by Brian Trent
According to IPC legislation, all TNO energy experiments are strictly limited to the outer region of the solar system.
PI spokesman Drake Fincher denied that any unsanctioned experiments are occurring in Earth’s vicinity.
* * *
Keiko clenched her teeth. The Sol was in the pocket of TowerTech, Inc. A fucking Ronald Gates property.
The opening shots of war had begun.
“Was there any such memo, Drake?”
“No.”
“They knew about the negative-mass experiments.”
“The negative-mass virtual testing,” Drake emphasized. “And there are ways for our enemies to get that info.”
Keiko took her foot off the bench. She glanced at the statue in this grove, half-expecting it to be the God of War. Instead, the cloven-footed ram-horned god Pan smiled impishly at her, pipes cradled in his wanton embrace.
Fincher gave a reluctant sigh and seemed to halt in his pacing. “There’s one more thing. Security has just learned something. We classified it instantly. As part of the investigation team, you and Saylor are cleared to know it. Moreover, you need to know it.” He took a breath. “Okay. It has to do with Kenneth Cavor…”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Old Friends
“Are you experiencing dizziness?” the voice asked him.
Gethin looked away from the racing blur outside the express maglev window. The 0529 train was sparsely populated. He sat alone in his boxcar, knowing he was beating the commuter rush by an hour. His hair was still wet from the shower.
“No dizziness,” he told the medprogram counselor.
“Fixations or obsessive thinking?”
“Story of my life,” Gethin muttered, glancing again to the rushing landscape; a tract of lemon trees appeared like a solar flare and was gone. “Yes, a little bit.”
“How long did your shivering last?”
“A half hour, before I went to sleep.”
“Have you been experiencing hypervigilance or paranoia?”
“Not more than ordinary.”
The counselor was a middle-grade AI which sounded like an affable male physician. It wasn’t allowed to make formal diagnoses but could provide general preliminary assessments. “Are you experiencing obsessive thoughts about your death?”
“Not really.”
“Are you sure?”
Gethin sighed. “Well, maybe a little.”
“Are you at all worried that you aren’t really alive since your regeneration?”
Gethin frowned, realizing the questions were becoming more relevant to his situation, as if a diagnosis was gestating at light speed. “Yes.” He suddenly blinked, trying to see the end of the inquiry. “Do you think I’m fraying?”
“This is only a consultation,” the AI advised. “It is impossible to form a diagnosis. You may want to follow up with your primary care physician. I advise that you try relaxing for the next few days.”
Gethin dropped the link. Fraying afflicted less than one percent of regenerated citizens. The reconstituted neural complexity folded in on itself, collapsing into a frenzied self-destructive feedback loop. It was birthed from a tiny defect that snowballed into cataclysmic paranoid breakdowns. Afflicted persons had been known to throw themselves off buildings, set themselves on fire, go on murderous killing sprees, and in one gruesome case from Copenhagen…fatal self-cannibalism.
A stress disorder was preferable, by comparison. Most people got the shakes from time to time.
At the next stop, Gethin emerged from the maglev and saw the towering façade of the University of Athens museum annex. Scarlet banners hung from its illustrious frieze. The stairs were as long as he remembered them.
He wondered how many of his old colleagues still worked there. Liz at the reception desk? Yuen in the restoration vaults?
Cool blue lights flashed in Gethin’s sensorium. A new email icon swirled and he tapped it open.
TO: Gethin Bryce
FROM: Natalia Argos
DATE/TIME: 07/19/702, 0223 MT
SUBJECT: You are forgiven.
The message field was blank. Gethin shivered again, caught in a sadistic symphony of gravitational and emotional forces that, crazily, felt like they were trying to draw and quarter him. He remembered that he still had an unread message from his ex-wife Lori. Remembered that he hadn’t contacted his father on Ceres or his mother in London. That he had yet to touch base with anyone, really, since resurrection.
Gethin breathed heavily. He climbed the university stairs.
Liz was not at the reception desk. A young Zulu woman sat there now, taking calls through a silver headset. “I think he’s in his office,” she was telling someone. “Do you mind holding?” She touched a button and smiled at Gethin. “Good morning!”
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m here to see Professor Peisistratos. My name is Gethin Bryce. I don’t have an appointment.”
“Let me check if he’s available.”
Gethin turned away and examined the facility’s exhibition guide hanging on the nearby wall. Two hundred and fifty million years of Earthly history was contained in the museum. A colored line ran through the exhibits, starting red and then cooling like hot metal. The line was vermillion with the cooling of the planet, the trilobites, and the Permian Extinction. It dulled to sunburned orange as it underlined the hall of dinosaurs. Still cooling to crepuscular hues, the line cut through successive eras of life’s myriad experiments and then, at the start of winter blue, a squat ape with opposable thumbs hopped onto the scene. Blue flushed to indigo throughout the Paleolithic, the Bronze Age, and the entirety of the anno Domini calendar from Ashurbanipal to Zero Hour when the nukes sprouted and the whole geopolitical house of cards came crashing down. It deepened to purple dusk at the Warlord Century, the Unification, and the dawning years of the New Enlightenment.
This final segment was the museum’s pride and joy. Apollo the Great’s gilded throne was actually in the museum. Several times after-hours, Gethin had seated himself in that chair, which once cushioned the ass of history’s greatest conqueror.
“Professor Peisistratos awaits you in Hall Three,” the receptionist said merrily.
Gethin thanked her and cut through the museum’s twentieth-and-twenty-first-century wing. It was empty save for two purple-haired girls ogling an ancient advertisement in which a bare-chested young man stood on a beach, wearing only torn jeans: a nameless, unknown soldier for a forgotten product with faded letters: QUA I GIO.
Hall Three opened as Gethin neared its doors. He stepped through…
…into an alien jungle.
The door shut behind him before he could gather himself. Fibrous star-shaped plants overshadowed a feebly lit walking path. A vibrating mass of rubbery-looking tentacles, bearing resemblance to sea-worms, strained needfully to the obsidian sky. Without warning a shelled creature scuttled towards his feet.
Gethin deftly sidestepped it. The creature continued past, not seeing him or not recognizing him as a threat. A holobubble materialized above its peculiar head:
TRILOBITE
It looked good. A little too good; clearly, Professor Peisistratos had upgraded the museum sensoramics. The brachiopods and trilobites roaming this primordial seabed appeared slick and visceral, yet were only smartpaper sprites grafted onto nanocrystalline frames.
A familiar voice spoke crisply by his ear:
“Welcome to the Permian Age, Mr. Bryce.”
Gethin glanced about the aquamarine gloom, seeing no one.
“The Permian Age,” the voice continued, “began four hundred and fifty million years ago and represents one of the most understudied chapters of terrestrial life. You are witnessing a world with a single ocean and a single continent.”
Another holobubble arose from the mud, a large one, like a glassy globe. Pangaea d
isplayed on that rounded surface as a dramatic landscape of white peaks, deep valleys, green plains, and mysterious shorelines. An exotic world, as alien as anything coming back from out-system probes.
Gethin realized the jungle was fading, swapped out by a rocky beach beneath unfamiliar constellations. Sail-backed dimetrodons squatted lazily in this predawn blackness, forming a worshipful line for the impending sunrise.
“The wonders of the Permian Age saw life spread in fascinating ways. Until life itself was delivered a terrifying blow.”
Gethin expected sunrise, but what he got was something else entirely. The primordial world quickly suffused with an angry white light. The dimetrodrons made nervous croaking sounds and began to scatter, but there was nowhere to go. The light overpowered everything in sight. The reptiles sizzled and cooked where they sat, flesh blistering and crawling off bones like papier-mâché under a blowtorch.
A wave of sound followed, filled with screams that were not screams…the agony of a dying world. In that perfect fury of merciless disintegration, the voice spoke again.
“The Permian Extinction saw ninety-five percent of all life vanish from the Earth,” the voice intoned. “And no one truly knows why.”
The exhibition lights snapped on. Gone were the beach and jungle and sensoramic creatures; in their place was a lengthy gray chamber dotted by fluorescent holodisplays of the exhibit’s cast: trilobites, nautiluses, edaphosauruses, each highlighted for closer perusal and gift-shop ordering or smartshirt download.
Gethin needed a moment to gather himself.
A cherubic figure entered from the opposite doorway. Bearded, wearing a silver toga, and panting excitedly as he drew near.
“Gethin Bryce, prodigal son, returns to Athens!” The man laughed merrily. “What do you think of our new Permian exhibit?”
“Professor Peisistratos.” Gethin couldn’t help but smile. “Honestly? A bit sensationalist and intense, don’t you think?”
“Then we’ve done our job on both counts!” The man clapped Gethin in an embrace. It was just a friendly squeeze; nevertheless, Gethin could feel his shirt strengthening its fibers in response to the pressure.
Doros Peisistratos was several inches shorter than Gethin, squatter, heavier. His eyes twinkled beneath briar-patch eyebrows. His nose was hooked like a Medici, his wide mouth comfortable in its nest of beard. The old charisma was still there, unchanged despite the pounds.
“How are you, Gethin?” Peisistratos beamed.
“Very well, sir.”
“You look terrible. I would expect as much, from a man recently returned from Lethe.”
Gethin rolled his eyes. “How long have you known?”
“My dear boy, I have been glued to the newsfeed since the incident. Your name leapt out at me. Stars, you look haggard! Or did Mars do that to you? Come, sit down.”
He chose a bench for them, seated before one of the holodisplays of pre-saurian reptiles.
“You look good,” Gethin insisted.
“I look fat.”
“You wear it well, at any rate.”
“My lean Senate days are over, my boy.”
Gethin smiled wanly. He remembered the Wastelander’s query: how can you truly know the depths of an immortal? The challenge fell on his mind like a Zen koan. Doros had been a colleague and friend for twelve years. Hell, that was longer than any one of Gethin’s marriages. Yet what were twelve years in the course of three hundred?
“So,” Doros said, eyes bright and eager. “What was it like?”
Gethin foisted a quizzical look. “What, specifically?”
“Death.”
“Oh. I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just the Wyndham Save center.”
“In all my years,” Doros mused thoughtfully, tugging at the end of his beard, “Death is the one experience I’ve never had, my boy. When you factor the mortality distribution curve, death becomes inevitable at some point. Conservative estimates claim no person will live beyond fifteen hundred years without perishing for some reason or another. Therefore death will happen to me. I only pray to return in better spirits than you.”
“You have been Saved, right?” Gethin was suddenly aghast at the idea that Peisistratos was like that idiot Salvor Bear, opposed to Digital Captures on some half-assed philosophical principle. Great stars! What a loss this man would be…like the burning of a priceless library.
“Of course!”
Gethin felt the odd vibrations of his Ego Familiar:
Gethin felt his stomach twist into an agitated knot.
No wetware? There were arkies who did that…leaning towards body-purist stylings. But Stillness agents did that too. Rejected augs as a perversion, a cancer in the human body and spirit.
Peisistratos scratched his beard. “Gethin? You still haven’t answered my question. You crossed the waters of Lethe and returned. Come on, Orpheus!”
Gethin looked at him sharply. “An interesting metaphor. What can I say? If I danced with Mephistopheles, the memory was lost in transit. To be honest, I’ve been feeling…unwell.” He forced a laugh.
Peisistratos watched him. “There is a recovery period.”
“I know.”
“Have you been taking it easy since—”
“No.”
Peisistratos shook his head sympathetically. “Want the truth, Gethin? You never took it easy. You are a first-class, balls-out, obsessive-compulsive. And a smoldering, dangerous potential.”
“Yeah? A potential what?”
Doros’s face darkened. “That’s for you to decide, isn’t it? We’re a lot alike. Give us a task, and we devote ourselves to it with manic, unrelenting energy. Allow us to wander, and darker demons tempt us.”
“Into doing what?”
Doros raised an eyebrow. “Don’t know. But in the niche of life, everyone has their own species of demon, and they are currently out in force.”
“Oh?”
“I’m worried. I usually stay off the feeds, but right now it feels like a massive storm is brewing.”
Gethin’s heart hardened. “The story of our species. You’re worried about…what? Another war? Seriously?”
His old friend gave a grave look. “Think about the last one. It doesn’t matter how it started. The Old Calendar societal system back then was poisonous. Corrupt governments existing only for self-perpetuation. Corporations promoting wage slavery. The premeditated cultivation of fear and chaos for the profit of a small cabal of plutocrats, who themselves subscribed to end-of-world belief systems. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Have you updated that museum wing too?”
“We have,” Doros said. “During your absence, some of our excavation teams struck print in important landfills. We now know conclusively that the old countries were breaking up before the War. Secessions around the world. Tribalism returning. Countries fragmenting into the old demes again. Toxic social media.”
Gethin decided to steer the conversation to where he needed a spotlight. “Okay, so how does the modern world compare?”
Peisistratos stood and shuffled to the nearest wall, bringing up the latest newsfeed headlines with a touch of his fingers:
PI IN THE SKY? PUBLIC DEMANDS ANSWERS FROM PROMETHEUS
Click for more
SENATOR KASTER GAINS NEW ALLIES IN ‘WASTELAND WATCH’ BILL
Click for more
WASTE POACHERS KILL 428 NEAR MEMPHIS TO AVENGE SALVOR
Click for more
Gethin was silent.
“The old ways keep creeping back,” his mentor said. “It’s like the Roman mob after Caesar’s death. Blind rage. It’s a plague on our species.”
Gethin looked at him, disturbed by thi
s choice of wording.
Plaga.
Plague.
Latin.
Caesar.
Was this a coincidence? He feigned the kind of frown he usually wore when in deep debate. He didn’t have to feign too hard.
“So you think…what? People are a plague?”
Peisistratos’s eyes widened. “What do you think?”
“I honestly haven’t decided yet.”
His old friend sighed. “I think for all our sakes, it’s good that you haven’t decided, Gethin. Want my opinion? People are wonderful. A spectacular species. Came down from the trees and went up to the stars. But we never outgrew the bloodlust that got us here. There’s always another Dark Age lurking in the wings. Always more demons drawing near, drawn to the scent of our fear and hate.”
Gethin looked away, pretending to examine the headlines. Surreptitiously, he sent a command to Id: “Order Hassan Class spybots to tail Doros Peisistratos.”
*Done.*
His friend suddenly seized his arm and steered him out of the room. “Have you eaten yet, Gethin? No, right? Come along.” Whatever else he is, Gethin thought, the ancient professor is Greek to the bones, insisting that stomachs be sated.
* * *
Between bites of salty feta, egg, and toast, they caught up on old times in the museum café. Sensoramic pterodactyls wheeled overhead, alighting on the rafters, and perched there like a murder of crows.
Doros’s smile was huge in his beard. “Gethin, you have to see the new troodon exhibit. The crowd was in an uproar. I almost single-handedly caused a riot among visiting paleontologists.”
Gethin thought he had heard something of that while on Mars. The old eccentric still maintained a bee in his bonnet for troodons, obscure dinosaur of the late Cretaceous. Doros had become fond of suggesting that the troodons might have been intelligent enough to use tools and even build rudimentary shelters from the bigger, fiercer dinosaurs. There had even been some paleontological findings that were suggestive of the idea…but it was anathema in scientific circles.