by Demir Barlas
The God Complex
DEMIR BARLAS
Copyright © 2020 Demir Barlas
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-64871-714-7
DEDICATION
To Alev, Mina, and Batuhan, with love and wonderment.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
I
1
A Clone and His Camels
1
2
Redcolds
16
3
Asshole-to-Asshole Communication
29
4
Broken Families of Clouds
43
5
Our Two to Their Thirteen
56
6
Sapient Lightning
71
7
The Luxury of a Wandering Mind
85
8
A Pocketful of Gigajoules
101
9
No Killer Robots
115
10
Feels
129
11
Call Them Undermen
143
12
Dewclaws and Deadfalls
157
13
The Only Matching Butterfly
170
14
Wessex
184
15
Hope and Loneliness
197
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have conceived, completed, or published this novel without the constant encouragement of my wife, Alev Ateş-Barlas, who believed in my talent and industry when I did not. The beacon of her personhood shines lovingly before me, even when I fail to follow it.
1 A CLONE AND HIS CAMELS
The camels batted their long eyelashes at each other, and the male camel’s erection signaled an unapologetic preference for the female of its species. The protuberance poked about like a thorny demon seeking its way back into hell. And now, when the female camel drooled for him, hell had no vacancies.
The camels were—there was no other word for it than the honest ancient one—fucking. In fact, the male was thrusting so enthusiastically that enormous chains of spittle flew from his agitated lips. Jed Salt, himself naked but unaroused, grinned madly at this sexual spectacle from a dozen feet away and lit a cigar in celebration.
Ordinarily, a man like Salt would not have gone or gotten naked. In the healthy past of the species, he would have been weeded out through the needful cruelties of sexual selection. Later, when the species grew corpulent and complacent, his compact reediness would have been taken for disease. Now, though, Salt carried himself with an immense and thoughtless ease, like a man who had spent a lifetime under no yardstick but his own, like a man who was a world.
Salt was in a cubic space, enormous and vacant of everything but himself and the fucking camels. The volume of the cube was unknowable—both because there was no God to measure it, and, more prosaically, because the choice of units was arbitrary. Salt was a connoisseur of units. He had once loved the djeser, the symbol for which reminded him on an upturned penis; later, his migratory mind had overflown the pes, or Roman foot, before settling on the international foot, in whose terms he now saw spaces on his scale.
Twenty-seven million square feet, that is, the cube of three hundred international feet: That was the space in which he now stood. The cube was imperfect to the eye, because it contained many layers, accretions, and afterthoughts. The very bottom of the cube was open and clear. The floor glistened in rainbow concrete, the color and texture he had chosen for it today. The walls were clear to a height of perhaps twenty feet, after which they grew jubilantly crowded with stairs, bridges, and rooms that grew like inward barnacles.
The space had begun platonically, as a true cube, but, with each generation of Salts, it had added sites and structures to suit the individuated clonal taste. The Salts being Salts, there was no interest in destruction: All previous amendments to this place, too large to be exhausted by their kind, were allowed to stand.
Too, as time elapsed, the pace of the Salts’ novel needs slowed. It was a simple application of the exponential decline formula.
Marlo’s hologram manifested just behind Salt, who knew she was coming.
“Eighty-six clonal pairs!” Salt gushed to Marlo without turning to face her. She was naked too, as it turned out, so there was no isthmus of shame between them.
“Jed.”
“But they wouldn’t mate until this iteration.”
“Jed,” gently insisted the hologram—a blue, ageless, and beautiful woman who could have been, and was, a cosmic mother.
“In nature, they would have mated right away.”
“Jed, someone’s awake.”
Salt spat cigar smoke.
“Balls!”
“Marcus Masters. He’s in Gallery 419 and appreciably traumatized. He won’t listen to me or Non-Henry.”
“Jesu-Krishna, I should get dressed.”
“Yes, it’s best to minimize the shock.”
“What do I wear?”
There was a humming from a distant vent that opened in the walls, and some clothing from Masters’ century floated across to Salt. He knew better than to look at the clothes. He knew that Marlo would have chosen optimally.
So Salt got dressed. As noted, he was a thin man, thin to the point of genius and distraction (what though all imaginable foods were readily available to him from the energy-matter converters), and, notwithstanding his trust in Marlo, he wondered whether the costume would fit him. It did. Of course it did. He looked fine, from his polished shoes to his self-knotting tie, and Marlo smiled at him maternally.
Jed’s physiognomy would have been alien to all but the last generations of the Coastal Republics. He was an irreducible mix of traits, themes, and tones from the great races and lineages of gone humanity, cutting across the simple racial classifications of the past. Salt’s skin was the pleasing color of dirt, Pharaonic and Turkanan dirt, a happy ancestral synthesis; his hair, whether by neglect or design, seemed straight and stringy from some angles and curly and kinky from others; and his height was a modicum under what had been average in his time. He seemed healthy and new, as if he had come out of a tube—which he had—but his eyes were old, older than the airy metals and arcing plastics of the new world around him.
Salt could have had Marlo transport him to Gallery 419 by means of the tubes that interconnected Seaboard, tubes that Marlo kept active solely for him, but he wanted to walk some of the distance. Rumination required it.
Salt and his camels had been in a cube, and the cube, it now transpired, was part of a still-larger underground complex interlinked by vertiginous bridges, stairs, and transportation tubes. The whole place was kept in darkness but for a bubble of light that surrounded Salt wherever he went. He was a mobile candle in this void, his presence illuminating the contours of supercolliders and quantum pillars. It was a place of physical experiment, this cube and the arcology around it, this place that Salt had reduced, for the moment, into unhappy breeding experiments.
At the main platform, Salt entered into the tube, into the womb and amphora, into the conductive air that shot him into another part of Seaboard: Into the depths of a cyclopean building that Salt called the Museum of All Things, or, alternatively, the Index or the Archive. There were lots of capital letters in such descriptions, as Salt imagined them, because the building itself was so grand and because Salt was open-mouthed and boyish in his labeling of things.
Seaboard itself consisted of only three zones. There was Salt’s private subterranean domain, which he called the God Complex and from which he had just come; there was the historical city, which Marlo had prese
rved out of love; and there was, as Salt thought of it today, the Archive.
The Archive was in the precise middle of the historical city of Seaboard. Seen from a sufficient distance, it was a truncated octahedron that rose half a mile into the air and measured a radius of twenty miles around its outermost walls. In the Archive’s preternatural shadow was the historical city, consisting of aparticle complexes, demesnes, health factories, technoblasts, and pleasure centers—none of which were discernible, because the Archive was so much larger than them all, and because they had lost the magic of human habitation. There was too much for the eye, had there been any, to take in; and the eyes of the Salts were too jaded and self-involved to assess the overworld.
The God Complex lay underground two miles from the Archive, but Salt had been too impatient for the full walk. He had taken the first tube on the surface of the God Complex and had been transported directly into the Archive—more precisely, into the Vault of Salts. The Vault of Salts was simply this: A place where the two hundred and sixteen Salts who had chosen to do so were dreaming. The remaining fifty-five Salts were suicides, each of whom had taken special care to dispose of his unwanted flesh.
Salt looked closely at the faces of his clones, which, along with their naked bodies, could be glimpsed through the translucence of the Fluid. They were dreaming crystalline and immortal dreams. Oh, the Salts were nobly treated! Whereas the other sleepers in the House of Dreams, elsewhere in the Archive, were embalmed in functional, spare caskets, each Salt had a distinct and vertical vault, a true place of honor. The closest ancient analogue to this place was the Luxor Temple. The dreaming Salts were laid out at a regal distance from each other, and their vaults were roughly as tall as the dreaming carven kings had been. Unlike those kings, though, these Salts faced the hallway between them—so Salt was walking between his progenitors and replicas, glancing from right to left at tubes full of himself, considering the unoriginality of life. Cells, just cells, aggregated into self-deluded bodies, each claiming false urgency and identity for its splinters and replicas! Life was small and modular, assemblable, invisible; by the time it reached his scale, or a camel’s scale, it claimed an unearned urgency. The summed colony of human beings, and of his selves, was worth no more than a mass of cells that lived and died invisibly.
Superstitiously, inevitably, Salt 272 paused before Salt 1—the first, the original, father of the line of Salts, his primary status embossed in the number on his tube. Salt 1 had become of increasing importance with historical recession. To 2, he had been a father, loved but demystified by proximity. To 272, he was an Adamic colossus, holy with age. But 272’s business was not with 1 today.
The resurrected man had been a general, and Marlo had deliberately ported him to Gallery 419, which was one of many holding-chambers for the bric-a-brac of the past war, the last war. Ranged along the walls were orderly lines of deactivated androids (distant relatives of Non-Henry) in their resplendent uniforms, each inscribed with the eagle standard of the Coastal Republics. The ceiling was five hundred international feet high, and small skyfausts hung suspended from it, forever sundered from what had been their skies.
Salt’s shoes tapped a requiem into the marble floor.
There, in the middle of the gallery, seemed an exhibit come to life: A tall and powerful man, a warrior, a giant, a shadow cast by time, aged and ageless. A man nearer in height to seven feet than six, yet, even at this distance, the possessor of thoughtful and tactical features: A Puritan sharpness of eye and cheek, a Eurasian fullness of mouth, a canny Persian fullness of the shoulders. Standing a dozen feet away from this man, disinterested, was a necessarily smaller person (an android, not that it could be told from his careless slouch; an android, not that such distinctions were meaningful now). The smaller person was Non-Henry, and he was, apparently cutting cigars with a taciturn hand. The android and the general seemed to be in a détente, ignoring each other until Salt’s arrival.
The confidence in Salt’s step drained considerably as he approached the general. Salt’s hair, an analogue of himself, was nervous and intimidated, some portion of it trying to flee his head and another, more cowardly bunch sticking closely to his scalp. Salt was a compendium of traveling emotions that made free use of his physiognomy—animating him one moment, dejecting him the next, turning him through the points of the human compass that he’d suppressed so far in his guise as the general’s greeter.
Fear was uppermost in Salt now, fear of the prospect of someone to understand and reach his deepest self. Still, Seaboard’s veil of eternal boredom had been pierced, so the clone smiled upon greeting the general. The general spoke first.
“Salt? Jesu-Krishna, it’s you!”
“General Masters. Good morning, I suppose.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six! I don’t know where I am. I couldn’t hail Samson on the ether. There was only a blue woman and this—this android—and after seventeen years—”
“Carbon consciousness,” corrected Non-Henry, but casually, like a man with a very mild attraction to the truth. Someone had designed him to look like someone’s idea of a young Cicero.
“It hasn’t been seventeen years,” Salt resumed bashfully.
“Eh? What’s that?”
“Not seventeen years,” Salt repeated, more forcefully this time. “Rather more.”
“But you’re twenty-six. You were nine when I—when I—saw you last. Surely you remember the…”
Salt waved Masters to the door.
“Easier to show you, general.”
Salt walked away with Masters following. Non-Henry, having finished his snipping, lit one of the cigars and watched the humans leave.
Gallery 419 abutted the Vault of Salts, through which Salt 272 now walked, trailed closely by the woken general. Marcus Masters looked from side to side as he walked, his steps lugubrious and automatic. The Salts entranced him.
“They’re you,” he marveled.
“I’m twenty-six,” Salt resumed, “in cellular age only. I’m cloned at nineteen, skipping the ignominies of childhood and adolescence. These are many of the rest of me to date.”
“That liquid. The white stuff. That’s what I woke up in.”
“The Fluid,” Salt confirmed, eager for things to retain the names he’d given them.
“That’s what kept me alive?”
“It was meant to. These others are demonstrating a subsidiary feature.”
“Which is?”
“Heaven.”
Masters looked closely at the arrayed Salts. The somnolent faces bore the same look, a look Masters had seen before.
“They’re …they’re online?”
“With much the same technology you remember, the Sensorium. Two differences. First, the Fluid keeps them alive for a very long time, perhaps forever. Second, only their brainstems are left to operate. They go to paradise lobotomized, and they don’t come out. The rawest pleasures of the flesh, infinitely and eternally amplified, and privatized for the individual dreamer.”
“But I came out.”
“Your internment was purely medical. You were never connected to the Sensorium. Did you dream?”
“No.”
“These do,” Salt promised.
They had come to the end of the Vault of Salts, where a hallway led to a much larger space, Luxor giving way to something like the Gateway Arch. The walls here seemed punctuated by bricks, but that was a trick of perspective.
“How many?”
“Two billion. Everyone. Except you and me.”
Salt waved his hand, and one of the bricks separated from the wall. The general saw that it was not a brick at all, but a rectangular container.
The container floated towards Salt and Masters; it was transparent, and, through it, the general saw life, but not as he’d known it.
Masters was standing next to Salt now, and both men were looking through the top of the container. What was inside? Masters’ fir
st impression was that of a giant amoeba, but then the waving and articulation of limbs signaled the fundamental and horrific humanity of the thing.
“Jesu-Krishna,” Masters whispered.
“They didn’t go in looking like you, general. They went in vast and soft and shapeless. But it didn’t matter. The Fluid kept them alive. That thing in the casket, dreaming its dreams, is humanity.”
“Is my wife here?”
“I don’t know, offhand. You’d have to ask Marlo.”
“She tried to talk to me earlier, but I didn’t want therapy. Just information.”
“She was a therapist in your day,” Salt explained. “She’s God in ours.”
“What do you mean?”
“After the war, after you’d entered your tomb, Salt 1 and Marlo decided on an age of happiness. It was what the apes and angels had groped for, after all. Salt 1 expanded Marlo, and Marlo attained her singularity.”
“But she was an application,” Masters insisted. “Just an application.”
“Trained on humanity itself. She listened to our problems, fixed them, understood our pains and pleasures. Who better to optimize happiness? Her energy-matter conversions power the House of Dreams, keep the Shield up, lock paradise in. Each person here consumes more bandwidth in a second than the ancient world consumed in a year. Look at this one. It’s in a fully inhabitable universe of pleasure, with every subatomic grain rendered and every string vibrating. It could be adrift in a cosmos of cookies, having orgasms, each amplified by more bits than the universe actually contains.”
“How can you know?”
“The brain lights up. The pleasure centers enlarge and pulsate. Now and then, we get messages. Isn’t that spooky? Dream-fragments out of nowhere, which Marlo stores as sense-data. So we can extrapolate what’s happening to them.”