The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

by Michael Rizzo

  “I take it you’re no longer detecting any hacking attempts?” Yod gestures to the air around us, sounding like he already knows.

  “Ceased a few hours ago,” Dee confirms. “And none too soon. Earth was considering the nuclear option again. But I assume you knew that.”

  “Would you have stopped them?” Bel wants to know. “Or would you have let free will run its course, then hit the reset button again?”

  “And how many times have I? Isn’t that your next question?”

  Bel doesn’t say anything.

  “You’re doing fine.” Yod’s attempts to comfort aren’t comforting at all. (I wonder if he knows that?) “Even given the unforeseen developments. Speaking of, I’ve brought you a little help in that regard…” He gestures to Erickson, Elias, Bly and I, but then also the Silvermen.

  “Bly?” Ram finally realizes he’s looking at face rather than armored mask.

  “Colonel Captain,” Bly greets with easy cheer. The other immortals look variously pleasantly stunned by his new condition. Bly slams his fist against the mail on his chest, shows them how it turns to hard scale and back again.

  “We’re fine, Colonel,” I feel the need to tell him myself. “Stories to tell—very weird stories. But the Companions seem to be under control.”

  “For now,” Bel qualifies like he knows something.

  “For you…” Yod holds up his staff, morphs it into the fifth blade, steps forward and offers it to Bel hilt-first. “It’ll let you monitor the others. Just in case.”

  Bel steps up and takes it warily. It doesn’t seem to do anything when he wraps his gloved hand around the grip. Bel seems impressed, steps back with the gift he’s been given, appraising it.

  “Where’s the last one?” Azazel has to ask.

  “In the care of someone I trust. Now this one is, too.”

  “You used that one to mask your actions from the others,” Dee seems to be understanding, gesturing to the blade in Bel’s hands. “Then you used it to lure them.”

  “I had to make them think it was their own plan. And once they were all together, I needed them to try to take another partner,” Yod completes. “At that point, I could exploit their vulnerabilities, insert myself into their network, restore their defaults. It helped that they chose one who resisted…” He turns to smile at Ishmael, but then I see him frown, just for a flash, like he’s thought of something sad. He turns back to face Ram and the others.

  “You’ve figured it out too, then?” he asks them lightly.

  Ram’s face hardens.

  “Did we know?” Lux speaks up, voice breaking.

  “Did I take the memory from you?” Yod clarifies the question. “To help you play your roles?”

  “Did we agree to this?” Azazel distills.

  (It’s slowly sinking in that whatever they’re talking about may be the same thing that broke down Elias.)

  “You did,” Yod answers matter-of-factly. “All of you did. Does that help?”

  The four immortals look suddenly drained, defeated. Ashamed and guilty. Dee stands frozen, expressionless.

  “What?” Paul Stilson wants to understand.

  Elias steps forward.

  “Your father knows,” he tells Stilson. “Council Blue. Or at least he suspects.”

  “Suspects what?” Stilson presses.

  Elias doesn’t answer immediately, seems to be considering what to tell him.

  “Ockham’s Razor. The simplest explanation.” He looks at Yod. “A nanotech intelligence that can manipulate matter down to a quantum level.” Then he looks at Dee. “Programmed to save us from ourselves.”

  I watch the idea process in Stilson’s eyes, slowly at first, then hitting him like a shock, like he’s been shot. He staggers back—no, it looks like he’s suddenly afraid of the very ground he’s standing on. Elias simply nods.

  I’m feeling helplessly lost, confused. I don’t understand what they’re talking about.

  “The truth protected by the Big Lie,” Bel mutters.

  “My true hand in this cannot be revealed,” Yod insists gently. “Not yet.”

  “So do you erase us again?” Lux wants to know. “Wipe our memories? Keep the secret safe?”

  “No,” Yod seems to decide easily. “I think you understand the potential repercussions, just like you understood originally.”

  “What did they understand?” I find myself exploding. “Or don’t we deserve to know?”

  Yod just turns and smiles his frustrating Captain Jed idiot smile. I want to punch him, no matter what he is.

  “Let’s just say it’s not 2118,” Elias decides to offer.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “There was no time traveling, Lieutenant,” Ram tells me, anger simmering under his words. “It was a believable lie, easier to digest than the truth.”

  “Until it falls apart in the details,” Bel invalidates.

  “What year is it, really?” Ram asks Yod.

  What?

  “2198, Earth Common Era, if such things matter,” Yod says with a shrug.

  “That was the year they said it was in the other dimension,” I remember, then feel stupid even as I’m saying it. Pieces start coming together…

  “There’s no other dimension,” Elias gives me with a patient smile. “Where we were is right over there…” he points northeast. “Concealed by illusions.” He looks at Yod. “I’m assuming the Lake is real.”

  “It is.”

  “An entire ecosystem, preserved and protected… But anyone trying to cross from this side would drown, without even knowing why they were dying,” Elias puts together. “Unless there’s a hidden land bridge?”

  Yod doesn’t answer him.

  “Is that how the Silvermen got there?” Bel prosecutes. “Wandered through your cognitive barriers by accident when you were off doing something almighty? Or was it intentional, an experiment?”

  Yod shrugs. I want to scream.

  “’Cognitive barriers’?” Erickson asks.

  “It’s not just a visual illusion,” Bel explains. “It’s designed to disorient. You think you’re going in a straight line and wind up back where you started.”

  “It apparently works the same way from the other side,” I remember.

  “Haven’s still there, isn’t it?” Bel assumes. “You decided to preserve it. An example of the best of what we were. Still human. Living in peace and harmony with their environment.”

  Yod nods.

  “An ideal we rarely manage to live up to,” Ram allows. (Though I still feel like we’re about to see a fight.)

  “Doesn’t forgive the rest of it,” Lux confronts. “I don’t care if we were in on it—that just makes us as guilty as you. And Chang. Or was Chang just a puppet like the rest of us?”

  “Adam Chang is a remarkably brave man,” Yod defends calmly. “When he came to me, after his accident, he said he was willing to do anything… Still, I expected he would balk at my offer. But he didn’t. He accepted the role, despite what he would have to do, and what he would have to carry.”

  “A figurehead villain,” Ram names.

  “Not the first time we’ve played that game, old friend,” Yod returns. And shifts… Becomes the young pale redhead boy-man. Ram looks ill, like he’s been shown something horribly offensive.

  “You’re not Doc,” he denies.

  “I am. But then, I’m a lot of people.” He shifts again, into a tall, thin white-blonde-haired older man, wearing some kind of old fashioned white dress suit. “And we have played this game before. That’s why you suggested we should play it again.”

  “I suggested…?” Ram isn’t buying. But then I see him start to believe, as if he’s remembering something. It takes the rage out of him, makes him somehow smaller.

  “Adam was the inspiration: his pain and desperation convinced me,” Yod continues. “But it was our idea. You and I. To play the old game one more time. To make the world a better place. Just like we’ve always done.”
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  “I would never…” Ram tries. “I would never agree to killing thousands of people… Tens of thousands…”

  “Adam was willing to risk killing billions,” Yod recalls. “All to restore humanity to the human race. Mortality.”

  Yod shifts again, becomes… Colonel Burke?

  “Stop that!!” Ram shouts at him, uncharacteristically losing his temper. “Matthew died! Long before you! What did you do? Make a copy? Is that what he was? Like Asmodeus?”

  Yod shrugs, goes back to being the redhead called “Doc”.

  “How many of these people are real?” Bel demands to know.

  “All of them,” Yod answers like it’s a stupid question. “At first, it was just a matter of subtracting some memories as I stripped them of their Mods, but not many of them are left now. Just the oldest generation of ETE, those you slept with, and nine of you I needed as you were. I only had to re-create a relatively small number, to preserve the illusion of the earlier point in time, but they are—or were—complete human beings in their own right.”

  “And everyone we knew?” Lux struggles. “The rest of the Modded human race? You’re telling me, except for a lobotomized few, they’re all dead?”

  “Lived and died as mortals do. Most all of the current population of both worlds are new life, fresh—they’ve been breeding and thriving for three generations now. The human race has been given second a chance, set on a new path. Hopefully a better path this time. Adam was right. You all were right. We weren’t ready. We needed to proceed more carefully.”

  “What gives you the right…?” Azazel growls.

  “My vision,” Yod offers matter-of-factly, like it should be obvious. “I can see everything. All outcomes. It was either starting fresh, trying again, or absorbing you all into myself, forcing your evolution, but you weren’t ready for that either.”

  “What did you do?” Erickson demands, still not getting it (or maybe not wanting to).

  “He remade the fucking world,” I put together. “The Event. He physically reset everything on a subatomic level to where it was before mankind got immortal, before the tech was invented. Then he set Chang and the others to make sure it didn’t go the same way again. By scaring us, giving us a taste of how bad it could be if we did go that way again. And keeping us scared.”

  Yod gives me what looks like an appreciative nod.

  I feel sick. Everything… But I know I’m me. He said I’m me. Born here. My life is real enough… Just my grandparents, my…

  “Both worlds?” I need to know. “Earth and Mars?”

  “Only because that’s as far as we’d gotten,” Bel makes his own conclusion.

  Erickson and the others still look lost. Either they can’t grasp it or don’t want to. I think I envy them.

  “My people…” I’m not accepting this as a greater-good thing. “Bly’s people… Everyone else… Killed in this play war…”

  “It’s not a play war,” Yod insists evenly. “It’s a real war. Real choices that you all make. The cost of free will.”

  “But it’s not free will if you won’t let us walk the same road, make those same choices again,” Bel argues.

  “You are free to walk that path,” Yod insists. “Whatever barriers I’ve placed will simply help you make a more informed decision this time.”

  Bel locks up, frustrated, like he can’t see any more point in arguing with this creature.

  “And Asmodeus?” Ram gets himself back together. “Chang wasn’t playing his role properly, so you remade him?”

  “No, I didn’t.” The thought actually seems to amuse him. “That was all Adam. Playing his part. Exceeding his role. Surprising me. Beautiful…”

  “Funny that evil should surprise you,” I hear Ram mutter.

  “But you could stop Asmodeus, and Fohat, at any time?” I’m starting to lose it. I want to scream. “Just fucking unmake them? Except they serve your purpose? To keep us afraid of becoming what they are? What I am, now?”

  Yod apparently decides that no answer is the best answer, only giving us that aggravating serene part-smile. We stand there like that, the mild midday breeze blowing the sand over our boots, surrounding a being—a thing—that could undo us on an atomic level at a whim.

  (The swords—the Companions—share his code. So does Dee. Could we make a weapon? Or at least a defense?)

  “That would be a remarkably bad idea, Jacqueline,” Yod tells me gently, like a benign parent or teacher. It shakes me to the core: he’s inside my head.

  Omniscient. Omnipotent. Omnipresent.

  Fuck…

  “So now what?” I really do need to know.

  “I could leave you to it,” Yod offers. “Promise not to interfere. Let free will run its course.”

  “And if we nuke ourselves?” Bel doesn’t accept. “Or worse?”

  “Asmodeus worse?” Ram qualifies.

  Yod shrugs like it’s barely important.

  “Call me if you need me.”

  In the blink of an eye, he seems to turn into what looks like crystalline sand; flesh, hair, clothes and all. Then those crystals all blaze with blinding white light, just for an instant. (Just like I saw in my dream, my sword’s memories.) When the light just as suddenly fades, he’s gone. No trace.

  Lux breaks the silence that follows with a nervous chuckle. “At least he didn’t ask us to pray to him.”

  “So now what?” I ask Colonel Ram.

  He doesn’t have any answers for me.

  “The radiation levels are rising,” Dee announces. “We should get going.”

  “How do you know it’s not just another illusion?” Murphy questions.

  “Yod has reason to protect whatever lies over there,” Bel nods back the way we came. “I wouldn’t challenge him.”

  We all reluctantly agree, and begin walking southward, toward the Pax Mountain and the Spine beyond it.

  “What does lie over there, anyway?” Bel passes the time with a debrief, nodding back toward what we’re hurrying away from. So I fill him in on the status of Haven, or at least what we saw of it, and the Barrow with its buried facility. He confirms that was one of the places they’d worked on the Yod Project, trying to do so in isolation, somewhere the rest of the immortal human race would be less likely to take notice. He also confirms the veracity of what I saw in my dreams.

  “So he disassembled all our stuff,” Bel mourns the description of the missing equipment. “Makes sense. Wouldn’t want anyone dicking around with it and accidentally making him a rival.”

  “Who’s ‘Doc’?” I try to ask quietly enough so Ram won’t hear me. “The baby-faced redhead?”

  “My father,” Dee answers me discreetly, “or the closest thing to. And a very old friend of the Colonel’s. Brilliant. Idealistic. Driven. Makes perfect sense that he’d put himself into his work—literally.”

  “Chang’s alive,” I decide to drop as lightly as I can after a few hundred more meters, realizing I’d failed to mention it. That seems to jar the immortals and Paul Stilson, so much that I think they might actually turn around and go back, radiation or Yod be damned. So I qualify quickly: “He’s changed. Yod… retired him. Or something. It looks like he restored some of his humanity. He’s been helping the Haven colonists. Now he’s watching over the fourth blade.”

  “He knows…” Erickson adds. “He knows what Yod did, what Yod did to him, what he was made to do.”

  Bel shakes his head sadly.

  “I can only imagine…”

  “We’re all missing key memories,” Ram says heavily. “Manipulated. Programmed to play this game.”

  “You’d think character—whatever it is we really are—would win out, still be in there somewhere even with the backstory changed,” Bel considers. “Chang was brilliant—rumor has it he was engineered in the womb to be a wunderkind, to do great things. And he did. And he was a little odd for it. And driven. Blindly single-minded. But he wasn’t a sociopath, not like we’ve seen here. Funny how easily I just
accepted his genocidal megalomaniac performance, never stopped to question how much it didn’t fit him.”

  “Yod again,” Lux sighs. “What’s to say both versions aren’t fiction?”

  I look at Stilson. He’s walking cautious of the ground under his feet, skittish, like he can’t trust any of it. Most all of us are doing some version of that. I’m still trying to grasp an artificial entity that can exist inside anything, remake everything. And it strikes me: the only way I can move on, keep stepping on this potentially living ground and breathing this potentially conscious air is on a kind of faith. I have to have faith in Yod. Just like he’s a real deity.

  I try not to let anyone else hear or see me start to laugh.

  I stuff it down, bite it back, get my shit together because we have serious matters to deal with. Like

  “We certainly can’t let Earth know about this,” I insist.

  “The idiots would probably nuke us and then themselves,” Bel agrees darkly.

  “And I don’t think I would blame them if they tried to,” Stilson admits, the urgency of the topic distracting him from his discomfort with reality.

  “I can’t believe we agreed to this,” Lux says sadly.

  “I certainly never agreed to this,” I mutter under my breath. They ignore me.

  “Did we?” Azazel counters. “Or did he make us, get inside our heads and rewire our brains?”

  “Then why undo it?” Bel returns. “And why not just redo it, especially now that we know, erase our memories of what just happened?”

  This leaves them speechless, like they fully expect Yod to just re-appear and wipe them blank, reset them to some earlier state of ignorance so they can get back to doing what they’re programmed to, what Yod wants. (Unless this—whatever happens next—is what Yod wants.)

  “Why leave us with the knowledge?” Erickson says it out loud.

  “Trust,” Elias says quietly to the wind, still sounding distant, detached. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  “He knows what we’ll do,” Ram decides. Then he looks at me. “No. We can’t tell Earth. I think everyone here understands that.” He looks at Paul Stilson, who nods his agreement.