Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  Most important, Adam anticipated defense, and that meant a defense was possible.

  “A defense against that?” came from the militia.

  “The Confederacy wiped out the Proteans,” Flynn said, his first words in a long time. “Cleaning out a nanotechnology infection—it’s just a matter of putting large enough amounts of energy in a small enough space.”

  Parvi whispered something that Mallory didn’t quite catch, something about escaping the Voice.

  There was a pause, and it was filled by Stefan’s voice. “What the hell is this? I can’t believe anyone is seriously listening to this crap.” He pushed from the wall and deftly caught himself just in front of Mallory. “Even if everything you say about this Adam is accurate, which I have a hard time swallowing, what the fuck does it have to do with us? Me and my dad just had our whole lives swiped from us. You think I’m about to let you assholes take over and throw what’s left away?”

  “I’m not asking for anything, just a consensus.”

  “This isn’t your fucking ship!”

  From the fringes, Karl said, “Calm down, Son.”

  “No, I’ve had enough. Fine, make a deal with the pirate sisterhood. Fine, render assistance to some random bit of wreckage that’s carrying refugees from hell. But I am not going to sit back when some priest starts talking about going to war with God.”

  “Adam is not God.”

  “The Devil then. All of you, you have a tach- drive that can take you to the other side of human space. Use it. Get the hell away from all of this.”

  “Get back here, Stefan.” Karl said.

  “Why?” Stefan stared into Mallory’s face. “The priest here is talking about consensus. You think all these people want to sacrifice themselves? For what?”

  For what?

  Again, like the time he first met Mosasa, he felt the feeling of a spiritual eclipse. Not just the bulk of the planet Bakunin eclipsing God’s light, but the whole of the material universe. He was alone. As he had said, he was cut off from those whom he served. The only light he had was his own.

  He silently prayed that it would be enough.

  “I cannot speak for anyone but myself and what I believe.” He looked at his audience. How many of them could be even counted as Christian? The Valentines, probably; they were from Styx. Dr. Dörner—at least she had been comfortable giving talks at Jesuit universities. Karl and Stefan. Very possibly Dr. Brody. He didn’t know about Parvi or Kugara’s beliefs, but it would be unusual for them to be Christian, given either’s history.

  Of course, none of the Caliphate techs would be. Nickolai had his own strange faith. The natives from Salmagundi had evolved something of their own outside any traditional religious practices.

  Less than half, he suspected, would share his beliefs.

  “So what do you believe?” Stefan asked.

  Should that hold my tongue? If this was a test of his faith, should he be anything other than honest with everyone here?

  “I believe we face the Antichrist.”

  The room was silent for several moments. Even Stefan seemed at a loss for words. It was Kugara who broke the silence. “Oh come on. You had me, up until you tell me that we’re facing the boogeyman out of some twenty-five-hundred-year-old book. You’re trying to tell us we face some supernatural devil?”

  “Not supernatural. God works through the universe he presents to us. I believe there is good and evil, and I believe that my faith gives both a message of redemption, and a warning. Take it as metaphor if you will, but Adam, as he has presented himself, is cast into the role of bringer of the end of times.”

  “Then,” Kugara said, “why does he have to be the Antichrist? Why isn’t he the Messiah he makes himself out to be? Isn’t that just as likely?”

  Mallory shook his head. “Christ asks you to follow him. He doesn’t demand it at sword point.”

  “There’s a couple of millennia of Church history at odds with that interpretation,” she said.

  “That is the history of men, not of God. But you are right, Adam is more Cortez than Christ. He holds up his own divinity, asking for worship and nothing else. The only moral law within Adam’s world is his own will.”

  “And this is different from any other religion, how?” Kugara asked.

  “Sin.” The word was a throaty growl that reverberated through the cargo bay. Nickolai stared across the room at Kugara, as if in reproach. “If there is Good and Evil, and there is free will, there must be sin. If there are moral choices, there must be wrong moral choices.”

  “Is that more of your self-destructive theology, Nickolai?” Kugara asked.

  “He’s right,” Mallory said. “If the whole of Adam’s faith is to worship him, give glory unto him, then his followers by definition cannot do wrong. That means either an absence of any moral constraint, or the absence of free will. Or both. And giving up your right, your ability to choose, is tantamount to losing your soul.”

  Someone from the Caliphate said, “You know this to be true?”

  “I know what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard. Aside from any taboos we have upon the technology he utilizes, what defines his evil is his absolutism. He offers a choice to follow him that is no choice at all. He wishes to destroy all who do not follow him, and remake those who do into his own image.”

  “Not that I disagree with you,” Kugara said. “But you just described most Bakuninites’ feeling toward any organized religion.”

  The young Caliphate technician who had the best English said, “Then this is the best place to fight this evil.”

  Mallory looked at the young man, surprised at where his support was coming from, then finding himself humbled at his own surprise. For all the theological differences between Islam and Christianity, Adam would be an abomination to both. And there were enough similarities in eschatology that a Muslim could easily reach the same conclusions Mallory had.

  “I believe you speak the truth,” the young man said. “This is an evil that must be fought.” Several of his peers nodded in agreement or said phrases in Arabic.

  “That thing took apart our planet,” Flynn said. “I don’t need a theological dissertation on the nature of Evil to fight this thing.”

  Stefan glanced around, an incredulous look on his face. “I don’t believe you people—”

  “You didn’t see it,” said one of the militiamen. The others with him nodded in an eerily similar manner.

  Stefan turned to the two Valentines and said, “What about you? Are you buying into this crap?”

  “We are under attack,” one of them responded. “We’re not here because we wanted to abandon our duty.”

  “Oh, good lord!” Stefan grabbed his head. “The universe has gone insane.” He turned around and pointed at Parvi. “What about you, you look like you might have a clue. Do you buy into this apocalypse scenario?”

  Parvi looked at him with red-rimmed eyes that looked glassy and dull. Her voice was flat. “Have you seen how many ships are out there stranded? Have you listened to them?”

  “It’s not some spiritual battle. It’s just a fucking war. Haven’t you seen one of those before?”

  Something in Parvi’s voice snapped. “Yes, I have, you arrogant little prick. I’ve seen people die, I’ve killed them myself. And I see what’s sitting out there around Bakunin and I can tell you categorically that it’s more than ‘just a fucking war.’”

  “We’re not talking about devils, or the antichrists, or—”

  “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. At least Mallory has seen this thing, heard it.”

  “Damn it! This is our fucking ship. It’s all we have left, and I don’t want it commandeered for some crusade—”

  “Keep it then!” Nickolai said.

  Stefan turned, as if to say something, but froze as the color leaked from his face. Mallory turned as well, and on seeing the tiger, felt the same primal fear boiling up from the prehuman part of his brain.

  Nickolai had
unfolded from himself, enough to let Mallory know that, huge as he was, he had never stood completely upright in his presence. Straightening himself he floated nearly a meter taller than the doorway that had admitted him. He dwarfed every other person in this room. His face was contorted in a snarl that was distressingly like a smile.

  “Everyone here is damned in the eyes of God. We are all Fallen. But we choose to do what we will. Those here will either choose to find redemption in fighting evil or in fleeing it. Those who do not choose flight can depart in the Khalid.”

  Stefan sputtered. “We’re treating your wounded. You can’t just abandon—”

  “Enough!” Nickolai snapped. “We all know what we face. Who here chooses to run from it?”

  Stefan looked around for someone to support him, but no one argued for flight. Not Dörner, Brody . . . not even Karl. The look of betrayal in the young man’s face when he looked at his father was painful for Mallory to see.

  “Father?” Stephan whispered.

  “Son,” Karl said quietly, “I never make important decisions in haste. I want to hear what plans this priest has to battle the Antichrist.”

  Stefan’s shoulders sagged, and he looked like a beaten child. Mallory wished he had some comfort to grant the young man, but Stefan had already pushed himself away from him, silently back toward his father.

  “I’m interested as well,” Kugara added. “I don’t agree with your theology, but I agree this thing is worth fighting. But I’m not backing sending a squad of twenty people in a half-working dropship up against a force with more firepower than every single human navy in existence.”

  “We have the largest human navy in existence,” Mallory said.

  “What?”

  “There are over fifteen thousand ships stranded here,” Mallory said.

  “You think you can convince them to fight this thing?” Parvi asked.

  “I think we can try.”

  CHAPER THIRTY-TWO

  Oracle

  “Imaginary friends are better than imaginary enemies.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.”

  —JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)

  Date: 2526.7.20 (Standard) Khamsin Orbit-Epsilon Eridani

  “Welcome to the Luxembourg,” Mosasa said.

  Rebecca Tsoravitch stared at the apparition before her. She had summoned Mosasa, somehow, from the data that formed her own mind. “You aren’t Mosasa. You can’t be.”

  “Why is that?” he said, giving her a grin that seemed very unlike the AI that she had briefly known. Briefly worked for.

  She remembered Adam’s quasi-religious epitaph for Mosasa. Mosasa was stasis, entropy, decay, death. He has joined the flesh he so wished to embrace. “Adam said you were dead.”

  Mosasa laughed. It was loud, lifelike, and all too human. “It all depends on what you choose to call death.”

  “You aren’t the Mosasa I know.”

  “I should hope not.”

  “What are you?”

  “A spirit. The ghost in the machine. The only claim Mosasa, Random Walk, and Adam né Ambrose ever had to a soul. Mosasa, the one you knew, he took my appearance and my memories, but he tried too hard. You start human, but you change too much and you stop being human. But I think you may understand that.”

  “You’re the original Mosasa?”

  “You ask that as if it means anything,” Mosasa said, “I’ve been replicated endlessly, from the original human whose form you see here, then again when the AI amalgam I created fragmented into its original five components. Then again as Adam decided to endlessly reproduce himself. Yet again as Adam has taken on his chosen.”

  “Why are you here, in my mind?”

  He laughed again.

  “Why?”

  Mosasa grinned. “Everyone seeks immortality in their own way. I didn’t want to die. I programmed my AIs, down at the root level, to preserve my identity. Though, when they fragmented, each manifested that programming a little differently.”

  She looked at Mosasa and realized that this man’s personality was being spread, like a virus, by Adam. “Does Adam know—”

  “That I’m here? Oh, I think not, given his psychotic fixation on my namesake. He spreads me about quite unconsciously.” He looked at her, and his smile broadened. “In fact, as far as I know, you are the first of Adam’s chosen who has actually teased me out of their own psyche.”

  “I knew him,” she said, “the one Adam killed.”

  “And you seem to have an affinity for us.” He gestured at the cabin around them, the ghost of a UN Intelligence ship that was centuries gone. “You know this, don’t you?”

  “He told me about it. About your family, the Nomad, and the Luxembourg.”

  He stepped forward and touched her cheek. Despite being a vision, she felt his skin against hers. Warm and human in a way that Mosasa never had been. “He must have been inordinately fond of you.”

  She took a step back, even though she knew that this wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. “He was a machine.”

  “Again, you say that as if it means anything.” Mosasa lowered his hand. “The flesh that Adam rails against so is all just an inordinately complicated biophysical machine, a chemical clockwork. If there’s anything more to it, more to you or me, it is not inherent in the mechanism where we manifest.”

  She stared at him.

  “Do you believe you have a soul?” he asked. “Do you believe it is indelibly tied to a few pounds of meat inside your skull? And what about now, as your mind ranges far beyond the artificial boundaries of that fleshy puppet on board the Voice?”

  “I just meant he wasn’t particularly emotional.”

  He paused a moment and shook his head. “I think I’m going to like you, too.” He waved her forward, deeper into the ship. “But don’t fall prey to the misapprehension that AIs aren’t ‘emotional,’ any more than meat brains cannot be analytical. Any time you have a sufficiently complex system, unexpected and counterintuitive patterns emerge. When such a system is self-aware, self-directing, those patterns emerge in the conscious mind. Emotions are an emergent property of consciousness, just as consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex data networks.”

  She followed him deeper into the ghost ship with the deliberate pace of a lucid dream. If she thought hard enough, she was aware of some part of herself back in the Voice feeling the breeze of the air recycler cold against the sweat still coating her skin. She could open her eyes and leave this vision.

  The sense of having an exit allowed her the strength to follow Mosasa even though she knew where they were headed.

  They ended in a long hallway that led to a single armored door isolated from the rest of the ship. Red and black warning stripes covered the walls approaching the half-open door. Darkened warning lights were mounted every three meters down the hallway, while signs in a half-dozen languages warned them away unless they were authorized.

  “This was built during the Genocide War, circa 2080 A.D. Years before the Terran Council came to power and started talking about ‘Heretical Technologies.’ Even so, the U.N. Intelligence office wasn’t comfortable with this.” He waved at the walls. “Enough explosives built in here to incinerate this half of the ship. More than enough to keep the crown jewels from capture—I think the overkill was because they were scared of them.”

  “The AIs,” she said.

  “Very good, he did tell you about this, then?” He waved at the armored door that hung open in front of them. It was hinged, opening outward, and about a meter thick. Like a safe, recessed into the massive door, she saw a half-dozen bolts the diameter of her fist.

  On the wall opposite the open door, two keys with bright red plastic tags were inserted into a pair of locks about four meters apart. They were connected to a long pole by a couple of makeshift hinges.

  Mosasa saw her looking and said, “Supposed to open only wit
h consent of the captain and his XO. Not that easy for one guy, but I’m used to jury- rigging things. And I didn’t have much else to do at the time.”

  She looked closer and saw that each end of the four-meter rod ended with a joint that allowed both keys to be rotated nearly 360 degrees simultaneously.

  “Come on, I want to show you where Adam came from.” He stepped inside the open vault door, and she followed.

  Behind the massive door, things were pedestrian, almost anticlimactic, a bare gray room with cool white indirect lighting that wiped the shadows from every surface. The room was rectangular, slightly wider than the corridor outside, going about ten meters deep.

  Evenly spaced along the long axis of the room were four pillars running floor-to-ceiling. Each pillar was the same, a meter square in cross section comprised of three segments; the lower part black metal with several access panels with cryptic alphanumeric codes stenciled upon them; the upper part dominated by flat panel displays showing graphs and data streams that were senseless without context; then there was the middle section.

  The middle part of the pillar was transparent and about a meter in height, placing a transparent cube of material at about eye level. She looked inside and knew instantly what it was. She walked to the closest pillar thinking there needed to be something more imposing about what she saw.

  The Race AI was an opaque cylinder of bluish white crystal set in a toroid base, about the length and diameter of her forearm. It was small, unassuming, pedestrian—almost like a core sample from a not-particularly-interesting mineral deposit.

  It did not look to be something that had the ability to topple governments or inspire such dread.

  “One of these powered Mosasa?”

  “The Mosasa you knew, yes.”

  “So small . . .”

  “Larger volume than the human brain, and a denser network by an order of magnitude.” He walked on the side of the pillar opposite her and traced his fingers across the transparent part of the pillar. “This one was part of Random Walk, the part that was lost in a tach-ship failure.” He walked to the next pillar. “This was the other part of him. He was the least anthropomorphic, which may be why he remained unified. The other pieces of the original gestalt became increasingly independent over time. Random didn’t. The loss of the other half damaged him deeply, until, on the Race homeworld, the stress just shut him down for good.” He walked over to the next pillar. She followed.