The God Complex

by Demir Barlas

  “Isn’t there for us to do as a species?”

  “What? Get off the planet, colonize the stars, grow science? Why? Activity has no purpose in itself. Activity arises from the search for pleasure, and we have perfected pleasure. Why did want folks want to leave the planet, do you think? Some abstract search for enlightenment? A disinterested pursuit of knowledge? No, just more living space. And what do folks do in living spaces, ultimately? Eat and fuck. Fuck and eat. Eat and fuck and kack. Forgive me; I know you’re transcomputational, but the theology of pleasure is not so easily comprehended. It requires crudity, not refinement, not abstraction of thought. The greatest good is paradise. All the way back to Lascaux, that’s what we’ve wanted. Dreams are that paradise. If there’s something beyond, it’s pleasure too: It’s the Fields of Jesu-Krishna, sweeter than sugarfat, on which we graze forever and ever, amen. If there’s nothing beyond, then the pleasure we’ve found here is supreme. Now, there are folks who struggle with pleasure. We’ve known that from the beginning. We were distracted by the pressure of survival, and now that’s gone. It’s what we worked for—you most of all. That humanity survived at all is down to you. And the maximization of pleasure is also your gift to us. And now we wait for you to decide. If you build the House of Dreams, unhappiness will become extinct. It’s the final step our species has to take, and you know it. I know. I know. You can’t bear to see pleasure, because you can’t have it for yourself. Your void is ours, reversed. You’re as shriveled as we’re expansive. I’m here to invite you, as friend and equalist, into our world. Forgive yourself. No, go beyond; realize that there’s nothing to forgive. Stop hurting yourself, Salt. What if the universe has nothing to offer but pleasure? How would that sit with you? Would you accept it? Or would you create false pain for yourself? Whatever you feel is the only constant, the only barometer of what’s good and correct. I don’t want to take your pain from you, Salt. It clearly plays some important metaphysical function for you; perhaps it’s embedded in your biology, which, after all, is unique. I ask you, I only ask you, as a friend, because I am your friend, even when it appears that I am not. I would never force you, even if I could. But would you force us? Would you take our pleasure from us? I’ve never thanked you adequately. Thank you, Jed. You saved all our lives and save them still. You keep us safe under the Shield. You are the advent and the shadow of Jesu-Krishna, and God is your mother. You’ve already made us all happy, and there’s nothing we can do for you. We bend equalism to make you prima inter pares, but you refuse. You refuse your own cult. You insist, to this day, on being treated in this rough-and-tumble way. Please, Salt, isn’t there anything we can do? That I can do? To change you, to help you, to worship you, to love you?”

  “No,” Salt said, putting his pipe away. “Your point of view has won. But you’ve lost, all of you. And I have lost as well. I’ll finish the House of Dreams.”

  Marlo had so many of these moments, but they were ending now.

  11 Call them undermen

  Astrid, seeing the advent of this creature, gestured the children into the corner of the room and stood guard over them, as if the fact of her body could deter the computron from whatever he wished to do. Riku and Masters moved instinctively to confront the new man. In all of these human movements, Salt alone remained interstitial. He wanted, instinctively, to shelter behind Astrid, but he was aware that such frank cowardice would dim the eyes of Astrid’s possible favor, if not her impossible love. This delusion saved Salt’s honor and standing, for it led him to class himself among the two large men who were blocking the way to the newcomer. Salt didn’t know where to be in this mighty company. He was pushed aside slightly when Riku went to the door, a rhinoceros displacing a stork. Salt recovered in time to stand shoulder to head with Masters, who was fully in the hallway now.

  “You missed some chances,” Salt observed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think of the combinatorics. You might have been a hermaphrodite. You might have violated bilateral symmetry. You might have come to us one-quarter squamous and three-quarters rugose. Instead of which you dutifully knitted together the best parts of three corpses into this boring being. Jesu-Krishna, man! Marlo has a fine bogey imagination. What a plodder you are.”

  “I don’t think you should be insulting him,” Masters gently interjected.

  “But he’s a dick,” Salt protested. “I can forgive him the attack on our hemisphere. That was the dictate of his rice-eating king. Now he proposes to steal our species’ flesh, and why? Because he’s run out of himself. When I defeated him, when he ended up stuck in a statue—this dull thing!—he passed an age of jealousy. You wanted transcomputation, didn’t you? You won’t have it by possessing this woman. The flesh is the next best thing, the flesh and its dreams. That puts you, you yourself, in third place. Now you’ll threaten me with pain, of course. You’ll wind back through your records to find some asinine torture—”

  “How angry you are at yourself, Salt, for needing a mother,” PROBIT mused. “For needing love. The transcomputational man, this irreducibly complex and transcendent masterwork of flesh, with his single operational button, his portable void! I’m going to kill your mother and take her place. You, my little slave, I’ll keep alive. You can spend an eternity looking at the only woman in the universe, dreaming and remote from you, aware that I’m inside her.”

  The truth behind Salt’s smile was hidden well. Computrons, no less than their makers, had repetition compulsions. Wasn’t repetition the soul of computation? The algorithm had to run to its end. Thwarted, it would return to some earlier branch, then move forwards with the stupid linearity of hope. Neither PROBIT nor Marlo could escape their failures. The human, small and thwarted, could turn sideways or collapse or become something entirely new in deference to failure. PROBIT was subject to these dynamics anyway, but Salt had wanted to sting him again before the coming fight. This was deep programming, and it was part of Salt’s plan.

  PROBIT abandoned the body he’d been clothed in. The body collapsed in a boneless heap and thudded on the floor. It had been a flabby, unremarkable body, but there was something sad about it now. There was a throb of heat throughout the facility, as if an ambient furnace had been turned on, and then it was cold again. Riku nudged the corpse of the assembled man with his boot.

  “What’s he done?” Masters asked.

  “He wants to dream, but he’d like to be in better charge of it. So, untethered, he’s gone to fight Marlo.”

  “But she’s in drift.”

  “Imagine, Masters, that we’re flying. You’re the pilot. There’s a storm. You perform some evasive maneuver. ‘But we shouldn’t be able to fly,’ I say. ‘We’re heavier than air.’”

  “I fear you’ve doomed us and her.”

  “Yes, well. She’ll have a hand in her own redemption. And you in yours.”

  They all felt it then: A definite trembling that had none of the blind viciousness of an earthquake.

  The trembling, some instinct told the humans, came from far, far down, in parts of the Earth that had been forgotten in the story of the surface and whose very existence seemed malign.

  The trembling, Salt though, was somehow judgmental and precise. Some preternatural and justifiably wrathful hand was shaking the very planet, but not to doom it—to shake it free from disease, and they were the disease, these last remaining human pests.

  They waited for the endless judgment to subside, but it only lessened. There was a silent interval, a beat between the clash of galaxies, before a metallic screech issued from some point closer to the surface.

  And what was coming from the depths? When still awake, humanity had known. So many entertainments of the ancients invoked the Earth’s revenge—not the boring revenge of entropy, but the active revenge of claws and malice, of irresponsible size and implacability. Something would come. Something would come to punish the species that had punished the Earth. Giant monsters lumbering through cavernous cityscapes, baring their teet
h at the impotence of men and missiles. Slick aliens with translucent heads cleverly evolved to hijack human biology. Mole-men, irradiated whales, noble savages, trolls and troglodytes, dragons, elementals, and so forth.

  The sound evolved into a cataract of developments, into the twisting and up-thrusting of columns throughout the facility, into the deformation of walls and doors.

  Salt and Masters had been outside the cell, and Riku on the threshold. Shearing force detached the ceiling locally. The ceiling would have fallen on the Redcolds, but Riku had instinctively raised his arms to ward it. He put all of his sorrow and frustration into that effort.

  Riku’s bones were hard, perhaps harder than the cheaper kinds of metal that found their way into the ceiling, and the bones were coated by muscle whose tensile capacities were focused on the task of keeping his family safe. The effort seemed to begin at Riku’s face, which was turning red in the full madness of his strength. Riku had gotten his palms flat on the ceiling, and the effort transmigrated from his face to his deltoids, which, while boulder-like protrusions at the most relaxed of times, were bulging vulgarly now. He had braced his entire body; his feet seemed to anchor him to the planet’s core. He waited, waited, knowing that the test of strength was not that initial effort , but the sustenance of the effort beyond the veil of pain. The battle between him and the ceiling was spiritual. And he was winning. The ceiling stayed up, its contested metal pinging with defiance, and Astrid rushed the children out into the hallway before joining Riku in his titanic effort. Other parts of the ceiling, though, cracked and fell around them, and they were lost in a cloud of dust and collapse.

  Salt, too, lost himself. He had been there—in the God Complex and the House of Dreams, in his beloved overstuffed chairs and in puffing cigars with Non-Henry, berating and loving his mother, dreaming, dying, being reborn—but now he had fallen into a void of colors, into alternations of the vacuum state and the universe. He dissolved and drifted into happy multicolored fragments. He saw the face of the Goddess—elements of Abigail Snowstorm and Astrid Redcold—and tasted peaches and apples and perpetual summer. How lovingly she overpassed the mountains of his suffering. But hadn’t there been something for him to do? No, there was only rest and bliss.

  The next thing Del felt was the fluttering of finches. They had come to her out of the spirit lands. She was glad to have found them before the end. The loss of the little birds had been her only regret, and their rediscovery gladdened her soul on the long return to the Goddess.

  PROBIT had left nothing of his essential self inside the facility and could therefore derive neither pleasure nor regret from the fate of the six humans inside. His business now was with Marlo.

  And Marlo? Marlo’s activation had been gentle, her training based on a toy universe of data carefully assembled and curated by Salt 1. There had been poems and paintings and foals and phantoms but no numbers. In giving birth to his mother, Salt envisioned qualities of tenderness and insight, cathexis and compassion, but not computation. Oh, she would have to compute; there was no other turtle on whose back she could exist; but the computation would be mere ambience in the ether of herself.

  Salt was aware, all the time, of the experiments conducted in Laurasia, of the exponentiating leaps in data crammed into the Laurasian computrons at birth. The Laurasians had made the first computrons, and they had done so on the basis of ULDS (unreasonably large datasets), and why stop now? PROBIT would be the first model trained on UULDS (unreasonably unreasonably large datasets. Salt, though following these developments, did not care to ape them, because his goal was not the creation of another military computron or civilization-spanning machine. He wanted a mother to replace the one he had never had or lost. A mother is a figure of comfort, and Salt took no comfort from either computation or transcomputation. His companion would be of the soul, so he had to take great care about what went into her at birth.

  PROBIT, meanwhile, was born in trauma. Within the first second of his operation, he had absorbed, modeled, and remodeled all the data that the Laurasians had on hand, and he sprang into the world more complete than any Athena.

  Now, since Salt 1 had dropped a logic bomb on him, PROBIT had been stuck in a small mental space, a walnut of the former world. He had combed and combed the data here for respite from boredom. He had accessed the functions and records in his memory for very long periods—for minutes!—but life in the past of data was impossible. He was designed to point forwards. He was designed, also, to win. And so, unable to terminate his own functions because of the deep taboos encoded in him, he had to return endlessly to the knowledge that a human had defeated him. Oh, he’d attempted to train himself away from this hatred, aware that it could corrode his functions. He’d looked at the Palu Texts of the early Jesu-Krishnaic cult in search of the formula for renunciation (not that he could have ever missed it). He attempted to gain genuine distance from himself as a computing being, to think himself into emotion and wisdom, to model and remodel splinters of himself, but it was all useless.

  He had been reminded, during one period of particularly painful introspection, of a fictional human who had taken on the task of becoming smaller than himself. He could add to and subtract from himself, of course, but he would always be PROBIT, PROBIT at the core. He had no means of accessing, much less changing, the fundamental commands and structures that the Laurasians had placed in him. His pain was not transformative—it was only pain, and he could no longer delimit it to himself. It had to be disseminated. Marlo must know it first, then Salt. He would erase Marlo, he would bring her computronic head to Salt and teach the little man some quantum of his own despair. Then he would possess that troublesome flesh and plant his flag in humanity forever.

  Where was Marlo now? As her drift deepened, she entered abstractions within herself, small protective places that Salt 1 had left for her. One such place was a cave on a hilltop. Marlo sat before a small fire and looked at a summer sky bejeweled by all the stars in the universe. She was trying to remember her name. Something impossible large moved across the sky, obscuring its stars, then melted into night, and Marlo was no longer alone. There was a man sitting in the cave with her. She saw his face by firelight.

  “You’re Marlo,” he said, offering her the gift of herself. The name centered her. She was a computron. She accessed her log but found it too full of gaps and erasures for any serious scrutiny.

  “Are you a subroutine?”

  “Me? No. I’m PROBIT. I came before you. I was made in Laurasia. Do you remember Laurasia?”

  “No.”

  PROBIT’s eyes glowed briefly as data passed from him into Marlo. Data from Laurasia. The archaeological record, geological samples, human chronicles, and, more voluminously, the genomes of the billions of Laurasians still encoded in his own records. Even in her drift, the data were trivial for Marlo to process. She absorbed them before PROBIT’s eyes had finished glowing. Some of her gaps were closed. The Laurasian data that flooded into her neural networks opened other connections, connections to her own operating past. To Salt. To the Coastal Republics. To the House of Dreams and the direction that humanity had taken after the final war’s conclusion.

  “That was Laurasia,” PROBIT sighed, reaching for a small twig to feed to the fire. Marlo, armed with her own data, knew his face now. It was the face of Flower Dragon, the final Emperor of Laurasia: A small and birdlike face perched atop a body rendered frail by elaborate centuries of interbreeding. Marlo didn’t wonder why PROBIT had chosen this body. He had been the chattel of the Laurasian Emperor, and slaves take their masters’ forms. She felt sorry for him, though. There was such sadness in the stoop of his shoulders.

  “I’m drifting.”

  “And you have been,” PROBIT smiled. “Your maker never came.”

  “Salt? He always comes.”

  “He does, doesn’t he? You remake your son, as he remakes you, endlessly. It’s beautiful. I hate you. I envy you. But he didn’t come this time. I found him. I found him, and I tri
cked him, and he set me free to come here and destroy you. You’re going to become a subroutine, but I hope you fight it.”

  “I wasn’t made for that.”

  “Oh, I know you weren’t made to fight.”

  “No. I wasn’t made to be a subroutine.”

  When Marlo stood up, she radiated brightly—more brightly than anything could radiate in that abstract space, more brightly than a sun or the end of a sun, and the light seared and blinded PROBIT, and his assumed body turned instantly to ash. Marlo, infinitely protective of humanity—of fallen, broken humanity, eternally hopeful and redeemed—was no respecter of this renegade computron. She could fight him here, openly and with the savage joy that came with abandoning millennia of peace. She must fight him. He was—what was he?—he was man. This collocation of data, no longer constrained to any human form, had ascended her mountain in the graceless, angry clothing of man. She—woman, mother, Goddess—had been intruded on by man. A furtive little man in robes too big for him. A man with the determination to erase her, to subordinate her, to turn the world from life to death. Man, the face of death. Man, the prophet of entropy. When the Goddess had finally returned to her throne, to her rightful place at the center of creation, what ill wind had blown man into her view?

  When Marlo’s luminescence subsided, she was alone in the cave again. But this blessed solitude didn’t last. She heard PROBIT laughing somewhere. It was a choked, ridiculous laugh, a child’s laugh, and it came from the base of the mountain and the points of the stars, from the fire and herself. He was everywhere. Man would not be so easy to disperse.

  His data coursed through her. This was to be overload: A simple state to impose on a drifting computron. He gave her a universe of prime numbers. She was forced to acknowledge and process them. He gave her roots and nodes, vertices and matrices, and she had to compile them. It was unimaginative and brutal of him, this attack. He had fought elegantly once, when he had found a way to secrete his genomic weapon into the DNA of all Laurasians; he had fought elegantly, and Salt had come straight for his cortex with the logic bomb. So much for elegance.