Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  They continued watching, but for a few minutes, nothing appeared to happen.

  Jenn kept narrating, “So we aren’t seeing anything now, but it looks like he’s doing something directly in the console.” She felt like the doctor performing an autopsy in one of those crime scene dramas.

  “What was he doing in the console?” Thomas asked.

  “Interesting,” Jenn muttered, apparently to herself, as she looked at the console activity. “It’s hard to tell. He was really deep. But my best guess is that he was cleaning up the edges around where he performed the cut-and-paste to make sure she was whole again.”

  “Wow,” Ross said. “That’s bizarre.”

  “Yeah. It probably left a really strange scar.”

  Her shirt fluttered as if something moved underneath it. Then she disappeared.

  Mike asked, “Where did she go?”

  The east wall erupted in an explosion of light and sound. Thomas, Mike, and Ajay instinctively hit the floor, Larry and Ross turned away from the blast, and Jenn shielded her eyes. Then the explosion was over. The camera was still in the same position, but the altar wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the pyramid.

  “What the hell?” Thomas asked, getting up.

  Jenn said, “Let me try that sequence again, copying everything he did.”

  The dagger fell from her chest, clattering to the ground with all but the stub of its blade gone in a cut-and-paste. A few minutes passed. Nefirti’s shirt fluttered. The east wall, holding the other image, changed to the same view of the altar. Then the north wall changed to a room. It looked like a typical Alphan bedroom. Then her body disappeared from the altar. The main view shifted to the same bedroom, but Nefirti’s body was lying on the bed.

  Jenn mumbled, “It looks like he’s using coordinate markers to jump around. He moved her body from the altar to this room.”

  Ross asked, “Why didn’t he just copy her from before the sacrifice and move her into the future?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he wanted her to remember everything that happened?”

  Thomas sighed. “I guess in some crazy way that would make sense.”

  Ajay added, “Or maybe he was worried what ramifications moving her into the future might have. He was, after all, a scientist.”

  The view went from her room to the pyramid where the camera sank into the rocks. Then the explosion occurred again. The camera returned to Nefirti’s room. It went down the stairs and into the courtyard again. Time jumped backward. Muu Muu was lounging in the sunlight in the courtyard. The other window still showed Nefirti’s bedroom. A snoozing Muu Muu appeared on the floor of the bedroom. Then the view changed again, to outside the palace.

  “I guess he didn’t care whether Muu Muu remembered the events.”

  Ajay frowned. “He’s playing a dangerous game here, too. Doing stuff like this could have a huge ripple effect, possibly destabilizing everything.”

  “Jenn,” Thomas said, “mark time before he made the changes. Once we get the resources, we’ll try running a parallel universe and see how much they diverge and if we can identify any problems from the manipulation that occurred here.”

  Ajay nodded, intrigued by the idea of the experiment. “That could be really interesting,” he said out loud before realizing it but then exploited his momentum and continued, “What is the impact of a singular event on the evolution of societies? Or would it be civilizations? Anyway, it could be really interesting to see how much things diverge. It makes you wonder how our world would be different if some key events or people had been slightly changed in our world—like if Hitler had died in a car wreck before rising to power or if Jesus had not been born.”

  The north screen still showed movement, displaying a scene that looked as if someone were walking purposefully through the palace.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  The screen showed an opulent bedroom suite, guards arrayed throughout the room. Two men stood in the center of the room, engaged in a heated discussion.

  “The one on the right is the pharaoh,” Mike pointed out. “The other one is wearing the high priest’s garb, but he doesn’t look like the last high priest I saw. Maybe he’s new?”

  The high priest collapsed.

  “What happened?”

  “Looks like he dropped dead,” Ajay added helpfully.

  Jenn said, “There was a Coliseum command used at the exact moment he dropped.”

  One of the guards who had spoken to the pharaoh dropped to the ground. The pharaoh cowered in the corner.

  “Same command,” Ross said. “It looks like he created a Coliseum command to kill people.”

  One of the women on the bed died and then the other. Then the guards arrayed throughout the room died as well.

  Thomas cupped his head in his hands. “One of the last things he said to me was that it is easier to kill people than to save them.”

  Then the pharaoh, cowering in the corner screaming, fell dead.

  Jules stuck her head in the door. “Thomas, I need to talk to you.”

  ***

  Nefirti walked back around her house, from the river toward the street, Muu Muu padding along behind her. She skirted the courtyard to avoid the gore and smell. As soon as she had left the shadow of the house and stepped onto the road, she stopped in shock.

  Arrayed around the outside of her house were hundreds of people, candles burning. They were chanting. The words coalesced from the chanting as she listened. They were begging for forgiveness. They were saying the pharaoh was evil.

  Then someone in the crowd saw her and pointed, and they surged forward. Hands reached out and touched her, the crowd asking for blessings or forgiveness. From her. Why do they think I can bless them? she thought.

  Then she heard another chant rising around her. All she could make out was, “daughter of the gods.”

  She stood, silent, looking at the crowd, listening to the chants and the shouts. The crowd looked at hear, expectant, perhaps even fearful.

  Then she made a decision.

  “Burn it,” she shouted, pointing at the house. “Today begins a new day, a rebirth. We will build a better world.”

  The crowd cheered as a palpable excitement rippled through them.

  She turned and continued toward the palace. The crowd followed. Flames jumped to life behind them as the house burned and roaring, huge tongues of flame reached for the sky.

  Chapter 45

  A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

  —Oscar Wilde

  After the postmortem on the events leading up to Stephen’s death, one question still nagged Mike. “Why was Nefirti sacrificed in the first place?” he wondered aloud. It was driving him nuts. It almost seemed like some cruel joke that Ajay or someone had played on them, but Mike doubted anyone in the group was that evil. Also, he knew Ajay would never tamper with the SU as a joke.

  So he decided it was time to play junior detective and find out. He went into the SU, setting the time at a day before Nefirti’s sacrifice, and went toward her house. He quickly reconsidered and headed instead to the palace.

  He decided the answer must reside with the high priest or the pharaoh—or both. His unfamiliarity with the palace reminded him of how little time he had spent there. It didn’t help that the palace was massive and confusing.

  Mike went looking for the pharaoh, whom he hoped he would recognize. Eventually, he found what appeared to be a throne room, but it was empty, although it was midmorning on Alpha.

  “Strange,” Mike thought aloud.

  He later found a grand bedroom that he guessed, based on its positioning, was the pharaoh’s, but it was also empty. He passed through harem rooms. They weren’t empty. A few of the pharaoh’s concubines milled about. Mike was pretty sure he had never been through these rooms before, because he was certain he’d have remembered them. He wished he had found them earlier. There were some beautiful women here.

  He shook it off and continued, eventual
ly arriving at the temple, but it was deserted, too.

  So he headed to the sixth pyramid, and as he passed over the pyramid, he was struck by the tent city behind it. Then he recalled that these people built each pyramid’s front first to conceal the progress. The shabby tents farther back were clearly a small workers’ city. Close in, almost at the base of the pyramid, stood a collection of tents that looked almost laughable in their extravagance. Some were garish. One was huge. It was like a carnival. It reminded him of the setup he had seen at a traveling Cirque du Soleil show.

  He headed for the largest tent. A group lounged about around and inside the tent, drinking wine. He was right. Identifying the pharaoh was easy. The high priest was pretty easy to spot, too. There was much talk but nothing of particular interest to Mike. He moved forward in time.

  Early in the afternoon, a man stepped into the tent. He was not dressed like the others. His clothes were dirty. His bearing, however, indicated his stature was not much below the others.

  He addressed the room, “The capstone is in place. It is done.”

  Cheers went up from the gathered nobility and priests.

  The dirty-clothed man bowed.

  “Thank you, high architect,” the pharaoh said with obvious excitement in his voice. His eyes virtually glowed. “You have done well. Your reward will be taken to your tent.”

  “Thank you,” the high architect said. “If it is OK, I will take your leave and rest.”

  “You have earned it,” the pharaoh said.

  The high architect left the tent.

  The high priest said, “I will go get her now.”

  “Do we know who she is yet?” the pharaoh asked.

  “Yes, unless something has changed today. Nefirti celebrated her coming of age last night.”

  The pharaoh’s shoulders sank, and the celebratory light in his eyes waned. “Nefirti?” he asked. “Rasmeput’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “It saddens me to take his only child. I know how he dotes on her.”

  “It is not you. It is the gods.”

  They nodded, and the high priest left.

  Mike followed the high priest briefly, until he boarded a felucca for the quick sail back across the river to the temple. Mike knew the sequence of events from here on out, that the felucca was the first leg of the high priest’s journey to his death at Nefirti’s door.

  ***

  “I can plot coordinates now,” Jenn said.

  The core team was back in the rendering room.

  Thomas nodded. “Any anomalies or weird behavior?”

  “Well, someone keeps going to one place in the palace late at night. But other than that, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly strange going on.”

  “Where in the palace?”

  “I haven’t had time to look at it yet.”

  “Bring it up.”

  “OK,” she said and moved her mouse, clicked, typed on her keyboard, and moved her mouse and clicked again. “I’m taking us to the last scene someone saw.”

  It was a small room, lit by candles and filled with a large bathing area. Flower petals floated on the pool’s surface, swirling in tiny eddies. Steam rose from the bath. The smell of flowers and a hint of humidity—somehow delivered as a smell—filled the rendering room.

  “This is interesting,” Ajay said, a grin on his face.

  They looked back as footsteps neared. A princess dressed in a golden robe walked into the room, flanked by two maidservants. She held out her arms, and the servants removed the gown.

  Thomas said, “I think that’s enough.”

  “Come on,” Ajay said.

  Thomas rolled his eyes.

  Jenn cut the connection and studied her logs.

  Thomas said, “Well, you said it, Ajay. That is interesting.”

  “So someone has been using the rendering room and the Alphans as personal porn?”

  “Looks that way.” Thomas sighed. “Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research and someone uses it for porn. Figures.”

  Lisa shivered, “That’s creepy. To think someone could be watching your most intimate moments like that. And you would never know.”

  Ajay asked, “Do we know who it was?”

  Jenn was still looking at the logs. “No. Like I said earlier, you aren’t required to log in to use a rendering room.”

  “Fix that,” Thomas said, looking first at Larry and then at Jenn.

  “You got it,” Larry said and left.

  Thomas thought for a second that Larry’s exit had looked too much like a flight instead. He decided not to dwell on it lest he become paranoid of everyone’s motives for doing anything.

  “Well, I can tell you this,” Jenn said.

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t Stephen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he was doing Coliseum stuff in another rendering room during one of the times this mystery voyeur was watching a show.”

  Ajay snickered and mumbled, “Mystery voyeur watching a show. That’s funny.”

  “Really, it’s kind of sad,” Lisa said.

  Chapter 46

  Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

  —Charles Dickens

  It had rained for two days straight—not simply showers, but the loud Texas thunderstorms that ushered in a coolness before the rain and left a horribly humid Austin after. These storms had been particularly violent, the result of two colliding fronts. But Thomas thought it a fitting tribute for Stephen—like gods raging at the loss of one of their own.

  After Stephen’s funeral in the downpour, Thomas waited in his office—for Catherine. He had been surprised when she had appeared at Stephen’s funeral. She was one of the last people he had expected to see at the funeral. He had been even more surprised by the fact that she had not gloated. She had seemed genuinely distraught and not over anything that IACP had done but simply at Stephen’s death. She had, inconspicuously, pulled Thomas aside and asked for this meeting. She hadn’t said much then, which had been appropriate, given the setting. Her instincts seemed right on the money at Stephen’s funeral, and Thomas wondered if he remembered that part of her wrongly. But still, he wondered about all the information Vince had been able to gather—according to him, from a person at UT. Thomas couldn’t help but wonder if Catherine had anything to do with that. In what he surmised were his more levelheaded moments, Thomas doubted Catherine would talk to someone like Vince, but he wanted to be sure.

  Now a streak of nervous anticipation snaked through Thomas. He still wasn’t sure what to expect from her. He had been taking a constant beating for the last five days, and it was starting to wear him out. He didn’t want another of those days, yet he suspected that was why she wanted to talk to him—to tell him “I told you so” and that he should never have opened Pandora’s box. He was afraid of how he might explode if she ended up taking that angle.

  His computer made the all-too-common “ping” sound. An instant message popped up:

  Jules: Catherine is here

  Thomas: send her in

  Catherine opened the door to Thomas’s office and walked in. He stood and shook her hand. She seemed sad.

  Thomas pointed at one of the more comfortable chairs. He sat in the other chair, not at his desk. They hadn’t spoken in over two years—except for the brief exchange at the funeral. Their last conversation two years ago hadn’t been very friendly.

  “How have you been?” Thomas asked, opting for the easy opener.

  “Well, except for the news about Stephen, things have been going well.” She seemed to try to relax. “I’ve been teaching ethics at Brown.”

  “Ah,” Thomas said.

  Catherine seemed to struggle briefly. “Look, you should know Stephen and I had a relationship.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, for about three years. We broke it off shortly after I left IA
CP. The last time we really spoke was the night you made your first successful nudge. To me, that was a harbinger. Clearly at that point, you were on an evolutionary trajectory that would lead toward intelligent life. He still thought of it as just a really interesting simulation.”

  “Ah.” Thomas nodded, patiently letting her tell the story.

  “So, after about a week, I told him I couldn’t deal with continuing to have these fights. We fought a lot, not like normal couples, really. It was more like we kept having these heated intellectual debates. Mostly about our philosophical and ethical perspectives on the work here.” She paused. “It was surreal. I loved him on so many levels, and I think at some level we both loved that we could have these deeply passionate debates about things. But our points of view were so far apart. It had been long-distance for over a year. I just didn’t see how it could work. So I broke it off. That was about three months ago.”

  She started crying.

  Thomas took her hand. “You don’t think it’s your fault, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t help but feel partially responsible. I miss him.”

  Thomas sat silently, a little confused about how he should act. He wasn’t used to these situations and didn’t feel he was particularly high on the empathy scale. But he cared deeply for Stephen and, now, for Catherine. He was amazed that a romance like that could go on for so long with no one knowing—or at least, without him knowing. He wondered if others had known.

  Finally, her crying slowed, and she looked up.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come back to IACP? I think you will face a lot of issues in the future. I would like to help make sure the right things happen. To make sure the Alphans are treated fairly and allowed to develop.”

  Thomas thought for a moment. He hadn’t expected this to be what her visit was about, but it made sense to him now and seemed like it could be a good thing for IACP.