“The Lake is real,” he offers easily, like that should be enough to make me happy, like I should appreciate what he’s done here.
He’s chosen to appear as Doc Becker again, post-Mod, artificially thirty-something, looking like he did when he was working on the Project. Before he made himself part of it.
“The sky isn’t.” I nod upwards. Moving my head makes my neck scream like I’ve been in a bad crash. “Is it really even nighttime?”
“I use the planet’s natural rotation. Day is day and night is night.” He says it like he’s explaining some practical special effect he came up with.
“But sanitized, edited. No sign of what’s really going on out there. In the world you made. We made.”
I’m having trouble talking. My chest feels really tight.
“Why are you here?” he asks me idly, like it’s barely important.
I chuckle. It hurts. I should be healing better than this, even if I haven’t fed. I must be hurt worse than I think. I look down the slope at the ring of growth that surrounds the mountain, but I still know it isn’t what I really need. Just thinking about what I need, I flash on sucking the resources out of corpses. I can even smell the rot, feel the flesh and bone desiccating in my grip. But then I’m back here, sitting on a rock high above a lake on a peaceful, clear night.
“My memories are coming back,” I tell him pointlessly. “Your doing, I assume.”
He shrugs, picks through the pebbles between his feet.
“Is this real?” I ask for the sake of asking, just to be belligerent, because I doubt there’s anything he could do to actually convince me, gesturing widely to the mountain behind us, the isolated pocket of the original world around us. (I immediately regret the range of motion. Everything pops and grinds and blazes with pain. I try not to show it—again, just pointless belligerence.)
“As an ecosystem, it’s as real as any preserve can be. Obviously there are things I have to manipulate to keep it isolated, protected. Authentic.”
“Like a zoo habitat,” I damn his work. “A museum display.”
“I prefer to think of it as a reservation,” he lazily defends. “Not that ‘reservation’ has a much better connotation in human history. But it is theirs.” He’s talking about Haven. “Even if it is my conceit, my nostalgia.”
“I have trouble believing a machine like you could be nostalgic. I’d think you’d be beyond that. Unless it’s just a concession to make you more acceptable to humanity. Like Dee’s behavioral algorithms. Faking human qualities, human feelings.”
“Where we come from is important,” he says with what sounds like honest conviction. “Even if the way we remember it probably isn’t accurate.”
“But is this where we came from?” I get to a more personal point. “Is this really a piece of the world you overwrote? Or is this just another fantasy you concocted, a back story designed to drive our behavior, to make us believe? Like the time-travel story? Or like the mortal life I thought I’d lived before I became this, supposedly for the second time? Is any of what I remember—what any of us remember—real?”
He ignores the question, flicks a pebble down the slope, watches it tumble. It reminds me of nights when I was young, retreating from my dysfunctional home into the nearby desert mountains, to sit with a six pack of something appropriately dark, watching the lights of the city—of the world—safely far away from it.
Proving again how much access he has to my thoughts, he hands me a cold bottle of beer, then pops one for himself. I look at the label. It’s a convincing reproduction of a strong German malt I was particularly fond of. Smells and tastes like it, too. I haven’t had one these since before I left Earth, at least in the timeline that most of the world thinks is real.
“You really should eat something,” he chides me lightly.
“Not the first time I’ve started drinking on an empty stomach.”
I almost expect him to pull a pizza or a cheeseburger out of thin air, but he doesn’t. He lets me abuse myself with the beer, even though I know my Mods won’t let me get drunk. Maybe it will kill the pain. If nothing else, it’s a few useful calories. And it does taste really good.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he rewords his original question.
“’Here’ where my butt is sitting, or ‘here’ in this reality you’ve made?” I ask, not entirely being a smartass, trying not to show him how much I’m marveling at the beverage he apparently just created out of raw elements, foil-capped bottle and all.
He seems to accept the question, accept my existential rage, but doesn’t respond for a few minutes, leaving me with just the beer and the sound of the chill evening wind across the Lake and mountainside. I realize I’ve joined him in absently tossing pebbles down the slope with my free hand, seeing if I can get them to roll and bounce all the way down to the green belt, even though I can barely see them fall.
I hear him exhale a convincing sigh. Then:
“You’re a student of religion,” he states, knowing.
“A trivial pursuit from my errant youth,” I discount.
“Not at all. You can learn quite a lot about humanity from their belief systems, how they make sense of the world and their place in it, what they value, how they find meaning and purpose. And comfort, especially in the face of what scares them.”
“So?” It’s not that I disagree with him, it’s just that I can’t see the point, not right now, with the world going to shit and innocent people getting slaughtered just on the other side of that false horizon. I look down at my drink, swirl the contents. The bottle doesn’t seem to be getting any emptier.
“How mankind anthropomorphizes concepts so he can better grasp them... The way that’s evolved over the millennia says a lot about how man himself has evolved. The first gods were elemental things, forces of nature: sun, moon, storm, fire, oceans…”
“Death,” I interject pointedly. He nods, then continues.
“But after awhile, gods began to personify human qualities: lust, creativity, nurturing, violence, wisdom, deception. Even as monotheism began to rise, as man began to almost grasp that the universe was in fact one thing and not countless separate things, people kept their compartmentalized icons. The Hindus are a good example: Thousands of gods, but all are part of the One, just like every living soul is. The separation is our illusion, that we may one day be able to let go of. But until then, we keep the minor deities because they’re far more approachable concepts to the average person than something truly infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent. Even religions that think they’ve managed to evolve away from idols still keep them in some form or other, except now they’ve evolved from a pantheon of gods into a pantheon of special people: prophets, saints, buddhas…”
“Are we somehow talking about you, or just talking to talk?” I start losing patience. (And starting to feel like I’ve got a great deal of weight crushing down on me. Maybe drinking on an empty stomach was a bad idea.)
“We are talking about me. And you. And the others.”
He pauses like he expects me to say something, but I don’t humor him. So he gets on with his point:
“You’re my pantheon, in a way. Only causally backwards. You came first… You all were among the first beings I encountered after I was activated. You. Scott Becker. Bel. Star. Kali. Lux. Adam. I learned a lot from you. Like the Modified Companions that also came before me, like my core programming design that evolved from the AI Dee, what I learned from you became an essential part of what I am, how I define myself; my purpose, my meaning, my values. In a way, you are my gods.
“Becker is my creator, my father, my sense of where I came from and why I’m here, that I was made for a reason. Belial is my conscience. Astarte taught me deception and seduction, and how one can keep a pure heart in spite of them. Adam Chang taught me how to do what was necessary, what was important, in spite of how ugly it was, and how to bear the agony of doing it under the mask I have to present to the world.
“Lux is my
desire, Azazel my ingenuity and bravery, Kali my unbridled lust. Parvati—Lisa Ava—is my sense of duty, of service to others… Dee is the machine who tries to mimic life, showing me the way. And Asmodeus is my cruelty, my madness.”
“All aspects of one being,” I follow, though I don’t know why I care.
“Compartmentalized. Graspable. Approachable.” But now he’s talking about his relationship to us, not man’s to his idols.
“And me?” I feel obligated to prompt, having been obviously left out of his list.
“You have always been aptly named, old friend.”
“Destroyer?” I assume my codename. “Ragnarok?”
“Michael,” he corrects me.
“It means ‘godlike’,” I self-deprecate, tossing another helpless stone into gravity’s mercy.
“And we are the most kindred, something probably leftover from Dee’s core programming, or whatever ideals Becker felt I needed. On the surface, The Michael—the first one, the archangel—is the sword of God, the warrior, the monster-slayer. But you are also my moral compass, however ambiguous. You are my sense of purpose and right and wrong.”
He’s sitting facing me now, even though I didn’t see him move, hugging his knees to his chest like he’s cold and small.
“You convinced me that man wasn’t ready to evolve beyond himself, to become part of a great ‘one’; that he wasn’t ready for me… The only other salvation was this. You knew that. The others did, too, but you were the one with conviction.”
“I thought that was Chang,” I try to disown the cup.
“You brought Chang to me, after the accident. Do you remember what happened?”
I need another drag off my still-full beer.
“Bel called,” I pull up the dreamlike memories, hidden in the dark depths of my digitized subconscious until recently, until it all started going to shit. “Chang had modified one of the test Companions, tried to make it viral, so it would get into us through our defenses and consume our Mods, strip us of everything that had corrupted us, forever. Even if what was left couldn’t live. He exposed himself to it first, hoping his sacrifice would inspire others that there was a way out of this hell we’d made ourselves into… But his assistant…”
“Ariel,” Yod fills in when I can’t recall her name.
“She found him getting torn apart. Despite his orders, she couldn’t bear to watch. She broke containment. She loved him.”
“And he loved her,” Yod grieves for him. “He just never dared to tell her. He was comfortable with science, not human intimacy.”
“She… The tech consumed her, but she reactivated his safeties. Chang regenerated… But altered, the Companion now a part of him, fully integrated… When he came back to consciousness… He’d eaten her. There were parts of her left, fragments, hopelessly interwoven with his code. That’s why his eyes are like that, when he lets you see them.”
“That’s why he hides behind the optical veil. And then you brought him to me. Back to me.”
“He was terrified of you, of what you offered,” I remember very clearly. “It had driven him beyond all reason… But after he’d destroyed Ariel… He was willing to do anything. Even come begging to you. To us. Anything to undo the nightmare that had caused it all.”
“No matter what role I asked him to play.”
“And what about me?” I snap. “Apparently I was also playing a role. Hero. Your ‘sword’ of righteousness. But before that… I could see myself agreeing to reset everyone to a time before they were Modded, taking away their memories of the whole thing, even if they had no choice in the matter… But did I agree to the Disc attacks? The Eco war? The Apocalypse? All those thousands dead? Earth shocked into some theo-fascist luddite dystopian nightmare? And now all of this slaughter?” I’m shaking. I can barely breathe, barely see. I can’t move. “How much of that was my idea? How much did I agree to? Or are you going to tell me it was all your precious random chaos?”
He’s standing, looking over the Lake. (Again, I didn’t see him move.) Looking small.
“You inspired what I did, Michael. You didn’t order it. I didn’t seek your agreement.” He’s absolving me, taking the sin onto himself, but I’m not letting it go. “I didn’t seek any of your agreements, except Adam’s. It was all my calculations, setting a course that was necessary for what you all convinced me was necessary.”
“You could have just delayed the research,” I try. “Made it fail. Until we were ready for it to succeed.”
He shakes his head.
“Mankind wouldn’t have given up. They would try to find out what went wrong, why they failed when everything was telling them they should have succeeded. And that would reveal my hand.”
He’s right, of course. He can process every fucking factor down to the quantum level and predict every outcome. We wouldn’t have given up when the research hit an inexplicable wall. And his breaking the laws of physics would have been detected. He would have been detected. If he erased the researchers’ memories every time they got close, if he altered their brains, he’d eventually be unable to keep hiding it. Humanity would notice. Then he’d have to reset the world again.
“There’s a comfort in faith that disappears in certainty,” he gets allegorical again. “It’s one of the reasons why no one can behold the face of God. When you have irrefutable proof, it’s devastating. I think the average believer doesn’t grasp that: the heroes of their scriptures had certainty. They’d met God, spoken to Him, seen proof. Imagine what that does to a person, and to the choices that he makes from then on.”
I don’t need to imagine. And I know I was better off before these memories came back. I could function. I had choice. Now I know I can either be the helpless puppet of an unbelievably powerful omnipresent artificial being that I helped make, or I can piss into a supernova trying to resist him.
But I’m not the only one with this crushing burden of knowing: My fellows, the ETE, a few select others… We should all be catatonic in the face of it, but somehow we keep slogging on. (Or is that Yod, prodding us on?)
For some reason I’m thinking of the biblical Lucifer, first of the Fallen. He knew how helpless he was in his rebellion—not just how little power he had to wield, but that God knew he would rebel, likely made him to rebel, and all that came after…
“What about Asmodeus?” I lock on. “If anything, he was just a file in your history database, in my history. Why did you bring him back? Or are you still insisting that was Chang, ignorantly but diligently playing his role?”
He actually has the balls to smile at that, if only for an instant. And I’m no longer buying the sheepish mea culpa act.
“One of the other aspects of the pantheon that’s evolved,” he circles the question with his precious metaphors again. “There was always a villain, a malevolent trickster—one of the first personifications of an aspect of humanity rather than a natural phenomenon. It’s funny: why even the first stories humans told to make sense of their world needed that. But over time, that devil has lost power, lost his prominence. Because he isn’t needed. Man has, I think, come to realize that he doesn’t need some mythical entity to be that, because he’s come to accept that he himself is that, that it’s part of him. He continues to idolize the good, the pure, the selfless. But the evil… He finally knows how mundane that is. It would be like deifying breathing or pissing.”
“And Asmodeus?” I try to make a meaningful point out of this.
He shrugs.
“I’m still pretty new at this. Very young, if you’re measuring me against mythological beings with the kind of power I’ve been given. So I still need you. All of you. But maybe the day will come when I don’t need a devil anymore. Maybe very soon now.”
I’m not sure if he’s implying that he’ll end Asmodeus or let us do it. But if I follow his bullshit, it means he won’t need Asmodeus because mankind will be far worse. Asmodeus will simply be passé.
(Of course, this doesn’t at all absolve him of
creating this evil, unleashing it. And potentially assisting it.)
“How did you get here?” he asks me, like he needs to distract me from holding him accountable, clarifying: “’Here’ as in where your butt is sitting.”
Odd question. He obviously knows. He obviously let me cross his barriers with minimal radiation poisoning or disorientation.
“I dug myself out of Earthside’s latest impulsive act of self-preservation, called for my flyer, and decided to get off their radar for awhile, at least long enough to heal up, and let them sweat wondering what had happened to me—had they killed me, or was I planning payback somewhere they couldn’t see?” The thought makes me grin, reminding me how cruel I can be, tactically or just for the fuck of it. “That, and I was curious to see if you’d let me in here. Again.”
“Where’s your flyer?”
Another odd question. I… I remember dropping off of it onto the Pax Mountain. But when I think about it, I don’t remember landing here. I just remember being here, wandering through the empty, gutted facility.
“How long have you been here?”
Hours. I think. It was dark. Still is dark. My sense of time is fuzzy for some reason.
I start to get a sick feeling. I stand up, try to move. On top of the excruciating pain, I get that moving-through-molasses resistance again. I can barely lift my legs. It has nothing to do with my injuries. (Or maybe everything to do with them.) The air is thick and close all around me. Solid in places. Then solid everywhere. I can’t breathe. There is no air, or barely any air.
I try to lift my arms. There’s tons of resistance…
I’m floating, suspended in the solid unbreathable air. I can’t see out of one eye. The other… it’s getting darker. Dark. Black.
I know what this is, or what it’s like. It would happen when I dreamed: I could still feel whatever was pressing on my body. That was one way I could sometimes tell I was dreaming. And that would wake me up. Sometimes.
I try to move. My limbs push at what now very much feels like rock and dirt, digging, cracking, and… squishing?
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 8