But why does it matter now?
My body is ice as I think of a universe without my companion. Qod! Oluvia! I slide down the wall to sit and stare vacantly in the direction of the door to the Aberration Sphere, the place where it started, feeling the slow creep of despair ebb through my limbs as though my blood has thickened within my veins and lost the will to flow.
All those years.
She’s gone …
I don’t know if I can get up. Mere minutes ago I felt a thrill at the revelation that a whole new existence awaited discovery and fierce resolve to stop Keitus Vieta. But all of that is melting away as my thoughts sink into a quagmire of hopelessness. I’m not the man Oluvia Wade knew. I’m not the savior Brother Sunny believed I would be. And I’m not able to win a fight against a force with such power. Whatever his plans involve, Keitus Vieta has won. I cannot stop him.
Better that I end it now.
“Control, are the protocols still in place for self-termination?”
Yes.
“Then make the preparations.”
EIGHTEEN
Here I am again. Standing, staring at that empty slot. My slot.
More than ever the desire to simply end my life and join the others overwhelms me. Over the years the curiosity gnawed at me until it became an obsession. I had to know what was beyond death. But that obsession eventually led me here, and it is no longer curiosity that drives me; it is sadness. I am not just the last man. With Qod gone I am the last soul.
So here I am, contemplating my death. The death of the last human. Why is that so significant? The universe is still in the early stages of its fourth cycle, and it will evolve again to spill new life into the waiting void. Perhaps that makes me the first man. But so what? I have no purpose. And did I ever truly have one anyway? The last part of my life has been a fruitless chase to find an aberration, ending in defeat. Surely in all the billions of people who will be born one can stand against Vieta. There’s a dissenting voice somewhere distant telling me I am the one it should be. But I ignore it.
Time to move on, then. Time to take the same risk that all the others did before me and see if death really is the end.
“Control …” I pause, still captivated by the emptiness of that slot—the darkness inside the perfectly formed hole waiting for life. Death in reverse, that slot is nothing until the sum of my life experience has been deposited there.
Insanity! Why am I hesitating? Doesn’t the immeasurable anguish of loneliness, the futility of existence, and the fear of Vieta outweigh the greater unknown? So why do I delay?
“Control?”
Yes?
Still staring at the slot. Subject 9.98768E+14. That’s what the slot will be called when I die. Through Oluvia’s life I know exactly how the process works: the Codex calculations will be made, duplicating my life in precise mathematical detail, the quantum recorders at work inside each atom of my body will make their final data transfer, and both sets of data will be compressed and spliced together to make an exact memory library of my entire life. Trillions of years. Most of them experiencing other people’s lives. A glorious fanfare of sentience.
But for whom? There is nobody left to care or discover it out here. The Soul Consortium will wander through the void, discarded and useless, perpetuating itself for eternity for no one. For nothing.
What was it all for?
Yes? The soulless voice repeats. It jars me.
“Why don’t you tell me? What was it all for?”
I do not understand. Please rephrase the question or provide more detail.
“Qod would have understood.”
Silence from the Control Core.
“Control, play me Qod’s last entry again.”
Day 4113: Data Analysis Batch 9K1.533: Abnormality transport complete. Containment fields holding. Monitoring abnormality for qalkkjk. Aberration intrusion detected detected detecteddddd. No! Initiating firewall proto proto Keitus proto Vieta protocols. No! Protocols. Protocols. Initihhyfmnm. No. Salem! Help … help … help … Salem … Sal … Sal … Sa …
It doesn’t sound much like her. Too analytical. Too … inhuman as she proceeds through the last words of her life. But nevertheless, hearing it is significant to me. Meaningful in a way that defies explanation. Perhaps it’s because she spoke my name amongst the gibberish. But not all of it was nonsense. She’d done something just before she died. Transported an abnormality—not an aberration—an abnormality. Vieta is the aberration, so what is the abnormality? Is it the same thing?
“Give her back,” Vieta said in the Observation Sphere. Give whom back? The abnormality?
“Control, where is the abnormality Qod transported?”
The Consortium royal gardens.
“Finally, you actually know something. What is the abnormality?”
Unknown.
Well, in that case, I’d better find out for myself what it is.
NINETEEN
The word abnormality falls far short of a true description for what I find when I arrive, but I am no longer in any doubt as to what it is. Since I last saw it, it has grown into a monstrous collage of human body parts, compressed, stretched, and twisted into a single hurting nightmare.
The Consortium royal gardens—the place where I spent so much of my time when I first arrived at the Soul Consortium—has been choked by Keitus Vieta’s abominable sculpture of life. Had Plantagenet Soome not shot the fetus within the walls of the genoplant on Castor’s World, this is the poor creature it would have eventually grown into. But Keitus waited and began again, and here is the result.
I step slowly through the archway, wincing at the multitude of agonized moans, glancing between the suffering faces, clawed hands, and warped spines, all fused together as though some maniacal god squeezed a world of people into one impossible body, then stretched it out like a fleshy blanket across the land. The trees that once graced this place have been stripped of life, every branch and root clogged by bloody veins. Bark and stem smeared with pulsing organs and sticky pulp.
A thousand lidless eyes follow me as I continue on toward the glowing center drawn by a macabre curiosity but repulsed by the fetid stench and morbid horror. Cavernous mouths gargle their pain in tortured unison, and from the grass and earth, fingers with too many joints fumble to grasp at my feet as my soles crunch onward. I keep walking, numb with shock, willing myself with every last atom of resolve to see the core of it all. And at last I find it—the indigo glare of energy surrounded by wet tubes and slippery fibers.
Distant memories of Dominique Mancini’s visit to Keitus’s house in Lombardy remind me of the ugly statues he kept there. He called it a creative outlet, the residue of another purpose. Within his jeweled cane, within the same blue light were the echoes of the dead, blended together into a gestalt of consciousness. And here before me it has been made flesh.
Keitus Vieta has been gradually deconstructing the atoms created at the birth of the universe into other, unknown particles, like some kind of virus or cancer infecting the law of physics, altering the DNA of the universe to suit its own design. Left unchecked to continue growing as Keitus adds more to it, this tumor will eventually create an imbalance so great, the cycles of the universe will stop completely. No more universe. No more life. Ever again.
I can’t wallow in self-pity and defeat any longer. I have to stop him. But I still don’t know how.
I could ask Control to purge the garden, but Keitus is patient. He will wait as long as it takes to build again, feeding another new embryo with the energies gathered by the death of each human.
I have to find a permanent solution. Soome’s experience told me Vieta can’t die, but everything has its vulnerabilities. Perhaps I can find out his. Or perhaps even persuade him to stop. Either way, I need to have a plan—several plans—if I am to succeed.
TWENTY
At first, Keitus Vieta seems indifferent to my presence when I return to him. He watches me in silence as I move slowly toward his image in th
e center of the Observation Sphere. The cloudy crimson orb in which he sits glares bright against the backdrop of forming galaxies surrounding us, and I cannot help but feel intimidated, especially without Qod’s reassuring presence. But I have a plan. All I need is a way to snare him, a way to lure him in, and to do that I have no choice but to talk with him to find the leverage I need.
“Control, can you establish an audio link?”
Confirmed.
A low but eerie howl of wind and a distant crackle of nova interference come through. His environment sounds familiar, but I can’t yet place it.
“Will you tell me who you are?” I ask.
Vieta looks at me, a greedy smile creeping across his face like the stretching of an infected scar. I still can’t tell where he is because of the limited field of view in the image, but I suspect he doesn’t know where I am either, or he’d probably have found a way to come here.
“Give her back,” he whispers as if his voice is carried with the wind.
“Who are you?”
His hairless head tilts slightly, as if he is calculating something. “We are many. We are one.”
“We are many. You said that before to Soome. What do you mean?”
“Give her back.”
“Her?”
“Yes,” Vieta whispers. “My … daughter. My … offspring. She is near maturity … Give her back.”
“I can’t.”
His eyes continue to pierce me. “You will.”
“I cannot allow that. If your … daughter continues to grow, this universe will end with this cycle. Human life will not be able to continue.”
“Human life is an infestation.”
“No, your offspring is the infestation.”
Vieta’s lips separate to reveal a gray tongue sliding behind decayed teeth. A long and wheezing rasp ends with a gurgling hiss. With a shiver, I realize he is laughing.
“I’ll give you a chance to stop all this. You told Soome you wanted to get back to wherever it was you came from. Well, perhaps I can help you. Maybe we can find another way for you to return without harming the rest of us.”
“No.”
“It can’t be done, or you won’t?”
“Give her back to me.”
I nod slowly, understanding that Vieta won’t be persuaded. “No. I won’t.”
“I could kill you.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Vieta raises a bony finger.
For the next few seconds I fight the surging panic he might actually kill me.
“I removed Qod because she stole my daughter from me.”
I try to disguise the pain in my voice. “I thought so.”
In his eyes I see the same intensity that must be showing in mine. He’s looking for leverage too. A way to bargain with me.
“Would you like her back?”
I feel my pulse quicken. Surely he’s taunting me. “You can do that?”
His head tilts again. “Perhaps.”
Could he be telling the truth? Or is he playing the same game as me, trying to reel me in? If he is, then I can trust him about as much as he can trust me. But this could still be the leverage I need.
“So,” I say, trying to keep my breathing level, “you want your daughter. I want Qod. Can we come to an arrangement?”
Vieta continues to stare, the same sickly smile warping his lips. “Bring the Consortium here to me, and I will return her to you … once you have told me the location of my daughter.”
I stay silent for a moment as if thinking it over, though my decision was made even before he finished the sentence. “Agreed, but where’s here? We’re at the beginning of the universe’s fourth cycle. No stars have formed yet, let alone any planets. There shouldn’t be anywhere for us to meet other than here.”
“You will find me waiting on Castor’s World.”
“How is that possible?”
“I arranged for its protection while the universe collapsed at the end of its third cycle. It was not difficult, but I had to expend some … shall we say, energy, to succeed.”
By energy he must mean the energy he’s been collecting from people’s objects—the energy that created his daughter—or whatever that thing is. A moment of fear tightens my throat. I’m trying to negotiate, even deceive a being with such power he has been able to somehow preserve a small section of space while the rest of the universe condensed back within a singularity. Not only that, he managed to dispose of Qod. Again I wonder how I can possibly hope to defeat Vieta.
“You want me to bring the Consortium through the Promethean Singularity?”
“If you want me to return Qod, yes.”
I wanted him to come to me, but either way, my plan should work. “Very well. It’ll take eighty days for the slipstream drives to power up. I’ll see you then.”
His smile sends a wave of nausea through me. “Yes. I will see you in eighty days.”
“Control, sever transmission.”
Confirmed.
TWENTY-ONE
Eighty days. Less than a blink in the eternity of my life, but now that span of time seems like an age. And it may seem even longer without Qod. I am tempted to visit one more life—a contented soul—during that time, but I cannot give in to the temptation. Nothing should distract me from my new purpose.
Below my feet the steady rumble of the Soul Consortium’s slipstream engines build their gradual crescendo, bringing back memories of the first time they were used. I have no desire to experience another journey through the heart of the universe for the third time. I did it once myself and once as Oluvia Wade, but nobody found out what it would be like to go back through the opposite way. I remember the pain. With the immense power fluctuations at the point of impact, the Control Core cannot suppress the sensations in the human body. But this has to be done.
Ahead of me, still clogging the Consortium gardens, is Vieta’s abnormality, heaving like a restless sea of bone and flesh against the transparent walls of the sphere, crushing the trees under its weight and lamenting its own existence. Outside the boundaries of the universe it seems Vieta is unable to locate his creation, but that may change when we pass through the Singularity again. Just as he has no real intention of returning Qod to me, I have no intention of releasing this abomination to him. Otherwise the consequences for creation would be disastrous, and I would have nothing left with which to bargain. He must know I plan to deceive him, and if I return this monster to him, he’ll simply dispose of me and continue where he left off, ready to celebrate his offspring’s coming of age and the resulting dissolution of my universe.
I take one last look at the gardens I once cherished above all else, then give the order. “Control, detach Consortium Royal Garden Sphere and jettison.”
Please confirm trajectory.
“It doesn’t matter. As far away from the Promethean Singularity as possible. It must never get back into the universe, so just get it away from here. Away from me.”
Calculating … detaching … ejecting.
With a vast shudder, hoses, fibers, umbilicals, and bridges snap away from the sphere, leaving clouds of gas and debris to jet away into the darkness. A pulse of energy buffets the sphere, and a few seconds later it drifts away from the rest of the Consortium—a massive glass ball tumbling into infinity, filled with a living horror I hope nobody ever finds, most of all Vieta.
“Good riddance,” I say, turning my back to return to the Soul Spheres.
TWENTY-TWO
Day eighty. The final preparations have been made for my final day. After all this time, after all my aeons of existence trying to decide if I should follow the path of my long dead peers, my decision is made but not for the reasons I ever expected. I have finally discovered there is more to life than this universe I have come to know so well, but I must be denied that adventure. To stop Vieta, I must die. At least now I will know what lies beyond. Perhaps the greater adventure is waiting for me there. I will find out soon enough.
To ensure my death I have cut off all power to every genoplant in the Soul Consortium to prevent my resurrection, and now the only remaining risk is a premature death. For my plan to work, my sacrifice must happen at precisely the right moment or all is lost. Facing Vieta is dangerous enough, but if I handle things correctly, he will not kill me. Passing through the Promethean Singularity will be the most dangerous obstacle to overcome. Many people died last time, but I know exactly what to expect and I am prepared.
Adjusting trajectory for final approach to Promethean Singularity.
Contact in sixty seconds.
Please brace for impact.
The Observation Sphere is the best place to be. The velocity as I approach at slipstream speed is breathtaking, and rather than focus the sphere’s viewpoint somewhere within the universe, I have withdrawn it for this occasion to view the approach directly ahead of the Soul Consortium, as if I am looking straight through a massive window. I didn’t see this the first or second time. Back then, both Salem and Oluvia’s eyes ruptured. This time I am wearing protective lens implants.
Contact in forty-five seconds.
Calculating vectors for arrival orbit at Castor’s World.
I cannot help but scream with exhilaration and fear as the universe rushes to greet me. The boiling heart we call the Promethean Singularity is spinning and exploding in bursts of white and gold light, as if all the stars waiting to be born are warring against each other to win the prize of existence. Vast arcs of lightning ripple across the dome above me like white fire, and as we draw closer in the last few seconds, the deep shuddering power of creation rocks the Soul Consortium.
Contact in five … four … three … two …
My ears explode, my bones crunch, my throat collapses, my heart crumples, and my lungs burst as the Consortium punches through the heart of the universe. My restraints are failing, and through a blaze of white, I watch the sphere splinter above me. With an abundant taste of blood in my mouth and throat and the sharp tingle of shredded nerves telling me I won’t survive the next few minutes, my body slams into the glass high above the ground. Debris shrieks through the fracture in the sphere, and the immense pressure smears me across its surface toward the opening. What remains of my corpse will spray into the waiting atmosphere of Castor’s World as the Consortium screams to a halt above the legendary crater.
The Soul Consortium Page 26