The Religion War (16 page)

As he zigzagged through traffic and other obstacles, he thought of his objective, to stop the war. He had failed.The war was on. He was confused. How could it be happening when he was so sure he could stop it, so sure he was supposed to stop it, so sure it was hard-coded into his future? He hoped that maybe there was still time to stop the worst of it, but that thought evaporated with the sound of a drone passing low over his head.The second wave had begun.The streets were filled with pedestrians, the media's cameras were rolling, and the biological terror was upon them.

H2 had limited space for nonmilitary people. In case of emergency it was designed to house diplomats and politicians who lived nearby. It was the safest place in the metropolitan area. The Avatar had negotiated his own space at H2 ahead of time. Cruz had agreed, because although the Avatar creeped him out, he still seemed to know a lot. And that could come in handy.

The Avatar got in line behind a hundred people hoping to get into H2. There were mothers and children, hydrocab drivers and businesspeople. Guards worked the line, trying to find people who were preauthorized. One of the guards recognized the Avatar from his first visit and asked his name. Finding him on the list, the guard ushered the Avatar to the front of the line and into the gate, past the desperate curses of those left behind. The Avatar looked at the faces in line before entering. He knew they would all be dead in hours, ifthey were lucky. In days if they weren't. He had failed. The full weight of his failure was building inside him, corrosive and thick. The survivors would be emerging to a ruined world. Some would survive, but none would prosper. Not in this lifetime. The Avatar felt rage, an emotion he had not felt since he ascended to Avatar. Or had he ascended to anything at all? Maybe there was no such thing as an Avatar. Maybe he was insane after all.

How can a man know whether he has more awareness than anyone else, and not more mental problems? He wondered how much of the past year was even real. Was today real? Could it all be a dream? It seemed so much like a product of his imagination; his imagination was so good that the distinction between his thoughts and reality was hard to sort out. His doubts and the weight of failure converged to form a sharp pain in the Avatar's chest. For the first time in years, the patterns in his mind vanished. There was nothing. He just existed. His mind was quiet while his torso thumped in rhythmic agony. He couldn'tfeel the people around him as easily as before. He could only see them and hear them.This is what failure feels like, he thought.

H2 was chaotic, loud, bustling. Highly trained military men and women focused on theirjobs, knowing that their loved ones outside the protected walls would probably die that day. There was no security inside H2 to prevent people from roaming freely. Checking credentials would be too much of a distraction. The Avatar's arms and legs felt heavy. The sleeplessness of the past week had started to catch up with him. He was hungry now too. Starving. He didn't remember the last time he had eaten. There was an unpleasant calmness about failure, he thought. His mind was released from big thoughts. It was too late. Now it was about survival, eating, sleeping, and staying sane. He wondered how he could have been so wrong. His mentor, the prior Avatar, had predicted this war. Since then, he had been preparing for it, learning everything he could, becoming more aware, sharpening his thinking skills. In the end, it wasn't enough. War was upon the world. Or had he imagined the prior Avatar? Was it the day he became aware or the day he went insane? He was only sure that he couldn't know the answer to that question. No one can know if they are deluded.That's just the way it works.

The Avatar wandered to the officers' lounge, where a crowd of civilians—mostly politicians—was gathering. Everyone was on the phone, talking to those left behind, assuming it would be the last time most of them spoke with each other.

The Avatar's attention moved to the corner of the room, where a string of curses emerged in a familiar voice. A pink-haired woman jabbed at the keypad of her phone, held it to her ear, cursed andjabbed again.The Avatar approached her, drawn to the only familiar face amidst the horror.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he said.

"I have connections, Captain," said Stacey, stilljabbing at her keypad. "Crap! I grabbed the wrong phone before I evacuated. I can't reach my husband.This one is filtered to someone else's call list. Crap, crap, crap! He doesn't even know I'm here. I got him approved to get into H-Two, but he doesn't know it. He's probably in the safe room at the house, trying to call me, but he can't get through to me either."

The Avatar's head pounded as he listened, knowing that her husband would be lost within hours. The war had been an abstraction to the Avatar until now. Here was a specific person who would die because he had failed. Failure made breathing difficult.

"Do you think I should start believing in God now, Captain?" Stacey said, still fiddling uselessly with her phone, as if trying it over and over again would help.

"I don't know what anyone should think right now," said the Avatar, resigned, as he let his back slide down the wall until he was sitting against it.

Stacey sat down next to him. "Is this how you figured it would turn out?" she asked.

"No," muttered the Avatar, looking at the floor.

"Tell me
your
version, Captain. How was this supposed to all work out? I need to hear a story. Make me think of something else."

Stacey closed her phone and set it on the floor next to her.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes. Get my mind off of what's happening. I know you have stories. I can tell by looking at you."

The Avatar paused, collected his breath, sighed, took another breath, and began. "About fourteen billion years ago, there existed only one particle."

"That's all? One speck?"

"One speck, as you say. Imagine, it pops into existence and in an instant it is gone, then the process repeats, like a pulse. While it exists, it is alone, singular, and complete. It can't be divided. It is the smallest piece of reality. While it is gone, time doesn't exist, because time is nothing but the motion of things compared to other things, and when nothing exists, time is meaningless."

"You're crazy. I like this. Keep talking."

"This speck, this one indivisible bit of reality, is perfect. It can't be destroyed because nothing exists to destroy it. It has no unfulfilled needs. Itis everywhere,becauseit alone exists.There is nothing outside it or over it or inside it. Nothing has dominion over it."

"So the speck is like God or something? Is that what you're saying?"

"In a universe where nothing but the speck exists, the speck is almighty."

"That's not too almighty if you ask me.A speck can't think," Stacey countered. "The speck is just a speck."

"Thinking is only useful for imperfect creatures. Humans think to survive. We think to predict the future.The speck is better than that. It doesn't need to think to survive. It has no need for insecurity or fear. It is perfect, timeless, and complete."

"It can't even talk. It's just a speck.That's not exactly omnipotent," returned Stacey.

"What does it mean to say you have power to do something that you have no motivation to do? Power that will never be used is not power at all. It is nothing but a human concept. The speck has everything it needs. It has no frailties, desires, or motivations. It simply exists, and thus it is perfect."

"This story better get better. The speck is cool, but if it becomes a movie, I'm not paying to see it."

"It gets better."

"So how'd all the other stuff get here? Did the speck create it? Or were there lots of specks?"

"It is meaningless to ask if the speck is alone or part of an infinite number of identical specks because only one existed at a time and then disappeared. There were only two conditions: existing and not existing. To a computer programmer, it was like a one and a zero .That is the most basic pattern."

"That almost makes sense, but not really. Keep going."

"Then,
two
specks popped into existence in the same place."

"Why?"

"Change is the fundamental nature of the universe, and so there is no answer to why. You might try to understand it by saying the speck was curious or that it wanted a challenge, but a speck is not burdened by human motivations."

"Okay, whatever, so then what? One speck had to get out of the way for the other one?"

"Yes. And the rhythm of existence was broken. A chain reaction started, with speck after speck coming into existence on top of one another, each one needing to move to unoccupied space, creating all the matter in the universe as it went."

"That second speck was like an evil twin. Look at all the crap it caused."

"Yes, you could imagine the first speck to be perfect, and ordered.The second speck caused chaos and motion. Everything bad that ever happens is because of the second speck. It has spawned many metaphors, chief among them: Satan."

"So now what, the good speck and the bad speck are duking it out?"

"In a manner, yes. There are two overwhelming forces in the world. One is chaos; the other is order. God—the original singular speck—is forming again. He's gathering together his bits— we call it gravity. And in the process he is becoming self-aware to defeat chaos, to defeat evil if you will, to battle the devil. But something has gone terribly wrong."

"Yeah, the war."

"Not just that. I felt I was supposed to help God become conscious, so the war could be avoided. But it didn't happen. Now I suspect that you are right: I'm crazy after all."

"What do you mean by'conscious'?"

"The Internet was, I thought, God's central nervous system, connecting all the thinking humans, so that one good thought anywhere could be available everywhere. The head would know what the feet were feeling. It would be an upper consciousness, above what the human beings that composed it would understand."

"We have an Internet. That already happened."

"Not completely .The war on terrorism stopped it from being what it was trying to be. There are too many restrictions now. People only see what the government wants them to see. Everything else is filtered. Even the phone system is crippled.You can only call approved people. God's central nervous system is incomplete. And without that, I believe the war is unstoppable. Chaos will win."

"The bad speck wins? This story sucks, if you don't mind me saying."

Stacey picked up her phone and tried dialing again. Nothing.

"Frickin" speck.

Mackey was sweating.The plastic for his safe room was taped up, he had a supply of food and water, and his television reported the progress of al-Zee's attacks on the city. He tried to work on his laptop while reporters described the war outside his windows. He couldn't ignore the Avatar's challenge of using his database skills to find the one most influential person alive, the one that could change all this, and maybe stop it. He had serious doubts that such a person could exist. He had even more doubts that the database held enough clues for him to find that one special person. But he didn't doubt his skills. If it was possible, he would do it.

Mackey shifted into his serious programming mode, a state in which he didn't feel hungry, scared, hot, or tired. Mentally he left his body and inhabited the program. He imagined the computer code as physical objects, with himself in miniature, looking around, checking the structure. It was like a pinball machine with the control of the program being the ball as it moved through each line of the program from top to bottom, being redirected by flippers and banks and obstacles, each with specific rules established by Mackey's code. When the pinball went awry, he snapped back to his normal size and typed some adjustments, then tried again.

This was undisciplined, undocumented, no-rules programming. Mackey didn't need flowcharts, staff meetings, or user requirements. He had been writing computer code since he was six. He could program as fast as he could type, over a hundred words a minute. He could code while exhausted. He could code in any mood, in any place. His cockiness was not misplaced. He thought he might be the best that ever lived and he had a habit of mentioning that to his co-workers. They thought he was a jerk, but no one doubted the claim. He was the main architect of the GIC database and a holder of eighty-three patents. He didn't just
write
code, he invented it as he went.

All the obvious approaches hadn't worked. He knew they wouldn't work before trying them, but he thought that in failure a better idea would emerge. Maybe something that didn't work would suggest a better approach. It wasn't much of a hope, but it was all he had. He was working on pure instinct, writing code by reflex, sometimes having to read it after he typed itjust to know what he wrote.The methodical method had failed. Now he was poking around in the dark, hoping to get lucky, although he would never confess to luck. It was a "managed luck," he liked to think, a process of eliminating the impossible until the possible revealed itself. It was all dark alleys and deep wells. Poke and test.

Mackey wrote some programs to help him write other programs, leveraging his considerable genius. His computer screen filled with dots of different colors, each indicating a different type of data, swirling and fluid, like dirty water. He combined code used for DNA analysis with code for fluid dynamics and created subroutines that literally evolved, changing on their own, according to the data they encountered. Like sharks in an ocean, the subroutines were attracted to the smell of blood miles away and moved toward it. This was crazy code—brilliant, unpredictable, and almost thinking.

Mackey felt his first physical sensation in an hour, a chill that ran up his back when he realized what he had done. He had created a digital ecosystem that was crossbreeding, creating virtual creatures to hunt for the Prime Influencer. It was happening at light speed. Virtual species in Mackey's code world evolved, lived, hunted, and sometimes got devoured in nanoseconds by more capable digital entities. Mackey sat back and watched as the forms of creatures flashed on his screen, each one different from the last. The virtual creatures lived offthe database as if it were the Earth. They resided on it, consumed it, then died and became part of it. Mackey had found a program that multiplied his own intelligence a billion times, then a billion times a billion times. He was in awe of his own work, watching it process, build, virtually live.