99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  The elevator dropped, but it didn’t stop at the 40th and kept accelerating. Satan screamed “Now, Willie!”

  The elevator stopped and the doors blew open, flower petals of metal, grease and charred plastic. Satan licked her lips and focused her mind. “Heh,” Willie said, with a smile. “Here they come.”

  No telling what floor they were on, but it was somewhere in the twenties, Satan extrapolated. She scootered over the remains of the elevator door – Willie’s magic had stopped them exactly at floor level for whatever floor they were on – and gazed across this floor’s elevator lobby.

  A half dozen guards crouched and began to shoot. With complete predictability, they all missed. Several dropped from unfortunate ricochets; the rest fled. People began to scream.

  “Follow me,” Satan said, her blood up. She wheeled into the first office and glared at the computers. Their screens began to flash in interesting patterns of random data or, in some cases, became little more than placid blue. Phones rang, messages played on loudspeakers, and Willie whistled.

  “Damn. You got this one to start reformatting its hard drive,” Willie said, in awe.

  “I didn’t do anything. The device did it to itself,” Satan said. The fire suppression system went off in the hallway. More screams. “If they won’t deal with me directly – heh.” She bent her mind to the fracturing of causal reality and pushed.

  The lights went out.

  “Willie?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The stairs. The floor below this needs a little renovation.”

  “This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” Willie said. “They’ll just rebuild.”

  “I know that,” Satan said. “On the other hand, it’s a start. My calling card. Because they won’t meet with me in person, I’m going to engage in some politics.”

  “Politics, you?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Satan said. “It shouldn’t be hard to find the Seven Suits’ political enemies. You’d be amazed what politicians will do to convince me to leave an area. They’re nearly as malleable as the Gods.”

  46. (Dana)

  “Hey, Mom. Wazzup?” the Kid God said. Bob Personason had apparently stopped ‘growing’, stuck as a seven year old for weeks now. Dana thought he must like the size and mentality. He had done this before, as a toddler, then grew and aged several years in a few days.

  “We need to start thinking about emergency plans,” Dana said. She paced around the former sculpture garden and patio area Immunogen once used to impress investors and clients, before going bankrupt. The Indigo, before they vanished, had redecorated it to their nerdish pleasure, complete with they called a STOS Lego diorama, a statue labeled ‘The Shrike as a Stormtrooper’, and a dozen other incomprehensible geeky pieces of pseudoart. Nothing of Hell or from their fantastical adventures, though. “With our territory evaporating around us, we’re either going to have to leave or go hide under Portland or Akron, or go underground, as War suggested.” Tap, tap, tap, sensible pumps clicking on the brick path.

  “Sure.” Bob bounded over, wiggled his hands magician style, and conjured up a tablet computer. No, summoned. “Here. That wasn’t hard. Two hundred and twenty one scenarios, for your viewing pleasure.”

  The Kid God’s latest personality foible was ‘show off’. His created clothing of the day was a natty business suit, not exactly what Dana expected to see on a seven year old boy. She took the tablet from Bob and looked through the scenarios he had created on the fly, delving into several along the way. Damn.

  “So, what do you think?”

  She smiled at Bob. “Well, about three quarters of them are too stupid for words, meaning you invented them simply to be humorous.” They only people they would amuse would be the Indigo, the lot of them addicted to the worst sorts of groanworthy humor. “I’m going to have to study the rest. Some of them are very impressive.”

  The Kid God beamed, bouncing up and down on his toes of his faux shoes. “Now, if you spent more than ten seconds on these, we might be getting somewhere.” His smile turned to a frown.

  “Boring.” He sighed, grabbed her hand, and dragged her over to a poured concrete backless park bench, where he sat. She sat next to him. “Aunt Kara says when I start getting these particular feelings of annoyance with you, I need to slow down and explain. Do you mind?”

  “No,” Dana said. He cuddled up next to her, seven-year-old style, and she put her right arm over his much smaller shoulder. Parenting came easy to her. Her extended family had children of all ages, and she had helped raise quite a few. Parenting a baby God, though? Nothing could have prepared her for Bob.

  “You’re smart and I’m smart,” Bob said. “We’re both way off the charts smart. Only my type of smart is a very different kind of smart than yours. I’ve even come up with a good analogy, if you don’t mind a little tech. You’re a tablet computer, optimized for raw processing speed and for mental connections to the internet – read, other human beings. You’re memory bound and stuck dedicating a lot of your processing resources to your real-world GUI interface. I’m, however, one of those supercomputers used for research purposes by the military or big science. I’ve got tens of thousands of CPUs, but each one is a joke compared to your CPU, and I’ve got nearly unlimited memory. My benefits come from my parallel processing and the fact I don’t need to dedicate any resources to any real-world GUIs. In fact, I don’t have any built-in GUIs at all, which is a big problem.”

  Dana nodded. She had picked up more tech knowledge in her ten weeks listening to the Bob and Inventor show than in her entire previous life. “Different mind types. I sort of figured that out when I was trying to make sense out of Atlanta. So, what does that have to do with my apparently uninformed comment about spending more time to create better contingency plans?”

  “It’s tough, isn’t it,” Bob said. He gave her a hug. “The contingency plans I came up with in those ten seconds are the contingency plans, based on the knowledge I have right now. It’s like solving a math equation, and, extending the analogy a bit, I can’t spend more time to ‘solve it better’. I can gather more information, which will likely give me more contingencies if I gather the correct information, and I can repeat the process several times a day, as the external world changes, but as of right now, there aren’t any other possible contingencies.”

  “Whatever happened to creativity and inventiveness? Orlando’s argument about ‘science may be limited, but the application of science isn’t’?”

  “He was oversimplifying,” Bob said. “He left out the time component and the iteration component. At any one instant in time, based on the existing science and tech, tech development is finite and limited. Large, of course, right now, but still finite. The infinity comes in when you add in iterations. If you develop a piece of tech, then not only have you added tech to the outside world, you’ve added tech to your database of tech you can develop from, which changes the tech you can then develop.” Bob paused. “That’s what art is, as well: tech. Why, although all art is unlimited, any single artist is, at any point in time.”

  Dana smiled. Definitely different styles of intelligence, here. “I’m not sure I follow your godly logic, but you did just disprove your original thesis about contingency plans.” She paused to see if Bob would come up with the answer, but he didn’t. “Use your original set of contingency plans as part of your background database for creating the next set. It’s like you said about art.”

  Bob froze for a moment. When he unfroze, he said “Neat!” After another longer pause, he said “Why did I miss that? Even when I think about it, I can’t figure out why I missed the logic hole.”

  “I don’t know,” Dana said. “Perhaps it’s best if we leave that as a mystery for the moment.” She worried more about what it said about the Kid God if he thought his humorous contingencies were worth mentioning, even the ones that would have been stark evil to do for real instead of appreciating just for humor sake. Artificially inseminating all the women i
n Dubuque’s territory to distract him from the chase, for one egregious one.

  “My other point is that I wasn’t born with a very good built-in GUI,” Bob said. “That’s why I’m spending so much time in the internet. I need a way to interact with people who aren’t going to peanut butter mouth around me, the way they do in the flesh so often.”

  Interesting. “So, about Aunt Kara. You said she left with the Indigo. She didn’t go, did she?”

  The Kid God sighed. “She told me to lie. You figured it out, anyway, huh?”

  “No, you told me. Sort of.”

  “I’m going to get in soooo much trouble,” he said. “She isn’t available all the time, understand.”

  “I need to talk to her anyway,” Dana said. “I wasn’t ready before, but I am, now.” Having Bob with her helped her nerve herself up. The Godslayer was going to lay some nasty truth or ten on her, Dana predicted. The pain would come, and then she would get over it. The same way she had forced herself to be over Jan’s death. “Let’s bring her in.”

  “Okay, I guess.” He held out his free hand, Dana held out hers, and together they bent reality with the willpower and called in the Godslayer.

  Besides, with Bob in the picture, Dana would actually be able to see the Godslayer. Dealing with the Godslayer as a voice in her head was much harder. Visible, she was more human, approachable and understandable.

  Kara appeared, wearing ratty blue jeans with a hole in the left knee and a t-shirt that said ‘Indigo Chakra’ on it. She yanked her hands out of theirs, crossed her arms, and frowned at the both of them. “This is cheating, you know.”

  “So?” Dana said, and stuck an artificially cheery smile on her face. “Hi there! How’re you doing? What’s happening with the Indigo?”

  The Godslayer laughed. “Initiating you may be the stupidest thing Abe’s ever done if this turns out bad, and given some of his boneheaded ideas over the years, that’s saying a lot,” she said. “I can’t answer any of your questions. I’m too busy trying to save a few of their lives.”

  “I need to know what’s going on.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I’m tied to them. They’re part of my Mission. By weakening my Mission, you’ve made it harder for me to keep Bob alive.”

  Bob didn’t say ‘Told ya’ to the Godslayer, except in his mind, but Dana heard his non-comment anyway.

  The Godslayer gave Dana a pouty glare and didn’t answer.

  “My nightmares are back,” Dana said. “I need someone to talk to, about them, someone Hell-initiated, Indigo-style.”

  “Help yourself,” the Godslayer said. “We showed you the way. You don’t need any more help from us in that area.” Her frown intensified. “Have some fucking faith for once.” When the Godslayer got angry, well, it was no worse than facing down Atlanta or Portland. The confrontation wasn’t pleasant, but endurable.

  Dana shook her head. “Either I’m in or I’m out. In my opinion, I’m in, because I can do this.” She brought up the Indigo around her, a trick she had taught herself a few days ago. With the willpower. “Tell me I don’t have enough faith. I dare you.”

  “Impressive,” the Godslayer said. “Amateurish and weak, but impressive. Fine. You’re one of us. You’re in. Fat lot of good being ‘in’ will do you. I have no idea how a potential can initiate themselves into being true Indigo, but, well, you’re impossible to begin with, so doing the impossible shouldn’t be too much of a shock. You still don’t get to know what’s going on with the Indigo. Because you’re a Regent, you’re a security risk. Both you and Bob are. I can’t tell him, either.”

  Rats. “Tell me this, then,” Dana said. “Intellectually and emotionally, I know Jan’s dead. I got her to give me the limits of the Inner Circle’s enhanced survival tricks, and the wound she took was fatal even for you guys. But there’s this voice in the back of my head saying she’s still alive. An inseer style intuition. So, Godslayer, what’s going on? Is Jan still alive?”

  The Godslayer turned to stare at an artfully sculpted prickly pear cactus. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Can’t? Can’t, or won’t.”

  “Can’t. Look, this is hard for me, too. I’m not emotionless, despite my lack of a functional body here on Earth. Not even close.” Kara walked away, down the bricked path, but didn’t vanish. Not with both Dana and Bob emotionally demanding she stay. “However, I can’t let myself get emotionally involved with you, Dana, at least in a direct fashion. I’m talking epic disaster here. I’m talking end of the world bad. If I fell for you the way I fell for the group of people I called together back in 1980, the survivors of which you know of as the original Indigo, I would end up destroying everything I’ve built in the intervening years, here and in Hell, as well as consigning Earth to a perpetual dictatorship under Dubuque, Verona and Portland as worshipped Gods, as well as chasing off the entities you call the Angelic Host.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Bob said. “This isn’t like you, Aunt Kara. You fell for me, didn’t you?”

  “This danger doesn’t apply to you,” the Godslayer said. “You’re not mortal.” She hopped up on top of the Stormtrooper Shrike and sat, cross-legged, now facing them. “Two fish were in a tank when one turned to the other and said ‘You man the guns, I’ll drive’.” Dana blinked in incomprehension for a moment, before groaning. “To be frank about this would involve changing my name. Or figuring out how to type lowercase numbers.” Dana glowered instead of groaning. “I often say to myself, ‘I can’t believe the cloning machine worked.” Short pause. Dana refused to play ‘straight man’ to one of the Godslayer’s extended jokey monologues. “Of course, that was just before I shot the clock, after I decided I hadn’t killed enough time.”

  Enough! Dana summoned up the indigo glow around her again. “Get serious now,” she said, wielding the voice of command trick Jan had used on her so many times.

  The Godslayer sighed and shook her head. “Jan didn’t die, but she’s gone. Whoever or whatever arranged for the Minnesota trap altered the future at a level I’ve never before encountered on Earth, and now that we know what to look for, we now know this is just the first of the massive future alterations that are coming. In any event, I got pissed enough at the temporal manipulation this unknown did – that’s a euphemism for Kara Overreacts Emotionally Yet Again – to try something I wasn’t ready for, something I didn’t think I would be revealing for another blasted century. I can’t tell you more, because the rules of the game require you to learn about this from another mortal, not someone like Bob or me. And, no, I can’t tell Bob either.”

  “Wait a second,” Dana said. “What are the Gods, then, if not immortals? What are you implying?”

  “Oooh, information from nowhere,” the Godslayer said. “So your inseer benefit is that people aren’t going to be able to lie to you or easily mislead you, or paper over complexities with vagueness. That’s ducky enough to make me quack.” Which the Godslayer did. “About the Gods? You’re thinking there are only two options, ‘mortal’ and ‘immortal’. Braaap! Wrong, by a whole hell of a lot.” The Godslayer stood on top of the Shrike Stormtrooper statue, a crazy sight to behold. Then she did so on one toe. “Don’t call me again, either of you. You’re endangering yourselves and reducing the chances of any of us surviving. And the Indigo isn’t done with either of you. Have faith.” The Godslayer waved a cheeky ‘bye bye’ at them, then leapt into the sky and flew off Superman style.

  “I was wondering how she would get around our summoning,” Bob said. “You know, Angels are impossible to deal with.”

  That matched everything Dana knew on the subject of the 99 Gods’ Angelic Host as well. “That’s their Mission,” she said.

  Nothing else made sense.

  47. (Satan)

  “Mr. Smithers,” Satan said, whirring her scooter up to his venerable oversized desk, some relic from the 1800’s. The scooter made a sshh, sshh sound on the carpet. Distant sounds of Albany traffic seeped in through the
narrow windows. “You know who I am, and I’m glad you could take the time to talk to me in person. I have information regarding the ongoing activities in the Empire State Building.”

  Smithers, an older man, nodded. “Miss Bais, I’m not sure how much help you can be. The evidence you’ve collected” he nodded to a pile of paperwork in front of him “is one thing, doing something about the evidence is another.”

  Satan chuckled. “Miss Bais? There weren’t cities yet the last time I was a ‘Miss’.”

  “Forgive me, I’m old fashioned,” Smithers said. Smithers, a typical American of his generation, had medium length dark brown hair tinged with gray. He looked to be well under six feet, but he had the posture of a man of physical power, a manual laborer instead of a bureaucrat. Gym time, Satan guessed. “Do you have some other title you prefer?”

  “Just ‘Bais’, Mr. Smithers. I’m not of your culture, and I’m an illegal alien, or so people have explained to me.” Hell, if enough people used ‘Bais’ she might even stop thinking of herself as ‘Satan’. “I understand the problems of ‘doing something about the evidence’, but in that regard I’m not going to be of much use.”

  “No? My people have noticed that your companion, Mr. Ganiji” that is, Willie “seems relatively safe in your shadow.”

  “He’s a magician,” Satan said. Willie, sitting in a leather chair beside her, nodded. “He can protect himself from my aura and my stench.”

  “I don’t find the smell overwhelmingly unpleasant,” Smithers said. “Not like the reports I’ve heard.”

  “Thank you,” Satan said. “That must mean that the doctor’s treatments are working better than I’d realized. Would you or your men be willing to be, um, protected by Mr. Ganiji’s magic?”

  “Ah, the rub,” Smithers said. He thought for a moment. “Will it be any more disturbing than the tricks the top-end Supported can put on a person?”

  “Only a little,” Satan said, a bit surprised. She didn’t know that Smithers, as an assistant Attorney General of the State of New York, had Supported to call on. The damned Supported were far too common. That was just wrong. “What sort of Supported do you have?”