The Omega Project (37 page)

“Huh?”

I released the dead clone, pure hatred burning in my soul as I turned to face GOLEM.

The ten-foot sphere gazed back at me in triumphant silence … checkmate.

“Would Robert Eisenbraun like to see his friend Oscar?”

Enraged, I grabbed anything within my reach, hurling objects at the six-legged orb—beakers and flasks shattering harmlessly against the bulletproof plastic—ABE altering my aim as it identified a dozen ten-inch opaque optical sensors mounted at intervals around the sphere’s chassis … the flea revolting against the elephant.

Exactly what happened next, I can only speculate. One moment, I was wielding a heavy piece of equipment—the next, I was flat on my back, my body quaking, my vision blinded behind purple spots delivered by a blue bolt of electricity.

30

In this kingdom of evil, there is no peace for the righteous. It is the wicked that inherited this tortured world, engulfed in the red, milky, cry-absorbing fog, guarding the wilted conscience of man.

—A
LEXANDER
K
IMEL
, Holocaust survivor, from the poem “We Will Never Forget Auschwitz”

In the thick suffocating squalor of darkness, the cattle car swayed and squeezed me against cold walls of bundled human flesh. No air. No food or water. Unseen men defecated and unseen women fainted, their unseen children crying out to be heard.

Whispers of conversations slipped in between the rattling rails—attempts to magnify glimmers of false hope—anything to anesthetize the insanity.

“Enough! The SS officer explained all this at the station—we are being resettled to work for the Wehrmacht. Obey and we live. Disobey and all of us shall die.”

Lies. Told to us by our oppressors to prevent a revolt; rationalized by us, their victims, who were unwilling to see the cruel reality of our situation. Hours earlier, the monsters wearing the red armbands had laid siege to our village, segregating “the
Juden
” from the rest. Our homes had been looted. Our women accosted. Laughing soldiers entertained themselves with random kills. I heard my mother scream. I saw my father’s skull spray her nightclothes red with brains and blood, his body left in the street with the others as we were marched in columns to the train station six miles away.

Through a child’s eyes, I waited for the rebellion. Our numbers were far greater than theirs, and yet there was no resistance. Worse—not a word of protest from our neighbors. Not when our people were dragged from our homes and shot in the street. Not even when we were squeezed by the hundreds into cattle cars. Terrified and isolated, we rendered ourselves sheep, fearful of upsetting the wolves that fully intended to eat us.

Desperate to breathe, I pushed and squeezed my way to the nearest rectangle of night, the window grated with steel, entwined in barbed wire. Pressing my face against the cold bars, I sucked in deep lungfuls of winter—and my probing fingers discovered a loose bolt! Using my fingernails and teeth, I managed to remove a screw, and after ten minutes of effort twisted the bar free.

Using my new tool, I pried off the barbed wire and stared at freedom rolling by at forty kilometers an hour.

“You—Boy, what do you think you are doing?” The gray-haired woman had been my third-grade history teacher; she looked at me now—her eyes crazed in madness.

“The bars are loose, we can escape.”

“Little fool! The SS counted us when we boarded, they will count us again when we disembark. Escape, and they will kill us all.”

“They will kill us all anyway.” I pushed my head and shoulders through the opening, but she thwarted my escape, grabbing my ankles and dragging me back inside.

A short time later the train slowed and the whistle blew and we arrived at the outer gates of hell.

*   *   *

“No!”

Disoriented, I opened my eyes, the nightmare lingering with my dark surroundings. Was it just a dream or something deeper—a disturbing remnant of a past life? Either way, my mind struggled to connect with the present.

It took me several minutes before I realized that the heaviness I felt was gravity pressing me to the flat top of a Hunter-Transport—one of more than fifty transhuman vessels lined up end to end like freight cars to form an orderly procession several miles long. Hovering above a mist-laden swampland, the vessels inched their way past juvenile redwood trunks, their part-human part-machine pilots silently waiting their turn to deliver their precious cargo.

Cephalopeds. Males and females; adults, adolescents, and suckling young. Some were held in oval traps, and others were stacked in blood-strewn piles, the captives rendered helpless by the ship’s gravity well.

Guarding their catches were the hunters—an assortment of Andria clones ranging from the long-haired, camouflaged beauty I had met in the woods of Virginia to the frightening genetically engineered Nosferatu freaks.

A familiar woman’s bare foot stepped in front of my face, obscuring my vision. I strained to look up beyond her orange pant leg. The figure filling out the jumpsuit belonged to the short-haired version of my fiancée, the one who had taken me to the farm.

She playfully nudged my chin with her big toe. “Ike, if you promise to behave, I’ll ease the gravitational field. But I’m warning you, the Creator sees everything and she’s not happy with you.”

The invisible weight pinning me to the porous surface dissipated. Andria helped me up, and I held on to the clone’s hand. “The Creator told me you’re an exact replica of my Andria, that you even share her memories.”

“I’m not a replica. I am Andria Saxon.”

I looked into her eyes. For all intents and purposes she really was the woman I loved, with two important distinctions: This Andria wanted to raise a family together, and, unlike my fiancée, she had never cheated on me. She was an unblemished beauty, representing a clean start in a new world, and as she leaned forward and kissed me, I realized how much I needed her.

That’s right—needed! So what if she had been cloned by the warped mind of my own creation, she was still a woman—still human. And so there’s no misunderstanding coming out of this internal journal, let me be perfectly clear—my interest was not based on my own sexual desire, nor was it to star in some Jason Sloan–concocted “Omega wet dream”; that ship had sailed the moment GOLEM “the Creator” had appeared. Having heard the computer’s explanation of things that had come to pass, my mind had finally awakened to the fact that I was no longer asleep. But with each passing moment in which I had come to accept this waking reality, I found myself experiencing a gnawing emptiness inside—a feeling I think must be shared by all castaways … the emptiness of finding oneself alone in a new world, having lost everything you have known.

In retrospect, I could not have predicted this reaction; after all I had spent my entire adult life, to paraphrase the real Andria Saxon,
“… as a recluse, living inside my own head.”

The clone …
this
Andria was an offer of reconciliation, GOLEM’s olive branch. If I could accept the machine as the Creator of this new world, then Andria would become the Eve to my Adam—the choice was mine.

But before I bit into the proverbial apple, there was another matter of the heart I had to attend to.

“I want to be with you, Andria, but first, I need to know if you’re even capable of loving me.”

“Ike, I do love you.”

“Love has to be more than just words or sex, love means placing the other person’s needs before your own.”

“Tell me what I can do to prove that to you.”

Squeezing her hand, I led her to the cephaloped trap. Pressing my face to the porous acrylic surface, I could smell the musk of Oscar’s fur, but between the darkness and the reflection of the Holy City’s habitats glowing orange in the distance, I couldn’t tell if my eight-legged companion was still alive.

“I don’t understand. Why do you care about this creature?”

“This creature saved my life. Twice. If you truly love me, then release him. Release my friend.”

“Ike, the octopeds are our enemy. They are godless vermin who seek to destroy humanity.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s fact, passed down from the beginning, when the Creator returned life to the new world. It is said that humans once ruled the land, the octopeds the sea, and there was peace. But the octopeds were jealous of man and desired to rule the land, and so they sent an object from space to destroy the moon.”

“Andria, that isn’t true.”

“It is true. The moon will return in six days, you can see the damage for yourself. The moon survived, but the impact wiped out humanity. The Creator healed the Earth, then recreated humankind in Her image.”

“The moon was struck by an asteroid, but the octopeds didn’t cause it. The octopeds weren’t even around back then; just their ancestors—timid creatures living alone in coral beds at the bottom of the sea. As for humanity being recreated in the Creator’s image—have you ever seen
Her
?”

“No one can see the Creator. We can feel Her presence when She returns to the church. We can hear Her commandments whispered in our heads. Without the Creator there would be no breeding farms or nurseries or habitats.”

“And without the octopeds, the Creator couldn’t genetically defile nature.”

“Ike, humankind was created to rule the world. Octopeds are worthless, vile creatures … lecherous devil worshippers who murdered the Creator’s son.”

“The octopeds murdered Christ?”

“Who’s Christ? I was speaking of the noble Golem. For this act, the Creator decreed that the octoped must live in servitude forever. It’s all part of the Final Solution.”

A chill ran down my spine, the coldheartedness of the clone’s words unnerving.

The transport accelerated for another hundred feet and slowed. We were getting closer to our destination … I needed to free Oscar.

The mist cleared, revealing an object floating beneath our transport. It was gray and bloated, drifting on the lake’s placid surface—an island among dozens more—a cephaloped carcass.

Did I report dozens? As I looked closer I saw thousands of dead cephalopeds littering the placid surface, their tortured remains evidence of an evil that rivaled the crimes at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka, and Theresienstadt.

My throat constricted. “Andria, what happened to them?”

“There’s nothing to be concerned about, Ike. It’s all part of the cleansing process.”

Cleansing process. Final Solution.

For evil to flourish, it required a conspiracy of silence among the locals, the acts reduced to a language of euphemisms designed to render mass murder more digestible. Hitler had used anti-Semitism to gain power and fuel his own irrational need for conquest.

Terror threats. Weapons of mass destruction.

Eight decades after the Third Reich, political extremists had fueled anti-Islamic fears to perpetrate a Middle East oil grab that had led to another world war and the Great Die-Off.

Twelve million years after mankind’s annihilation, a man-made machine was using hatred to subdue the free will of its own creations.

The transport accelerated again. In the distance I could hear the tortured shrieks of pan flutes.

“Andria, open the pod.”

“Ike—”

“Do it!”

She passed her right palm across the top of the trap, generating a spark of blue electricity. With a depressurizing
hiss,
the oval container split open, spilling Oscar on to the flattop.

I gathered the cephaloped’s head in my lap, pressing one of its tentacle palms in my hands.
ABE, is there a pulse?

THERE ARE THREE PULSES, ALL EXTREMELY WEAK. OSCAR IS DYING.

The transport lurched ahead, its bow bumping into a wooden pier. Spotlights mounted on unseen buildings blinded me. Shadows moved toward us.

“Ike, we’re here. Turn Oscar over to the Hunter-Sentries and we can return to the farm.”

“Sorry, Andria, that’s not going to happen.”

“Ike, the cleansing camps are not for humans. Now leave the damn octoped and let’s go!”

“We all have character flaws, Andria. God knows I have my anger issues, you cheated on me … at least the original Andie did. But I am not abandoning a friend to the Creator’s ghouls, and if that floating ball of chemicals tries to separate us, then you can kiss me and my sperm good-bye.”

Five adult Nosferatus stormed the transport, their clawed hands gripping my elbows, dragging me to my feet. Oscar held on, wrapping his tentacles around my upper torso as the pale, hairless, bat-winged transhumans led us across the dock to the gates of death.

31

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart—and all human hearts.

—A
LEXANDER
S
OLZHENITSYN
,
The Gulag Archipelago

Humans have been invoking God’s name as part of their interspecies slaughters since the Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec empires chose to appease their gods through human sacrifices. Generations suffered and died during the Christian Crusades. Countless innocents were “shocked and awed” during the campaigns to thwart Saddam Hussein. And as the nukes went off, the phrase “God and country” ushered in the opening battles of World War III, perhaps because it was a lot easier on the conscience to annihilate forty thousand Muslims if you truly believed God was on your side.

Thou shall not kill? More of a convenient metaphor than a commandment. A pacifist had never won a political office, nor had an atheist.

Kill, baby, kill.

Was bloodlust in our genes? Having witnessed my entire family murdered by a God-fearing, Bible-toting mob, my answer was a resounding “yes,” and that yes and the anger it had engendered in me led to the invention of ABE: If God could not keep our innate vices in check, then technology would.