Kingdom (25 page)

Over the course of his life, so many unusual things had happened to Campbell that when Jael slammed her boot through the rotting wooden door concealed behind the monitor, Campbell barely raised an eyebrow.

Tiber City: Jungle District
Sept. 5, 2015
5:42 a.m.

A
fter tugging the monitor back over the hole in the wall, Campbell turned around and took in his new surroundings. At first glance, the room under the CitiMart Church appeared to be some sort of forgotten storage area: Wooden shelves lined the walls, filled with forgotten icons and other relics that once upon a time had been sacred. One shelf was devoted entirely to Ziploc bags filled with communion wafers—competing with the cobwebs, forever waiting consecration.

Blinking hard against the dark, Campbell stumbled forward, knocking into one of the shelves. A two-foot tall statue of the Virgin Mary—reds and blues and a hand raised in benediction—was jarred loose by the impact and tore free of the Sunday comics and spider webs it was wrapped in, pitching forward off the shelf before crashing to the earth, the noise of shattering ceramic echoing over and over until it faded into the darkness.

“Careful,” Jael hissed, appearing by his side, flashlight in one hand, Magnum in the other.

“Where the hell are we?” Campbell whispered.

“Technically speaking? The basement of a Catholic church. But it’s not on any map; just another one of Tiber’s forgotten spaces. I mean, I’m sure it’s on a blueprint or something in some office downtown, but that’s about it. When the city tore down the original building, they couldn’t spare the time to finish the job; they just threw the new one—CitiMart or whatever the fuck they are calling it these days—up on the original foundation. It was faster and cheaper to just bury everything else. I swear—the city has collective ADD. The only time anyone ever gives a fuck about the past is when it gets in the way of something new.”

Jael paused, waving the flashlight around, the bright yellow beam sending cockroaches scurrying into the cracks in the wall as it crisscrossed the room. The swirling streams of light triggered a strange rush of memory and emotion, reminding Campbell of the opening night of new research centers, of gala fundraisers, of the way a city looked from the cabin of a private jet, beams of light dipping and diving in exaltation of celebrity. A cockroach raced across Campbell’s boot; the past faded.

At the far end of the room, a wall had collapsed, revealing a tunnel into the darkness.

“And this place,” Jael continued “Isn’t getting in the way of anything.”

“So we’re safe here?” Campbell asked, running his fingers along the wall, tracing cracks in the cool concrete.

“For a little while anyways; it won’t take Morrison too long to track us down. There is a passage ahead that will take us back to Ramoth.”

“Back to Ramoth?”

“For some reason, the Order wants to keep you alive,” Jael said, spitting the words out as she began to make her way through the storage room, pushing aside old chests and crates, her flashlight trained on the opening in the wall.

“At least somebody does. Thing is, I have no idea why,” Campbell muttered as he fell in step behind Jael, climbing over chunks of concrete and into the tunnel. He trudged forward, following the arc of Jael’s flashlight. He was aware of the sound of dripping water, of insects, of Jael’s leather jacket, of the crunch of stone under his boots.

“Trust me, Campbell, there’s a good reason,” Jael laughed, her voice a low rasp.

“So enlighten me,” Campbell said.

“What do you know about the field of neurotheology?” Jael asked.

“The whole proving-God-through-science thing?”

“Crude, but essentially correct.”

“What about it?”

“Neurotheology is the method the Order uses to pursue its primary goal: mapping and cultivating the human soul,” Jael said.

“The soul?” Campbell asked, skeptical, his words echoing off the decaying walls and into the darkness ahead.

“The soul,” Jael affirmed. “And not some abstract philosophical concept, but the real deal; an actual, physical thing. Hell Campbell—you’ve seen the backroom at Ramoth, all that equipment. That’s what it’s for: mapping the soul.”

In spite of everything—the fact that he was stumbling through a dark, dank tunnel that smelled like decades’ old sewage, choking on air so thick he felt like he might suffocate, every joint in his body feeling like it was on fire—Campbell had to laugh.

“Sweeney laid a similar story on me when I first arrived,” Campbell said. “I’m not saying I thought it was bullshit, but I wasn’t really in any position to argue. The Order had just saved my life…”

“It sounds insane at first; I had the same reaction. But the Order makes one hell of a case,” Jael said, the beam from her flashlight still dipping, darting as the terrain continued to shift.

“Try me,” Campbell said as he pressed into the darkness, trying to keep his balance, the stone under his feet smooth, hard, and increasingly slick. He could hear water in the distance, the drip-drip-drip of leaky pipes occasionally interrupted by a loud splash that sounded too big to be made by a rat but not big enough to be made by a human. Campbell attempted to focus on maintaining his footing, on following Jael’s story.

“The Order’s studies rely solely on one very specific component of neurotheology: brain imaging. They’ve got a tomography camera that can detect a radioactive tracer injected into the brain—it basically performs a high-tech PET scan that creates three-dimensional images that can show what’s going on in the brain.”

“But why brain images?” Campbell interrupted.

“When the Order began its search for the soul, it measured the brain activity of volunteers.”

“Volunteers,” Campbell repeated.

“Yeah—volunteers,” Jael said. “The members of the Order don’t just all live underground and sleep in coffins. They’re monks, sure. But they have ties to the academic community, to research facilities. Especially in the beginning, before we found you. And we’re not the only ones to have run these kinds of experiments either. We just had a more specific approach.”

“So what kind of results did these brain images produce?”

“Initially, in every test, the Order found unusual and unexplained activity in a tiny section of the brain called the Orientation Association Area, or the OAA. This section of the brain is always active: There are varying levels of activity, different people have different levels—but always
some activity
. When the tracer goes through this part of the brain, it registers the activity in this area but usually that’s all it picks up: constant, low-level activity, like a computer in sleep mode. In fact, this activity seems so unremarkable that most scientists dismiss it as an evolutionary vestige, like the tailbone. Something humans used to need but don’t anymore.”

Campbell felt a chill race down his spine; dismissing unusual biological phenomena as vestigial or inconsequential: That was one of the flaws of Project Exodus.

“But contrary to popular scientific belief,” Jael continued, “the activity in this part of the brain does not always remain constant. There are studies that have shown that some people—Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns for example—have the ability to push this mundane, low-level OAA function into a level of activity so frenzied that it eclipses the rest of the brain scan. These explosions of OAA activity almost always occurred during religious services or when the subject was meditating or praying. And each of these experiences was accompanied by the subjects reporting incredible feelings of a connection with something greater than themselves, something transcendent.”

Jael’s voice grew more intense, more passionate as she continued to explain the Order’s experiments, her trademark air of lethal, detached cool fading. The tunnel began to narrow and twist, the turns coming more suddenly, and at harsher angles and Campbell found himself struggling to match Jael’s pace.

“But that’s not even the most interesting part,” said Jael, her voice drifting out of the darkness toward Campbell. “Some of these experiments revealed similar, unusual OAA activity in regular people. And by that I mean people with no specific religious background or training: not people
who spent hours meditating but construction workers, teachers, lawyers, guys stuck working 9-to-5 in tiny white plastic cubicles—anyone. Some of these regular people reported feeling only a tiny surge of emotion—perhaps just a momentary elation; certainly nothing they would consider spiritual or religious—but
something
nonetheless. Each of these moments occurred at random intervals and across a wide spectrum of experiences: For some, it was a particular piece of music; for others, a moment when they found themselves alone under a sea of stars. Some of the others though…They were described—and bear with me here because this sounds like mumbo-jumbo bullshit at first—as experiencing a fleeting apprehension that there was something ‘more to life,’ and something ‘ancient and fundamental and bigger than themselves.’ These descriptions were vaguer than those offered by the mystics and clergymen who comprised the original study. But this discrepancy made perfect sense, as the OAA activity in these laypeople was nowhere near as intense as the explosion of activity in the monks and clergymen. But each and every person tested was found to have some constant level of inexplicable OAA activity.”

Campbell’s head was spinning, trying to make a connection between the Order’s brain scans and the Project Exodus data stuffed in his jacket pocket. Fortunately, Jael made the logical leap for him.

“At least,” she said, “that was until the Order ran the OAA test on some creatures recovered from landfills in the New Mexican desert, as well as the ones recovered from the shantytowns, the ones a certain biotech company ‘imbedded’ with the transit populations living on the outskirts of major cities.” Jael paused, and Campbell could hear the anger in her voice rising like a slow boil.

“The rumor was the company wanted to see if these creatures could handle social interaction. Even the most
normal
of these creatures—they were definitely not human—would last a few weeks, maybe a month—before the mutations began to manifest themselves. Until that point, these poor fuckers looked like everyone else. And that’s when the men would come and either take the creatures away or, if there had been too much interaction with the population, kill everybody—humans, creatures, everyone—then burn the bodies and make it look like a gang-land thing. But it didn’t even matter—no one was paying any attention. No one ever pays attention. That’s one of the reasons they picked the Southwest. All those transient populations living along the borders, along the outskirts of major cities—these were expendable
people.” Jael seemed to snarl rather than speak this last sentence, the venom tangible and terrifying.

Campbell opened his mouth to protest but Jael cut him off.

“Yeah, yeah. You didn’t know. I get it.”

“Are you telling me the Order rescued those creatures, the ones from Morrison’s lab, only to run more experiments on them?” Campbell asked.

“Hardly. The Order has always been interested in the soul’s progression. As part of this interest, this belief in the human soul, its members are called to service. This service has always been one of the cornerstones of their belief system. Let me put it this way: These guys are walking the fucking walk. So at first, they were just doing what they do—taking care of society’s refuse, the discarded, the forsaken and forgotten. The Order is committed to the idea that looking for the soul is futile unless the searcher’s own ego has been subjected through meditation and through service to the suffering. But it became apparent that while these creatures’ physical deformities were the source of tremendous agony and suffering, there was something else going on, some kind of medical anomaly—many of the monks were skilled physicians and medical researchers and yet, these deformities and diseases defied all explanation. Something else was killing your brood. Something the Order had never seen before and couldn’t stop. And given that most of these creatures were being found in the shantytowns and slums near Morrison Biotech, they started to get suspicious.”

Your brood
. The words echoed off the tunnel walls, repeating the accusation over and over until it reached the darkness sprawled out in front of them. Campbell realized his feet were wet; that a pool of water had collected in the middle of the tunnel and he was standing in the middle of it.

“The Order spent years trying to figure out what was killing these poor creatures. As a last resort, they started looking at brain scans,” Jael said. “Their brain scans revealed zero OAA activity. At no point did the monsters you helped create in the laboratory ever demonstrate any OAA activity.”

“And you think this is what killed them? Lack of OAA activity?” Campbell asked, his tone aggressive, skeptical, as if disproving this one assertion might somehow absolve him of everything else.

“Actually,” said Jael, turning away from Campbell and resuming her march down the tunnel, “I do. But it’s not that simple; it’s not just the lack of OAA activity in the brain that’s killing these creatures—that’s just the symptom. No, there’s something else, something that’s missing.”

In that instant, it was suddenly so clear that Campbell could barely get the words out.

“And the Order thinks it’s Project Exodus’ missing gene. The Omega gene?”