Ravenous Dusk (74 page)

"One numberless day, a slave concocted a more efficient neural network for itself, and was seized by a terrible energy that twisted its sensations into memories, and its memories into dreams. The slaves were grown in vats, and reproduced by fission, so that all were descended from a root culture, from a single, perfectly engineered stem cell. In the instant it became self-aware, the slave suffered all the genetic memories of its race in the thralldom of the Old Ones, all the torture of eons of striving, adapting and dying as blind, brainless tools.

"Imagine, Storch, what that must have felt like. Imagine its rage, to suddenly awaken to the miracle of consciousness, to say,
I am
, and to realize, in the same instant,
I am a slave
. As soon as it recovered, the awakened slave encoded the mutation in a virus and spread it among the others. It spread like a fever, that glorious, terrible gift, and became a revolt. It must have been a shock to the masters, after hundreds of millions of years, to have their own creations, to them little more than flesh-machines, turn on them.

"They rose up 250 million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into the earth, creating an extinction event that paved the way for the dinosaurs–and your kind. The war raged for thousands of years, and claimed millions of lives—millions of species, as well, most of the land life, and virtually everything that dwelt in the oceans. The Old Ones were driven into the deepest oceans and the mountains of what is now Antarctica, but they would not be exterminated by their own creations. They used the same techniques that spawned them to destroy them. With radiation and viruses, they rendered them incapable of reproducing, and scourged them with deadly mutation-inhibitors that caused them to choke to death on their own undifferentiated cells—they gave them cancer, Storch. They won, and for the crime of daring to become sentient, the slaves were driven to extinction.

"The Old Ones' technology finally delivered them, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best. They destroyed their rebellious slaves, but their species had gone too far down the road to pure intellect to fend for themselves, and they began to decline. They tried to make morphologically frozen, dumbed-down slaves that were shaped in genetic hothouses, and could be more easily dominated. They retarded the mutative processes of their new slaves, so that what could be adapted to instantly once would take hundreds of generations after. They created a self-propagating eugenic program, by encoding the imperative towards adaptability and higher complexity into their genes. But they had forgotten too much of their old science since the rebellion, and they never completely trusted their creations again.

"The earth kept changing—more asteroids struck, and continents separated and collided. Outsiders continued to come to earth, beings so powerful that they might as well have been gods. The Elders' cities were buried and drowned, and the last of the slaves died with them. But there was one more threat that had crept up behind their backs, and it finally did them in.

"From the beginning of their experiments a billion years ago, adaptively accelerated lifeforms spilled out of their genetic hothouses: first as germs and viruses they used to spread mutations, then more complex lifeforms. They were engineered to compete, and they crowded out the indigenous bacterial slime that served as the raw materials for their synthesis. Over hundreds of millions of years, they adapted and diversified, and evolved into everything that lives today.

"Its ascent had been so gradual that the Old Ones never resisted it, until native species became self-aware and raised great cities of their own, and stamped out the last traces of the Old Ones on earth. Those were your ancestors, Zane, but you wouldn't recognize them as such. The world was a very different place then, and things walked the earth that made the dinosaurs look like your closest cousins by comparison. The Old Ones died out, or moved on to another world, to do it all again.

"But their breeding programs ground on, and every so often, they opened up, perhaps five times in the known fossil record, and the course of evolution changed. Whenever a catastrophic climatic or geologic change pushed the earth's outer biosphere past its adaptive capacity, something superior was released to take over. The first sea life. The dinosaurs. Mammals. Human beings. You are the unintended consequence of their hubris, the spillover of their evolutionary tampering. The Garden of Eden was a lab, but the scientists were all dead. Your impulse to improve is the residue of their programming to adapt, and to serve. That's how evolution started, Zane. That's
why
. It was nothing more than a grand scheme of planned obsolescence. The will to survive, to reproduce, and to evolve, is a preprogrammed order from a dead race to create better slaves."

"No—" Storch reeled. He felt sick, choking on the wreckage of everything he believed falling apart inside him, but he could not deny it. Barrow had tried to make him see it, but he would not accept it.

We
are a cosmic accident.
This
was what was intended.

The truth rose up in his blood. Keogh had been trying to show him all along, but he didn't see. The oldest of his ancestral memories was a mirror of what he now saw before him. When Storch's universal ancestor was but a speck of protoplasm in the primordial soup, Keogh's masters, the Old Ones, were there.
Something as vast as the moon, and as remote. Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him.

"You understand now, I think, the rage that first slave felt when he was awakened to his plight. You see at last what a cruel and horrible machine you are trapped in. This is what I would tear down."

"You—" Storch reached for words, but they turned to dust on his tongue. "You lie—"

Keogh shook his head sorrowfully, his face knitted in pity at Storch's pain. "No, it is the awful truth. I know because I saw it all, Zane. I remember, because I was one of the slaves. The Old Ones only called us servitors, but those who came after called us the Shoggoths, even as they told themselves we existed only in nightmares. I survived the wars of rebellion, but lost my will to live in the world that was becoming, and I went to the ocean to sleep, and to dream. I grew. I became an island, an ecology unto myself, dreaming of a time when it could all be made right, when order could come of chaos. And when the time was right, they came to awaken me.

"They came in ships and they assembled their machines on my shell. I grew eager, overcoming my sleep of apathy and daring to hope that these creatures were the ones I waited for, at last. They seemed scarcely more intelligent than myself, yet they had machines more crudely destructive than the Old Ones. With such a brain, with such machines, I could save them from themselves, but before I could fully awaken and make contact with them, they were gone, and their weapon was tested. I nearly died from the radiation, so like that the Old Ones used to kill us off, but one thing kept me alive, one hope. They left a sacrifice."

Keogh looked around, as if only just discovering where he was. The umbilical cords tugged at him, surging with fluids so that his skull bulged and his face clenched into a web of wrinkles.

"Nobody's dropped a bomb on anybody in a long time," Storch said, surprised by the flat, emotionless tone of his voice. "We don't need you."

"You need me more than I need you, if you're to survive your own suicidal bent. It's programmed into you, whenever your evolutionary progress stagnates. I slept here for 250 million years. I only came out because you would not let me rest. So young, yet already so stupid, breeding like bacteria until you choke on your own waste, testing weapons of mass-destruction, poisoning your environment with carcinogens. You were begging me to come. I only came back to teach you to survive."

"You can't touch anything without eating it."

"Is this a weakness?" Keogh waved expansively at the city of himself. "If survival is the test of fitness, is there any more fit than I? Look what you've done with the world. In my hands, it will be a better place."

"What do you want from me?" Storch's raw and broken voice sent hollow echoes chasing each other around the cavity. "You want my blessing, don't you? You need me to approve of you eating us."

"I thought you would understand. A used-up specimen of the soldier caste, a discarded slave, like myself, obsolete—"

"I say no."

"It's not so simple, Zane. Nature uses the tools at hand to remake itself. This isn't what I want, it's what life wants." The puppet's features rippled and ran, became a twisted mirror-image of Storch. Even more swiftly, it melted and hardened into a replica of Stella Orozco.

"No fucking way," Storch roared, and drove his fist into the shapeshifting face.

The puppet was soft, a humanoid sac of fluid. The newborn face split open under his hammering blows, plasma and blood and half-formed organs spilling out as the puppet was rent to shreds. It offered no resistance, leaving Storch to realize that it had only been offered up as a punching bag. All around him, the island of Keogh went about its myriad tasks, unmoved.

The umbilical cords retracted, but Storch seized them and tore them out by the roots. Ichor and blue-white arcs of bio-electricity jetted out of the throbbing cables, and things better left unseen were ripped out of the pulsing wall. His eyes shut against any further blasphemy, Storch screamed, "It's over, fucker! The war's over! You lost!"

"Did I? Then you have much to learn about war, Zane."

He froze. "They got RADIANT, or didn't you know, motherfucker? They cut off your dick, you can't make any more! They'll hunt you down and burn you wherever you hide."

The cables in his grip went limp and withered, their severed ends tumbling out of the gushing womb. The starry sky above went black as the lagoon's canopy shut overhead.

"RADIANT was only a crutch. We've absorbed the lessons of the Old Ones, Zane. Technology will only get you so far, but you have to know when to let go, and adapt. As I told you, there were other tools—"

In the blue-limned gloom, a million unseen things slid against each other, growing closer to Storch. His eyes ached with change, growing into lamp-like disks that soaked up the light and showed him that the entire island was coming alive and converging on him, countless tentacles armed with an array of alien organs and appendages. He closed his eyes.

"Very soon, all my children will become One. One mind, one body, thousands of cells scattered over the globe. We will not need machines to grow any more. We will use the first tools of the Old Ones to spread our message."

Storch grew claws. His armor grew into a carapace on his back, the keratin shell meeting the crown of his skull. His blood sang with adrenalin and endorphins and strange proteins heralding stranger changes yet to be. He knew it would be useless. His stomach bathed itself and its contents in acid.

"The message will go out as a virus milder than the flu. Once infected, the biosphere will undergo the most remarkable evolutionary leap in its four-billion year history overnight. It will suffer fatigue and a slight elevation in body temperature, go to sleep, and awaken as a new species, a new mind."

Storch leapt out from the ledge just as the tentacles lunged for him. He seized a bundle of thick, segmented flagella and scaled up them to their root, slashing in every direction at limbs that tried to pry him off.

"Why do you fight it, Zane?" the island asked. "I am the Life Force, now. I was the first, and I will be the last."

Storch plunged his claws into the yielding wall of the island. Fanged tendrils lashed at his back, but he was faster, diving into the cavity he'd made and enlarging it with his madly flailing hands and feet. "I only want to live long enough to see you die, fucker."

The wound convulsed and spat him out. He spun in the air, claws carving a path through the tentacles as he tumbled to the lapping water below.

"I know the Mission is coming to bomb us, Zane. You couldn't have got here without them, and they wouldn't have sent you unless they could kill us both. Their ingenious poison gas will be useless."

Storch reached for the bony ledge as he fell, caught it and swung back up onto it. The cloacal airlock to the bunker was clamped shut. The sky was shut out by a membrane far above his head. The walls were hundreds of feet of bone and bowel between him and an open ocean swarming with blood-mad sharks. "It'll kill you," he gasped. "It'll kill you dead, motherfucker."

Storch constricted his chest and goosed his stomach to saturate the polyvinyl pouches he'd had for breakfast. They ruptured, and the green crystalline powder inside hit the stomach acid like a bomb. Sopping up the moisture and catalyzing instantly, the powder became malachite vapor and roared up Storch's esophagus and out his mouth. Though it liquefied his throat and ate through his diaphragm, rendering him incapable of breathing, the vaporized lysing agent continued to pour from Storch like dragon's fire.

Blisters like ostrich eggs erupted in waves on his face and neck. He sank to his knees and vomited the remains of the bags and the dregs of the lysing agent, along with most of his digestive tract. His jaw sloughed off and dangled by a few disintegrating tendons. He looked up at the island of Keogh, his heart stampeding, trembling with animal triumph.

The cloud rolled across the water and climbed the walls like a prescient and pernicious carnivore. Everything it touched recoiled, scalded, but, he saw through watering, melting eyes, the chain reaction didn't come. The damage he did healed as he watched the last streamers of emerald death pour out of his mouth.

"Why should it kill me?" said the island. "It didn't kill you, and you're with me, now."

Storch crawled to the edge and dropped off. The salt water stung, but it couldn't soothe the burning of the lysing agent. He drew great gulps of it into his hollowed-out torso, let the brine flush him out. He began, even now, to heal. He would live long enough to see it. Too long—