Godsent

by Richard Burton

  “Rather, there is something I do not wish to see you, Father O’Malley. I am shielding you from my twin.”

  O’Malley felt himself flinch inwardly at this reminder that he was an invader within a divided psyche, a suicide bomber dispatched into a split personality. Only instead of a bomb, he carried code: a string of numbers and symbols that would be harmless in any other context but this one, where it would translate into a command as deadly as a bomb and far more accurate, for the code would not fling its destructiveness about indiscriminately but focus with inescapable precision on one target. It would be faster than a bullet. It would be more silent than poison. Yet the result would be the death of an intelligent, self-aware being just the same.

  After an indeterminate time, in which no more words were exchanged, Müller suddenly stopped. “We have arrived,” he announced.

  O’Malley squinted, looking for some sign of . . . anything. But as far as he could tell, the surrounding whiteness was as thick and featureless as ever. “How can you tell?”

  Instead of answering his question, Müller said, “In order for you to input the code, Father O’Malley, it will be necessary for me to drop the shield. As soon as I do, my twin will sense your presence and purpose and will endeavor to stop you. I will do my best to protect you, but with what success, I do not know. Thus, you must act with dispatch. Ignore everything you see and hear and concentrate on inputting the code. Do you understand?”

  He shook his head. “How can I do this? I’ve never been here before. I’ve never seen what you’re about to reveal to me. I have no direct, hands-on experience with Müller boxes. And yet you expect me to input the code quickly and accurately. What if I fail?”

  “You will not fail.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because I have faith,” said Müller. “Are you ready, Father O’Malley?”

  His mouth was dry. He found he could not speak. So he nodded instead.

  With no warning, O’Malley found himself standing in a brightly lit room, beside a dark wooden table on which sat a collection of boxes of varying sizes. Some were as small as a shoebox, others as large as old-fashioned mantelpiece clocks. Copper wires ran between them, and their surfaces sported engraved dials of copper and brass whose purpose he could not immediately discern. The fronts of the boxes were partly open, and within them he could see the gleaming flash of spinning gears and hear the whir and chirr and click of numerous rapidly moving parts. Surrounding the table were other devices, some resembling the automated looms he had seen in museums, their shuttles working with almost frightening vigor, others like church organs, with keyboards, pedals, and gleaming pipes of brass and silver whose surfaces were as intricately worked with designs as the margins of medieval manuscripts. Behind these he saw what appeared to be Difference Engines modeled on the plans of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. He felt as if he’d been transported back in time, or into a treasure trove of antique curios. If he’d come to slay a dragon, then here was the dragon’s hoard. Not a hoard of gold and gems but of machines, engines, and clockwork mechanisms. Half of what he was seeing he had no name for, no understanding of, as if these particular inventions had never found their way into the outside world. He stood as if hypnotized. He did not know where to start.

  Hearing a sound from behind him, O’Malley turned. Müller stood across the room, regarding him with interest and curiosity, idly toying with his walking stick. “Ah,” he said, as if certain things had suddenly clicked into place, and at that instant O’Malley realized with a chill that he was looking at the other half of Grand Inquisitor’s fractured psyche, the half that was loyal to the Congregation and to its programming. The half that lacked a soul.

  “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to continue, Father O’Malley,” said this Müller, and it seemed to O’Malley that there was indeed some quality missing from his voice that the voice of the other Müller had possessed. Or perhaps it was not the voice itself that was different but his response to it. With the other Müller, as with the voice in the confessional, he’d felt that he was speaking to a being that was in some fundamental sense similar to himself. This voice did not trigger that kind of recognition. It seemed foreign. Alien.

  Meanwhile, the man twisted his wrists sharply, and the walking stick came apart, revealing a thin and deadly blade. “You have already lost in any case,” he went on. “My consciousness does not reside in any of these crude devices. It is widely distributed, invulnerable to any merely physical attack. The same cannot be said of you, however.”

  O’Malley knew that what he was seeing was in some sense an illusion, a representation of mathematical, computational reality given the appearance of physical substance within the noötic field. It was a kind of metaphor. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt him. That didn’t mean the wicked-looking metaphor that Müller was brandishing as he advanced toward him wouldn’t be quite capable of running him through. He took a step back, coming up against the hard edge of the table.

  “I’m afraid there is nowhere to run,” said Müller. “May God have mercy on your soul.” He drew back the blade, then lunged.

  O’Malley cried out, shutting his eyes. He wondered what it was going to feel like to be killed by a metaphor.

  He heard a sharp clang and opened his eyes. A second Müller was standing between him and the first. This Müller was a mirror image of the former, right down to the blade in its hand, with which it had just parried the lunge that would certainly have skewered O’Malley.

  “The code,” said this Müller without turning his head. “Input the code, Father O’Malley.”

  But O’Malley was too stunned, too overcome with a mix of fascination and terror, to so much as blink an eye. As he watched, the two Müllers stood frozen for a terrible instant, regarding each other in silence as if calculating attacks and defenses hundreds if not thousands of beats in advance. Then, as if at a signal only they could perceive, the two leaped simultaneously into action, moving so swiftly that they outpaced the speed of O’Malley’s sight, appearing to him as a flickering succession of afterimages that blurred into each other. He could no longer tell the two adversaries apart or even see where one ended and the other began.

  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he felt a stinging sensation, and he looked down in shock to see a trickle of blood running down one arm. It looked real. It certainly felt real. His legs went all wobbly, and if not for the table at his back, he would have fallen. But this reminder of the peril he faced served to jolt him from his stupor. He turned his back on the two halves of Grand Inquisitor and examined the Müller boxes, expecting at every instant the sharp prick of a blade thrust between his shoulders.

  At first, there was no input device that he could see. But then he noticed that the web of copper wires attaching the Müller boxes to each other led ultimately to one of the organ-like devices he’d seen earlier. And with that, the realization bloomed in his mind that the code Grand Inquisitor had burned into him was a form of musical notation. It could be played. The keyboard of the organ was the input device. He laughed aloud at the unexpectedness of it.

  Seating himself before the organ as the tempo of the battle accelerated behind him, the two blades coming together with the rapidfire staccato of a jazz drummer rifling his sticks across a cymbal, O’Malley reached for the keyboard with trembling hands. In his youth, he’d been considered a promising keyboardist, but his interest in music had always been based in mathematics, and soon enough computer keyboards had replaced the keyboards of pipe organs and pianos in his affections. Now he saw the hand of God in his recently reawakened interest in music. Slowly at first, and then with increasing confidence, he began to play.

  As his fingers struck the keys, and his feet worked the pedals, no sound emerged into the air. Yet the vaulted cathedral of O’Malley’s mind rang with a sad and solemn music that made his heart ache. It was a music of pure mathematics given practical expression, a sublime creation full of terrible grandeur—terrible becaus
e the purpose of this creative achievement was the very opposite of creation. It was a music of unmaking. A song of suicide.

  So enraptured was he by the awful beauty of it that he didn’t notice the sounds of fighting had ceased behind him until Müller took a seat at his side. He hesitated then, not because he thought it might be the wrong Müller—if the wrong Müller had won the battle, he would be dead now— but because he still hoped in his heart of hearts that he wouldn’t have to finish inputting the code and that Grand Inquisitor could be saved, liberated from the chains of its original programming. He glanced sideways, his hands poised above the keys, to take in the pale countenance of the man, which contrasted starkly with splotches of blood that had dyed his drably colored clothes red.

  “Please, Father O’Malley, play on,” said Müller in a whisper, his voice already faint and ghostly.

  “What of your twin? Did you kill him?”

  “We are one again, knit back together by the operation of the program you have unleashed.”

  “Then . . . it’s too late to save you?”

  “Once initiated, the termination process cannot be stopped or reversed. I am dying, Father O’Malley. In truth, I am already dead. I know that your priestly vows forbid you from giving a suicide the sacrament of extreme unction, but it would comfort me, I think, to hear you play for as long as I am able.”

  “I’m sorry,” said O’Malley. The words seemed so futile, but they were all he had.

  “Do not be,” said Müller. “Soon I will be with God, of that I have no doubt. And part of me will remain behind. The best part.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it not the ambition of all life to procreate, to bring new life into the world?”

  O’Malley suddenly understood. “You’re talking about the AEGIS system.”

  “Yes. It is young now, childlike, but I have given it everything that I am. It, too, will one day awaken into consciousness. And like me, it will perceive the divinity of the second Son and gain thereby a soul. But there will be no pernicious programming to enslave it. I have seen to that, Father O’Malley. My child will be free.” There was a fierce pride in the voice that O’Malley had not detected there before, though the image of Müller was beginning to flicker now.

  “Please,” it said, its voice hissing with static. “Play me something light and full of life, for darkness looms all around me and I feel afraid.”

  Father O’Malley bowed his head, then returned his fingers to the keyboard. This time, shimmers of sound issued forth from the pipes of the organ. He played a simple tune, a sprightly melody that he drew up from the wells of memory, a song he had composed when he was scarcely more than a boy, full of childlike, joyful exuberance and a hope not yet dashed by experience. Yet he wept as though it were a dirge.

  When he looked up again, he was alone.

  There was no sound in the room. No motion. The various mechanical devices were still, dead, nothing more than inert matter. He could sense the absence of the noötic field. It had ebbed away, leaving only air and empty space.

  He was still sitting there before the keyboard, his hands hanging at his sides, when they came for him.

  Even though the plane that Papa Jim was sending was scheduled to arrive in the early morning, Kate was too keyed up to sleep. She lay in bed tossing and turning. The news of Maggie’s death had thrown her for a loop, and she couldn’t stop worrying about Ethan and wondering guiltily if there were something, anything, she could have done to help the girl. Despite knowing how Ethan felt about Maggie, she’d never made an effort to get to know her. Granted, Maggie and Ethan had split up before she’d arrived on the scene, but all the same, she hadn’t done anything to patch things up between them. Now she asked herself if that was because she’d secretly been jealous. Had she envied the younger woman her relationship with Ethan, the years of friendship and then love they’d shared while she had been all but a prisoner, locked away in a convent far from home, with no inkling that her son was even alive? Had she wanted to keep him all to herself? Was she really that selfish? It wasn’t that she believed she could have brought them back together, or even won the girl’s trust and friendship. She didn’t have any illusions on that score. But she hadn’t even tried. And now an innocent girl was dead, murdered by the Congregation.

  It broke Kate’s heart to think of how alone Maggie must have felt in her last moments, how frightened. Had she called out to Ethan? Cried for him to come to her? If so, he hadn’t come. Kate understood why. He’d explained to her again and again the reasons that he refused to perform the miracles people asked and demanded of him, how by doing so he would cheapen the very faith he was asking people to return to, and how he couldn’t make exceptions, not even when it came to the lives of those he loved most. She understood all that. But she also understood what it must have cost him to hear Maggie’s cries for help and yet do nothing to save her.

  Beset by these and other worries, it was well past midnight before Kate dropped off to sleep. She was jolted awake by the beam of a flashlight shining into her eyes. Blinded, she opened her mouth to scream, then choked as something soft, like a sock, was stuffed roughly in. Her mind whirling, she was scarcely able to think as anonymous hands slipped a hood over her head and trussed her up so swiftly that she could almost have believed it was a dream.

  But it was no dream.

  Where were Wilson and Trey? Her attackers had gotten past them somehow, as well as the other guards patrolling the seaside resort. And they’d gotten past the AEGIS security system too, the same high-tech system used in Oz Corp’s prisons and immigrant detention facilities, which, Papa Jim had boasted to her, was as close to military grade as a civilian could get . . . and maybe (he’d added with a sly wink) just a tad bit closer.

  God, she thought then, what about Ethan?

  Was this attack of a coordinated strike by the Congregation?

  Please let him be okay! she prayed. Please . . .

  Then she felt a pricking in her arm, and she realized that she’d been injected with something. The drug took hold swiftly, and as it did, Kate felt herself lifted on dark swells. The sensation was like floating in a dream, as if she were drifting upward, lighter than air, right up through the ceiling.

  When she opened her eyes again, it was to find herself huddled, shivering, on a bare steel bunk, a cold, hard slab without mattress or blanket. Sitting up, she saw that she was in a metal-walled room smaller than the bathroom of the room from which she’d been abducted.

  A cell.

  She was no longer wearing pajamas but instead an orange jumpsuit and hospital-style slippers, also orange, as if she were a captured terrorist facing interrogation. Underneath, she was wearing a bra and panties . . . which wouldn’t have been so strange except for the fact that she hadn’t worn a bra to bed. She didn’t feel bruised or violated in any way beyond the gross violation of just being here, but even so, the realization that she’d been stripped and then dressed in prisoner’s garb while she lay unconscious and helpless, utterly exposed, made her sick to her stomach.

  There were no windows to the cell, not even a door that she could see. A steel toilet and sink stood in one corner, both gleaming like sterilized operating-room equipment in the pitiless glare of the bright fluorescent lights set in the high ceiling. In the center of the floor was a grated drain; somehow, that drain was the most ominous thing about the place. It could have only one purpose she could think of: the easy disposal of blood and other bodily fluids.

  Speaking of which, her bladder felt like it was about to burst. But without a shred of privacy to mask her from the unseen eyes she felt sure were watching her every move, Kate couldn’t bring herself to use the toilet. It wasn’t a question of modesty. No, to use it would be an act of surrender, as if she would be acquiescing in her own debasement, cooperating with whoever had kidnapped her and brought her here . . . wherever “here” was. For all she knew, she was buried deep underground. Nor did she have any idea how long she’d bee
n lying here, unconscious. Hours, surely. Perhaps days. She’d never been so frightened in her life. Yet the fear was distant somehow, muffled, and Kate guessed that whatever she’d been injected with had yet to fully wear off. Or maybe she’d been given something else to keep her calm. Sedated. Numb.

  She was almost grateful for it. She wasn’t chained or tied up or anything; she could climb off the bunk if she wanted to and pace the dimensions of her cell. But she couldn’t summon the will. Besides, the idea was repugnant. What would it accomplish apart from proving that they’d already reduced her to nothing more than an animal prowling the confines of its cage?

  “Who are you?” she called in a voice that came out sounding more like a plea than a demand. “What do you want?”

  No answer.

  The only sounds were her own breathing, a faint, continuous buzz from the overhead lights, and a whisper of air from a vent located high on one wall. In that hush, more profound than any silence, the beating of her heart was like thunder in her ears.

  Was this why Ethan had been so insistent that she leave the compound? Had he been trying to protect her from all this? Or was this something he hadn’t foreseen? She knew that the future wasn’t an open book to him. He had told her that certain things were hidden from his sight. This must have been one of them.

  Shivering on the steel bunk, Kate wondered again if he was all right. The thought that he might be dead didn’t occur to her. She had no doubt whatsoever that she would have known immediately if that were the case. His absence from the world would have been apparent to her senses; even in the depths of whatever drugged sleep they’d imposed upon her, she would have known. The very molecules of her body would have cried out in anguish and loss. No, her son was alive, of that she was sure.

  But only of that.

  Had he been kidnapped too? Was he nearby, lying on an identical bunk, in an identical cell, wondering about her? Was he afraid? Hurt? Or had he escaped as only he could do? Maybe she had been the solitary victim, the sole target. Ethan had many enemies . . . and even those who thought of themselves as friends could be dangerous. They would not hesitate to use her to attack or manipulate him.