Immortality (69 page)

Fox jogged up to the Humvee, grinning from ear to ear. Alexander stepped down onto the hood and then jumped to the ground. He saw men starting to move around in the camp. Fox gave him a bear hug and then pushed him back to arms length.

“It’s happening,” said Fox. “The radio’s reporting kill zones hitting all over Charleston. Goddamn! I wish we could use kill zones all the time. I’m telling you, they’re better than nuclear bombs. If we could used ’em in every attack, we’d rule this whole fucking world.”

“Let’s go get us some warheads,” said Alexander.

“Yes, Sir,” barked Fox.

There was no question in Alexander’s mind that the dreams of kill zones would keep coming and that the victories would follow. There was little that gave Alexander pause. Every day he awoke was a day he was ready to die. There was nothing he wouldn’t do and nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice to rid the world of the Traitors and their plague. Revenge was the only nourishment that satisfied his hunger.

Alexander picked up his M4 and strode off by himself toward a footpath that wove through a stand of old growth trees. Between the trees, he saw fragments of a large body of water which flowed down toward Charleston. Behind him, he could hear the excitement building among his fighters as word of the kill zone spread. The smell of blood and victory was intoxicating them. He reached the edge of a broad river. He’d visited this spot earlier in the day. A metal rowboat was beached and chained to a tree. The chain was heavily rusted and rattled as he propped his foot onto the stern of the boat. He set his M4 down and squinted at the bright daylight in front of him. A wind was coming in off the water. The Cooper River was a quarter mile across at this point. People were being exterminated just miles from where he stood. Alexander could almost see their shocked faces as realization of their demise sunk in. Some were innocent and some were not. His breathing was deep and regular. It was almost as if he could inhale their anguish, and it troubled him. Too many people were dying. He stared across the river at the opposite shore. Every day brought him closer to his goal. Every beat of his heart made his success more of a certainty.

The goal had been crystallized into its final form by an unlikely catalyst, a dream of the female cop who’d saved him. In the dream, she was able to read his mind and had killed him because of what she saw in him. The dream had reoccurred since the night of his attack on the state police barracks. This dream was so much more than any normal dream. Like his other premonitions, this one told him things he needed to know. Sometimes during waking hours, he could almost feel the female inside his head, probing and searching and violating him. He didn’t understand what she wanted, nor did he understand what she was trying to do to him; but he knew at some instinctive level that she had been born to do him harm, and this world harm – she and her mirror image, a male every bit as inhuman as his female counterpart. They were a sentient virus cloaked in human skin. Alexander’s entire body tensed like a weapon every time he thought of them.

Each time when he dreamt of the pair, he’d learned more. He’d come to realize they were a danger like no other. He was haunted by them in his dreams and thought about them in his waking hours. Sometimes, he thought about them to the exclusion of all other things and could not even eat or sleep. He felt like he knew them as if they were part of his family. They were like disowned siblings who’d turned into vicious killers and needed to be destroyed. He was drawn to them like the needle of a compass was pulled to magnetic north. There was no other course for him to follow. He could feel they were in Atlanta. He knew they were changing and growing in power and, in the ultimate of betrayals, the government was protecting them, sponsoring them. He knew that opportunity had to come soon or they might slip away. The truck bombs were only part of his plan. He would lay siege to their government stronghold. He would sterilize all that he found, leaving no chance that their disease could escape. He would leave not a man, woman, or microbe alive. In his mind, those two creatures had become the entire reason for this plague. He could never explain how he knew this, but not even a particle of doubt existed within him. When he killed them, the plague would stop. When he killed them, his revenge would be complete. They had become the sole focus and fuel of his hatred. He thought of how Suzy’s lifeless hand had felt loosely curled in his fingers. He picked up his M4 and sprayed the air over the river with the machine gun and his rage.

Hours ago seeking solitude, Mark had gone up to the roof of the BVMC lab. The night air was cold and invigorating. The moonless sky was sprinkled with stars. He wore a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. He was sitting on the ground with his back up against the helicopter pad. The pad was elevated three feet which served as a reasonable backrest and made it almost impossible for him to be seen from the door. The deserted spot was ideally suited for his needs.

The world was quiet except for a whispering breeze. He wasn’t tired but he should have been. His lips and mouth were dry but he had no intention of finding water. More than once, he’d realized he should have felt cold; but he seemed to be warmed by an inner heat. He was trying to learn how to operate a new user interface he’d discovered. He’d achieved a modest amount of progress so far this night. The interface was an extremely complicated and alien collection of symbols, but it did have some basic rules in common with all software. Program commands resulted in actions or responses. He had proved this with his command of the thought-interface itself.

Earlier in the night, after a surprisingly painful data-flow, he’d managed to identify a single thought which, when focused upon, caused this new interface to open. The interface was a catalog of programs and commands displayed on a paper-thin two foot high tablet that floated in space in front of him. Like the three-dimensional medical display of his body, this tablet occupied a specific
physical
space. He could move closer or father away from it. He could even walk behind it. In every way, the tablet was a real object to him, except for its ghostlike transparency.

The tablet managed to appear both ancient and high tech at the same time. It looked like a sheet of metallic-colored material, slightly rounded at the top and bottom. Covering its surface were row after row of symbols which seemed to be grouped into words or phrases with vertical lines as delimiters. The result was that each row looked like a collection of variously sized, tiny blocks containing ancient writing. The language was the same mixture of runic and cuneiform characters that Mark had seen in the kill zone map and medical projections.

Floating in space near the lower right hand of the tablet was a globe about the size of a softball. The globe appeared to have a rubber-like texture. He had touched the globe and been surprised when he’d felt something against his fingers. The tablet and globe had a tactile presence. If he touched lightly he could feel them. However, if he applied force, his fingers and hands would pass through them, confirming they were as ghostly as they appeared. Through exploration, he discovered that if he lightly pushed the tablet or gently gripped it, he could move the tablet around in space to reposition it wherever he liked.

Without a doubt, the globe was some kind of input device. Floating around it were what appeared to be directional markings. The markings were more transparent than the globe and had no tactile presence; to Mark, this set them apart as something non-interactive. There was a pair of markings which partially encircled the globe on either side like the oak-leaf symbols of a government seal. The markings tapered to points at the top like a pair of curved ‘modern art’ arrows. The two markings in fact probably were arrows – one pointing clockwise and the other pointing counterclockwise. They gave a clear impression that the globe was meant to be rotated in those two directions. A second pair of similar markings partially encircled the globe from its rear, curving up to and stopping at each pole. These markings gave the impression that the globe could also be rotated in the vertical axis. A final set of similar rear-side markings suggested rotation in the horizontal axis.

Reaching out with his hand, Mark tentatively gripped the globe. After a few breaths to steady himself, he rotated it several degrees clockwise. A rapid, disjointed, shuffle of weak feelings, visuals, and sensations ripple through him like mild electrical currents. The effect was a little confusing but not unpleasant. At the same time as the sensory effects, the content of the tablet had been swapped out for new pages; and the arrow pointing in the direction of rotation had changed in color, as if mercury were rising up inside it like a thermometer. Turning the globe farther in the same direction caused more sensory effects as the tablet flipped through pages of commands and the mercury color rose farther up the arrow. Turning the globe in its vertical and horizontal axes also resulted in the same things. The globe seemed to be a three-dimensional selection control with infinite possibilities. Mark was trying to remain very objective and scientific. Even though the globe’s function seemed obvious, because he was dealing with a completely alien machine, it was impossible to be scientifically certain that paging was the only function of the globe. It was possible that by turning the globe, he was also initiating something that was completely invisible and potentially very dangerous. Over the last few days there had been many aspects of the god-machine’s interface for which he’d experienced either confident or insecure feelings for no apparent reason. He believed that these feelings or intuitions stemmed from subconscious coaching by the god-machine; but when it came to this command catalog and its uses, he’d experienced almost no feelings to guide him in any particular direction.

As a result of sensing desertion by those guiding feelings, Mark did not have enough confidence to try executing commands. He was not even completely sure how to execute commands but suspected all he had to do was touch one of the phrases with his finger as if it were a button. Instead of tempting blind fate, he occupied himself by shuffling through pages, looking for clues. There had to be more than just these endless rows of symbols. Somewhere there might be illustrations or help diagrams which were universally recognizable.

Mark had lost track of time and finally lost interest in paging. He’d found no clues; but despite his caution against blindly trying commands, he had mastered one task which amounted to a program command. By accident, he’d learned how to close the tablet at will. He’d discovered that by emptying his mind, it would wink-out. The tablet was apparently monitoring his mental activity; and when his attention was not on the tablet for a certain period of time, it turned off. When he reopened the tablet, he had no control over where it appeared. The interface seemed to choose the best location to position itself in his immediate space, with minimal chance for interference with real objects. He recognized that everything he did and everything he discovered could be important, even the simplest things like opening and closing this tablet. At some level he felt like he was just playing with a new program to learn how to operate it; but at another level, it was impossible to forget that the stakes he was playing for were life and death.

A sharp wind tugged at his clothing and hair. Mark looked up at the stars. There were countless millions of them visible in the moonless sky, too many to ever name. In front of him, within arms reach, the tablet and globe floated unaffected by the wind, like the computer illustrations they were. Based on the hundreds of unique symbols and phrases on each tablet-page, and that each page appeared completely different, Mark had reached the depressing conclusion that this ancient language possessed as many written words as there were stars in the sky.

~

Mark knew frustration, combined with the sure knowledge that he didn’t have enough time, was coloring his judgment. He’d discovered that when he moved a pointed finger to within a fraction of an inch of touching a command, he felt a repelling pressure and at the same time received a single vague sensory impression. He suspected the interface was trying to communicate descriptions of commands. The response was like a built-in help system; but it was failing he believed, because the descriptions did not contain anything remotely similar to what humans experienced through their senses. As a result, all he perceived were phantom impressions instead of clear descriptions. Some command phrases produced weak emotions in him; others, faint aftertastes; and still others, light sensations on his skin; but none came close to an understandable impression.

Mark decided that using the thought-interface was his best option to learn more about the cataloged commands. His plan was to select command phrases at random, and then focus on each until he triggered a data-flood. With a little luck, each deluge of information would fill his mind with implanted memories explaining the command and, along with it, a new phrase in the ancients’ language. He’d already learned a phrase in the ancients’ language for the thought-interface. Earlier, when he’d activated the thought-interface while the floating catalog was displayed, something that looked like a program window appeared to the left of the tablet. At the top of the window was a single phrase. The layout was intuitively recognizable to him; this was a program task list and the single phrase was the name for the thought-interface program.

Mark wondered if the interface’s similarities to modern software were coincidental or if a few influential human programmers had subconsciously tapped into the god-machine and emerged with ideas and layouts which were unwittingly incorporated into commercial software. He hoped there were more undiscovered similarities. His accidental identification of the command for the thought-interface was a small victory in what promised to be an overwhelming amount of work. He was beginning to decode the language of a highly advanced civilization, one word at a time. He wondered if a thousand human lifetimes would be enough; yet all he had, based on even the most optimistic projections, were weeks; while every day cost humanity so much more in blood.