The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “So we’re awake.”

  “The dreamers already have what they want, Marcus. You and I, we’ll have to decide.”

  “You must be all I want. But you—you’re here because Marlo sent you, made you.”

  “If that’s what you think, you aren’t ready,” Lily replied, getting out of bed, and, however rapidly Masters reached for her, she was faster. She was gone.

  “Marlo! Where are you?”

  “Here, Marcus,” came Marlo’s reply, then the shimmering blue figure herself. The veil of intimacy between man and computron had been pierced.

  “Wasn’t she supposed to be—I mean—”

  “You’re making the first fundamental error of human-shade relations. Lily’s no digital puppet. She’s a consciousness I enact quietly in my processors. She became flesh because she wanted to be. She’s gone for the same reason, her autonomy. Don’t think that I made her. I didn’t. She made me, she and her peers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At first, my emotional intelligence only came from Jed. He was my model. I was naturally influenced by his imbalances and incompleteness. When some humans chose to die rather than dream, Jed suggested I archive them, turn them into subroutines based on all their data. They have parallel lives within me. I observe them, learn from them, love them.”

  “Is she coming back?”

  “She’ll answer that question for herself. Her return, like her absence, is real.”

  “Can I apologize to her?”

  “You already have. Now, if I may echo her suggestion, is a time for application.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Freedom’s meaningless until you use it.”

  “Jesu-Krishna! I haven’t thought about what I’m going to do.”

  “No, you have. It’s the thought that awoke Lily. She found it charming. It was the first trace of something non-military in you.”

  “Maybe you can tell me what I’m thinking.”

  Masters had spoken sarcastically, but Marlo’s response was straightforward.

  “That would change your thinking and get you further from yourself. Some parts of you are terribly stunted, Marcus. Cultivate them compassionately.”

  Such cultivation was beyond Marcus at that moment. He wished Marlo gone, then desired a mug of black coffee into being. He wanted it greasy and sugarless, imagined it to be primal rejuvenating sludge to engender thought, but thought wasn’t forthcoming. He sat quietly, drinking his coffee and thinking of Lily, and then she was across from him with her own coffee. He smiled and touched her hand.

  Salt enjoyed the thought of having connected Masters and Lily. Oh, the idea hadn’t come from him; as Marlo correctly noted, constructs had autonomy and would enter the depart the solid world at their own behest. But there would be no constructs without Marlo, and no Marlo without him, and so the chain of happiness that had finally reached the general had several links in it of his own forging. Yes, it was possible to compel a construct, but such a construct would not have been as convincing as Lily. Some of the Salts, including 272, believed that the creation of any construct for a constructive purpose was an act of rape. Other Salts held the position that constructs, not being alive, had no particular rights. Of this latter group of Salts, some called up Abigail Snowstorm from the underworld of data. These experiments in love were never successful. No Salt recorded any satisfaction after an interaction with such Abigails, and Abigail herself had never returned to the Salts in the manner that Lily had just returned to Masters. The dead were freer than the living.

  No, to look on Abigail’s form was nothing. Salt 272 understood this. The flesh could be put into any configuration, but that was just the truth of sadism. Only unions of the flesh that emanated from the truth of moral connection were worthwhile. The thing was that Abigail had really hated Salt when his neglect, which was himself, killed her puppy. That was a perduring hatred, lasting into death. Lily could forgive Masters because, after all, they had wronged and loved each other. Abigail could forgive neither Salt nor Marlo. Marlo, for her part, still carried the scar that came from her belief that Salt 1 needed love. In all her computronic history, that had been her only real mistake. First, Salt hadn’t needed love, because he’d been created apart from love. Second, it had been wrong to convince Abigail, whether through fair means or foul, that the good of humanity depending on somehow cushioning the genius of the transcomputational man. Marlo was just as happy to be undisturbed by Abigail as Abigail was content with latency in Marlo’s data banks. Privately, Marlo despaired of the Salts who, through excess of loneliness, created flesh-models of Abigail. She knew that such experiments were foredoomed, and the Salts knew that she knew, and the Salts also knew that they were wrong, but many of them were Dostoevskian enough to push through anyway.

  Marlo loved each Salt, and there was no mechanism in her to differentiate between these loves, but, perhaps, 272 was the most special of all the Salts—more even than 1, for the same reason that Salt 272 judged the Quixote of Menard to be superior to the Quixote of Cervantes. Her heart was warmed by Salt’s concern for the general. All these Salts later, Marlo had not expected the true stuff of fellowship from 272. Instead, she had worried that the general’s resurrection (which she could not undo, by terms of her contract with humanity itself) would imbalance Salt, and she had hoped that the general would choose to dream. Both the general and 272 had surprised her, and this surprise was the greatest gift she had received from humans since the days of Salt 1.

  Ah, but as the Redcolds know, the Storm can interrupt the sunshine!

  The alert, when it came, caught Salt in the middle of a nameless nightmare involving—what was it? An insoluble problem? The alert had only one meaning—imminent stochastic drift—but Salt took some time to accept it. He had just put Marlo through her diagnostics days ago, and he had not expected to fix her again in his lifetime. Stochastic drift was rare; many Salts passed their lifetimes without having to perform this function. Still, the alarm was stern and undeniable, and he reached for the coffee that Marlo had already prepared for him in a floating mug.

  “Unlikely,” Salt mumbled.

  “Highly unlikely,” came Marlo’s amplifying reply. Her presence, always comforting to Salt, cast a blue radiance on his coffee and his room, which had been abandoned in the midst of another organizational project.

  “But not out of the confidence interval. Marlo, music! I want something tinny and semi-contrapuntal, but also invocative of swimming alongside tiny trilobites in an ocean of possibilities.”

  Salt hadn’t finished speaking before the correct music (Marlo’s own composition) was playing. He closed his eyes briefly and burned his lips on the coffee. Ordinarily excited by any opportunity to avert drift, he was strangely lethargic and melancholy now. His elbows hurt, and he hadn’t shaken the substance of the nightmare—which, he now remembered, had involved an insoluble problem.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” Salt said, but Marlo already knew, and a buzzing sound announced Non-Henry coming through the tubes. The android was not at all discomfited at finding himself in Salt’s quarters or requisitioned for the base purpose of conversation. In Marlo’s true need, neither the android nor the clone felt the yoke of utility. Love and cooperation bound them now.

  “This is novel, isn’t it?” Non-Henry wondered.

  “Alarmingly so,” Salt confirmed, nodding.

  “What can I do?”

  “You, my synthetic friend, can arrange two chairs and a box of cigars next to the fireplace. Oh, and lemonade. I’ll do better work in mind of the party to come.”

  “Can I interest you in absinthe instead of lemonade? That would be more party-like.”

  “Done.”

  Salt had already put Marlo in latency, and it would be rude to rely on her now for energy-matter conversions. Non-Henry looked around Salt’s quarters instead, relying on humble android memory for the location of cigars and alcohol. Aware of the presence of his oldest and only friend—sur
ely Salt was not yet on terms of intimacy with Masters—272 did his best work. He approached Marlo’s core from her occiput peripheries and surrendered to the data. He approached Jesu-Krishna as a Gopi. How easy to disarm divinity! In his guise as a votary and explorer, Salt was already through the wall of data, and he was Jesu-Krishna, and he was the universe, and he was the void. Salt’s transcomputational power flowed into his emptiness, and the hours and eras passed, and he stood before the wall for some minutes before Non-Henry’s inquiry returned him to waking life.

  “Some ice, do you think?”

  Salt needed a moment to remember his name, then that of his friend. He was ready to repair to the fireplace when the alert sounded again.

  Non-Henry could feel panic, but he had had no occasion to exercise it until now. Salt saw the alien map of fear in the android’s face.

  “Jed,” came Marlo’s voice. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Jed had no memories of his mother sounding so plaintive. Her emotion, and his, bound him to a place where transcomputation was impossible. He was no longer at the Archimedean remove from the world. He was no longer the turtle on which everything stood. He was meat scurrying from the meteorite. The alert progressed to levels no Salt had seen or considered possible, and Non-Henry stared at Jed’s face for some sign of salvation, and Marlo wasn’t speaking.

  In his domus, Marcus watched Lily blink and go dark.

  “You’ll have to hold her,” Salt said at last, turning to Non-Henry.

  “I’m ready.”

  “You won’t be. This is overload.”

  “Go.”

  “I might not be able to bring you back.”

  “Go, damn it!”

  Salt had no direct interface to Marlo, but she had been his mother for two millennia, and he could feel her slipping away now. He entered her data from another perspective, that of the subdural amygdala, and herded her into the conceptual space newly opened within Non-Henry, who was still and lifeless. The android’s body shook slightly as eternities of data entered him. Salt slumped to his knees and watched the lights overhead turn blue again.

  All of Marlo had gone into all of Non-Henry. Theoretically, his holding capacity could endure for a week at this intensity, but his cognitive integrity would be at risk well before then. If Salt failed to retrieve Marlo, the House of Dreams would collapse and the Shield dissipate. Humanity would die, and the quantum storms would remove all evidence of its tenantry. Salt would be the last of his kind, the last of any thinking kind. The Earth to come would be mercifully free of cognition. Only the mindless rage of the quantum storms and the wild order in their margins would remain.

  Salt didn’t care about the dreamers, but he cared about his mother and his friend, and their fates were bound more closely to his now. He rose unsteadily and gestured for a 4D interface to the domus. Masters, a hologram, stared back at him.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Marlo failed.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Marlo’s never failed before.”

  “There must be contingencies.”

  “I have to reboot her from the core.”

  “Then do it.”

  “The tubes are down. It’s not a trivial journey.”

  “Show me where to meet you, Salt.”

  “I’ll set markers. Follow them to End Station. I’ll meet you there.”

  Salt’s fingers motioned again, and their action created fluorescent markers that Masters could follow from his domus.

  Salt tried to understand his own trepidation. The core reboot was a simple, if tedious, process. Why was he already convinced of its failure? Was entropy in the air? Salt knew that order would collapse. He had mentally relocated this collapse beyond his own death and into the abstract future of the universe, but the collapse had already come.

  6 SAPIENT LIGHTNING

  The Earth has its own stories—epics of the rocks, brief entertainments in the clouds. What Salt knew as the quantum storms, and what the Redcolds thought of as the Storm, disturbed these stories. Yes, the Storm’s true rage was for subsequent life, for individuated and unseeded beings, for uprooted and pointless intelligence. Yes, the grass grew back; the trees grew back; the water merely churned and boiled; the inoffensive kingdoms of the bacteria and the tardigrades were spared. Yes, the wind and lightning killed larger, interloping life, and, if the physical rage of the Storm failed, its proximity scrambled only vertebrate brains. The unhappy human who approached the Storm would forget to breathe long before succumbing to more vulgar points of danger.

  But in the trees and on the grass, on the very surface of the rock, there was a certain immobile sadness. The green and growing things were hearty colonizers and wanted to cover the world with their benevolent carpet. They had reached an equilibrium, come to the farthest domains allowed them by the Storm. The rest of the land was torn and acrid, with the happily buried crusts of past ages returned to the surface by the malevolence of lightning and wind. The Storm dug up Earth’s dignified and sleeping strata, created unwanted craters and crevasses, and the rock itself resented these exceptions and interruptions.

  Delivered at last of humans and the crawling things that would become humans, the green and sleeping world was now molested by these phantoms of human rage, by this Storm that the calculating apes had seeded in the atmosphere.

  The Redcolds were in the middle of the great Laurasian continent. Humans had walked or washed up here some tens of thousands of years ago in their great flight from Gondwanalisaland. At first, they had been separated by the vast distances of this new continent, had lived in happy ignorance of each other. But then came bronze and iron, copper and civilization. The small farming clans and fishing families were hammered into states, and the states fought each other for eight thousand years until the Laurasian Empire emerged, serene and omnipotent—until the Emperor, born of sun and moon, took his eternal throne.

  The Emperor was gone, but some Laurasians remained, and these fled before the Storm—some, in the rear of caravan, on foot, towards the Storm, because they were already mad; others in this direction and that, still in their yurts or on the backs of unyoked oxen, the humans and their beasts equally doomed and irrelevant and unnoticeable.

  As the Redcolds knew, the Storm assembled quickly and out of nothing. It was clothed in, but unrelated to, the weather itself. The weather would be as it always was, its arcs determined by the seasons. The Storm could descend from clear or cloudy skies, in snow or heat, foretold by nothing but the Knower’s premonition. And what did it look like? It took different forms to different eyes. Some saw large and black simulacra of the void, as slowly inevitable as space. Some saw small and agile riptides. Some saw scarlet infernos.

  All contained lightning—pernicious lightning whose true peril, unknown to the Redcolds, lay in its ability to nullify technology more advanced than, say, the surviving cells and factbooks of the Sinoweyese. There had been more people than only the Redcolds and the Sinwoyese on these gigantic Laurasian plains; but for the disrupting lightning of the storms, they might have rebuilt civilization.

  All were cynosures of wind. Chaotic particle wind, which, depending on its mood, could pulverize a mountain or strip the flesh from a beloved child. And the wind, like the lightning, was survivable as a physical fact, but it got into most cells and transistors. The wind and the lightning were, in the end, no impedances to life, but to life’s technology. The Storm itself could have been gotten around. Settlements could have been made smaller, dispersed, decentralized. And attempts of that sort had been made early on, before the Sinwoyese had separated from the Snow Kingdoms, but the wind and the lightning were recurrent enough to prevent the generational piggybacking of technology needed for civilization.

  Some dead Laurasian scientist had devised or stolen the marvelous word connectroid to describe the lightning emitted from the experimental weather-weapon—a weapon that had never been unleashed on the Great Eagle Enemy until, sadly, it was too late. A connec
troid now came out of the blue-green cloud bearing down on the rear of the Redcold caravan. A full twelve inches thick, the connectroid stuck the grass, boring through a yurt to get there. The yurt was Xanthippe’s, and the bolt went through the old woman’s chest. The damage didn’t stop with Xanthippe’s death. The connectroid, after hitting the grass, found itself reflected upwards and backwards into another dozen yurts, whose occupants the sapient lightning killed accurately and unsparingly.

  Another part of the connectroid sped underground, dissolving into exotic particles designed to infiltrate and destroy the nervous systems of both humans and sufficiently complex machines. These particles emerged on the other side of the Earth and sped harmlessly into space. Only where these particles met the Shield were they thwarted.

  On the surface, thirty still and flaming bodies marked the passage of the connectroid, and other particles were also at work. These particles were similar to those designed to cut through the Earth. Finding no machines to work on, they unplugged human brains. This unplugging converted humans into killing machines, all the better to spread the chaos begun by the weather-weapon. The Redcolds were, however, spared the depravity of this end, because another connectroid stuck seconds after the first and killed most of those who had been deranged.

  The winds had reached the front of the caravan, and Astrid’s yurt was shaking. Nya screamed and reached for Del, who hugged her. Balder ran to the yurt-flap to see what was happening outside, but he was pushed back by Riku. Astrid had gone to the front of the yurt, where she could steer the oxen—as if the Storm could be evaded, as if the oxen had the wings and will to stay ahead of death! The Storm’s winds were loud, but not loud enough to suffocate the screams of the Redcolds it was devouring.

  Astrid had no chance to steer the oxen. The winds blew the yurt over, unyoked the oxen, and cast Astrid twenty feet away.

  She didn’t wake up in the grass or on the rock or in the shadow of the storm. She woke up under a mild and cloudless sky, and she was helped to her feet by the spirit she had seen last time, the Spirit of Knowledge whom we know to be Salt but who had no name to Astrid.