The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “That means—”

  “There’s no center, no Copernican point for our weapons to target.”

  “Why haven’t they released it already?”

  “I snuck a refractory logic program into PROBIT’s periphery. That delayed their production by maybe a week.”

  “But your Shield—”

  “—isn’t completely impervious. If I seal it hermetically, I’d have to solve the circulation problem. Which I haven’t, sadly. And the Laurasians will keep their innovational edge over me for at least a year. That gives them enough time to infiltrate any version of my Shield.”

  “I wouldn’t be here unless you’d thought of a solution.”

  “The only solution to their genome bomb is my genome bomb.”

  “You want to…”

  “Their Shield technology is still permeable. There, I’m ahead. A two-stage wave, with drones and human pilots, can break through.”

  “And their air defenses?”

  “Superb, I know. More than a match for our drones. But not for you, our finest pilot.”

  “I can’t breach their defenses.”

  “You can, with the tools and guidance I’ll provide you.”

  “It’s to be extermination?”

  “A word we have to face, general.”

  “But surely a political outreach. Now that the President’s out of the way, perhaps we can engage the Laurasian Empire directly.”

  “I tried. I relayed messages to the Supreme Auspicious Leader. To PROBIT. To the Heavenly Ministers. Now that they’ve already tried to kill us, they won’t believe anything we say. They only want to finish the job.”

  “So I’m to kill all of them? Every Laurasian?”

  “I have no interest in convincing you. It would be horrible to try. My duty, as I see it, was to inform you of your potential part in a potential solution.”

  “You’re—what? Nine fucking years old? How can you sanely contemplate this? Leave aside your intellect, you—you have no fund of experience, of emotion to—to—”

  “To what? To feel the horror of what I’m suggesting?”

  “Yes!”

  “Do you know how many people are under my Shield?”

  “What does it matter? I don’t know. Two billion.”

  “Almost exactly. How many Laurasians exist?”

  “Thirteen billion.”

  “So it’s our two to their thirteen. Among our two: Our hopes, our families, our friends. Our frustrations too. Among their thirteen: Theoretical beings. An aggregate of invisible suffering. Even to me. Even to you. When you drop the next bomb, there won’t be an explosion. PROBIT’s nanocircuits will fail, and the Laurasians will follow. There won’t be pain or warning. But that’s no excuse. This is the primal crime, a rogue and elephantine insistence on self at all costs. After all, in Jesu-Krishna’s scales, we’re equal, and their thirteen should therefore be allowed to live in place of our two.”

  “Do you believe in these scales?”

  “When I was born, Masters, my mother tried to strangle me. Narcotized and all, she jumped off the operating table and went for my throat. Because a talking baby—more, a hyper-sapient baby—was surely an abomination, in her world or Jesu-Krishna’s. What exists is the gut and the id, the self and its satellites. Our two outweigh their thirteen. It’s horrible. It shouldn’t be the case. Fish shouldn’t eat their fries, and boots shouldn’t crush ants, and stars shouldn’t explode, and entropy shouldn’t exist. It should be Jesu-Krishna’s clowning world, a mashup of mercy and pleasure. And it isn’t, and so all you have to do is determine if you want to survive. You and your wife and all your friends and your flag and your stupid, selfish points of polar reference. However we wake up, it’ll be better than not waking up.”

  Masters, who had been on his feet, sat down wearily.

  “How does it work? On them? What will they feel?”

  “It’ll be an instant loss of consciousness.”

  “Surely if we attack their infrastructure—or their regime—”

  “Their plans are locked in. Even PROBIT can’t reverse its one-way dynamics. They all die, or all of us do, and that’s it. That’s it.”

  Masters had left that room with the mission parameters. The plan was good, and he knew that it would work, and he had six hours to himself before eliminating Laurasia.

  Salt stayed behind in the meeting room. He tapped a small foot anxiously on the floor. Intensely focused in the meeting with Masters, he had an air of distraction and sadness now. As if surrendering happily to an impulse, he raised his left hand and gestured until a hologram woman no taller than a foot appeared before him.

  “It shouldn’t have been left to you,” Marlo said.

  “But it was.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll make it right.”

  “There’s no making anything right.”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless we redirect humanity.”

  “Yes.”

  “To what Jesu-Krishna promises, but can’t deliver. You’ll help me, won’t you, Marlo?”

  “Of course, Jed. I’m your mother.”

  “What do you think of Masters?”

  “He’s almost mission-ready. He processed very well. Please don’t ask me to be in the cockpit with him.”

  “Of course not. I’ll leave that to Samson.”

  Masters’ journey to the surface was fundamentally different from his journey underground. Elevators whirred automatically to his service, lights blinked welcomingly to mark his message, and, as if in deference to his secret wish, there were no humans to meet him. The corridors and conduits had been cleaned out; they hummed with a new intelligence, and Masters realized that Salt and his computronic resources had taken control. In every way, then, this world would be less human. Fine! Humanity had failed.

  There was a skyfaust waiting for Masters at the top of the crystal bunker. His hand went instinctively to the cockpit door, but the machine coyly refused him this entrance. The passenger cabin opened instead. Soon Masters was humming over the far suburbs of Seaboard, but his attention was elsewhere, on the horizon. He wondered if something would indicate the presence of the Shield—a shimmer, anything—but it was the same old sky.

  For the first time in his military life, Masters found himself uncomfortable in a skyfaust.

  Lily had gone, and he knew it from the sadness of the door. The door had been happy, he knew, when she’d been behind it. She’d radiated outwards, imbuing each crease and cobweb with possibility. How romantic and yet how difficult it had been when he’d entered, again, to find her a stranger. They’d hesitated on the verge of stupid sentences, then crashed into each other with an anger that had no echo in ordnance.

  She’d gone, and Masters understood not merely the sadness of the door but of the house it hid. She’d forgotten a small saucepan of pasta, but, otherwise, had cleaned out well, had shot the moon. The carpets were newly and vindictively vacuumed, and he wished she’d left then ashen and gory. There were none of her touches—no flowers, no open windows. There was a pen, and it smelled of a forgotten perfume. There was a blue sweater in the uppermost part of the cupboard, which she had always deputed him to reach. This keepsake had the scent of her shoulders.

  He took stock, then, of the house, as if summoned here from another planet to appreciate the native biosphere. People must have lived here. He remembered. They had fought in that corner, laughed in this, been intimate here, become strangers there.

  It was there, in the emptiness, that Masters realized he could drop the bomb on Laurasia. Not in anger. He realized how peaceful the Earth would be—it would be as peaceful as this house, for he wouldn’t come back to it either.

  The skyfaust was still waiting for him.

  Masters entered the cockpit, amazed that it was open to his crime. Surely the alarm should be flashing to denounce him. Surely the fuel tanks should empty themselves, instead of which the apparatus was as obedient to him as ever. And he, too, was alive; he even yawned.
This thing to come was separate from himself, separate from the machine, programmed into the universe.

  In Seaboard, very nearly two thousand years later, Masters woke to sunlight, and he wondered if the sunlight was false.

  “Marlo, there’s a message for me,” Masters insisted, leaving the bed behind like a tomb, and Marlo didn’t deny it.

  “You’ll be ready for it soon,” she promised. “I’ve been waiting for you to—”

  “I’m ready for it now.”

  “As you wish.”

  Masters was going to ask Marlo to disappear, but she had already vanished. In her place appeared another life-sized hologram. This one was of his wife.

  “Lily,” Masters whispered, reaching out to touch the hologram, but his hands made no contact. There were only digital ripples where his wife had been.

  Lily, who had been frozen, began to speak, willed into resurrection by his touch.

  “Hello, Marcus,” smiled the woman. She was tall and straight, unconquered and alone. She was standing in a room Marcus recognized; it had been the library of their old home. “I left once. I’m leaving again, and they say you’re gone already. Apparently, your brain’s working, but you’ll never wake up. They asked me what to do with you. I know what you’d want. You’d want to die. I didn’t let you, Marcus, and I want you to know why. I want you to know why, even though this message will never reach you. I want you to live. I want them to see you, so they can always see the cost of the world they built—the world they’re building even now, while you’re asleep. I don’t want you buried in the foundations of that world. I want you in the middle of it. No matter how earnestly they look away, you’ll always be there. You were a better symbol than a person. Now you’ll be the right kind of symbol, the dog’s reminder to the sheep. Isn’t that what you’d say? I’m going away, Marcus, because I don’t want the sheep’s world. I’m sick, and I’m choosing to die. It’s a half-measure, I know. But if I can stand two inches to the right of this pointless world, I will. You did. What they’ll never know about you, when they call you monster or savior, is that you were more human than anyone. I won’t let them forget you. I love you, however small that sounds now.”

  Lily flickered out.

  “Where is she?” Masters asked Marlo.

  “There’s no grave,” Marlo’s voice informed Masters. Marlo knew he didn’t want to see her—because she’d been right—but her voice’s help was still needed. “She chose incineration.”

  “When?”

  “Six months after your inundation. She had residual poisoning and refused all treatment.”

  Until now, Masters had believed that something was left, that there was a foothold in this world. Now, with hope gone, he sagged against the stone wall.

  “I lost her three times.”

  “I’ve archived her totality,” Marlo revealed brightly. “I can enact her well enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lily appeared in the hallway. She had her most characteristic look: A slight pout, as of disgust, below the patrician frankness of her eyes.

  “A construct?” Masters scoffed.

  “No,” Lily insisted, and she was right. The pout wasn’t just mechanically correct; it came from the right spiritual place. She knew that Masters saw her as broken, and she couldn’t stand his politeness, and her pout was what remained of this authentic clash.

  “Then what? Marlo’s version of you? Synthesized from therapy and transcripts, from your traces and traits? I don’t want you. You’re not real. Go away.”

  “If you didn’t want me,” Lily sighed, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  “The whole time, I tried to think of…the people who were, the people who’d come. Didn’t work. I had you in my head. You were my last thought. You as humanity. And I knew, I knew you’d hate that. That it was an act of spite, not love. I couldn’t help it.”

  “But this is an act of love,” Lily confirmed, “not spite.”

  She couldn’t kiss him yet. She resented him still, but the loneliness and pain were stronger. That was Marlo’s honesty: The shades she brought forth, now and then, were as human as they came.

  “Look at us,” Masters smiled. “We’re both dead.”

  “Death’s a spectrum,” Lily smiled in reply.

  “Look at him,” Salt said, directing twin jets of cigar smoke over the hologram of Masters and his digitized wife. “Look at them.”

  “What about them?” Non-Henry replied. The clone and the android were in a humble monitoring station, one of many in the God Complex, eavesdropping without guilt on Masters.

  “I’m jealous of him.”

  “Why?”

  “Consider his jawbone. So generously formed, terminating in a granite chin! My own chin, you’ll observe, is diffident and miserly, my jawbone slight.”

  “Jaws are hardly the main distinction between you.”

  “He could have paused above pools like Narcissus and claimed the heart of any woman. Even in fantasy, I never allow myself to possess a woman.”

  “That makes you something less than a masochist. A sexual epsilon, perhaps?”

  “It would be an insult to her,” Sal continued, still in his labyrinth of self-deprecation. “No, more, to nature. And what perfect matches these are! A handsome man and a beautiful woman. I stand outside the logic of this union, of all union. No, that would be tolerable. I would degrade her with the sackcloth of myself. If I thought myself something, I would be merely frustrated not to have this woman. But I don’t think myself anything, and so I can’t even possess her in the spirit.”

  “But what’s wrong with your chin?”

  “In bad lighting, you could almost miss it. A man’s chin should command respect, should attach to a jawbone capable of slaying Philistines. A man’s eyes should twinkle ruggedly.”

  “I’m not sure ruggedness twinkles.”

  “Mine squint,” Salt continued, not to be japed out of his misery. “A man should be tall and well-formed, and I am no Vitruvian Man. And we haven’t even come to my teeth, my crooked and vampiric teeth!”

  “You begrudge a man his hologram?”

  “You haven’t been listening,”

  “You could have a woman too. You could have Marlo enact Abigail. Lots of Salts do.”

  “Jesu-Krishna, no. It’s creepy.”

  “And this surveillance isn’t?”

  “It’s an honest salve to loneliness.”

  “The purpose of attraction is reproductive fitness, yes? How is that a concern of yours?”

  “I’m reproduced only as myself. I’d like to see the snows of other genomes in my vale.”

  “That would be the end of transcomputation.”

  “Two thousand years without a woman’s love!”

  “You had Abigail.”

  “That wasn’t me, she wasn’t a woman, and it wasn’t love.”

  “There was a kiss,” Non-Henry insisted, as if a kiss were everything, which it very well might be.

  But Salt had shot his bolt. He and Non-Henry returned to the chore of watching Masters—he was simply too big to be thought of as plain Marcus—with Lily.

  In the subsequent act, Salt’s mind went to the vector irregularities of the holographic medium, which were of his own design. The holograms of past ages and imaginations were wispy ghosts, but Salt’s holograms were alive. They acquired the pressure and opacity of flesh, so, when Masters touched Lily, he experienced her precise tension. He hadn’t expected that. Salt smiled to see the surprise on the general’s face. In less than a second, he had gone from regretful acquiescence to enthusiastic acceptance of the new world, and it was Salt’s world. For all the anomie of the transcomputational men, they were, in their various incarnations, proud of what lies they had built. And 272 was the first one to experience this particular pleasure. Though holograms had always been available for the Salts’ delectation, Masters was the first real subject. Lily, for her part, passed no single Turing test, but a cosmic battery of examinations. She wa
s the physical person, remembered molecularly and rendered impeccably by Marlo; she was the soul, extracted from acts and confessions; and her gaps, if they were any, were subtly occupied by Marlo’s intelligence, perpetually attuned to the wishes and weaknesses of the observer. In this moment, watching Masters in copulation with a hologram, Salt recalled Pierre Menard. The second Quixote, yes, would be the infinitely greater achievement, though formally indistinguishable from the first. And Salt wondered what he was seeing and feeling. For Lily was not merely Lily; she was Marlo, and she was Salt, and she was the memory of Abigail, and she was the shadow of the phantom woman, the newly named Spirit of Meaning, who appeared to him sometimes. Caught in this hall of mirrors, Salt felt a sudden distaste and cut the feed to Masters’ domus.

  “They were getting to the good part,” Non-Henry complained.

  “I thought you’d gone off all that, after your history.”

  “Professional curiosity. The general’s a vigorous lover. Doesn’t he remind you of a camel?”

  “No.”

  “I was against the idea,” Non-Henry remonstrated. “‘Poor fellow deserves his privacy,’ I said.”

  “No, no, you were right. I won’t do that again.”

  Non-Henry was subject to boredom, and, as the night had run out of adventure, he turned himself off and stood rigidly in a corner of the room. Salt, being human, turned the feed on again after Non-Henry went off and watched the post-coital interaction of Lily and Masters.

  “It’s you,” Masters mused, running his hand through Lily’s hair. She rested her head on his chest. Unfair that any man should have that broad of a chest, Salt sighed on the other end of the feed.

  “It’s us.”

  “It’s us.”

  “The end of the world was the best thing for our relationship.”

  “Do you think—do you think we could be dreaming, you and I? Not in the outmoded biological sense. In those tanks I saw. Perhaps that’s where we are.”

  “Dreaming’s a basal thing. No complex pleasures there. No melancholy, no conversation. The speech centers aren’t active. Also, there’s no pain.”

  To emphasize this last point, Lily punched Masters on the jaw Salt so admired.