Immortality (67 page)

She was speaking with her eyes mouths and her normal mouth in sync. Mark felt himself sobbing as insanity neared. His mind exploded in an excruciating flash of white as awareness and life was torn from him like overcooked meat from the bone.

“Are you alright?” shouted Sarah. “Speak to me!”

She was patting him on the cheek. He could hear her but was unable to answer, unable to move. His head was splitting open. The pain was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. Fingers spread open one of his eyes then the other. He saw Sarah leaning close to inspect his face. Her appearance was distorted. Her head turned to one side; then she was gone from view. She returned a moment later holding the syringe in front of his eyes.

“Do you need this?” she asked.

He was paralyzed. She looked worried. He felt her turning his arm over to expose the tender side which was full of veins. He managed to shake his head ‘yes.’ She must have caught the movement because she looked back into his eyes. He shook his head ‘yes’ again. He felt the needle bite into his arm and mild pressure from the chlorpromazine injected into a vein. He tasted it in his mouth. His head was throbbing so hard he thought the only relief would be for it to explode. He wanted the pain to stop. As if a switch was thrown, the pain vanished.

“Are you alright?” asked Sarah.

Was he all right? He had no idea. A medical schematic of his body appeared as a projection overlaying empty space. All his circulatory systems and organs were drawn along with colored alien characters and symbols which he suspected were vital signs. There was an outline drawn around his pancreas. He didn’t know what all the measurements represented, but he got a sense from the display that he was medically normal.

“That was a short trip” he said.

“Short? You were gone for sixteen hours! I’ve been going through hell. There were times you were groaning, which I’m sure attracted some attention; then later there were people knocking on the door. I had no idea what to do except keep quiet. At least that monitor never went off. That would have been it for me.”

“What! I heard that thing going off like a full cardiac arrest. I was having heart problems.”

“Never made a sound.”

The chlorpromazine had worked far quicker than it should have. He felt no effects from the LSD. He should have at least had cobwebs between his ears, but his thoughts were sharp and insights came readily. He actually felt better than he had all week and he was ravenously hungry. Had the thought-interface been restructured? He had no memories after the appearance of Gracy; it felt like his mind had been erased beyond that point. As far as he could tell, there were also no implanted memories from the god-machine, not a single idea fading from his mind. This had never happened before. One possibility was that he hadn’t used the thought-interface during the entire blackout. The other possibility was that he’d used the interface early on during the blackout and everything that had come through fifteen or sixteen hours ago had long since faded.

If he’d succeeded in restructuring the interface, how was he now supposed to operate it? Focusing his mind on a single question was the obvious thing to try, since it had worked before with the subconscious interface. He walked over to the window and looked out at the twilight sky. He saw a jet high in the air glinting like a first star in the last rays of daylight. He’d lost an entire day. He turned and saw Sarah staring back at him. Her green eyes were fully dilated. She must have taken more psilocybin. He could tell she was thinking the same question he was...
had it worked?

While staring into Sarah’s eyes, he thought about the question he had been repeating for days.
Why are you terminating the lives of homo sapiens during the current extinction cycle?
He held the single thought for as long as he could, repeating the question in his mind. The effort was like holding his breath, except the difficulty was greater. Holding his breath was a physical act based on muscle and decision; holding a single thought to the exclusion of all else was far more difficult because even the smallest of stray feelings or senses could take him off on a tangent. The average person could hold total focus on a single thought for a minute or two before being distracted. Mark was past sixty seconds; any moment he would lose it. His lips were moving as he silently repeated the question again and again. There was a mild ache building in his head.

Without warning, a deluge of information slammed into his conscious mind. It was a flood that moved broader and deeper and faster than he could grasp. As the flow reached a crescendo, the information began to physically hurt. The pain was escalating! He willed the flow to stop; but the torrent continued, and so did the excruciating pain.

The flood of data ran its own course and then ebbed to a stop. His short term memory was overwhelmed like a small computer might be overloaded by a supercomputer. He retained only a small residue of what had been transmitted, and what had been retained was rapidly vanishing as other needs for his short term memory were met.

What he ultimately saved was like storm debris that had washed up on a beach after the tide had receded, an imperfect impression of what the ocean contained. There were fragments of memories which answered his question. They were incomplete but still contained revelations which stunned him to silence. The god-machine was acting to save us from ourselves and preserve the ecology of the world. The machine was creating conditions for the next variant of homo sapiens to emerge. Sarah had been right. A new species of man was part of the god-machine’s goal. To accomplish this, the machine needed a small group of humans as seed stock and plenty of uninhabited space to expand across, uncontested. Mark feared there was no way of stopping the genocide other than convincing the god-machine that humans were no longer a threat. There was a whole collection of causes that had triggered the god-machine’s action, so there was no single change in human behavior that would guarantee a truce. But there was a dangerous human trait that stood out far from the rest.

The machine had calculated that in the next two centuries mankind would deplete all resources needed to sustain life and turn the Earth into a desert planet like Mars; or failing to completely run the planet into a death spiral, we would destroy ourselves with nuclear or biochemical wars for control of what little resources remained. The god-machine had found mankind ‘guilty’ and sentenced it to replacement.

Mark did not believe for an instant that this dismal computer projection was accurate. Though humans had certainly demonstrated proof to the contrary, we were intelligent life with a fantastic ability to adapt and correct our mistakes. He’d always assumed that when oil finally began to run dry, we would have a crisis and then come up with an alternative. Our lack of preemption was not ideal, but a little crisis management was not the same as planetary murder… or was the situation worse than that? He started to think about the Middle East. Since oil’s discovery, the industrialized world had unleashed wars to maintain control of it. We weren’t conquering the oil rich lands to overtly keep them for ourselves, but we weren’t willing to let governments we didn’t trust have control of them either. Part of the god-machine’s calculation was already occurring. He thought about drinkable water, then radioactive minerals, then fertile topsoil. We were already fighting hot and cold wars for control of these resources and many more. There was evidence that the god-machine had caused extinctions of other species. The question was
had the god-machine caused near extinctions in the tree of mankind before?
If it had been driven to this extreme action in the past, then its current projection could be based on very solid data. In some dim and forgotten prehistory, had our ancestors caused similar problems leading to the same kind of global predation, which the god-machine was now murdering us to avert? Like a broken record, were our instincts dragging us down every time?

Mark considered trying one more question.
Has my species been terminated in prior extinction cycles?
Memories of the horrible pain from using the interface, and a dull ache which still remained, held him back. He would not overuse the interface until he had a well thought out set of questions. He had no intention of frivolously wasting this opportunity. The interface was painful and possibly physically harmful; but more than that, the pain could be an indication the interface might only be good for a limited number of uses before it began to degrade.

Mark noticed Sarah was still looking at him from across the room. He realized that the entire flood of data had transpired in less than a second. He saw her beginning to smile and had the distinct impression that when she looked into his eyes, she actually sensed something of what was going on inside him. That sensation he’d felt in the Kill Zone Monitoring Center of her energy tugging at him through the back of his eyes had returned. He could feel the tug ebb a small amount when she blinked.

“You did it,” asked Sarah; “didn’t you?”

Mark just nodded his head. Was there anything he could do with his newfound information, besides convincing everyone except Sarah that he’d lost his mind? The god-machine’s preemptively destroying us because it thinks we’re going to destroy ourselves and take the Earth with us. The only hope was to lessen the threat and pray the machine would stop. He was just one man, one voice. Who would listen when he told them to stop acting in a threatening manner? He had no idea what kind of changes would be enough – destroy our weapons of mass destruction? Stop industrial pollution? What? Maybe we should just try a different approach and wire up all the nuclear bombs to go off at once and play a massive game of ‘mutually assured destruction’ chicken. The god-machine seemed ready to do anything to protect the biosphere. Maybe they could blackmail it into stopping?

“What was it like?” asked Sarah.

“Painful,” said Mark. “Restructuring the interface was painful and operating it is even worse.”

~

Mark was in the cafeteria. He was embarrassed at the amount of food he was eating. He should have been exhausted and wanted nothing more than a solid week of sleep. He was agitated about what he’d discovered, but the need for food was so overpowering. He took a huge bite out of his second bacon cheeseburger, drank some diet Pepsi to wash it down, and then repeated the cycle of gorging.

Kathy walked into the cafeteria and sat down in front of him without saying a word. She looked both angry and confused at the same time.

“Hi,” said Mark between mouthfuls.

“You were locked in your office for twenty-four hours with a friend and some borrowed medical equipment. What’s going on?”

“I’m okay.”

“That’s not how it works,” said Kathy. “I thought we’d started something real. When people have something real, they do not keep secrets like this from each other.”

“What secrets?”

“Don’t give me that crap! This involves secrets and it better not involve any funny business with Sarah.”

Mark realized his hope of stonewalling was rapidly evaporating. He wondered what she was going to make of the actual story. Kathy had her arms crossed. Her mouth was set in a straight line. As he stared at her, a medical schematic superimposed itself over her body. The results made it harder for him to concentrate on what he was about to say. He closed his eyes and then opened them. The schematic remained.

“I’ve been conducting some unorthodox experiments,” said Mark.

“Go on.” Kathy did not look like she was ready to buy anything he had to sell.

“Once I realized we were dealing with networked nanotech computers, I decided to try to open a dialog with the machine. I had reasons to believe this was possible and reasons to believe that information I obtained might be useful. Sarah provided an important clue.”

“Sarah? Huh? This better be good.”

“Sarah had accidentally discovered a way to communicate with the nanotech when she overdosed on psilocybin.”

“Oh, this is getting bad. I hope you’re not going to tell me this involves taking drugs with Sarah or anything else…”

“There’s nothing going on between me and Sarah. She gave me some of her psilocybin and she described what she’d experienced, and that’s it. I believe the seeds provide the same function as our computers do on the Internet. With the nanotech seeds, we can connect to their wireless web, exchange data, and run programs that can perform unimaginable things like repairing our bodies. We’ve seen the opposite sides of what this nanotech can do – mass murdering and accelerated healing. Who knows what its limits are?”

“You said she gave you psilocybin,” said Kathy. “Does that mean you took psilocybin or you analyzed the psilocybin?”

“Please, forget about the drugs for a minute,” asked Mark.

“That’s not easy,” said Kathy. “Go on. I’m listening.”

“Thank you,” said Mark. “This nanotech wireless web connects all of us to a super colony of seeds which acts like a brain, and the web is its nervous system. I believe the super colony contains trillions of seeds. Marjari’s work proved that seeds in close proximity can do collaborative processing with almost zero-efficiency losses, and that every seed has more power than a high-end personal computer. Can you imagine the CPU power of trillions of these seeds thinking together? An AI entity of that scale would have god-like mental capacity. The god-machine was…”

“The what?” interrupted Kathy.

“I’ve started calling the global collective of seeds the god-machine. Anyway, I am convinced the god-machine was designed for a benign purpose, probably medical; and because of something unforeseen by its designers, it’s evolved a set of deadly rules or exceptions. By using hallucinogenic drugs, I’ve opened a thought-interface with this god-machine.”

Kathy no longer looked angry. She looked numb. Mark leaned across the table and picked up her hand. She squeezed back weakly.

“I believe you’re sincere about what you’re telling me,” said Kathy, “but I am very worried about you. How much psilocybin did you take?”