by Andrew Busey
The high priest appeared before her, flanked by several other priests. They looked at her as if they expected a fight, but she had lost the will to resist.
They led her up the stairs behind the pyramid. It was a long climb and made every muscle in her legs burn long before they got to the top. The new high priest moved slightly faster the higher they got. It seemed that, rather than making his leg muscles burn, their growing height up the pyramid made his desire burn. He panted with it by the time they crested the top, and she was nearly blinded by the light from the two giant braziers.
They led her to a large granite slab, where she saw her name carved into the stone. She was told to lie on top of it and did so without a fight. Though the braziers engulfed her with searing waves of heat each time the breeze paused, the stone was a constant chill against the backs of her arms and lower legs. It gave her goose bumps, and the tiny, downy hairs on her forearms and the back of her neck seemed not to know whether to stand on end or shrink from the searing heat.
The priests tied her arms and legs down. The whole thing was like a dream. She could barely see outside of the small open room, but she could tell the darkness was coming—and it was coming for her. She heard chanted prayers, songs of glory. It all mingled into a giant macabre, surreal ceremony to her. Shadows danced on the edge of her peripheral vision as the Alphan star began to set.
The darkness had come. The light from the braziers sent shadows dancing all around her. Soon, the shadows flickered over her, and she heard men approaching, very close. The pharaoh stood above her, the new high priest at his side. The high priest held a ceremonial dagger, and the sight of the blade made her see the soldiers and their spear tips piercing her parents again and again, Muu Muu fighting and dying for her.
Everything inside her exploded, and she struggled against her bindings and the heat and cold and the darkness.
“I curse you all to the grasp of Darkness!” she screamed. “This pyramid will be destroyed before my blood is even dry.” She didn’t realize how loudly she must have shouted. The words reverberated in the small room and took on a life of their own. It encouraged her. “And you,” she glared at the Pharaoh and shouted even louder, even more confidently, “will be wiped from this Earth. The Scribe will erase your name. The Builder will destroy your pyramid. And Darkness will take your progeny. What you do is not the way of the gods.”
The pharaoh’s face contorted in rage. He snatched the dagger from the high priest and drove it through her heart so violently that she heard its tip ring against the stone beneath her.
Then the darkness came for her.
Chapter 36
Week 9: Wednesday
The more man puts into God the less he retains in himself…The worker puts his life into the object, but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object.
—Karl Marx
Stephen was looking at his phone, reading the daily report that they all now received. It summarized events occurring in SU-N11. There was so much going on it was hard to keep up. So this was almost like they had spies, or maybe reporters, watching everything they were interested in twenty-four hours a day, which was not far from the truth. The computers still weren’t smart enough to watch for or identify significant events. There was some irony in that. The events, it could handle; understanding them, it could not.
Today, there was a “major event.” Stephen had never seen one of those before.
Major Event: Sixth pyramid is now lit by large braziers. Reason unknown. Did not investigate.
The system never seemed to do much except scan for anything interesting from four or five fixed locations. So he wasn’t too surprised there wasn’t much else there.
Having no idea what a major event could be, he wanted to immediately check it out. He looked at his instant messenger. Mike was on.
Stephen: meet me in rendering room 3, there is a major event
Mike: brt
It wasn’t necessary to invite Mike anymore, since they had Babelfish—which automatically translated anything people said. They had become a team though, and leaving him out felt wrong.
In the hall, Stephen ran into Don, who, the same as every morning, held a doughnut in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. Stephen invited him along.
They walked into to Rendering Room 3, where Mike was already waiting.
SU-N11 Time: 498 PC [+13,508,915,716 Years]
They looked across the river at the giant pyramid that had been under construction for so long. There was no doubting the report’s accuracy; the room at the pyramid’s peak was definitely lit up.
“I’ll navigate today,” Mike said. “Check in on Nefirti first, I assume?”
“Our girl is almost all grown up.”
They smiled. Don thought they were a little nuts.
Through mutual agreement, they always approached and entered through the front door. They respected this girl, and this was their subtle, albeit unnecessary, way of acting like guests.
A crowd in the street looked like it was centered in front of her house. Stephen got a bad feeling.
As they approached, it smelled like a charnel house. It brought back memories of the durian-like fruit they’d discovered on their first foray into the jungles of this spawning planet, which now seemed like lifetimes ago.
“What the hell?” Stephen asked as he turned off the smell.
It was now clear that the people in the crowd, most of whom had their shirts pulled up covering their mouths and noses, were staring at the front of the house. Three dead soldiers were arrayed near the open door.
“Oh, no. Muu Muu…” he said and rushed up. They had become attached to the cat too and called it by name—it had been a constant companion as well.
It was dead, its mouth still clamped to one of the soldiers’ necks. Stephen looked heartbroken. On the door was the diamond with five dots in it that represented their gods. The rest of the door was marred with blood. Inside the courtyard was more blood. A dead priest and Nefirti’s parents were there. Her mother was in a circle of blood and yellow paint.
Nefirti, however, was nowhere to be seen, but bloody footprints led into the house. They followed, weighed down by a sense of dread.
The trail ended at the end of the dock.
Their eyes were drawn to the sixth pyramid.
Stephen took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
It took only moments for them to reach the pyramid. Behind it, in a large open tent, a party populated by the pharaoh, part of his harem, and a bunch of drunken priests seemed to be winding down.
She was not there.
They went to the top of the pyramid, Stephen and Mike already guessing what they’d find.
She was there, tied to the granite altar, dagger still in her heart.
Stephen smashed his fist down, shattering the mouse and then stormed out of the room.
***
Thomas was sitting in his office looking at an e-mail from MC2 with revenue projections for the quarter—the numbers were through the roof. Apparently, the diamond storage systems were quite a marvel for all sorts of big data problems: massive data warehousing, regulatory compliance, and analytics applications. They were selling like crazy to giant e-commerce and financial companies. IACP, Nanotubes, and of course he himself, were making a ton of money. Unfortunately, it meant that there would be no more diamond systems for IACP this quarter.
***
Stephen stormed down the hall toward Thomas’s office. Jules had never seen him like that.
He didn’t ask if Thomas was in or if it was OK to go in—he just threw open the door, marched in, and slammed it shut behind him.
Ajay stuck his head out of his office and asked Jules, “What was that about?”
“No idea.” She shrugged.
***
Thomas looked up at Stephen with surprise.
“This is a little out of character,” Thomas said.
Stephen half-ordered, half-pleaded, “We have to rewind the SU.”
“We don’t just ‘rewind’ the SU.” Thomas tried to remain calm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nefirti. We have to bring her back.”
“Calm down, Stephen. What happened?”
“The pharaoh sacrificed her, apparently in some ceremony.”
Stephen’s face flushed. It looked to Thomas that Stephen was on the verge of crying. He knew how Stephen felt about Nefirti.
Thomas asked, “Can’t you resurrect her or something?”
“What?” Stephen looked at him, bewildered.
Thomas waited.
Stephen finally said, “It’s easy to kill people. It is hard to save them.” He paused again, lost in thought.
“Coliseum can’t do that?”
“No, no,” he said, his eyes distant. “I don’t think so.” Stephen seemed to get it together a little and said, “OK, OK, we need to fork before they pick her up for the sacrifice and then make sure she isn’t sacrificed.”
“What? How would we do that?”
“Kill the pharaoh or something.”
“Whoa. You need to get ahold of yourself, Stephen.”
“We’re supposed to be omniscient. How did this happen?” Stephen said, seeming to lose some steam.
“Well, you know, omniscient in theory and in practice are a lot different.”
“I know,” Stephen said. Then he looked up, the agitation returning to his eyes. “I demand we fork the universe.”
“Into what?”
That caught him off guard. “Into a new diamond.”
“We don’t have one right now.”
“What do you mean we don’t have one?”
“We’re committed to supply them to MC2. We can’t take another one right now.”
“Take one anyway!”
“What’s gotten into you?” Thomas asked. “You know I can’t do that.”
“So be it,” Stephen said and stormed back out.
***
Stephen went back to his office and cried. The adrenaline left him, and he fell asleep, his head on his desk.
That was how Thomas saw him before he left for the night.
Chapter 37
Week 9: Thursday, 3:31 a.m.
There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God “Thy will be done” and those to whom God will say “Thy will be done.”
—C. S. Lewis
Stephen woke up with rough, salty streaks dried on his cheeks. The side of his face was numb from lying against the hard surface of his desk. He looked at his computer. It was late or early…
It took him a few minutes to remember everything that had happened.
He got up, cracked his knuckles, and strode purposefully toward Rendering Room 7.
He fired it up. He had to see it.
SU-N11 Time: 498 PC [+13,508,915,716 Years]
He went to the pyramid. He didn’t want to see her dead body, but he had to go there.
Another week had passed in the few hours he had been asleep. The party was gone. It was night. Her body was still tied to the altar, the dagger still in her chest.
He started rewinding.
He saw the boat arrive and the anointment of the new high priest; he saw them escort her up the pyramid.
He watched the ceremonies and saw them approach her.
He was shocked when she went rigid and started shouting.
Then she spoke, her voice eerily delivered in the mechanical female voice of the translation software.
“I curse you all to the grasp of Darkness. This pyramid will be destroyed before my blood is even dry. And you,” she glared at the pharaoh, “you will be wiped from this Earth. The Scribe will erase your name. The Builder will destroy your pyramid. And Darkness will take your progeny. What you do is not the way of the gods.”
And then he watched the dagger come down. It was like it pierced his own heart.
He hit the button and heard her scream the curse again.
Before he knew it, he was back in the SU’s present, atop the pyramid.
He let himself sink down into the core of the pyramid. The rocks flowed by.
Coliseum was up on the LCD in the room, and he was typing. He didn’t really know what he was doing anymore.
It exploded outward from him, not quite the force of a nuclear weapon, but close. It was contained by the fact that he was in the center of the pyramid, and so the explosion’s force was mostly used up in shattering the tons of stones that were used in the construction of the pyramid and blowing them outward.
Still, it was a dramatic explosion. It lit the horizon as brightly as day and sent a blast wave carrying an initial wave of stones racing away from the epicenter, which was him. The rocks and the blast wave smashed into the neighboring pyramids first, nearly toppling the closest two and leaving a tapestry of pockmarks on the others.
The brunt of the stones from the exploding pyramid landed in the river. Some made it all the way across. Most of those smashed into the temple area attached to the palace. The force had mostly worn itself out by the time it reached the nearby houses, which were hit with a rain of smaller rocks and rubble.
Chapter 38
Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.
—Quintus Ennius
If the noise hadn’t woken everyone in the palace, the light as bright as day would have. No one had ever seen or heard anything like it.
The pharaoh jumped out of his enormous bed, leaving two members of his harem huddling under the sheets. He was still rubbing his ears and staring at the light when he yelled at one of the guards to assemble the entire palace guard in his bedchamber. It was the most secure room in the palace.
He shouted one last command as the guard rushed from the room: “Get the high priest!”
Soon enough, the high priest, flanked by several other priests, was there. Blood dribbled from one of the high priest’s ears. The priests’ quarters were closer to the river and much more exposed.
The pharaoh seized the high priest by his robe and shook him. “Is it her?” he asked and shook him again. “Is it her?”
“Her?” The priest seemed in shock.
“The girl! She cursed me.”
A guard ran into the room. “Sir, your pyramid! It exploded!”
“Oh, gods! Gods!” he screamed. “What have we done?” He continued shaking the high priest.
The captain of the guards arrived.
“You’ve got to protect me!” the pharaoh yelled, turning his ire to the captain.
“We’ve arrayed the guards, outward in concentric circles from here. Nothing can get through.”
The pharaoh was shaking.
“Good, good. You’re sure nothing can get through?” He seemed to regain a little of his confidence. He was god on Earth, after all. What could hurt him?
Then the high priest’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell over with a thud.
The pharaoh screamed.
Chapter 39
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee!
—Ezekiel 25:17, enhanced by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction
SU-N11 Time: 498 PC [13,508,915,716 Years]
Stephen stood in the pharaoh’s bedroom. The high priest lay dead at his feet. He turned and looked around the room. He touched the captain of the guard, who promptly fell dead.
The pharaoh was panicking. He ran to a corner and collapsed, curled in a ball, watching the room, and screaming hysterically.
Stephen walked around the bed. When the first harlot died, the secon
d jumped out of the bed screaming. Stephen touched her shoulder, too. Her body hit the floor.
He killed everyone else in the room except the pharaoh.
Then he walked to the corner where the pharaoh was curled in a fetal position, soaking in his own urine. He still screamed hysterically.
“Nefirti,” he said, “I only wish they could see me.”
He tried to look the pharaoh in the eyes as if to make him see, but the pharaoh squirmed too much and his eyes were locked shut.
“The Builder is now the Darkness.”
Stephen stopped the pharaoh’s heart.
“It is done.”
***
He grabbed the LCD from the table and smashed it into the wall. Then he quietly returned to his office and began to type.
Chapter 40
Week 9: Thursday, 4:11 a.m.
Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
—Chapman Cohen
Thomas heard his phone ringing in his dream. On about the fourth ring, he realized it wasn’t a dream. He had had four glasses of wine the night before.
“Answer your phone,” a groggy voice said.
“Mmm.” He looked over, startled. He had forgotten about her. Too much wine.
He picked it up. “What?”
“It’s me,” he heard Jules say over the phone.
He looked at his clock. It was 4:11 a.m., and she sounded like she’d been awake for hours.
“I repeat. What?”
“You need to come to the office,” she said.