The Omega Project (40 page)

“You still haven’t explained how that asteroid struck the moon, when every astronomer predicted it would pass us by.”

“The asteroid’s trajectory was altered—that was the effect. The cause? Our grief and anger and rage as we were forced to watch our loved ones perish in the GDO. Four billion people were wiped out. Multiply the anger in your heart by the population of the planet during those dark times, then calculate the electromagnetic deviations necessary to alter the trajectory of that asteroid just enough so that it struck the moon.”

“It’s an interesting theory, Dharma. I don’t believe it, but it’s interesting.”

“Denial is a trait of the spirit of the Hungry Ghost. It comes from the inner rage fueled by your past lives. It remains harbored in an internal emptiness that can never be filled.”

“Maybe you’re wrong about that. Maybe I can fill that emptiness by saving the cephalopeds from annihilation.”

“As I told you before, you cannot achieve enlightenment from anger.”

“What you call enlightenment, I call seeking justice.”

“Seek justice or seek happiness. You cannot have them both.”

I turned, registering the big male’s presence even before he entered our section of the cave.

Revitalized with my blood, Oscar was again an imposing beast. Moving to the hot springs, the cephaloped slid into the water, then extended two of its powerful tentacles, placing one sucker pad over my solar plexus, the other over Dharma’s.

Focusing my thoughts, I greeted my friend.
It’s good to see you.

No reply. Not even a simple ‘thank you.’

YOU EXPECT GRATITUDE?

So you can hear me. As for the gratitude, you were less than a minute from death. I did manage to save your life. Of course, you’ve saved mine on numerous—

YOU LEFT THE COLONY. YOUR ACTIONS MUTED SIX VOICES.

Six voices? Dharma, do you understand?

The cephaloped revere each beating heart as a voice from the Holy Spirit. When the Andria clone slaughtered Oscar’s companions, she did so dishonorably, muting their voices.

I’m sorry. Seeing the woman … the voice I was once bonded to … it confused me. Oscar, do you know where Dharma and I come from?

YOU COME FROM BEFORE.

Yes, I suppose that’s correct. Our awakening in your world … it was an accident.

NO ACCIDENT. THE LIGHT THAT BRINGS THE REBIRTH MOON SUMMONED MY VOICE TO AWAKEN THE ONE WHO SLEEPS.

I turned to Dharma.

“From what I’ve been able to learn, the Rebirth Moon is a very rare lunar event—a spiritual happening among the cephaloped that will lead to a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Your awakening was set for the last full moon which precedes the event—an event set to take place tomorrow night.”

“Dharma, how can the moon prevent the machine I programmed twelve million years ago from systematically exterminating Oscar’s people?” I turned to the cephaloped.
Oscar, there’s a voice in my head that tells me we may be able to create a weapon that can destroy GOLEM using the equipment aboard
Oceanus
. If the next full moon really is tomorrow night, then we have to hurry before the tide rises and sweeps the habitat back out to sea. I’m going to need your help.

THE COLONY WILL DECIDE.

35

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

—D
ENIS
D
IDEROT

Roused by ABE’s internal alarm, I opened my eyes. I was curled against Dharma’s back, the two of us spooning naked, sandwiched between giant spinach leaves. For a long moment I lay there, warmed by our shared body heat, bound by our place in history—the last two humans on Earth.

Were GOLEM’s clones human? To me, they were animated flesh, programmed to hunt and kill and raise offspring that never cried and could not procreate. That latter chore was performed in a lab by a machine—a computer implanting its designer eggs into incubators, the developing fetuses fed by artificial placenta until they were ready to crawl. They were human hybrids that would never love or be loved, experience the confusion and desires of adolescence, or the challenges and triumphs of adulthood. Theirs was an existence void of the shadow of their own mortality. They were animals bred to follow the commands of their master, their place in this world secured by my own “prime directive” that had salvaged the genetic blueprints of their species at the cost of another.

And yet, despite having been hunted down and butchered to near extinction, the cephalopeds refused to hate their enemy or rebel against them. Having congregated last night, the colony had agreed that Oscar would accompany and assist us in preparing a weapon to dispose of the “GOLEM entity,” provided it would do no harm to the transhuman race. No matter how I tried, I could not convey to these giving but simpleminded creatures that, even with GOLEM gone, the humans would most likely continue to hunt the cephaloped out of sheer habit. At one point, I confused them further by telling them the story of the scorpion and the frog—the frog offering its enemy a ride across a stream upon its back, only to be stung by the scorpion, who knew it would drown yet struck the frog anyway because that’s what scorpions do.

I realized the tale’s lesson was lost on the cephalopod after learning—in this time period—that frogs eat scorpions.

Yes, and what cephalopeds do is allow their kind to be butchered.

The parallels to the Holocaust infuriated me.

And then there was Dharma. In terms of beauty, she was not as exotic as Andria, and yet I found myself drawn to her in a deeper way—one which I found both compelling and at times annoying, for she would never hesitate to “push my buttons.”

Was she intended to be the Eve to my Adam? I had fallen into that mental trap back at the farmhouse. Of course, at the time I had been convinced that I was in the midst of an Omega dream; now that I realized I was awake, any hope of a normal existence while GOLEM and its creations were around seemed impossible.

Was there even a chance Dharma and I could live out our lives in peace? In truth, I had serious doubts GOLEM could be destroyed by any combination of components found aboard
Oceanus
.

So why risk exposing myself or Dharma to regain access to the crippled sphere?

The answer was as simple as it was terrifying. GOLEM was omnipotent. Driven by its own closed-looped ego, the machine would not let us live. Nor would it allow us to die. It would send its minions to capture us, then it would torture us for eternity because that was
its
nature. And that was the real reason I was returning to
Oceanus
—not to construct a weapon to short-circuit the computer but to find a quick yet humane way to end our lives.

I thought about the
Titanic
. While the women and children were getting into lifeboats and the men scrambled to remain out of the frigid sea as long as possible, some couples had faced death by cuddling together one last time in their beds, even as the icy waters reached their cabins.

The thought saddened me. Sliding my forearm between Dharma’s breasts, I pulled her closer, nuzzling the back of her neck. She responded by grinding her buttocks into my groin and we made love for perhaps the last time—the last two humans on Earth.

*   *   *

It took us nearly three hours to trek west through the cave. Oscar handled the brunt of the labor, carrying two tightly woven baskets made from ilala palm fronds, water grass, reeds, and the bark of banana trees. A rigid, bottle-shaped basket held several gallons of water; a larger basket, woven with alternating closed and open weaves allowed air to circulate to keep the food within fresh while keeping the insects out. Decorative, waterproof, and extremely durable, the cephaloped had surpassed the basket weaving skills of the African Zulu.

Dharma pointed out the intricate patterns of emerald green dye (acquired from fermented dung) that encircled a distorted red-orange figure intended by the artist to represent the moon. “According to the cephalopeds, this is what will happen tomorrow night as the moon passes over the South Pole. It does not tell us much.”

“ABE was able to calculate the lunar orbit based on the extended length of the moon’s cycle. Tonight’s event is a perigee full moon, meaning its near side will move closer to Earth than usual—approximately thirteen thousand miles closer—making it appear even bigger and brighter. As far as those green patterns on the basket—I have no clue. To me, it looks like some sort of nuclear explosion.”

The thought caused Dharma to grab my wrist. “Ike, do you think ABE intends to use the plutonium available in
Oceanus
’s reactor to create a nuclear bomb?”

Before I could respond, my bio-chip cut me off internally.

CONSTRUCTING A NUCLEAR WEAPON IS NOT FEASIBLE. THE PROCESS OF SPLITTING ATOMS IN ORDER TO GENERATE A NUCLEAR CHAIN REACTION REQUIRES PLUTONIUM-239, AN ISOTOPE WITH A HALF-LIFE OF 24,100 YEARS. THE PLUTONIUM-239 ABOARD THE
OCEANUS
REACTOR CEASED RADIATING HEAT TWELVE MILLION, ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SIX YEARS AGO.

“Apparently, the plutonium aboard
Oceanus
lost its kick long ago.”

Oscar was waiting for us in the chute, a final sixty-degree, thousand-foot descent that would take us down to the beach. Coiling each of us within a pair of its powerful tentacles, the big male cephaloped climbed down in controlled lurches, using me and Dharma as counterweights to the baskets.

The wind greeted us halfway down, howling full force by the time our feet touched sand. Following the narrow cavern, we exited among boulders into daylight, greeted by an ominous gray sky and a seemingly endless stretch of beach, pockmarked by holes. They were easy enough to avoid, randomly situated at roughly four to six per acre.

In the distance, perhaps a mile to the northwest, was
Oceanus
.

Oscar’s stalk eyes analyzed the desert canvas before us like an American Indian reading the terrain. The cephaloped hesitated, something clearly bothering it. Only after positioning himself between us did he lead us out, the sucker pads from his tentacles maintaining contact with our wrists as if the creature were our parent.

It took me only eight paces before I registered what Oscar must have felt—a static charge in the air that caused the hair on my arms to stand on end. The cephaloped’s fur danced like porcupine quills on his tentacles, Dharma’s long silky hair actually sparked—as did the darkening heavens, which flashed green lightning.

Fifty yards ahead, a funnel of tea-colored sand suddenly swirled up into the roiling sky—a miniature twister that dispersed within twenty seconds. Two more vertical columns of earth shot up to our left, sending us scurrying in the opposite direction as Mother Nature went haywire in a twister version of whack-a-mole—and we were the moles!

I heard a high-pitched blast that reminded me of a train’s whistle, and then Oscar was drawn upward into the air. Dharma let go, but I held on fast until the funnel wrenched him free, the twister launching the stunned cephaloped thirty-five feet above our heads before hurling him sideways.

We ran toward him, Dharma sprinting out ahead—the ground disappearing beneath my feet as I plummeted into gray darkness, falling five stories before the tunnel of sand curled and caught me, sending me tumbling into a horizontal burrow, where a stench attacked my senses, stinging my eyes like mustard gas.

Twenty feet away, unblinking crimson specks watched me in the semidarkness. As my watering eyes adjusted to the dim surroundings, I saw what appeared to be a pair of four-foot claws rise away from a tanklike body, the sharp appendages scraping sand from the eight to ten-foot-high ceiling.

People ate crabs; do giant crabs eat people?

I wasn’t about to wait around to find out.

Regaining my feet, I retreated back to the vertical shaft, burying myself in cold, wet sand as I futilely attempted to climb and claw and dig my way out of a shaft ABE annoyingly informed me to be fifty-six feet deep.

The car-size crustacean scuttled sideways as it sized me up, its perpetual gaze almost amused by my escape attempt.

A shrill blast of pan flute sent the monster backing away.

Oscar grabbed me in one of his tentacles and climbed up the shaft at a frenzied pace. Seconds later, the giant crab appeared behind us, its exoskeleton pale blue in the brightening light.

We broke free of the hole and ran toward Dharma, who was beckoning us fifty yards ahead.

But the holes functioned as sound amplifiers, and within seconds the beach was aswarm with dozens of giant crustaceans, the creatures coming toward us from all directions.

And then they weren’t. One second they were converging upon us across the flat terrain like monsters from an old sci-fi B movie, the next they had popped into smoldering scorched heaps of burnt crab meat.

The three of us remained motionless, afraid to take a wrong step. There had been no warning, no telltale laser beams or explosives.

Internally, ABE was analyzing my sight memory. Within fifteen seconds the bio-chip had traced the type and source of the weapon.

THE WEAPON WAS A MICROWAVE BEACON. POINT OF ORIGIN: AERIAL DRONE. LOCATION: EASTERN SKY. ALTITUDE: 371 METERS.

I pointed in the advised direction. “There’s a drone up there somewhere.”

Dharma squinted at the volatile eastern sky. “One of GOLEM’s?”

“I’m guessing from Oscar’s reaction that it’s more likely the mysterious Heavenly Ones Who Nurture. Either way, let’s get inside
Oceanus
before we get blasted by that storm.”

*   *   *

The weeks stranded on shore had not been kind to the massive underwater habitat. Lacking power, the ship’s internal compartments had become stifling, airless chambers that had slowly bled the arboretum dry. The good news: the bees and other “wildlife” were dead. The bad—we would require air supplies to function inside.