Demonworld Book 6: The Love of Tyrants

by Kyle B. Stiff

  The super-soldiers made communities of their own, and survived by raiding human communities. Back when they served as mercenaries for governments and corporations, it was agreed that only males would be grown, and most females would be aborted in order to control population numbers. But their creators had become lax. The super-soldiers were so hardy that a female could give birth to dozens of infants in her lifetime with a mortality rate close to zero. When the super-soldiers broke free, they took females with them. Over time their appearance became more bestial, and they became known as dogmen, one of mankind's most feared enemies.

  The demons disappeared for years at a time, or left parts of the world untouched. But even when people were free of their nightmarish presence, the habit of living with them persisted. Humans did not look to the stars, but kept their heads down. Anyone who drew attention to their community found themselves on a stake in the wilderness. Travel decreased as people hunkered down. When power plants or factories or machines broke down, they were rarely repaired, and innovation became taboo. Self-censorship became the norm. The land had already been turning against man, with pollution from frenzied consumption, dust storms, and rising sea levels. Now there was no way to deal with the problems, no spirit to contend against doom or make demands of nature. There was only less and less food for large population centers, and the easy solution of binding and abandoning those who complained.

  Now every moving thing in the woods could be a demon, every crying thing in the dark could be a monster. It was thought best to abandon fertile tracts of land in order to avoid the demons' wrath.

  But young Setsa grew bearded and filthy long before that. He slept, he ate his routine meals, and he watched the end of the world within his four gray walls. If it was not for the seed cave buried near his bunker, he would have certainly given up hope and ended his life. As it was, instead of completely losing himself in his video feed – what he would later call his Scry – he kept close watch on the data sent from the growing, artificially living seed cave. Just as it had taken a genetic engineer of Cecil's caliber to create Setsa, no doubt a similar genius had created the seed caves, which were artificially intelligent structures designed to grow and conform to their surrounding environment. They grew slowly, the theory went, so that they would not blossom until long after any cataclysm that wiped out their makers had passed.

  But something was wrong. Most of the seed caves shut down within a few years, their controlling AIs either too delicate to live alone or simply faulty due to flaws hidden in exceedingly complex programming. Setsa remembered touring one with Cecil, but he'd never imagined the things would become so important. The seed cave that bordered his bunker eventually grew black roots that broke through the walls of his bedroom. He spoke to the thing, and often felt like the parent of an autistic child. When all seed caves shut down save his own and one lying in a cradle of mountains to the north, he decided to break through the walls of his bunker and enter the living sanctuary.

  He was surprised to see that the cave was the same gray as the concrete bunker, but it was textured like the inside of a seashell, complete with gently curving formations and spirals that seemed to serve no purpose other than exercise for the self-aware program’s creative instinct. He leaned against one wall and noted that it took on the color of his arm and shirt, and realized that the interior was gray because it was mimicking the color of his bunker. He sensed a sort of stupid, purposeless, creative yearning in the thing that reminded him of himself, and he moved his possessions out of the bunker and into the living cave immediately.

  Years passed in the cave. Because it had been planted in a lifeless wasteland, it sprouted shapeless arms covered in black leaf-like growths that acted as solar panels. They provided more power than the failing generator in his bunker ever had. Setsa spent his time monitoring the cave's growth and chasing each of its dialogue options to its inevitable cul-de-sac, always surprised when the autistic program expressed a new side to its intangible personality. Setsa watched recordings of old dramas and documentaries, as well as the slow-moving, sordid, pointless events on the surface available through the Scry. He had plenty of sights to excite his awareness and curiosity, but as each day passed, as each year slipped through his fingers, it became obvious that things that masqueraded as something were in fact nothing if there was no emotional attachment. And yet he lived in a bubble outside of the world, an open eye attached to nothing. As demonkind spread over the face of the world and became a constant rather than an aberration, his childish idea that they would die off on their own and allow him to return to the surface faded like a dream.

  As his home grew and updated its functions, he managed to connect to the other surviving seed cave, which was in the land that would later be known as the Black Valley. He found out that Cecil had never made it there. After questioning the other cave, he learned that his maker was killed by demons who had been following him. It was strange to think that the only man who had not returned his strength with resentment had been dead for years, while the dead man’s creation sat in brooding silence, resenting his own existence. Setsa hadn't realized how badly he wanted to see him alive, old and wrinkled, his mind even wandering a little bit.

  Fortunately Cecil had already hidden the plans for the human genetic upgrade within the cave, which had learned how to repel curious demons and unworthy raiders using psych-warfare technology. But Setsa could not remain in constant contact with the cave, as the two AI units began bickering, arguing in circles over abstractions or even distinctly human concepts of which neither had no real understanding. Setsa could only check in every few years, hoping that there would be someone left among the human species who could enter the cave and unlock its secrets.

  As the years passed Setsa's little home grew into a great black tree, drinking the sun and digging deep into the dead earth. Setsa developed a laser to fix in the uppermost branches to ward off the curious. But he decided that he would become insane if he stayed; he had to go into the world, to speak with its people no matter how pathetic or disappointing the venture. But he became paranoid that the artificial intelligence that was his home would never allow him to leave – it was, of course, programmed to protect him at all costs. Setsa figured out a way to subvert its functions, but unfortunately his invasive re-programming caused the tree to grow sick. Its food and water systems became tainted and unreliable. He had to make a terrible choice: whether to leave his home and wander the world, searching for some kind of meaningful end to an endless life, or do something unthinkable in order to preserve his sanctuary.

  ***

  Wodan watched as Setsa connected his own brain with the failing computer's hardware. He had shaved his head but kept a long beard and, at that point in his life, wore only underwear. Wires trailed from his head into a jagged slit cut into the wall. A section of his brain was visible through a glass helmet.

  Wodan felt the presence of Setsassanar standing beside him, watching with him. “The tree substituted its ruined programs with my own mind, and in a sense, I became the tree from that moment on. Even before the surgery was complete, I could already feel myself outside, swaying in the wind and drinking in the light. From then on, it became pointless to try to leave.

  “In fact, as the years passed, I realized that it was pointless to even have a body at all. Do you concern yourself with the microbes that live in your gut? No. They are unconscious robots that exist only for the upkeep of the host organism, nothing more. I had already made robots to assist me, and I had disposed of them when they were no longer useful... but, as I grew older, I decided that it was my own body that was the great superfluity. It needed constant tending, and was filled with so many nerves that it felt like a bruise that refused to heal on an otherwise healthy body.

  “So, I… I placed my body in a sort of digestive vat. As my body was broken down and absorbed into my larger tree-self, my brain was gently taken, fused with the tree, and reshaped. The entirety of my mind's functions were uploaded into the struct
ure's vast, empty networks.

  “My roots grew deep. I grew tall and strong. I was the Tower, and the shell that I had crawled out of was turned into soup that I fed on. It's the same for everyone. People look into the mirror and think they are looking at themselves, or they believe that they are their opinions, or their habits, or their childish survival mechanisms. And they must kill themselves in order to grow. I was no different. The thing that I thought was me, it turned out, was only a cocoon. I crawled out of it and found that I had become my Ultimate Form.”

  “Ultimate Form?” said Wodan, repulsed and intrigued.

  “For all his talk of gods and visions,” said Setsassanar, “Cecil drew a lot of inspiration from animal life. He believed that there was no reason why a human being should have to live with weak, ill-formed bodies in exchange for complex brains. Much of my enhanced speed and strength comes from simple animal architecture. And yet Cecil also believed it was wrong to create a superbeing blessed with immortality but cursed to achieve physical maturation within its first two or three decades. So he granted me the ability to change my body, over time, so that it would mirror my unconscious self. I would become, in time, what I had always been. Think of it as an individual becoming an environment, a man becoming a world. Or, in occult terms, a human becoming the biological manifestation of their holy guardian angel – their true, higher self. You have this ability too, Wodan.”

  Wodan was overwhelmed, and a little nauseous. “How would… how would I...”

  “Only you can know that, Wodan. Only you can go that far into yourself. Only you can become what you are.”

  Wodan watched as a new Setsa emerged from a chamber of light. He was not bearded and disheveled, but shaped more like the Setsassanar that Wodan knew. “More than once,” said Setsassanar, “I created a body, what you and I call Robot Number One, so that I could feel the experience of walking around, of having a small, limited consciousness that has small, limited thoughts. It's easy to become lost when one is a vast structure… one's thoughts are like a cloud, or a community of thoughts. The line between dream and reality is less sharp. It becomes obvious that God created man in order to know himself. So I sometimes created this body in order to roam my own halls. In fact, I created this model of Robot Number One when Didi and Childriss first breached the seed cave in the Black Valley nearly fifty years ago. I was excited, you see... I wanted to meet my son when he came into the world.

  “I also had the Robot Number Seven series, including Lucas, to occupy myself. Have you ever wondered what you would be like, Apprentice, if you were born in a different environment? It's like the parable of the scattered seed. I've found that the environment does not make the man, it only limits or hastens what he already is. Ironic that I was originally built to save the failing economy of a dying nation; I was shocked when I found that my unknowing clone, when placed in Srila or elsewhere, inevitably set for himself the task of saving the people’s failing spiritual economy. And though every model of the Number Sevens has been murdered, I have always waited for that fateful day when he would return to me, alive, after setting things right. After lifting the veil for a few people, putting good people in charge, and putting spiteful and less capable people wherever they needed to be.

  “Did you know that the current model, Lucas, is actually about the same age as you? I created him because your own birth inspired me, Apprentice.”

  Wodan felt the strange fullness of being that a living god would feel. It no longer seemed so strange to live forever, to create messiahs, to create a smaller self within the larger self and train it to survive and fight, year after year after year. Just as one small man might speak to other people and influence them, so a living god would create beings as it dreamed, and send them out, and touch lives and watch to see what would happen.

  Wodan saw another image from long ago. He saw the lion Adamant, now with a full mane and as large as a horse. He saw him running full-speed as demons hounded him. Sand flew up in a storm as the monsters maneuvered, trying to surround him. The lion lashed out with blinding speed, decapitating and destroying limbs as he ran. He saw another image of the beast sitting on a mountainside, face as hard and cold as the stone itself, eyes alight with the glimmer of dawning intelligence. That was the world that the rejected lion came of age in.

  “The meaning of his name was forgotten to him,” said Setsassanar. “As the years passed his intelligence grew… but he became a beast, a creature who knew love only as a memory of regret. Hounded by devils, he grew strong and cunning. He drifted into the southern lands, below the mountains, where there were only primitive people living in the wilderness.

  As their connection began to fade, Wodan saw one last image. Long after the world fell to ruin, but long before Wodan came to the Tower, the lion Y’diamach ranged up from the south. He stood on the Fields of Epimetheus and glared at the Tower. He sniffed the air. The scales along his side glittered as he breathed deep, his red, feathery mane shifting in the breeze. Then Y'diamach's head jerked, almost as if choking on something foul. Was it a memory of betrayal, the ghostly knowledge that all suffering was born from that place? Glaring, lips pulled back from teeth, the great lion-god turned and fled. Wodan felt himself flooded with his Master’s grief, an understanding of godlike isolation but with no real means to communicate with a wild beast that had survived just as well without him.

  He felt needles pulled from his body, and wondered if something was happening to the Tower. Then he found himself in his familiar body, lying on a couch before a star-filled sky. Setsassanar sat up, his eyes vacant, jaw hanging slack. Wodan had never seen his Master with such a distant, unfocused gaze. Wodan had difficulty concentrating, but one question had been with him for so long that it would have been impossible to forget. “Master,” he said quietly, “there was never a part where you decided that you had to destroy the flesh demons.”

  Setsassanar glanced at him, then turned away. “That was always more your thing than mine.” He cleared his throat, then swallowed. He seemed to have difficulty communicating. “Perhaps your next test will be to respect me after knowing everything you know. Where I came from and… what I became.”

  But Wodan felt as if he had been there. The idea that he was a son of hard-headed laborer stock, or a barbarian king, or a demon-slayer, all of it was true, but none of it seemed important. He also remembered makeup and costumes for advertising shoots, and parties, and unexpected friends, and late nights talking and working with Cecil, and petting a cat and knowing that some kind of eternal god-being waited inside of it, and the strange emptiness after losing everything. Wodan was both of those things. Both lives were true and false.

  “If it wasn't for you,” said Wodan, “I would be working in a grocery store and gossiping about the outside world with anyone who cared to listen. Everything I am, I owe to you.”

  He sensed that his Master felt overwhelmed by his presence, but did not have the endurance to send him off to bed. Wodan rose to leave on his own. At the door, he turned back.

  “Master,” he said. “The pain, between you and… and Y'diamach. It's so… I mean, can pain like that, pain between friends, or family, little betrayals on such a small scale... can those scars really survive for so long?”

  Setsassanar placed the link back in his chest and sealed it away. Some of the old fire came back into his eyes. “That’s the problem with being so perfect that nothing ever fades away. Whether you have remote-access biological servers with silicon-hardware backup discs or nano-fiber musculature that can double as brain cells, they can both store countless years of practically infallible memory. The pain never dies.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Education, Indoctrination

  A group of burly Temporary Peace Agents burst into the Central Office dragging two prisoners. The white-uniformed Agents, mostly dogmen with a few roughneck human goons, cast the prisoners roughly onto the cold stone floor.

  Temporary President Mallery jumped from his seat and nearly spi
lled his wine. As soon as he saw the lacerations and bruises on the prisoners, he knew that his meal was ruined. “What is this?” he shouted, hoping to sound outraged rather than frightened.

  “Sir!” said an Agent, saluting and smiling. “Two rebels, waiting for judgment!”

  Mallery felt the recurring nausea that afflicted him these days. He took a long drink of wine, as lately he had found its medicinal qualities incredibly helpful. He glanced at Representative Almus. The old newspaper publisher was obviously drunk. Mallery knew that the old man’s poker-face was really his way of waiting until someone else did something. He was surprised at how much he’d grown to hate the man’s quietly smug, condescending attitude.

  Someday, thought Mallery, I’ll really bake his cake.

  Mallery glared at the Peace Agents. “Where’s Bobram?” he said.

  “Sir! Temporary Chief of Enforcers is at the scene of the crime. He’s, uh, doing something really import-”

  “Chumsen, then. Where is he!”

  “Uh... sir, Temporary General Chumsen is... uh...”

  “At Hilltop, sir!” cried a thick-browed Agent. “Training maneuvers or something, I think, sir!”

  “Dorcas, then!” Mallery shot back. “He’s a Representative, isn’t he? He should be here, in Central!”

  “Who knows where he is?” Almus muttered behind him. “He doesn’t come around unless he wants something.” Almus paused for a moment to finish his glass, then said, “Elmyr! I bet he’d come and weigh in on this. Hell, he comes anytime we ring the cow-bell.”