by IGMS
"Got it," Annie said. "Ah Muzen Cab is a god of bees, honey, beekeeping and creation. Can't really tell you much more. It's food-related, so some corporate bot has auto-censored most mentions."
Schematics flashed as his system scanned the crowd for threats and analyzed data from his subconscious. The words
There had to be a couple hundred people in the square. People weren't normally happy to see them. Hunger and despair had been their companions for too long. Even when Francis showed them how his bees worked, they only offered words of sad thanks. This crowd was in a festive mood.
The dirigible landed with a soft thud. Annie appeared in front of him, rifle raised and squinting down the sights. "You sure you don't want the guns out? I could shoot the cigarette out the mouth of that hussy there."
Annie opened a virtual window, showing the subject of her disdain.
Reeva. The same lovely copper skin, the long black hair. Big teeth in a small mouth, large eyes in a small face. A cigarette hung from her lip. He forced the comparison away. The woman wasn't Reeva, though she could've been her sister.
"She's stuffed to the gills with armor and shielded communications equipment," Annie said. "Some other stuff too, looks like analytical equipment, full laboratory packed in her belly."
"Corporate?"
"Can't tell. It's scrubbed clean."
The crowd waited quietly for the dirigible door to open, the woman with her thumbs tucked into her belt. Francis couldn't stop looking at her.
"I don't like this," Annie said. "You wanna scram?"
"My system's giving me nothing," Francis said. His retinal display scrolled messages about the woman's interior armor, but that was it. "Open the door. If there's trouble, I can handle it. I used to take down corporate soldiers for fun."
"Yes, but you had guns, not a blimp and a bunch of mechanical bees," she said, but the dirigible door slid open and unfolded into stairs.
He descended, the steel of his boots ringing on the metal. He spread his arms wide, as if expecting children to rush into his arms. It was stereotypically priestly, but people seemed to like it.
The woman who resembled Reeva met him at the base of the stairs and extended her hand for him to shake.
He took it. "Father Francis Connolly."
"Wahid Singh," she said. "Welcome to Temptation."
His system still gave no threat warnings. As far as he could tell, no one had a weapon here, not even the woman.
A fat, rosy-cheeked man waddled out from the crowd. He was dressed in a pinstripe suit and had a mayoral chain around his neck. "Don't get the wrong idea, Father. The name of this here town is from back when people followed the Bible. We were lucky we weren't called Absolution or Penance or something else equally stupid."
Francis never led with the subject of religion when he came to a town, but most people were happy to talk about it once he explained what his bees could do. Mocking his faith was unusual.
Annie spoke in his earworm, her voice crackling again. "There's a bee stamped on every link."
A surreptitious glance at the mayor's chains showed her to be right.
"Thank you for welcoming me to Temptation," he said. Wahid smiled faintly and he felt his cheeks flush. "I'm here as a member of the outlawed Order of Preachers."
"Welcome, Father," Wahid said. "We know that Dominican friars have been a great help to the starving masses in the Midwest. It's rare to see members of the Order this far south. You're young for a priest."
If they'd heard of the work of his brothers and weren't hostile, this couldn't be a corporate town.
"Before I was a priest, I was a marine. When the biotic pollination act passed, I joined the rebellion." He wiped his brow. "I was wounded in action. The Dominican friars saved me."
"A most unusual priest," Wahid said. "Doesn't explain why you're here, though."
He'd found it was simpler to explain without embellishment. "I have mechanical bees. They are capable of pollinating . . ." He stopped when the crowd burst into laughter.
Wahid gestured for silence. "I'm sorry, Father, I know your intentions are good. I can't even begin to imagine the danger you must have faced in coming here. But we don't need your bees."
She pointed to the right of Francis's head and looked up. He almost snatched the bee from the air, before remembering that they stung. It was a real bee. There was no doubt about that. The tiny vibrating wings, the yellow on black striped body, the thorax ending in a poison-tipped sting. A real bee.
His knees trembled. He hadn't genuinely prayed for a long time, hadn't seen the point when amid so much death, but this was a miracle.
He knelt.
Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .
The townspeople fell to their knees, too, but they were praying in a different language.
Francis stopped. "Annie, translate."
Annie's voice was barely audible through the static. "I can't," she said. "It's not a living language. It might be Proto-Mayan, but I'm having trouble accessing modern Mayan dialects for comparison."
Annie picked out a repeated phrase so that it was the only thing that he could hear. The other words of the prayer died away, and the crowd was chanting the name of the bee god.
Wahid held up a hand, and the chants died. She extended her hand to Francis and helped him up. "You've come at the right time, Father. Tonight we celebrate what Ah Muzen Cab gives us."
He looked up at the statue of the bee god. "I don't understand. You have bees. How is this possible?"
"I'll show you."
She gave his hand a tug. He hadn't held anyone's hand since Reeva.
"Don't go with that woman," Annie said. "Her interior body armor has abalone tiling, Lonsdaleite material. Only high-level corporate soldiers have that."
He coughed into his shoulder, hiding his words to Annie, but he didn't let go of Wahid's hand. "What's the trademark?"
"Like I said, it's been scrubbed."
"Could be stolen then, like we always wanted to do."
"You failed, with an entire division of rogue marines. This is one woman."
Wahid tugged on his hand again. He wouldn't learn more if he didn't go with her, and he needed to know what was going on here. He let her guide him down a side street. He let go of her hand and walked ahead of her.
"If she was corporate," he said to Annie, "then they wouldn't let her scrub their trademarks. She must have stolen it."
Annie's voice was so filled with static that he could barely hear her. "How could she get away with that?"
He shrugged and then Wahid had caught up to him. She didn't take his hand again, but she walked close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. Children ran ahead, laughing. He'd forgotten what it sounded like to hear a child laugh.
"You're talking to an AI," Wahid said.
He had been in his share of tight scrapes in his time, but nothing unsettled him as much as this woman. "It's a low-level personal assistant. I wouldn't call it an AI." He tugged at his priest's collar, implying that the circuitry was implanted there.
"No," she said. "It's the dirigible. Mark three intelligence."
"That's impossible. And illegal."
"Ah Muzen Cab told us she was coming," Wahid said. "But hush. He will tell you more."
She darted forward, faster than a person could naturally move, and cupped a bee hovering over a flower. There were hundreds of them, dipping from blossom to blossom.
"You've got type XL internal augmentations," he said. "I never rose high enough in the ranks for that."
She released the bee and skipped away, and he watched her swaying hips as the crowd marched out of town.
"Stop looking at her ass," Annie said.
"Are you jealous?" he asked.
The fat mayor slapped Francis on the back as he trundled past. "Come on boy."
"Where are you taking me?"
"To give thanks to Ah Muzen Cab."
Annie's voice crackled. "I don't like this."
"I can barely hear you," Francis said.
Annie's next words were swallowed by static.
Temptation wasn't a large town and Francis soon found himself following some teenage girls along a country lane. Somewhere along the way, he had lost sight of Wahid.
They led him toward a barn in a pasture.
The barn itself was small and old, the paint flaking and with a few loose boards. Attached to the left-hand side was a pulsing green sack that extended outward like an oversized tumor. It was almost as large as the barn itself.
"Annie, what's that on the side of the barn?" Francis said.
"Can't tell," Annie replied. "It's organic in nature. If it's corporate nanotech, it's been stripped of all identifying details. Hell, for all I know, that's how you make a barn around here."
Wahid waited at the open barn doors. Behind her, the interior was unlit and too dark to see into.
"Father," she said, "come meet our god."
His mouth felt as dry as sandpaper as he stepped into the barn. The air was thick with bees.
"Don't worry," Wahid said. "They don't sting."
Annie tried to say something, but the static in his earworm was too loud and he switched it off. His heart thumping, he stepped into the darkness.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Bees landed on him, crawling over his eyes and nose, but even when he swatted at them, they didn't sting. Along the barn walls were unlit ultraviolet lamps. He placed his hand on one of the lamps. Even ultraviolet light would help penetrate the murk, but he couldn't find a switch.
He focused on the green sack at the barn's far side.
The entrance to the green sack was like a cave in the wall. The walls dripped with honey. Squatting in the cave, massive and unbelievable, was Ah Muzen Cab. Between four arms that were tipped with humanlike hands, the humanoid bee was tearing apart a sticky green sheet of bio-ware circuitry. Every now and then, the bee would rip out a handful of the bio-ware and eat it.
"Holy Mary, mother of God," Francis muttered and crossed himself. He started to sway on his feet and would have fallen if Wahid hadn't caught him from behind. Her body pressed against his back, soft but firm, nothing like what he would have expected for all her tech and internal armor.
She leaned into his ear and whispered. "Careful, Father. Breathe."
"This is impossible."
"Not impossible," said a deep voice that seemed to come from everywhere around them. Francis stared at the bee god, but its mouth hadn't moved except to chew slowly at a bit of bio-ware, a wire dangling grotesquely down its chin. "Nothing is impossible in an infinite universe."
Wahid shuddered against him in what Francis thought was a fit of ecstasy. "Ah Muzen Cab has chosen to speak to you. You are truly blessed."
"Come closer," the voice said.
Francis stepped away from Wahid's arms.
"You believe I should not exist," the voice said.
"That's right," he said.
"Why would you believe that when you believe in a god that you cannot see or hear or touch? I am flesh. I am real, Father Francis Connolly."
"How do you know my name?"
Ah Muzen Cab blinked at him with its huge, many-faceted eyes while ripping another sheet of circuitry from the bio-ware and bringing the dripping green mass to its open mandibles. "I am Ah Muzen Cab. And you are a man who has lost much. You have searched for answers for a long time. Perhaps fate has brought you to me."
This monstrosity couldn't be a god.
Wahid spoke as if she'd heard his thoughts. "It seems too simple, doesn't it? That's the problem of the modern world. We're always looking for the catch, the trick, the sleight of hand. We made our lives too complex and then we act surprised when it all falls apart."
Ah Muzen Cab seemed content to eat, rather than interrogate him further.
"You can't worship a bee," Francis said.
"Yes, you can. How many people do you think could describe what they are worshipping when they go to a Catholic church? This is simple. I worship Ah Muzen Cab, and when we sacrifice to him, he gives us the bees. He protects us from the corporates and the Southern cartels."
Francis kept his voice low. "Sacrifice?" he said, though he already knew the answer.
"Why were the corporates so efficient in destroying the natural bees?" Wahid said. "How did they overcome laws and regulations? How did they defeat the American army? How did they beat us? You know how good our training was."
Francis pressed the subcutaneous emergency button in his wrist, telling Annie to come immediately. Static buzzed in his ear but nothing more.
"Gwair-Sematech was the first to break the prohibitions on human-level intelligence AIs," Francis said. "Gave them such an advantage in corporate strategy that the others followed suit. It was inevitable from there."
Ah Muzen Cab finished consuming the bio-ware, a single dangling string of green conductor gel hanging from its teeth.
"AI is wrong," Ah Muzen Cab said. "Before they existed, the world had balance. Now men create false gods. Give me the encryption enzymes in your blood for your dirigible and I will remove its stain from the earth."
It took a second for Ah Muzen Cab's words to sink in. "Annie, get out of here! He wants to destroy you."
Francis fled into the early evening air. Wahid overtook him and planted herself in front of him, knees bent, stance relaxed.
He threw a punch. She didn't flinch but instead intercepted the punch in one impossibly fast motion by grabbing him by the biceps. She grabbed him in a bear hug and lifted him off his feet. He struggled to free himself, but he couldn't even wiggle.
She squeezed and he grimaced. She let him have just a little air. "Don't go and do anything stupid, Francis."
He struggled to move again, but it was hopeless. "Put me down." She didn't relax her grip. "Damn it, Wahid, I can't outrun you anyway. Put me down." She released her grip and lowered him to the ground.
"Take a seat," she said. "And listen to what I've got to say."
He didn't sit immediately, and she fixed him with a glare. Francis settled for a rock by the side of the road.
"Ah Muzen Cab's right," Wahid said. "You know that. You know what AI has done to us, to everyone."
"Annie can't hurt anyone," he said. "She's not a strategy AI, nor is she military. She's the failed hobby project of a corporate scientist that liked dirigibles. There are so many bugs in her software and hardware he was going to destroy her before the Dominicans raided her compound. They stole the one AI the corporates were never going to use anyway. Hell, she truly believes she is a woman who's been dead for two hundred years. I point out that there aren't many women who are actually armed dirigibles, but she never listens."
Wahid looked over her shoulder at the barn. Indecision passed over her face and then she set her jaw. "If she's as harmless as you say, we can let her leave." Wahid squatted next to him and placed her hand on his knee. He couldn't have been more conscious of it than if she had a fistful of spiders. "But you can't stay here if she's around."
"Why would I stay?"
Wahid's hand slid up his thigh. "When you landed in the square, we were preparing our feast to celebrate the harvest. You can see everything we have and decide in the morning."
Francis made to stand, and Wahid smoothly removed her hand as if it had never been there.
"Don't you ever get sick of being hungry?" she asked. "Aren't you sick of choosing between starving or working for the corporates? Every morning, I wake up and I know there's a meal in my kitchen. I can walk down the main street without worrying a cannibal gang might crack my head open. I can have a slice of bread knowing that it won't bring patent enforcement kicking down my door."
There was no deceit in her voice. She believed every word. His military instincts hummed though, the ones that used to warn him of the sniper rifle in the shadows. Annie was safe, locked up tight in the dirigible and connected to remote backups, acce
ssible only with his blood-enzymes. It was worth the risk to find out what was happening here.
"I'll stay until morning," he said.
Wahid's face lit up with a brilliant smile. She looked too much like Reeva.
"Thank you," she said.
Before he could move, she did, with that terrible speed of hers. She kissed him softly on the lips.
Francis groaned, feeling like his skull was three sizes too small for his brain. His mouth was full of dust and glue. He cracked open his eyes a fraction. The back of Reeva's head was visible through his narrowed eyes. He closed his eyes and reached out to stroke her back. Not smooth skin. Ridges of hard flesh. Scars.
He snatched back his hand, images of the war AI strobing through his head. Reeva's screams. The adrenaline woke him, cleared his head of half-dreams. It wasn't Reeva lying naked in the bed next to him. It was Wahid.
He fully opened his eyes. It was still dark. He was lying naked in a large bed. There were no sheets. Wahid lay on her side next to him, facing away. Across her back were old white scars, like a tiger's stripes.
He sat upright, breathing hard. He'd seen such scars before. Always in corporate meat-puppets, typically Somalian boys paid by a corporate in return for allowing their bodies to be wet-jacked by a war AI. No, Wahid couldn't be one. Wet-jacked boys were always jittery, the commanding war AI pushing their adrenal centers harder than the body could handle. Wahid had none of the same aggression and herky-jerky movements. The scars must have come from something else.
Looking away from her scars, he became very, very aware that she was naked. Her body was hard and lean, like a long-distance runner. Before the priesthood, he had liked that in a woman. His body responded, despite the thumping hangover.
He rolled over to sit on the bed's edge, trying not to look at her, his head swimming with pain. The bedroom was sparse, a wooden chest and a rocking chair the only other furniture. The only decoration was a ceramic statue of Ah Muzen Cab atop the chest, its many arms open wide in benediction.
He scanned the bare wooden floorboards for his clothes and spotted Wahid's bra draped carelessly across the back of a chair. He started reciting his hail Marys. His own clothes were nowhere in sight.