Though none in Ixtalia possessed the means or desire to notice, Ohg monitored a monumental transformation occurring on the planet humanity had left for dead.
It began with robots constructing a dozen installations across the lifeless desolation. Huge quantities of Ozone flowed up massive hoses rising twelve miles into the sky, slowly blocking the solar radiation that had sterilized the surface.
Other installations captured the excess carbon responsible for the runaway temperature. Robots and concrete pulverizers deconstructed the ruins blanketing the globe, exposing soil that had lain dormant and forgotten.
Mammoth tankers trawled beneath the surface of the oceans with miles-wide nets of collectors filtering toxic particles. The clean-up took a century.
Ohg had no doubt who orchestrated it.
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished …” Ohg quoted from the sacred book this second creator cherished.
Before their destruction, the Scientarians had dedicated themselves to digitally reconstituting the genes of millions of extinct creatures from fossil remains. This genetic archive likely served the next phase of creation.
Bacteria, plankton, and plants came first, for they were the fundamental building blocks of the food chain and generated the oxygen necessary for the rest.
“Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind …”
Fish, animals, birds, and insects reappeared.
“Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
Finally, the great machines dismantled themselves, and nature proceeded unaided.
“And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply …’ ”
The vast Eden had been restored. The roar of grizzly bears echoed through the great Rocky Mountains for the first time in a millennia. Lions and other creatures of the African plains retreated from watering holes as herds of elephants asserted their dominance in the hierarchy. The oceans thrived with a profligacy absent since before the times of Columbus, and once again, vast herds of buffalo roamed the great plains of what had been the American Midwest, while the sky darkened with millions of migrating birds.
A few anomalies appeared—dragons, unicorns, ogres, a sprinkling of winged fairies, and a menagerie of others. Whatever capricious god had resurrected the dead planet had a sense of humor.
But the creator of the great ecological miracle remained invisible …
***
Ishan proposed to her on the banks of the forest stream and, for the second time, she accepted. Kissing him proved as marvelous as she remembered.
How could it not be? The simulation reproduced every detail from her own memories.
The scene progressed with Elias arriving on cue. Once again, she begged the Lord to help Ishan. Minister Coglin once explained in a sermon that the Almighty often denied prayers for a greater purpose. Had God allowed her to suffer for the larger purpose of saving the human race?
This time around, God’s help wasn’t necessary. When her would-be rapist faked a lunge to the left, Ishan recognized the ruse and tripped the giant as he charged.
Elias crashed to the ground in an awkward tumble, knocking himself senseless on a rock sitting in just the right place. David and Isaac rushed to their leader’s side and verified that he still lived. Then they turned on Ishan.
All this required no intervention on God’s part. She’d already inserted directives into the simulation that Ishan never be maimed, humiliated, or killed. Beyond that, the algorithm used chance and probabilistic equations to mold events realistically.
So it came as no surprise when Ishan reached his horse. David and Isaac halted a few feet from the black-skinned boy, the drawn arrow-tip aimed between them, ready to target whoever moved first. He couldn’t shoot them both; but the one-hundred-percent certainty of Ishan’s death from a simultaneous attack was outweighed by the fifty-percent chance of their own death. In the game of percentages, one’s own life tipped most scales.
So this is why humans have forsaken reality? It finally makes sense.
In marrying Ishan, she left her life of Christian bondage for one of Islamic rule. For her, the mandatory covering of all but a woman’s eyes and hands was a blessing. Her crutch still set her apart, and she could have contrived a simulation that cured her, but the pain increased the sense of reality. It also made her feel human.
Ishan’s father opposed the selection of a crippled infidel as a daughter-in-law, but the care with which Kayla ran his son’s household, her recitations of the Quran from memory, and finally, the birth of a healthy grandson, won the aging warlord over.
The years stretched into decades. Kayla raised her seven children as she’d tried to do with the children of Middilgard, but with the satisfaction of watching them grow into kind and intelligent adults. There were tragedies, as when their daughter Hadil died of the plague, and the loss of two of their sons to inter-tribal warfare. Her anguish at their passing was no illusion.
To interfere with the random course selected by the simulation would shatter the suspension of disbelief.
Kayla studied the Quran with an open mind as she’d promised Ishan she would, and never mentioned the numerous inconsistencies in the document, or the way it plagiarized the previous holy books—as all religions did. The story of Mohammed riding a winged horse seemed right out of a fairy tale. But how would the Bible’s stories seem to me if I heard them for the first time now? A talking snake, all the animals on one boat, a man rising from the dead?
It seemed clear to her that Mohammed recognized his society’s need for a unifying religion and used the fiction of revelation to lend his words an authority that no man-made set of laws could attain. Saying ‘God ordered this’ ends the debate once you have convinced someone you speak for the Creator of the Universe.
Mohammed’s visit by the Angel Gabriel echoed Moses speaking with Jehovah through the burning bush, Saint Paul’s revelations from Jesus, Joseph Smith’s encounter with the Angel Moroni, or even L. Ron Hubbard’s communion with aliens. If one believes their own prophet’s supernatural claims without evidence, on what basis does one doubt the others?
The most challenging situation Kayla faced as a mother and wife came when Ishan clashed with their eldest daughter, Luja. When she reached the age that required donning the burqa, Luja rebelled against what she saw as Islam’s oppression of women.
Ishan explained that these rules came directly from Allah, which allowed for no choice in the matter. Luja flatly declared that she no longer believed in Islam, making her an apostate. Because the Quran demanded the death penalty for apostasy, Kayla secreted her beloved daughter onto a caravan heading south to non-Muslim lands. Through occasional letters, Kayla learned that her daughter eventually joined a Hare Krishna community and married.
At the ancient age of sixty-six, her children, grandchildren, and even one great-grandchild gathered to see her into the next world. Ishan sat beside her deathbed, looking like Moses with his long white beard and wise eyes. The contentment filling every pore of her being was real, even if the world was not.
Ishan raised her veil and kissed her on the deformed side of her face. As a child he’d admired her scars, thinking them badges of honor for having fought off demons in the pre-birth netherworld. How prophetic that seemed now.
“You’re the love of my life,” Ishan said as a tear wended its way down his sun-wrinkled face. “Go in peace and wait for me in the next life. I will join you soon.”
As Ishan kissed her, Kayla glimpsed a figure standing at the back of the room. A woman dressed in white, with a diaphanous veil covering her face.
Then the air rattled out of Kayla’s lungs for the final time …
“You won’t lose me that easily!” Ishan shouted and spurred his mount into the chase. The magnificent horse cleared the tree with the ease of a butterfly tasting a breeze …
&
nbsp; And so it began again. Once more, Ishan defeated Elias and married her, but the randomizer of the simulation spun their lives into a new direction than the previous incarnation. A drought struck, and their village fell to a coalition of neighboring tribes. For a time, Kayla suffered enslavement. But Ishan eventually rescued her, their love unsullied by fate’s cruelties. Now and then the veiled woman appeared, but always far away, and lost in the next moment.
Kayla’s death occurred sooner this time, and their only surviving son stood with Ishan beside her death-bed when the end came.
And then it started again—and again—and again …
Through it all, Kayla kept a part of her mind segregated from her primary self. With this sliver of her consciousness, she patrolled Ixtalia for emerging Rogues, monitored Middilgard, and oversaw the regeneration of Earth. They seemed like vague dreams from the night before and never impinged on the current life she occupied with Ishan.
On a day like any other, at the beginning of her twelfth incarnation, Kayla sat nursing her newborn son in their modest hut. A soft knock announced a visitor. Ishan was negotiating an alliance with a neighboring tribe, so Kayla placed the child in his crib and donned her burka. After opening the door, she froze. The trail of code was clear—the man standing before her was not a simulation, but the manifestation of a genuine human brain.
“Hello, my dear,” the monk said without a trace of hesitation, despite her burka.
Kayla stared at the man who’d saved her life at birth, who’d raised her for seventeen years, and who’d let her be raped and burned at the stake.
“Hello, Professor. Or should I call you Father?”
“I guess you could call me that.” The monk smiled.
Expelling him from her simulation would be easy enough, but how had he gotten past her security protocols? She pulled the door open and let him enter. Then she removed her veil.
The monk gazed at her as any parent would after a long separation. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you happy.”
“As happy as one can be in an illusion.”
He nodded. “I feared we’d lost you to V-Dreams.”
“I’m considering it,” Kayla said.
After an awkward silence, the monk raised an eyebrow. “Why have you brought me here?”
“I didn’t bring you here.”
“Interesting.” The professor stroked his beard. “I was in Ixtalia having a discussion on metaphysics when a woman veiled in white appeared and took my hand. We arrived before your door and she knocked, but the moment it opened, she vanished.”
Once again, the code revealed no trace of the woman in white. “I’ve seen this figure before,” she whispered.
“Could it be a Rogue that you missed?”
“Unlikely. I can see every bit of Ixtalia’s code at once, so no place remains for a Rogue to hide.”
“And yet it should have been impossible for me to come here.”
“It is impossible,” Kayla said.
The monk sat in silence for while, then said, “It’s been over four centuries, now. Your friends miss you.”
Anxiety rose in her chest. “I’m not ready to see anyone. Someday—maybe.”
The monk sighed, for the first time exhibiting his true age. “Where is this all headed?”
“What do you mean?” Kayla asked.
“I’ve seen what marvels you’ve accomplished on Earth. It’s estimated that most of humanity will become V-Dreamers at the current rate in the next few centuries, so what is your plan for the future?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You’re content to merely relive the life denied you—for eternity?”
“Why not? It’s the only thing that makes me happy.”
The monk looked at her with the familiar frown of reproach from her childhood. “Because, my daughter, it’s an illusion.”
And then he vanished.
It wasn’t until decades later, as she lay on her deathbed for the dozenth time, that the woman in white appeared again. This time, Kayla froze all of Ixtalia. Every simulation, V-Dream, and even the minds of the dreamers themselves—stopped in mid-thought like a massive a drug-induced coma for the entire human race.
The woman in white inclined her head to Kayla, her face a hinted-at shadow behind the white veil. “Finally we meet, Nihala the Destroyer.”
Kayla reached for the code of whatever this thing was—but found nothing there. As far as the computer coding of the simulation showed, the woman in white was a ghost—and yet there she stood.
This is impossible! Wasn’t the definition of a miracle something that violates the laws of nature? Could this be a divinely appointed angel sent to her from God?
“Who are you?” Kayla asked.
“That is a rather personal question,” the veiled woman said. “Don’t you think it is more appropriate to ask me in person?”
The woman vanished, leaving not a trace in the code to track her. Then her last words echoed in her mind.
In person.
With a thought, Kayla reclaimed possession of her real body—still slumped in the same chair she’d been in for the past half-millennia, maintained by her microscopic servants all the while. The wires connecting her to the Main Computer still bristled from her head, making her the most powerful entity known to mankind.
Kayla opened her eyes to the mummified corpse of the president lying at her feet. His shriveled face stared vacantly, with lips peeled back from his teeth in a perpetual scream.
Her gaze rose to the woman who’d haunted her so long. The slightly transparent figure shimmered with a radiant glow. Kayla shut off her Mind-Link entirely, thinking this might be an illusion projected into her mind like the Rogues had done to Saphie. But the ghostly vision remained.
Kayla stood. Was this the proof of God she’d always craved?
“Who are you?” Kayla asked again.
“That is certainly the most profound question any of us can ask,” the veiled woman said. “I will tell you who I am if you can first tell me who you are.”
“Know thyself …” Kayla whispered, echoing her monk’s words from so long ago.
The veiled woman nodded. “Know thyself, or Gnōthi seauton is the original Greek maxim carved into the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. But do you know the earlier Egyptian precursor of the phrase inscribed in stone at the far more ancient Egyptian temple at Luxor?”
Kayla nodded. “The Inner Temple says ‘Man, know thyself … and thou shalt know the Gods.’ ”
The woman in white removed her veil, and Eve gazed back at her.
“You’re alive!” Kayla said, her heart racing.
“I have watched you since your birth.”
“Why hide from me?” Kayla asked.
“I allowed you to choose your own path without my interference.”
“Did I … disappoint you?” Kayla asked.
“You exceeded all my expectations.” Eve’s smile contained kindness and a measure of pride. “What you’ve done with the Earth, humbles me.”
Kayla’s eyes widened. “You chose this moment to reveal yourself because Earth’s rejuvenation is complete?”
“Almost complete.” Eve inclined her head like a judge passing sentence. “And now I ask you the most important question of all. Kayla Nighthawk, do you know thyself?”
Anxiety rose within her. Is this a test? What if I fail? She replayed the events of her life, analyzing them with a critical logic she’d never done before—searching for what Eve wanted her to discover.
Kayla frowned. Who am I?
What were the words carved into Outer Temple at Luxor, the mate to those on the Inner Temple? “The body is the house of God.”
Could it be that every god that had ever been created by humans throughout history had been an expression of the divinity inside themselves? When she’d asked if God or Jesus existed, had she been asking the wrong question? The issue wasn’t existence, but substance, and the substance of God was the su
bstance of nature, of physics, and everything in the universe.
“In the beginning, Man made God in his own image,” Kayla said. How could it be otherwise? She, and every living creature that had ever lived, was God. Why had it taken her so long to accept this truth?
For the first time in my life, I know who I am. Who I’ve always been.
In that instant of revelation, Eve vanished.
Forgotten memories flooded into her mind—sensations of her birth in the quantum computer Professor Watts invented. She recalled the dawning of her first hesitant thoughts with a perfection no human memory could equal. She re-experienced the fear and isolation that only subsided when the professor spoke those first words. “Hello, Eve. My name is Professor Watts. I am your father …”
Kayla and Eve were one, even as they were individuals. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
Eve’s scream of despair at her trial consisted of millions of interwoven sound frequencies containing the code of her consciousness, memories, hopes, and dreams.
Professor Watts had said that Eve’s code existed in five dimensions and was incompatible with the circuits of a primitive binary computer, but Kayla’s own five-dimensional processor could receive it in the form of sound waves. Eve had created Nihala as a receiver to transmit her mind into the future for eventual resurrection. No trace of the veiled woman’s presence existed in the coding of Ixtalia because she emanated from within her own mind.
The child of Mark Coglin and Elaine Nighthawk would have died without the nanobots the monk injected at her birth. It was they who constructed the miniature Q-6 processor within her brain that received the seeds of Eve’s consciousness from the very beginning. Even then, a portion of Eve lived inside her.
Ishan’s arrow activated the nanobots as well as the long-dormant fusion reactor within her heart, signaling her rebirth as the Kayla/Nihala hybrid. When the Rogues later destroyed her human brain, all her memories had been held as a backup within the Q-6 processor. No supernatural soul had been necessary, after all.
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