Ghia drew a deep breath, as if she had told whatever story she was about to tell many times in the past and had grown weary of it. She crossed to sit in the chair again, drained her glass and began to speak. "What you said before is correct; we are not human. I am not human. I never was, more to the point. This body..." She gestured with one hand, "is the product of the only science of travel that my people are able to conduct; psychospatial projection, the transmission of consciousness into the mind of another. Possession, for lack of a better term."
Walken gaped at her. He looked as though he was about to speak again, but Ghia turned her eyes upon him in a gaze so imperious, so fierce, that he instantly fell back in his seat despite himself.
Satisfied, Ghia continued. "Where we are from you do not know of and our tongue is not replicable by your physiology, but you may refer to our kind as the Yathi. That is the best approximation that your body can hope to accomplish. We are not human; we are far more enlightened, beautiful creatures." Ghia frowned, then, yet her skin seemed hardly lined. "However, situations are such that we have found ourselves forced to take on your unrefined bodies instead.
"Healthy and vital as we are as a people, our star is not. Seven hundred years ago, we discovered that our star was giving out and would go nova within the next millennium. Thus, we decided it would be necessary to find a new home." She sighed, leaning back a bit in her seat, sounding as if she were weaving for him a great tragedy of the age. "Unfortunately, ours is a beauty too fragile for long-range transport. We found ourselves unable to travel to a new planet in our own physical bodies; after surveying many worlds, we found yours. It took very little to learn your people's major drives and teetering on the cusp of technological expansion you were a perfect species for exploitation.
"But how to proceed? This is where the human animal's particularly interesting psychological proclivities came to light." She smiled to herself, a superior thing, as she folded her arms over her chest. "Humans require something greater in order to be organized and civil, something better to believe in than themselves. Do you agree?"
Walken blinked, unsure if she was being rhetorical. He nodded anyway.
She nodded back, satisfied. "It does not matter if it is God, or Buddha, the State — even the Tooth Fairy will do, so long as the belief is strong enough. It forms a kind of protective gestalt, an insulating layer." She lifted a hand. "It isn't about faith," she said, "It is about science, a science we have worked hard to ensure the human race has long regarded as fiction. Belief of a certain strength is a very potent kind of psychic defense."
"A psychic defense?" He couldn't help himself — if this was madness he found it a very fascinating species of it. Was she trying to tell him that ESP and psychic powers was some form of real science? "A defense against what?"
Ghia gave him a wide, terrible look, something like a smile but with far too many teeth to be civil. "Against us," she said and there was wickedness written all over her tone. "Without that belief, a void forms — a void into which we can be projected. The human consciousness is a frail thing, Thomas and the human mind is easily manipulated. When belief fails and the void opens, we can sense it at home; a significant portion of the homeworld has been converted into an array that can project the minds of scheduled individuals into these vulnerable subjects. The seed expands...subsumes the host's mental complex... until finally the remnants of the human mind and personality are simply a surface layer, a mask, while the Yathi mind behind it operates in harmony with the schedule's directives.
"Thus have we found ourselves a place into which we can move, a new world into which we can travel and make a new home for ourselves. I was the first; many have come after, cementing themselves throughout history, directing technological and cultural development as dictated by our simulations and our schedule. Ensuring that the psychic disciplines are dismissed as cartoonish hoodoo by most humans is a vital part of that.
"With the mainstream acceptance of body augmentation technology and, in time, biological computer technology, we shall be able to further distance the human race from its base existence. All those people, Thomas, implanting themselves with machines, cutting themselves off from the biological, or at least the human, bit by bit dissembling themselves and cementing our victory."
"Victory? Yours?" He grunted. "I don't see us wearing tinfoil hats just yet."
"Of course," she replied; Walken twisted a bit inside to see her amusement only expanded with his words. "Look around, Thomas. How often have you cursed the city around you? How often have you mocked the people around whom you lived, whom you have protected and punished? Surely you have said to yourself that this place is not as you would want it."
"But that's just it," he pointed out. "You're the problem. It's you, if you're telling even the slightest bit of truth, that's caused the problems that now plague this world. It's you who've been responsible for the world going astray."
She wrinkled her perfect nose and chuckled. "You're assuming that they weren't going this way in the first place, Thomas. I said that humans were easily manipulated; I did not say that they weren't self-destructive in the first place. All we have done is harness that capacity for our own good. Most of our agents are human, after all. Indeed, you are only one of a handful of people who know of this colonization effort who are not participants. We are steadily infiltrating the minds of the disaffected across the world. When that infiltration reaches critical mass, we shall all cross over and replace the animals whose minds we have molded."
He was quiet for a long moment. Was this at all real? He sat in front of a woman who had demonstrated herself incredibly intelligent, incredibly powerful; and yet, just by opening her mouth, she also demonstrated herself batshit insane. He knew that he should just pull the C-J from his pocket, or shoot her through the wall of his coat, put a comet round through her chest and put her crazy ass down. And yet...
"You didn't tell me what those things were, in the hospital," Walken said after a while, when the silence stretched between them like a skin. She was so patient, like a spider, weaving vast nets over the scale of years. She made him almost terminally nervous. "Or what you were doing there. Or why you know about my dreams." That last thing made him even more nervous than anything else.
"Corpses," she said simply. Ghia looked out the window at the city once again, watching the traffic, the sweeping skylights and the busy aero traffic and he saw she did not blink at all. Not once. "We make use of everything available. Living people, corpses, it makes no matter. The living you saw down there were being used as scaffolds for biological components — spare parts, as you put it. They are dissembled for implants and other products, both for ourselves and for the greater public. The bodies of the dead are simply recycled wholesale. We place a computer nexus in the skull along with a power source and underlying motor structure, you see and then they serve as menial labor and guardians. They have a reasonable degree of self-governance and follow directives and they are very hard to kill as you've already discovered." Ghia gave him a firm, satisfied nod. "Good menial stock."
Walken shuddered. "I... I see," he murmured, but his brain didn't want to accept it. He thought of the dry wounds and the sheer volume of damage the horrors in the hospital took before collapsing and how they killed the ST troops. "Were the Dolls like that as well?"
Ghia shook her head. She came back to her chair and sat down again. "The Dolls were an experiment. We were toying with the idea of transferring the consciousnesses of our own kind into pre-designed vessels rather than making use of human stock. A failed experiment, unfortunately. I arranged to have the two unfortunate test subjects smuggled over with a third standard Doll, had Anton direct you to the Koreans whom I had hired through another agency to collect them. They had different behavioral overlays, you see. Besides the control, who was meant to throw off the Bureau at the start, there was a fighter and a martyr — one would fight you, forcing you to bring her down and the other would merely curl up and die so that you could la
ter find her.
"You see, it was necessary to gauge your interest. You wouldn't have pursued the case of a simple Doll so deeply, after all. You had to believe that there was a greater mystery behind her than just improved technology. It was necessary to try your instinct — not to slay simple Wonderland stock, the items of technology you hated, but the parties who created them. You had to be faced with whom you thought were truly responsible — and you reacted with violence." Ghia shrugged. "But that is not to say that you did not react as a human would from time to time. It was you who killed that girl, Thomas; there was no accident. No hacking. It is a derangement of your essential psychology, you see. You've been conflicted for quite some time now."
Now Walken just stared at her, staggered by her words and by her arrogance. For her they were facts, the terrible fruit of her own machinations, but to any rational mind they would be passed aside as ornate psychotic delusions. And yet, somewhere in the back of his head that voice — that traitorous, horrible, instinctual voice — was sounding confirmation, that she was somehow telling the truth. "What the hell are you trying to tell me, Miss Merducci?"
"Call me Mother," she said with a chuckle. "That is my designation, after all, not this ugly human name. I am the Mother of Systems and I have birthed all this beauty which you so wrongly have come to hate." Ghia drew herself now into a tower of grandeur, becoming instantly a creature of a nobility that he could not understand and yet could not hope to deny. As he stared at her with wide eyes, she spoke with a voice that rang with a sternness to move legions. "What I am telling you, Thomas, is that you have been dreaming not a fantasy but a vision of the future." Her eyes met his. "We can't have this rock just swilling about as it is, primitive ecosystem and all. We shall eventually transform it into something that we're comfortable with. Bringing home with us, as it were."
"You're destroying it." The words were very small as they escaped his lips.
"Yes, quite," she agreed. "But only the world that humans know. And what is that, after all, but an inefficient system that needs to be put to order? We know best how to do that." She canted her head, a curious predatory bird. "You do not see the beauty of the system yet, I can see that. But you will. You are necessary to its completion, after all."
"And how is that?" Again he leaned back in his seat, away from her, his fingers splaying out near the mouth of his pocket.
"Why else would I do what I have done to bring you here? Don't be ridiculous. It is because you are one of my children, Thomas. You are here because you belong with me."
All instinct was overridden in that moment as Walken tried to pull the C-J out and shoot her in the face. Pain flared in his wrist as reached for the pistol, pain that flared even brighter than the distant flames. He cried out, his fingers stiff in spasm and looked to Ghia, who sat with her lips pressed into a staid line. "How?" he managed to croak, tears starting in the corners of his eyes. "How?"
"Remote nerve induction," the awful creature said; her voice had become an imperious version of Exley's tinny monotone. "I don't have to strike you to hurt you, Thomas. The human body is no challenge to me. You cannot win against this. Even now, the nanomachine colloid that you consumed is spreading through you, beginning to alter your mental state to bring out what is nearly ready to be reborn. The time for explanation is over, now. You have little time to make a very important choice."
The pain flared in him, made him feel as if his hand were about to fall off and burn, twitching and flaring, into ashes. "I don't..." he groaned, "I didn't..."
The flame in his arm guttered and died and his hand hung limply from his wrist. "There is much that should be discussed," she said, "But first, Thomas, the decision. Your choice."
He licked his lips, face pale from the exertion of agony. "What... what the hell... do you want me to decide?"
"You are one of my children," she said simply. "Or at least, you will be soon. Once you were able to see what animals humans really are, when you were in Baltimore; once you saw the truth behind the horrors people suffered, both at their own hands and at the hands of others. And then there was the lapse, wasn't there? When you were broken, under the sheets with that girl; that is when you became my child. We have many ways of sensing that vulnerability, Thomas and we sensed it very strongly in you that night. And then..." Ghia shrugged. "The void was filled. We had meant you for a host — and indeed, you were successfully implanted with the consciousness of one of my people. But something happened."
Walken stared at her, hating her for all he was worth. He said nothing. He didn't understand. All he knew was that she hurt him, loaded him with nanomachines that were — if she were to be believed — replicating through his system as they spoke for some unknown and most likely abominable purpose. Now she spoke insanity.
Ghia continued. She began to pace, to slowly sweep across the floor. Her heels clicked in time on the marble. "We take time to gestate within the human consciousness, you see. The infection rate is slow as the subconscious is subsumed — but you were different. Your other self, the one that had nested within you, had been busy unfolding itself within your mind... and yet you had not yet been consumed.
"I'm sure it was when your woman, your partner, suffered as she did. You closed up, found your hate — you became what you were in this city, this avenger figure and you found something new to believe in. Do you see? You were insulated for a while as you attempted to burn out every trace of Wonderland that came across your path."
Walken was quiet for a time as she looked to him in expectation, her hands folded so primly over her knees. She wanted him so badly to understand, he saw it in those silver eyes — but why? Why, if she were telling the truth, would he be able to even resist at all? "But I've been killing off your people right and left, if you're telling the truth," he said grimly. "It's all I've wanted to break you and everything you stand for. I can't be one of yours."
She smiled very faintly. "But even then, didn't you feel remorse when you killed the Doll? When you killed Emitra and her sister? You recognized yourself in what you were slaying, though you did not realize it; all that human emotion, all that empathy for what you thought you knew to be abomination — it must have been very difficult for you."
"You've got no idea what I felt, bitch," he snarled weakly. "What the fuck is wrong with you?" In his bravado he realized he sounded more like Bobbi than himself, felt a stinging prick of loss in his heart. He wanted to see her again, anything to escape the awful thing that wore this woman's disguise. "Do you think I'm going to just give up the ghost and let some... thing... ride around in my fucking head, take me over? I didn't feel anything when I killed that other one, so how does that figure in with your fucking plan?"
"Oh, Thomas." Ghia shook her head and, stepping forward, reached to take hold of his still-limp hand. Her skin was very smooth, very cool and dry. She felt like porcelain, too. Or not porcelain — perhaps some species of plastic. "You are very conflicted, I understand. But you cannot leave this place as you are now; you are a random element. You have no place in our timetable, our schedule. Left on your own you have destroyed a rather valuable facility already. Don't you understand? You must be brought back to the fold.
"And you are already on the way; the breaking down of your life, the sapping of your emotional fortitude, has already begun facilitating the resurgence of my dormant kindred in your mind. That is how you were able to decode the data packet, you see; it was the presence of the other that triggered the file's decryption sequence. Such files only truly open for our kind." Ghia smiled. "The overlaid mental signature, you see. It was the jolt that started things in earnest."
Walken cringed slightly under her touch. He thought of the pain, the mind-blasting agony of dropping into the pure stream of data, the momentary division. No longer did he sense any madness in her words. It made too much sense, this machine that she had spelled out before him; the plots, the conspiracies, the people who drove them like gears. Above all this he remembered the roaring agony tha
t he had felt when he fell into the data stream. It was that realization which terrified him, a single, blinding point of understanding that blasted away all doubt, rendering him unable to see anything but its undeniable light. Revelation's lash brought his mind into bleeding submission.
"But I don't want to," he said, his voice softly pleading. "I can't be something else. I want to be myself!"
"Hush," Ghia said with another shake of her head. And he noted, with no small amount of alarm, that he saw more and more of the mother in her lovely face. "You need not suffer such things now." Even the fear was beginning to ebb from him, melting away despite himself the longer he sat there in her presence. She was Mother, wasn't she?
"You must join the family that you tried to refuse and allow yourself to be the host for that voice which speaks behind your mind — for that is the true you, the true motive force. Open yourself and be mingled with that voice, that presence. Become the child I meant for you to be. Only as this will you survive."
She rose and, as she did, he felt himself go stiff. She reached into his pocket and pulled out the C-J, drew the magazine from its fat grip. She put it on the table before him. "You can either make that choice, my child, or you can make this one. There is a single round left. Listen to the voice within, Thomas. Perhaps that will convince you to make the right decision. I will return soon."
And then she was gone. He heard the door seal shut behind him and he was alone. Returned to motion, without pain, just him and the pistol on the red table in front of him. The confusing feeling of connection, of love, that had crept over him was gone, but its memory rang in the halls of his mind. She was right, he knew. He had a choice to make.
Walken sat for a while, gazing out into the boundless grid of steel and neon. The city spread out in all directions, piled upon itself, like reversing ripples of time. He thought of all the history that had passed, of humanity's blind rush to make itself a master of its own environment, to become greater than what had spawned it.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 28