“Nes and I really got along. He would come up with ideas that he knew could work, but he didn’t have the math, so he’d bring them to me, and I’d tell him he was insane and then stay up for a week straight coding and taking stims, making it happen anyway. We were the ones who figured out how to attach data to junk DNA and pull it out every few breeding cycles.”
Mombutabwe held his position for only a scant two decades, a trifling amount in a world where the average lifespan of a member of the Church of the Enlightened could be expected to last more than five hundred years. It was during this time that the final work was done on the great experiment for which Havenmont had been created, a project of such significance that its very existence had been kept secret from the general populace.
Limited in space, unable to augment all of the city’s people quickly enough, outvoted, and forced to enact the final plan by parliament and other high-ranking officials, Mombutabwe and Montgomery had done the only thing they could think to do: they seeded the population of the ghettos with the special DNA that would eventually produce the purple-eyed girl and her protector. They made sure that the RDIS network would grant access to anyone carrying Mombutabwe’s genetic signature, and they deployed the artificial intelligence that would govern the city’s mainframe until the time came when those left behind were ready to start anew the project that the city had been built for.
With this done, Mombutabwe, Montgomery, and all those who inhabited the city proper boarded a great number of ships that had been built underneath the mountains, and they launched themselves into space. There, the ships would link together into one gigantic, self-sustaining city and begin their journey out into the universe. The citizens of this floating city hoped to find a new, unspoiled planet upon which to settle, and there continue their work to unravel the mysteries of God.
Whether or not they had accomplished this goal no one on Earth could say, not even this shadow version of Allen that they had left behind. After their departure, communication bursts came for a time. Two hundred and sixty-eight years in, just as the floating city was reaching Alpha Centauri and – having found no suitable planets there to colonize – preparing to move on to the next destination in their course, communication ended. Messages were taking more than four years to return to Earth, and the crew of the ship said in their final dispatch that the parliament felt the ever-growing expanse of time between sending and receiving made the messages a worthless waste of energy.
Those who had departed were now truly separated from those who remained behind, and all that was left was ten thousand years of darkness.
Chapter 22
Pehr was sitting on the cold steel floor of the mainframe room, holding his head in his hands. More than six hundred years of history had been force-fed into his brain in what seemed only a few moments, though in truth it had been nearly six hours of non-stop inundation. If someone had asked him his own name at that very instant, he might not have been able to summon the answer from his addled mind.
Tasha was sitting next to him, staring straight forward, her body slightly hunched over and her face devoid of all expression. Pehr spoke her name but she did not immediately respond. He couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do, and so they sat like that, in silence, for some time. At last Tasha spoke, the words coming listless and leaden from her lips.
“They left us.”
Pehr felt himself nodding. Yes. Here they were, sitting in the middle of this dead city, the last descendants not of the great men who had built this place but of those pilgrims who had come too late to gain entry onto the shuttles. These abandoned souls, the parasites of whom Tasha had spoken, had lived at the edge of the city until the malfunctioning gardeners had driven them out entirely, whereupon they had split between the Plains of Tassanna and Pehr’s land. At some lost point in history, the Lagos had come between the two and contact had ended.
“I’m not proud of what we did,” Allen said. “We left you, or at least the ones who became you. Nes cried … that’s the last image I have of him, before the Allen that I am and the Allen that went off into space split. Just Nes sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, crying like a baby.”
“They wouldn’t give him any more time,” Pehr said. “That’s it, right? So you left us here with codes built into our bodies that would produce someone like Tasha who would be inherently drawn to someone like me, who held the Mombutabwe DNA and could get her past the RDIS units.”
“Yes.”
“Why bother? What was the damned point?” Pehr asked. He was still too shaken by all that he had seen to be furious, but he was filled with an almost overwhelming disgust.
“We wanted you to follow,” Allen said. “The rest of you weren’t ready, and we thought … Nes and I, we thought maybe if we gave a bit of ourselves to you, then it might produce some scientists. Some mathematicians. Maybe we were crazy, but there wasn’t any time. They were locking off the inner city. All of this knowledge was just going to lie here dormant, and we had to give it to someone.
“I know you must hate me, and Nes, and all of the rest of us for what we did. I guess probably you even hate us for screwing with your DNA and bringing you back here … but we had the best of intentions.”
“They say the road to hell is paved with such,” Tasha said, and still her voice sounded distant and dead.
“So I hear,” Allen said. “We did what we did, and it’s too late by thousands of years to make up for it anyway. Even if I had any way of communicating with that ship, which I don’t, they wouldn’t come back.”
Pehr gave a short, grim laugh. “Why return to rescue a bunch of savages?”
“You’re not savages anymore,” Allen told him.
“What did you do to us?”
“Basic set of augmentations. Your brains are now host to a whole colony of microcomputers built to communicate with your neurons.”
“So you’ve made us smarter.”
The gigantic, projected head shook back and forth. “Nope. Your brains can now store and retrieve data in much greater amounts, and in much better ways, but you’re no smarter than you were when you walked in here. We never did crack that one. I can feed you calculus algorithms and you could do some pretty complex stuff, but you’ll never wield it like … well, like I did. Your storage capacity’s been increased, not your processing ability. And by the way, Pehr … how would you say ‘the man dreamed a golden vision of God’ in French?”
“L’homme rêvait d’une vision d’or du dieu,” Pehr said, and after a moment his eyes went wide in surprise. “I … that’s …”
“That’s data collection and presentation, is what it is,” Allen said. “You came in here only knowing the Spanish-English hybrid that you and Tasha both speak natively – though I must say, Tasha, your side has really butchered the hell out of the pronunciation. Now you both speak several languages, including French. You can speak it … but whether or not you can write poetry in it is still up to you. Do you understand?”
“We understand,” Tasha said. At last she looked up at Allen, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with deep, dark circles of exhaustion. “So … you’ve given us all of this data. Now what?”
“Well, sweetheart, that’s where this all gets interesting. In the time before the gardeners went berserk and chased you off, I had plenty of kids come in here and get augmented, but none of them ever did anything with it. A couple tried, but it’s harder than you might think to get people to listen. The RDIS units wouldn’t let anyone into the inner city, but even living on the outskirts was pretty great, back then. There were cars and TV, diet soda, a pretty unending supply of food from the hydroponic farms and the meat-sheet warehouses. Who wanted to build spaceships?”
“Lazy …” Tasha muttered.
“Humans are pretty lazy,” Allen said. “We expected that. We didn’t think it would take this long, though. Actually, it probably wouldn’t have, but—”
“But we were cut off from this place by the gardeners, and t
hen from each other by the Lagos,” Pehr said.
“Right. You two are the first to make it through since the gardeners malfunctioned. Maybe others tried, I don’t know … they never made it far enough for an RDIS to broadcast their presence on the network.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Tasha said. She stood up, wincing at the pain in her leg, and stretched. “What happens now, Allen?”
“The city belongs to you and Pehr. Whatever’s left of the old girl. You can go anywhere, enter any building … if you wanted, you could wander into the reactor cores that power the joint, but I don’t recommend it. I can help you reset the gardeners and make them friendly again. I can help you get the food-production services back online. I can help you do whatever you want, but the point is: it’s all yours and you can bring anyone you want in for augmentation, too. Bring enough of them and you could restore the whole city.”
“To what end?” Pehr asked, but he could see that the greedy look had returned to Tasha’s face. She had thought further ahead than he had, again.
“We could follow them,” she said.
The disembodied head before them nodded. “Listen, sister … over the years, either a lot of my uplinks died or the machinery floating around up there broke down. Point is, I don’t have the vision I used to, but I can still see plenty, and I can tell you this: there’s nothing else out there. There aren’t any other cities and there aren’t any functioning bunkers left. Most of the planet is still so irradiated it would kill you in minutes. The Everstorm is starting to fail. It’s been failing since we built it, really – it was never meant to last – but the failure is speeding up, and the amount of land it can keep clean is shrinking.
“This planet will survive, OK? There’s hundreds of millions of years still before the sun gets too hot for life as we know it to exist here, and the radiation will clear itself out in time, but humanity … we’re pretty much done here. The numbers have been dropping since the Great Destruction.”
“Even if we could fix the Everstorm and wait out the cleansing, it doesn’t matter,” Tasha said. “There’s nothing left on this planet for us. There is no God here.”
“Whatever’s next for the human race, it’s out there,” Allen agreed.
“So, then, what – we must bring the plainsmen and my people here?” Pehr asked.
“Yes, that must be our path,” Tasha said. “We will go back now to my family and begin our work. We will raise an army, enter the jungle, and destroy the Lagos. We will unite all Uru and bring them to this place!”
Pehr took a moment to think, head down. There was a great need tugging at him, but for some time he struggled against it. He did not want to relive that horror, that pain, no … so why did it seem so very important? Why did his very soul cry out against leaving the mountains without first making the trip that he so dreaded?
“I know you wish to return to your family …” Tasha ventured.
Pehr could fight no longer. Shaking his head, he looked up at Tasha, looked her directly in her big, purple eyes, and he told her the truth. “Before we begin, I must go see Jace.”
These words were greeted with a rare sight: abject confusion on Tasha’s part. At first it seemed she did not even understand what he meant, and yet when comprehension dawned on her, she looked no less confused.
“Pehr … why? Why would you do that to yourself?”
Pehr struggled for a time to put his feelings into words, and at last found that the simplest explanation was also the best. “I left him there. I could have braved the arrows of the Lagos and taken him from that place, given him a proper funeral, but instead I fled.”
“You would have been killed.”
“Perhaps you’re right, but I must go back. I must make reparation for what I did. I must look upon my dead cousin and beg his apology for abandoning him there in a dishonorable grave.”
“Could you not do so when we come back?”
“It will take months to rally the plainsmen, Tasha. Years, maybe. I will not let him lie there that much longer.”
“What if there are Lagos?”
“There won’t be. I saw the circle … there were no dwellings near it. They come there to make sacrifice to the broken RDIS unit, but they don’t live there.”
Tasha stared at him for some period of time, and Pehr met her eye, unashamed and willing to accept the test of conviction he saw in her gaze. At last, seeing he would not back down, Tasha sighed.
“Very well. We will leave Allen to his video games and his simulations, and we will go see your cousin and this killing machine.”
“That unit’s been off-network for thousands of years now,” Allen told them. “I’m impressed he’s still functioning. The boys over at Amfeld built those guys to last.”
“They built them to shoot lasers visible to the naked eye, too,” Pehr mused. “Why?”
Allen laughed. “Honestly, man? It looks cool.”
Pehr wondered how cool Allen would have thought it looked if he’d had to watch those beams of fire bore through a cousin’s torso. After a moment more, he let it go and moved on. “We can’t leave while the gardeners are out.”
Tasha shook her head and reached over to scratch her shoulder. She smiled. “Of course not. Allen, could you tell me when sunrise will come?”
“About an hour from now,” Allen said. “You guys took a crazy route in, though. Some of the surveillance systems are still functional so I was catching glimpses of you. I can get you back out of the city in about forty-five minutes. I’d offer you a ride, but the batteries on the last working vehicle crapped the bed about six hundred years ago.”
“We can handle the walk,” Tasha said, and Pehr made a noise of affirmation. Then her words sunk in, and he glanced over at Tasha in surprise.
“Your leg …”
“Allen has done something to us,” Tasha said.
“While you were out, I had one of the RDIS units bring in couple of nanopatch kits. They’re good for light wounds. You can’t put a severed limb back on or anything, not without more direct intervention, and the cut will still ache for a couple days, but you should be able to use your arms and legs without much trouble.”
“This city is full of miracles,” Pehr murmured, and Allen laughed.
“It’s getting low, actually. If you want more of this stuff, you’re going to need to learn how to use the synthesizers, and you’re going to need to provide some raw materials.”
“We’ll worry about that when we return,” Tasha told him, and Allen nodded.
“All right,” he said. “I guess that’s it for now.”
“You’ve been a tremendous help, Allen,” Tasha said. “I … it may be a while before I can forgive you, but I thank you.”
“If we had known …” Allen let the sentence trail, and Tasha nodded.
“I understand.”
“Let me ask you something before you go,” Allen said, and Tasha glanced at him in surprise.
“Certainly.”
“Do you have any idea how lucky you are that this kid made it through? Do you know how completely improbable it is that, once you guys were separated, you would come back together and make it through to this place without being killed?”
Tasha bit her lip, pondered, and finally shrugged.
“Perhaps it was the will of God,” she said, and then she smiled.
Chapter 23
They spent the remaining hour before dawn sitting on the marble steps and looking down at the silent ocean of gardening robots that still sat at the base of the building, waiting for them. He felt strange – exhausted, but not in need of sleep – and Tasha seemed to be in a similar state. Pehr suspected that they both had slept during their augmentation without realizing it.
They shared between them a few bites of salted tral meat and the last of the water from Pehr’s flasks, which they would refill at the base of the mountain. There was no water here, other than what fell from the sky, and where it had pooled it had grown stagnan
t and greenish; after several years without use, Havenmont’s plumbing facilities had entered into an automatic shut-down routine and, like much of the rest of the city, it would require a time consuming manual restart to enable.
Pehr no longer feared the gardeners. He knew now that they would disperse when the sun came up, and that when next he returned to the city, they could begin the process of reprogramming the murderous things and taking control of the city’s nights.
“They’re going,” Tasha said after a time. The first pink ribbons of dawn had appeared in the eastern sky, and the little metal insects had begun, one by one, to march back to wherever it was that they spent their days.
“Back to their holes,” Pehr said.
“Yes.”
“When they’re gone, we’ll take the elevated highway … Route 19, right?”
“Right,” Tasha said, and she made a scoffing, laughing noise. “Route 19. Of course.”
There was a pause as they watched the crowd of robots rapidly thinning, and then Pehr said, “How are we ever going to explain this? How will we make them understand?”
“We can’t, Pehr. They have to come here to understand. Your family, too, once we find a way back to them.”
Pehr hadn’t even considered this. The jungle still stood between the city and his land, and though he ached to feel the warm sun, and smell the ocean, and see his beloved cousin again, he was not optimistic about the odds. Even should he, a single person, manage to avoid detection by the Lagos, it was impossible to believe that any group he might mobilize could long remain unnoticed.
“Perhaps once we have the city running …” he ventured, and Tasha shook her head.
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