes, she thought of nothing else except her physical form. She hadn’t noticed it at first. A diagram showing her organs and internal structures was superimposed over the reflection of her body. The three-dimensional diagram showed blood flow and nerve signals and other things she couldn’t decipher. She saw a small orange mass at the base of her brainstem. Somehow, she recognized this was the small part of the god-machine that was inside her.

The room disappeared into chaos. Sarah found herself perceiving through the senses of someone else – a soldier. A fierce cry of aggression bellowed from his throat but was drowned out by the thundering of weapons all around him. He was inside an armored vehicle staring through a computerized gun sight while operating a weapon that spewed small explosive shells at an impossibly high rate. The vehicle was alive with recoil vibrations. A single-story concrete building in his sights was quickly blown apart as he targeted it.

The firing stopped. Small secondary explosions popped within the flames and smoke. The soldier removed a pair of hearing protectors. His ears rung as he stepped from the vehicle. A few buildings remained standing while most were rubble. Sarah could feel heat on his face from the burning structures. She wondered why some buildings were spared. She saw the dirt-smeared faces of uniformed fighters coming in and out of view as if they were in a carnival funhouse mirror. There was cheering and excitement. From scraps of heated conversations, she deciphered the soldier’s name was Alexander and that he was the leader of this attack. This was his victory and he seemed to drink it in with an unquenchable thirst for revenge.

The carnival atmosphere which was already disturbing was growing worse. Sarah felt trapped in this hellish dream. Most of these soldiers were sociopaths. The vanquished were being herded up. The injured and uninjured were treated with equal brutality. Cries for help were met with indifference. Some that were too injured to walk were left behind. Sarah struggled to close her eyes to the violence but could not, because these eyes were Alexander’s to control, not hers.