Immortality (61 page)

“Have you been injured lately?” asked Mark.

“You mean did I bang my head?” asked Sarah. “Do I have a concussion?”

“No. It’s just a basic medical question. Have you been injured recently?”

“I’ve gotten banged up in the past few months. There’s no one out there who hasn’t had a rough time.”

“Do you have any scars?”

“You want proof that I’ve been hurt? I’ve got no scars to prove it. The injuries healed fast. I was in a car accident and broke a rib, I think.”

“No scars?” asked Mark.

“I’ve been healing quicker than… Wait a minute.” A smile formed on Sarah’s face. “Healing quickly is a symptom of some kind, isn’t it?”

Mark picked up the ping tester from his desk. He turned it on and waved a sealed test tube containing infected COBIC in front of it. The test tube registered a reading twenty-five percent up the graph. He turned the device around so that Sarah could see the graph.

“This is a detector for the nanotech seeds inside COBIC. The test is painless. Not much different than getting a sonogram,” said Mark. “If there are nanotech seeds in your head, this device will pick it up. Everyone here’s been tested. Everyone has a small number of seeds in them.”

“Let me guess. No one here has started having dialogs with the… umm… machine.”

“No one.”

“So if your tester gets a reading off my head, what will that prove?”

“Well, for one thing it’ll show whether you have nanotech seeds inside your head. Who knows, people react differently to the same virus, so why not a different reaction to the same nanotech device?”

Mark walked around the desk. He pointed the detector’s directional antenna at Sarah’s forehead and switched it on. Sarah’s eyes rolled up. Her body slouched in the chair. Mark caught her from tipping forward with his free hand. He stared at the signal strength display. The red line was at the top of the graph, same as his reading. She was loaded with nanotech seeds. Sarah quickly recovered from the mild seizure. She pushed his hand off her.

“Not painless!” she said. “Bullshit. That white light hurts like hell.”

“You saw a white light?”

“Yeah, more like blinded by it.”

“Interesting,” said Mark.

“Don’t tell me. I’m also the only person who sees white light around here?”

“So far,” said Mark.

He was not ready to let anyone know about his seeing white light or that the seeds might be affecting his mind. Sarah’s arrival could be an opportunity to learn more about the effects of high concentrations of COBIC without submitting himself as the guinea pig. Mark was lost in plans. He vaguely heard Sarah talking while he paid no attention and nodded at the right times.

“You’ve seen the white light,” said Sarah. “Haven’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“I get it. Listen, I’m a cop. I know how to read people. You’re just like me. Have you seen information projected into your mind?... diagrams, stuff like that?”

“I haven’t seen white light. No one else here has seen white light. This is ridiculous.”

“Okay, fine. You want to stay in the closet, that’s okay with me. We’ll pretend you’re normal and I’m possessed.”

Mark arranged for Sarah to be reassigned to him as a personal test subject. She was set up in an office down the hall for sleeping quarters. He’d also arranged for her dog to be allowed into the facility as a kind of concession to keep her quiet about white lights and her suspicions about him. Getting the dog in had not been very hard to arrange. Other people had pets inside, including Kathy.

Kathy was excited about what Mark had told her and agreed to run an expedited battery of tests on Sarah; both questionnaires and physical examinations had been completed already; more exotic tests were scheduled over the next several days. Sarah reported surviving two kill zones. Except for the highest concentration of COBIC on record, so far all her tests had come back normal or above normal, including a psych evaluation.

It was late Christmas Eve. Mark and Kathy were sharing the same bed in Kathy’s office. Mark had been unable to fall asleep. He was troubled by Sarah. She’d seen through his denials. She knew he’d experienced at least some of the same manifestations. He didn’t know if he could trust her to keep silent and he wondered what else she’d experienced and hadn’t revealed yet. Was he going to start experiencing implanted memories? Did the nanotech slowly drive its victims insane or was it really some kind of computer-assisted thinking? He didn’t see how anyone could trust their memory after finding false ones.

Mark crept out of bed and walked down the hallway to Sarah’s room. There was a yellow glowing underneath her door. He hesitated; then tapped lightly. There was no answer. He tapped again. The door opened. Sarah was standing in a swaying kind of way. She looked intoxicated. She was wearing a t-shirt and panties. She motioned for him to come inside. He walked in. The room was dimly lit with candlelight. She closed the door; then turned and kissed him. He kissed her back and felt himself swelling. His heart was pounding. What was he doing? He pushed her out to arms length.

“I just came to talk,” he said.

“Okay… we can talk.”

Sarah turned and walked with a sway to the center of the room where she sat down on a couch cushion on the floor and crossed her legs. The cushion must have been where she was sitting when he’d knocked. The arrangement looked like some kind of meditation setup. A single candle was on the floor in front of her. He sat down in an office chair. Sarah patted the floor next to her. Mark stayed where he was in the chair. She made him very nervous. He eyed the light switch but didn’t get up to turn it on.

“Are you high?” he asked.

“Nope, not me,” answered Sarah.

Mark heard people walking down the hall. There was a muffled conversation. When he looked back at Sarah, her expression had become glassy. She stared at him for a long time and then closed her eyes. Mark was convinced she was high on something. He sniffed the air. No smell of pot. He looked around the room. No signs of alcohol or drug paraphernalia. He looked over at the couch and saw a huge dog laying on it. The dog had one eye open and it was fixed on him.

“You have the same orange mass of COBIC in your brainstem as I do,” said Sarah. Her eyes were open and focused on him. Her pupils were the size of an owl’s. “I can see the mass. The machine’s showing it to me as a diagram overlaying your body. There’s also something unusual, like a computer-drawn outline around an organ that’s probably your pancreas, something’s different about it. You have diabetes, I think. Is that right?”

Mark was speechless. What the hell was this? She was either putting on the best act since the Amazing Kreskin or she was getting some kind of medical information through the nanotech in her head.

“The bacterium collects into colonies,” said Sarah. “The bigger the colony, the more intelligence it possesses. Each colony works like a single organism. Small colonies can be as smart as we are, and there’s at least one colony that’s so large and so intelligent it’s become like an artificial god. It’s showed itself to me. It looks like a balloon anchored to the bottom of the ocean floor. It seemed big, but there’s nothing recognizable near it to gauge its size, so I really don’t know how big it is – it could be a foot or a hundred feet in size – but I do know there’s an entire universe of bacteria in that colony. It’s the master of all the other colonies, the soul of the machine; and I’ve learned that if you pray to it, sometimes it answers.”

“What are you on? I can tell you’re stoned.”

“Psilocybin. It helps my mind link with the god-machine.”

“You’re nuts. That stuff can scramble your brain!” said Mark. “What did you just call it, the god-machine?”

Sarah opened a nylon makeup bag next to her and took out a small vial of pills. She shook three of them out into her palm and offered them to Mark.

“Try it. You’re like me. It’ll work for you.”

“I don’t need hallucinations,” he said. “I need facts.”

“You have diabetes, don’t you? That’s a fact. How did I know that?”

Mark got up and left. He was far more disturbed now than an hour ago. He went up to the roof to get some fresh air. Psilocybin? He banged his fist on the railing. How could a drug that turned someone into a zombie create any kind of man-machine interface with… with what?... the seed’s wireless web?... And more than that, what was she connecting to over the web? Was it possible that a vast collective of seeds was hosting an artificial intelligence that was lurking out in some alternate cyberspace or something? Centralized control was possible, but not an artificial intelligence. Bullshit, she was just a space-cadet with a vivid imagination and a little bit of
1-800-Psychic
con-artist mixed in for effect.

An hour later, Mark tapped on Sarah’s door again. He was extremely nervous. He felt like he was cheating on Kathy, but nothing was going on and nothing would go on. He was here for answers. Sarah opened the door within seconds. She was wearing a bathrobe. The room lights were on. Her hair was wet. She must have just gotten out of a shower. She smiled and stepped aside so that he could come in.

“I want you to tell me everything,” said Mark.

“So you believe me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Now, that’s honest, a little insulting, but honest.”

Mark sat down on the couch. Sarah sat down next to him. The cushion that had been on the floor was back in its place. Sarah picked up a glass of water and took a sip. She looked sober but her pupils were still fully dilated.

“You know it’s very old,” she said. “I think it’s older than us, the human race, I mean. I’m beginning to think that some of our myths and religions are about people who were linked with the god-machine like I am.”

“Do you think you’re going to be written up in history as a prophet?” asked Mark.

Sarah laughed. She had a nice laugh, nothing harsh or loud, just very down-to-earth and endearing. Hearing her laugh took some of the tension out of Mark.

“I don’t feel like a prophet,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that people could have mistaken someone like me for a prophet. People in the dark ages who saw visions were considered prophets or witches or loons... Hey, maybe I’m a witch?”

Marked hoped the last option was not the most accurate description of her. There was something she’d said earlier that was really bothering him.

“Why do you call it the god-machine?”

“I don’t think it’s God, if that’s what you’re asking. I believe in God and this machine isn’t God. What I do believe is that the machine started out really smart, and over a very long time it kind of evolved and grew into something like an artificial god. Who knows, maybe
god-machine
is some vague translation of its real name which I’m picking up on?

“And what about this coincidence,” she said. “The way I communicate with the god-machine is by focusing my thoughts on a single idea and then repeating it in my head again and again like a mantra. That’s called praying, at least in my neck of the woods it’s what we called praying. I can imagine ancient people praying and the god-machine answering one of them every so often. Two thousand years ago, who would have known the difference between God and this machine? You found it has the power to heal. What would simple people have made of that? The work of God, I bet.”

“Okay,” said Mark. “Let’s say I believe some of what you’re saying, at least the parts about machine intelligence. How do you know it’s not tricking you? How do you know it wasn’t made ten years ago and is running a program of disinformation?”

“I don’t; and I’m not going to say you have to have faith. This is just what I’ve gotten from it. Try the psilocybin. Find out for yourself.”

“I’ve got to tell you that the drug part makes me very skeptical,” said Mark.

“Indian tribes use psilocybin in their religion,” said Sarah. “Other religions use drugs for the same reasons. Maybe they all stumbled onto the same method and mistook communing with this machine for communing with god?”

“Stop for a minute,” said Mark. “Why do you keep making this case, this analogy to religion? Don’t you realize there are people who will claim you’re mistaken and that this is God? Once that line’s crossed, it’ll be easy for the weak-minded to legitimize this genocide on religious grounds. Maybe you’re one of those people. Are you going to worship it? Start your own death cult? Why all this religious bullshit?”

“You know, you’re starting to sound like a real bastard,” Her voice had a dangerous edge to it. “Don’t you think I want to stop it? Don’t you think what’s happened to our world is eating me, piece by piece? Just about everyone I’ve been close to has been murdered by that thing. I don’t love it. Yeah, I’m trying to understand it. Maybe if we all focus and pray for it to stop, then it will listen to us. Who the fuck knows?”

She took a deep breath. Her face was red. Her lips were trembling. She picked up her glass of water and then put it back down without drinking.

“You’re not going to like this next part one bit,” she said. “I’ve seen clues. Small bits of implanted memories which make me think it doesn’t want to kill everyone. I don’t know if that’s truth or disinformation. I do know that you and me and others are somehow different. I think it’s selected some of us to protect and continue the human race after its genocide is done. I know it’s protecting me. I’ve stood in the midst of hell and survived when I should have died. I was in New Jersey when the god-machine killed. I was in Virginia Beach when the god-machine killed. I know the same kind of thing is true for you and others. I’ve been getting different kinds of warnings from it all along – and I’ve seen evidence that it’s been interfering with my life since I was a kid. Maybe it interfered with my parents’ life and my great grandparents’ life. It’s got to experience time very differently than we do. It’s a goddamn computer. It could set us up like chess pieces far in advance of any game; and I believe that one of its big moves is something we and others like us are supposed to do when the world is partially empty. I think the god-machine is pruning the tree of life so that there’s room for a new race to grow from us. God help me, but sometimes it does feel like it’s a god tinkering with evolution. I’m not saying I like its plan. I’m not saying we can’t disrupt its plan. I’m just telling you what I suspect its plan is.”