“Hold fire,” I order, then watch the screens as the Discs buzz the mostly buried bunkers in formation, clearing past the landing bays, then turn and fly back. They do not fire. They spread out and form an aerial perimeter, a line of pawns between us and the big ships.
“My new friends told me you would impress, Colonel Ram,” a voice comes over the Link, smooth and cultured and not at all threatening. “Not that I didn’t expect you to live up to what the histories say you were.”
MAI confirms an ID signature as coming from what should be PK gear. I don’t reply.
“I assure you that you are very completely out-gunned,” the voice comes back in a few moments. “But despite what I have made happen, I do not actually wish to be a mass murderer. On the contrary: I do this to save you. All of you. Or as many of you as can be saved.” I hear the smoothness crack just a bit at the end—a hint of stress. Regret, maybe. Or madness. I’ve heard too many similar speeches from terrorists about to commit atrocities. “The outcome is not inevitable. The future can be rewritten, believe me: I’ve done it. Hear me out, before you choose.”
“The signal origin just moved,” Anton announces. “It’s…”
“I see it,” I tell him. There’s a single figure standing just outside of our perimeter gate. Playback confirms no trick of the eye: In one frame, empty space is suddenly occupied.
The figure itself defies description even with the best optics: It is man-shaped, but it’s a perfect silhouette, an outline of a man filled with the purest black, absolutely featureless.
“That doesn’t even look real,” Rick agrees.
“Some kind of high-tech digi-camo?” Kastl considers. But not even the dust is sticking to it. It looks like someone cut a hole out of space in the shape of a man, just standing there.
“Let’s get a closer look,” I order. “Small. H-A squad. Bring him in through Airlock 2 if he’s willing.” Then I call down to Medical and ask Doc Halley to ready an Isolation chamber like we used when Paul first visited.
Captain Thomas gets the honors. Her armored suits circle our un-seeable guest. Even on her helmet optics up-close, there’s nothing to see, no detail, not from any angle, not even a sense that he’s three-dimensional. He looks bald, and in profile the lines of his face show no mask. He also looks like he may be wearing a snug-fitting body suit, like a diver, though without detail it’s hard to tell. But there are no obvious outlines of weapons.
The shadow man doesn’t say a word, just gives Thomas a polite little bow and gestures for her to lead him where she will.
It’s no different in person, up-close through the plexi of Iso One. He’s still a perfect silhouette, a hole cut in reality, no matter how much light is shone on him.
“I can’t even get reading one to tell me he’s alive,” Halley tells me aside. “No heat. No vitals. Sensor pad in the floor says there’s a hundred and fifty-two pounds of something standing on that floor. But when I tried to reach in and get a sample with a remote exam probe, the tip went right through him, no resistance.”
I’ve brought Sakina with me, and I ask her the obvious question:
“Have you ever seen or heard of anything like this?”
She shakes her head, then seems to reconsider. “My father. When he left us, he said he had learned of an old evil,” she repeats what she told me once upon a time. “I think he called it a shadow. I assumed he was speaking in metaphor.” Her eyes begin to glare into the perfect darkness with the intensity of a predator.
I turn and address the man that is and isn’t there.
“What do I call you?” I begin, stepping up to the plexi wall between us.
“If I still have any name, it is Syan Chang, though I am not truly, not anymore.” His voice is still smooth, but his sentences have a lost, rambling quality. Looking beyond the impressive visual effect, the outline reminds me of a dancer in a leotard: lean, muscular build. Even his posture, the way he carries himself, is essentially casual and unthreatening. Relaxed. Even lazy.
“You said you’d heard about me,” I ignore the riddle of his introduction, hoping for some kind of clarity.
“From the Captain Bly. From the Colonel Janeway.” He says it like he’s thinking of something vaguely amusing. “I needed current intelligence. They were quite happy to tell tales, considering my generous gifts.” He steps closer to me, and I suddenly feel like I’m staring down into a bottomless pit when I look where his face should be. The edges that define him are incredibly sharp, even close up.
“You’ve made some kind of alliance with them?” I ask him to clarify what seems apparent from the gathered forces hovering just beyond our perimeter.
“They are still pure,” the black hole—Chang—tells me earnestly, “and willing to aid my cause. I offer them strength and purpose—my strength and purpose. The Zodanga are already using what I’ve given them to construct more of the simple but effective ships you see in the sky beyond your base. Very soon, they will be more powerful than your UNMAC ever was in its heyday, before my drones—what you succinctly call ‘Discs’—drove them away home. And the Peacekeepers, they serve me for their own protection, to be strong to keep their homes theirs, because they fear you, and because they fear the contaminated.”
“’The contaminated’?” I have to ask, keeping my patience.
“Those that have given up their humanity, infected themselves, to be something they should not be.”
“The ETE,” I assume.
“And others. But yes, they are the primary threat to us. To all of us.”
“And what about us?” I probe. “UNMAC. This base. My people.”
“I know you,” he changes the subject after a moment’s hesitation. He steps back, leans casually against the exam table like this is a conversation among friends. “Well, a later you that probably no longer exists and never will. But then my allies told me that you were here, earlier you, old man you, in this time, the victim or beneficiary of some hibernation mishap. You can only imagine my joy, to find someone even remotely familiar in this timeline, even though we were not friends. But I knew you, Destroyer. Not well, though. And not yet—perhaps never, in this now. But I can already see a lot of what I knew—not the god, but the man underneath the mask of the god—now that we talk here together. And I always respected you, no matter who you stood with. You inspired me, you see, at least partially. I think we value the same things… valued… will value… Anyway: It’s actually quite novel to see the man you were before you became the god I knew.”
I’m not sure if he’s trying to misdirect me, manipulate with bizarre flattery, or just rambling nonsense.
“You called me ‘Destroyer.’” I pick out.
“A juvenile epithet, don’t you agree?” he says like he needs to apologize for saying it. “But that’s what you were and what you will not be, not now. Or at least that’s how others knew you. Would have known you.”
“You seem to have an issue with verb tense,” I pick. His head tilts, as if he’s thinking. He is truly unreadable, with no face or eyes, but by habit I keep trying to read him, which only brings on a sense of vertigo. So I stop looking directly at him. Now he’s more like a shadow on the periphery of my vision. I suddenly remember a scene from Peter Pan, featuring a runaway shadow.
“Your studies of my drones, according to your own transmissions, revealed that you’ve considered the possibility of sub-atomic reverse-causality, even though you do not understand it. But then, nor do I, certainly not as fully as I should having used it. Time-Splicing is a technology I was forced to steal, because there was no other way left to me, and I was out of time, at least in the conventional sense. I tried everything to reverse the damage we had done to ourselves, to stop what was upon us, but I failed. I failed and I became what I am in that failure, which is what you see now before you and will never see. So I seeded myself—or at least a facsimile of myself—and what I needed to save us all, back across time.”
Seeding. Paul had used that word to describ
e how the Discs could have self-manufactured from a molecular start. Or how matter could be manipulated backwards through time.
“’Time-Splicing’?” Anton asks for clarification, sounding simultaneously enthralled and incredulous.
“In my origin-time, practical retrograde time travel is only accessible through the characteristics of certain sub-atomic particles,” Chang lectures him like an eccentric professor, excited about his subject. “You can’t send people back, you see. Not even objects. Nothing made of complete matter. You can’t actually ‘send’ anything. But if you can isolate and manipulate the right set of sub-atomic particles, you can connect to an earlier relativistic time on a quantum scale. This breakthrough allowed scientists to begin observing select past events. I simply extrapolated based on some experiments that had been suppressed for understandable safety concerns. Using sub-nano-scale manufacturing techniques, you could bridge the gap to do more than observe. You could create ‘seeds’ on a sub-atomic level by using those particles to manipulate molecular matter on the other side, painstakingly manufacturing nanites programmed to build whatever you want in the past. And the nanotechnology of my time is capable of building much more than drones.” He holds his hand up and flexes his fingers as if to illustrate his point. “Whatever you Splice back, it has to be done all at once, of course, and there is only one shot, assuming it works at all. Actually altering history is supposed to be impossible, of course, but if it were to be done…”
He stops and lets out a short chuckle as if something is amusing him, even though I can barely read his body language.
“…the timeline would be immediately altered, and no one knows what happens if time is altered, what becomes of your present once you manage to change the chain of causality and effectively rewrite your own past. No one has really studied the paradox adequately, at least to my knowledge, as I imagine it is even more impossible to observe. If you follow the paradox, you would likely not be aware there has been a change to study if everything is changed, including your own experiences. But what happens to the original chain? Maybe my time still exists somewhere, some when, unreachable, like a divergent track—there are many theories of multiple dimensions. Or maybe it’s overwritten, undone, like replacing a digital file in memory with another version. Unrecoverable. Lost forever to the butterfly effect. Maybe my whole reality—my whole universe—simply unraveled, destroying everything and everyone, including myself, erased, only to be re-woven…”
This thought seems to give him pause, even regret. His featureless head shakes. “I do not pretend to have any real idea,” he continues, more like he’s talking to himself. “Perhaps I haven’t saved my own reality at all—it either still exists or has been obliterated. But this one, this now… This one will be different. I will make it different.”
“You recreated yourself across time from nanites?” Halley interrupts, no longer able to hold back incredulous. Chang stands up, turns to her. I see her step back reflexively, unsettled by the blackness of him, even though his movements still aren’t threatening.
“The ETE—the ones the survivor descendents call ‘Jinni,’ or ‘Eternal,’ like they should be revered—they can rebuild their bodies, repair themselves with the clumsy science they’ve managed. The science of my time is—was—much further advanced. It ensures immortality: You can be entirely remade from the slightest fragment, including your memories, your personality. You can be almost entirely destroyed and return as you were from a handful of molecules. All the nano-machines need is the material to work with. The seeds and their programming can be created on a molecular scale, like a single cell and its DNA made of quantum particles, ready to reproduce, to grow the whole organism as programmed. All that’s required is access to raw building blocks, and part of their program is to seek those resources out. That’s where I got the idea of using temporally relativistic particles to create a nano-seed across time. I did not time-travel; I simply rebuilt myself whole in this time, fully expecting my body, my self, to be overwritten—to cease to exist or exist in a totally different form—along with my origin time.”
“You made a copy of yourself in our time and got killed or erased or whatever in yours when you changed the past?” Rick distills the insanity with remarkable restraint.
“If you like,” Chang allows him, like he’s lecturing a grade school class. “It isn’t that simple, though. There’s a great deal of restriction on splicing points based on being able to isolate the right particles, so I had to take what I could get and make do. So I picked a target as early in the Martian colonial development as I could, which was in 2045, several months before the Second Expedition landed. It also takes a significant amount of time to build from seed to final form after the transition, relative to the complexity of the construct.”
He suddenly turns to face me again, as if he’d been rudely ignoring his host, then hangs and shakes his head in theatric regret—I wonder if he must be practiced at exaggerating his gestures and body language because he has no facial expression to read, like an actor who must perform behind a mask.
“Unfortunately for so many of you in this timeline, my drones are much simpler and therefore quicker to build than I was. I had programmed them to begin their mission without me, assuming I wouldn’t grow to functioning consciousness until many months behind them. But I failed to account for the difficulty my personal seeds had in finding the necessary building blocks for this body. My drones are simple, and raw materials for them are common. Because of this, my drones became active fully nineteen years before my seeds found all the necessary building blocks and managed to construct me. They began their programmed mission automatically, and their tactical AI operated without my oversight for much longer than I had anticipated.”
“What was their ‘programmed mission’?” Tru cuts in and asks with more than a little rage under her politesse.
“To stop us from developing something with our nano-research,” I give Chang, letting him know I’m trying to follow what passes for his reasoning. I can’t see his face, but I get the impression he’s smiling at me by the way he nods.
“You understand me,” he says, making me regret my little diplomatic condescension. “I so hoped you would. My drones followed their programmed directives, their AI improvising as you resisted. And given the lengths to which you resisted, the drones exceeded all expectations.”
Chang begins pacing as he talks—not to me but to the floor—continuing his monologue as if it’s for his own benefit, like he has to make some kind of absolution.
“By the time I was remade, by the time my seeds found enough materials to work with, by the time I came to consciousness and discovered what had been done in my unexpectedly long absence, it was all done, for better or worse. You see, I hadn’t anticipated so much resistance on your part, or so much tenacity from the corporations. I had assumed I would only have to destroy a few facilities, enough to keep Mars economically unviable for research, and it would be done—in my time as in yours, even the greediest corporations were not willing to risk biological nano-engineering on Earth. I thought I could just make it too costly, or if that failed, frighten them off with a few tragic accidents. But I don’t pretend to fully understand people, you see. Or economics. That was my great mistake. You resisted, you persisted. My drones were programmed to adapt and succeed, so they escalated, calculated…”
He faces me again, like he needs to tell this to me specifically: “I awoke to a nuclear wasteland, thousands upon thousands dead by my singular deed—it was 2065, too late to moderate the destruction, too late for reason or mercy. But my future was certainly undone, the horrors awaiting our race… The corporate research was stopped, the facilities all destroyed, the people of the Earth too horrified to try again. I had succeeded. I had changed time! And despite everything that was lost, everyone… It was worth the cost. It was easily worth the cost. You must believe this.”
“I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to believe,” I reduce him. “You ma
ke very little coherent sense.”
“Coherent sense does not apply here,” the silhouette says intensely. “Even what you know as cause-and-effect is a simple lie told to protect unsuspecting children from an unimaginable truth. But this is no time for ignorance, so I will try to make it as simple as I can for you:
“What you must believe is that what was created here, on Mars—the nano-engineered biology created by human greed and fear of mortality—changed us as a species, too much and too soon. We became immortal, superhuman. Gods. You have seen the barest hint of this with your so-called friends the ETE, so you know that what I tell you is possible. But what the ETE have made themselves into is only a poor shadow of what we became; their salvaged research and hack science is a sloppy fraction of what the Great Corporations ultimately accomplished with their unchecked research. Curing diseases was not enough. Stopping aging, defeating death itself was not enough. Even making ourselves invincible… We wanted more. We wanted to be more. And if there is a market, there will be product to meet the demand…”
He pauses, breathes (I can see his outline inhale and exhale), shakes his head sadly, like he’s grieving something. Then, almost thoughtfully: “Tell me, any of you: What do you think the human race would become and do if given true immortality, invincibility? Would we be better creatures for it? Would we do good?”
No one speaks, and I don’t answer him except to shake my head.
“This is why I respected you, Destroyer: You always understood our nature. We made ourselves gods, a whole planet of gods, and did monstrous things without the slightest care. We turned our world into a nightmare, and when we had done our worst with it, we began to take our madness to other worlds, to play gods across the galaxy like horrible spoiled children. We committed unspeakable atrocities… You—you were the Ragnarok, the one who comes to challenge the powers that be and destroy the established order because it has gone so completely wrong—that is what you are. You spoke for reason, tried—like few others—to give us a moral compass. But we could not be saved from ourselves. And worse, we were about to commit the most unthinkable horror: we were on the brink of something that would have forever undone our humanity.”
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 21