The Omega Project

by Steve Alten

  “I’m not a replica. I am Andria Saxon.”

  I looked into her eyes. For all intents and purposes she really was the woman I loved, with two important distinctions: This Andria wanted to raise a family together, and, unlike my fiancée, she had never cheated on me. She was an unblemished beauty, representing a clean start in a new world, and as she leaned forward and kissed me, I realized how much I needed her.

  That’s right — needed! So what if she had been cloned by the warped mind of my own creation, she was still a woman — still human. And so there’s no misunderstanding coming out of this internal journal, let me be perfectly clear — my interest was not based on my own sexual desire, nor was it to star in some Jason Sloan — concocted “Omega wet dream”; that ship had sailed the moment GOLEM “the Creator” had appeared. Having heard the computer’s explanation of things that had come to pass, my mind had finally awakened to the fact that I was no longer asleep. But with each passing moment in which I had come to accept this waking reality, I found myself experiencing a gnawing emptiness inside — a feeling I think must be shared by all castaways … the emptiness of finding oneself alone in a new world, having lost everything you have known.

  In retrospect, I could not have predicted this reaction; after all I had spent my entire adult life, to paraphrase the real Andria Saxon, “… as a recluse, living inside my own head.”

  The clone … this Andria was an offer of reconciliation, GOLEM’s olive branch. If I could accept the machine as the Creator of this new world, then Andria would become the Eve to my Adam — the choice was mine.

  But before I bit into the proverbial apple, there was another matter of the heart I had to attend to.

  “I want to be with you, Andria, but first, I need to know if you’re even capable of loving me.”

  “Ike, I do love you.”

  “Love has to be more than just words or sex, love means placing the other person’s needs before your own.”

  “Tell me what I can do to prove that to you.”

  Squeezing her hand, I led her to the cephaloped trap. Pressing my face to the porous acrylic surface, I could smell the musk of Oscar’s fur, but between the darkness and the reflection of the Holy City’s habitats glowing orange in the distance, I couldn’t tell if my eight-legged companion was still alive.

  “I don’t understand. Why do you care about this creature?”

  “This creature saved my life. Twice. If you truly love me, then release him. Release my friend.”

  “Ike, the octopeds are our enemy. They are godless vermin who seek to destroy humanity.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s fact, passed down from the beginning, when the Creator returned life to the new world. It is said that humans once ruled the land, the octopeds the sea, and there was peace. But the octopeds were jealous of man and desired to rule the land, and so they sent an object from space to destroy the moon.”

  “Andria, that isn’t true.”

  “It is true. The moon will return in six days, you can see the damage for yourself. The moon survived, but the impact wiped out humanity. The Creator healed the Earth, then recreated humankind in Her image.”

  “The moon was struck by an asteroid, but the octopeds didn’t cause it. The octopeds weren’t even around back then; just their ancestors — timid creatures living alone in coral beds at the bottom of the sea. As for humanity being recreated in the Creator’s image — have you ever seen Her?”

  “No one can see the Creator. We can feel Her presence when She returns to the church. We can hear Her commandments whispered in our heads. Without the Creator there would be no breeding farms or nurseries or habitats.”

  “And without the octopeds, the Creator couldn’t genetically defile nature.”

  “Ike, humankind was created to rule the world. Octopeds are worthless, vile creatures … lecherous devil worshippers who murdered the Creator’s son.”

  “The octopeds murdered Christ?”

  “Who’s Christ? I was speaking of the noble Golem. For this act, the Creator decreed that the octoped must live in servitude forever. It’s all part of the Final Solution.”

  A chill ran down my spine, the coldheartedness of the clone’s words unnerving.

  The transport accelerated for another hundred feet and slowed. We were getting closer to our destination … I needed to free Oscar.

  The mist cleared, revealing an object floating beneath our transport. It was gray and bloated, drifting on the lake’s placid surface — an island among dozens more — a cephaloped carcass.

  Did I report dozens? As I looked closer I saw thousands of dead cephalopeds littering the placid surface, their tortured remains evidence of an evil that rivaled the crimes at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Treblinka, and Theresienstadt.

  My throat constricted. “Andria, what happened to them?”

  “There’s nothing to be concerned about, Ike. It’s all part of the cleansing process.”

  Cleansing process. Final Solution.

  For evil to flourish, it required a conspiracy of silence among the locals, the acts reduced to a language of euphemisms designed to render mass murder more digestible. Hitler had used anti-Semitism to gain power and fuel his own irrational need for conquest.

  Terror threats. Weapons of mass destruction.

  Eight decades after the Third Reich, political extremists had fueled anti-Islamic fears to perpetrate a Middle East oil grab that had led to another world war and the Great Die-Off.

  Twelve million years after mankind’s annihilation, a man-made machine was using hatred to subdue the free will of its own creations.

  The transport accelerated again. In the distance I could hear the tortured shrieks of pan flutes.

  “Andria, open the pod.”

  “Ike—”

  “Do it!”

  She passed her right palm across the top of the trap, generating a spark of blue electricity. With a depressurizing hiss, the oval container split open, spilling Oscar on to the flattop.

  I gathered the cephaloped’s head in my lap, pressing one of its tentacle palms in my hands. ABE, is there a pulse?

  THERE ARE THREE PULSES, ALL EXTREMELY WEAK. OSCAR IS DYING.

  The transport lurched ahead, its bow bumping into a wooden pier. Spotlights mounted on unseen buildings blinded me. Shadows moved toward us.

  “Ike, we’re here. Turn Oscar over to the Hunter-Sentries and we can return to the farm.”

  “Sorry, Andria, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Ike, the cleansing camps are not for humans. Now leave the damn octoped and let’s go!”

  “We all have character flaws, Andria. God knows I have my anger issues, you cheated on me … at least the original Andie did. But I am not abandoning a friend to the Creator’s ghouls, and if that floating ball of chemicals tries to separate us, then you can kiss me and my sperm good-bye.”

  Five adult Nosferatus stormed the transport, their clawed hands gripping my elbows, dragging me to my feet. Oscar held on, wrapping his tentacles around my upper torso as the pale, hairless, bat-winged transhumans led us across the dock to the gates of death.

  31

  Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties — but right through every human heart — and all human hearts.

  — ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, The Gulag Archipelago

  Humans have been invoking God’s name as part of their interspecies slaughters since the Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec empires chose to appease their gods through human sacrifices. Generations suffered and died during the Christian Crusades. Countless innocents were “shocked and awed” during the campaigns to thwart Saddam Hussein. And as the nukes went off, the phrase “God and country” ushered in the opening battles of World War III, perhaps because it was a lot easier on the conscience to annihilate forty thousand Muslims if you truly believed God was on your side.

  T
hou shall not kill? More of a convenient metaphor than a commandment. A pacifist had never won a political office, nor had an atheist.

  Kill, baby, kill.

  Was bloodlust in our genes? Having witnessed my entire family murdered by a God-fearing, Bible-toting mob, my answer was a resounding “yes,” and that yes and the anger it had engendered in me led to the invention of ABE: If God could not keep our innate vices in check, then technology would.

  Of course, my “genius” had also given life to GOLEM, rendering me history’s biggest hypocrite.

  Now, man was all but gone, and yet the practice of killing innocent beings in God’s name was still alive and well. Ironically — maddeningly — in reshuffling and resequencing human DNA, GOLEM could have eliminated the “evil gene” from the Homo sapiens menu, but the computer needed its genetically engineered children to maintain a cold veneer of indifference when it came to the processing and disposal of the cephaloped race.

  Having seen the remains of the dead, I could only imagine what evil awaited us in GOLEM’s death camp.

  * * *

  A predawn gray bled its way across the eastern sky, revealing the main gate — a pair of twelve-foot-tall bare metal posts. Nothing ominous looking like the entrance to Auschwitz, nothing as high tech as the security checkpoint at the Pentagon — simply two nondescript metal posts.

  Again, I had underestimated humanity’s ruling artificial intelligence.

  Prodded by the ghoulish Nosferatu sentries, I stepped across the threshold. Oscar was trembling against my chest — when my consciousness was instantly inhaled through a funnel of white energy, every cell in my body swimming in its warm, embracing, and quite intoxicating light. Gravity’s weight was shed from my body, my flesh liberated, my spirit tingling.

  How long I remained in this state of harmony and bliss, I have no idea, but at some juncture I opened my eyes to blue skies and the sun’s warmth on my face … and Bella Maharaj.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead.”

  I sat up and realized that my body felt refreshed. I was in a grassy meadow, human Bella kneeling beside me. She was wearing a sheer white frock and a smile … But where was Oscar?

  “Oscar’s safe, and so are you. Come, I’ll show you.”

  She held out her hand and I allowed her to lead me across the manicured lawn to a three-foot crevice that cradled a shallow brook of soothing sparkling waters which flowed east across the acreage. We followed the stream in silence, the sounds of nature better than any conversation.

  “You are wondering if this is heaven?”

  I smiled. “It feels like heaven should feel.”

  “What you are experiencing is the Creator’s love.”

  “I definitely feel something. Bella, where is Oscar?”

  She pointed ahead. I could see in the distance a large oak tree rooted in a pond that fed the stream. The oak was sixty feet tall, with outstretched limbs twice that length … and nearly every square inch of bark was covered by eight-foot-long, furry-brown bodies.

  Cephalopeds …

  As we approached, I realized the creatures were hugging the tree as if suckling off the bark; moreover, they were pushing and prodding one another, jostling to maintain the maximum amount of direct physical contact. Dozens more were on the ground, fighting one another to be the next in line — Oscar among them.

  I ran to the pond, then waded over to the big male. Reaching out for one of Oscar’s tentacles, I held fast, hoping the physical contact would allow ABE to once more bridge our interspecies communication gap.

  To my surprise, Oscar brusquely pulled his appendage away, as if he had no idea who I was.

  My eyes caught movement and I tracked a body falling from one of the upper branches. The cephaloped struck two of its kind on the way down; it was already dead by the time I dragged its carcass from the pond.

  The animal’s fur was covered in blood.

  ABE, theorize. What’s happening here?

  INSUFFICIENT OBSERVATIONS TO FORMULATE A WORKING THEORY. SUGGESTIONS: ANALYZE CEPHALOPED BLOOD. INSPECT THE TREE.

  Sloshing knee-deep through the pond, I approached the tree. Gripping the distal end of the nearest cephalopod tentacle in both hands, I forcibly peeled the appendage away — to reveal cactuslike needles protruding from the tree trunk’s bark, each three-inch thorn dripping in blood.

  The creature belonging to the tentacle shoved me aside, slapping its arm back in place before another animal could occupy the spot.

  Their demeanor had changed. Something in the tree sap was blocking signals to their vagus nerves. Something addictive …

  I looked around. The sky, the weather, the environment, the setting … I was surrounded by a sinister perfection.

  “Ike?”

  I turned, taken aback to find Andria standing by the edge of the pond. Her ebony hair was long and wavy, the way it was on the day we first met; her taut body nude beneath the sheer white frock.

  My heart pounded, pumping blood to my loins.

  She offered me a wicked smile as she entered the pond, the water rising along the sheer fabric of her garment, causing it to cling to her body.

  Sinister perfection …

  “Ike, isn’t everything so beautiful?”

  “Andie, why are you here?”

  “Baby, I’m here for you.”

  “And why am I here?”

  “You are here because I need you. Our world needs you.”

  Dharma whispered into my subconscious. “What is the meaning of life, Robert? What is this crazy world of ours all about?”

  “That’s just it, Dharma. None of this is real, it’s all an illusion. It’s like each of us is in our own Omega dream.”

  “Let me share your dream.” Andria peeled off the wet fabric.

  WARNING: TESTOSTERONE LEVELS DROPPING.

  I backed away, my feet sticking in the muddy bottom.

  ABE, this isn’t real. Reboot my senses.

  WARNING: TO REBOOT THE FIVE SENSES WOULD REQUIRE STOPPING ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S HEART.

  Andria reached for me—

  Do it … now!

  And suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

  Collapsing to my knees, I looked up. The sky was spinning and the cephalopods were falling from the tree like leaves — Andria’s flesh fragmenting into cellular dust before everything went black, adrift in silence.

  Life is but a dream …

  32

  Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

  — ADOLF HITLER

  BREATHE.

  I took a breath as commanded, and then another, the aching organ pounding in my chest beating stronger with each inhalation. Seconds later sound returned to my brain, followed by the scent of a strong disinfectant, which prompted me to open my eyes.

  The bizarre hummingbird-like creature fluttering above my neck had a hypodermic needle for a beak and a tiny cyclops lens for eyes. The left side of my chest hurt where it had injected the shot of adrenaline directly into my heart — a medical treatment that was wearing on me.

  Convinced I was alive, the battery-powered version of Tinker Bell flew away.

  I was back in GOLEM’s sphere, strapped to the same surgical table. Then again, to say, I was back was to infer that I had left, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure. It was very possible that everything that had transpired after my threat to GOLEM to “internally sterilize my own sperm” could have been artificially implanted memory — from the computer’s mind game with the dead Andria clone to my awakening on the Hunter-Transport … and everything that followed my passage through the gates of the cephaloped death camp.

  All one glorious mind-fuck.

  Lifting my head, I looked around. My eyes widened at the transformation within the spherical chamber, my bio-chip translating all I was witnessing.

  The oak tree that had dominated my last internal vision now occupied the ai
rspace above my spread-eagled body, only the tree wasn’t a tree, it was a giant machine for aphaeresis — a process whereby blood is siphoned from a donor and the desired components extracted, with the unused remains returned — the entire procedure contained in a looping cycle. In this case the tree — a multitiered labyrinth of mechanically moving parts, was simultaneously siphoning DNA strands from the blood of hundreds of cephalopeds at a time and squeezing droplets through clear vinelike tubes on its way to the trunk’s collection basin.

  Dozens of robotic arms extended from the sphere’s tubular walls. The telescopic devices operated in an incredibly coordinated multitasked singularity of purpose. As the drained, dead eight-legged donors were peeled away from their perches and dropped into one of several disposal tubes, another robotic arm would replace each fresh carcass with a live specimen extracted from a conveyor of oval traps. Fluttering around this living assembly line of bodies and bodily fluids were hundreds of the mechanized hummingbirds — miniature mobile sensors that fed bytes of information to GOLEM.

  Then there was the “island of misfit toys,” something more akin to Mengele’s genetics lab. Set off in their own multitiered, bacteria-free acrylic habitat were the seedlings produced by GOLEM’s genetic engineering experiments — bizarre genome creations combining the DNA of multiple species with artificial devices in an attempt to harvest and sustain unique new life-forms. They were occupied by hairless rats with human faces and lizard-tongued humans that possessed tentacles, and by bats hanging upside down from perches using their opposable thumbs. Even more freakish was GOLEM’s garden of mutations, which featured rows of sunflowers equipped with human mouths and voice boxes that cried like infants and infants that sprouted upper torsos from trees.

  There were also attempts to harvest aquatic species. Rows of water tanks contained human tadpoles and infant mermaids and human squids — genetic abominations of nature that struggled to coordinate gasps of air with gill slits, blue blood with hemoglobin red, each fleeting moment of life observed by GOLEM’s sensors, each tortured death dictating the next pairing of chromosomes into a slightly altered DNA strand as the supercomputer created life in the same manner one would solve a Rubik’s Cube.