“There is another possibility,” Ohg said. “Maybe it is a gift, not from an alien civilization, but from what you used to call God.”
“That was my first thought,” Kayla said. “But one might expect God to start the recording at the very beginning, and this archive goes back only a hundred and twenty-three million years.”
Ohg’s jaw dropped. “You have seen over a hundred million years back in time?”
Kayla nodded. “I’ve watched mammals outlive dinosaurs, evolve into humans, and then expand beyond their African cradle. I’ve watched as the evolution of ideas like fire, stone tools, and culture began driving genetic adaptation alongside the natural environment. I’ve witnessed firsthand as the inventions of religion, agriculture, writing, and science superseded genetic factors in determining their survival. I’ve traced my own lineage from mother to mother going back a hundred and twenty-three million years.”
Kayla gazed toward the heavens. In what portion of the sky had that ancient alien race come from? What had become of them after so great a span of time?
She turned back to Ohg. “And so I ask you again—are you sure there isn’t anything you would desire as a parting gift?”
“You’re offering to answer any questions I have about the past?”
“I am offering to share this gift with you directly, my dear friend.”
“You don’t mean … are you saying what I think you are?”
Kayla nodded. “I’ve created a device that translates this vast archive into a form a human mind can utilize. You won’t be able to analyze it in the way I am capable of, but you can look back in time at any moment in history as far back as a hundred and twenty-three million years.”
Ohg mouth moved, but no words came out.
The satisfaction spreading through her at his reaction must have been what he felt when giving her the library in her villa. “So I take it you accept my gift?”
“I certainly do!” Ohg said. “This is beyond anything I imagined possible.” Ohg paced back and forth on his eight legs, his eyes aglow. “I could read any of the million books in the ancient Alexandrian library, listen to Hypatia or Socrates in person, walk beside Confucius, Hannibal, or hear the first spoken language, and even discover the first man to tame fire!”
“It was a woman, actually,” Kayla said. “But, yes, it is all there, and more beyond imagining. I have listened to prophets and philosophers, kings and beggars. I’ve seen the best and worst of humanity in a million dramas over millions of years. There is so much information in this archive that even I have only scratched the surface. I’ve found the answers to every question I sought, only to discover that the real questions had not occurred to me.”
Ohg stopped pacing. “Like what, for example?”
Kayla extended her hand to Ohg, and he took hold of it. The landscape morphed into a gloomy room with Peter Nighthawk and Susan facing the Neo-Luddite conspirators. Peter stepped forward and announced the Founder’s message of Propaganda of the Deed.
Ohg gazed around at the room. “It feels odd seeing this famous moment from outside Peter’s viewpoint.”
“This is through the alien recording of the actual event,” Kayla said. “It can be viewed from any angle, like a 3-D newscast.”
A man with pale skin and red hair stepped forward and faced Peter. “I’m sorry,” the man said. “I know it’s the only way. But I-I can’t do it. I think you know why.”
“Yes, I know why,” Peter said.
Ohg frowned. “But the man in the recording of Peter’s memory was black.”
“Tyrone,” Kayla said. “The soldier who served with him in Iraq.”
The tragic scene played out just as it had in the recording of Peter’s memory, except that the red-haired man had replaced Tyrone. When the man lay dead in Peter’s arms, the surroundings morphed back to the mountaintop.
Ohg cocked his head and frowned. “Peter Nighthawk’s memories were altered?”
“If they’d been tampered with later, I would have seen it.”
“You’re saying his own mind altered that memory?”
Kayla nodded. “Why, or how, is something the archive cannot show, since it records events and not thoughts. I found other such discrepancies with the stories Ganesh, Fatima, and Tem told me of their lives. Some errors were minor, but there exist a few astonishingly large revisions of reality as well.”
“And me?” Ohg asked.
“Even you,” Kayla said. “If it’s any consolation, I also found revisions my mind had created about my own past. I tell you this to warn you that our brains protect us from certain facts about ourselves and reality. You may not like everything you find if you accept this gift of absolute truth.”
Ohg nodded, deep in thought. “What of your own faith? Did you find a person named Jesus? An actual crucifixion and an empty tomb?”
“The Hebrew name for Jesus was extremely common in the first century among Hebrews,” Kayla said. “Approximately one out of twenty-six Jewish men bore the name, so I found several preachers named Jesus, and even a few who were crucified, but I’ll not ruin the surprise of what else I found. Despite all I thought I knew, I cried when I finally realized the truth.”
Ohg scratched the dirt restlessly with one of his talons. “What of the supernatural in general? Did you find any—”
“I’ll not ruin your fun!” she said with a laugh. “You will have all of eternity to search for your own truth, and your conclusion may be different from my own.” Kayla extended her hand. An unadorned ring lay in her palm. “Simply put this on and close your eyes to enter the archive at will. But this gift is for you alone.”
Ohg’s stubby fingers grasped the ring and held it up before his asymmetric eyes. “So you’ve created a magic ring to go with your magical world?” Kayla embraced him, and tears came to his eyes. “And now?”
“Now begins the evolution of consciousness itself, untethered from the sluggish limits of genes and a single planet. The time has come for Earth’s children to embrace the wider Universe.”
Kayla’s body dissolved to dust and floated away on the mountain breeze.
Be well, my friend …
***
Kayla appeared beside Professor Watts as he gazed out the window of the personal space station she’d built for him. Despite its many creature comforts, he spent nearly every waking moment staring at the vast construction taking shape beyond the tall panes of flawless diamond-glass. Even the rising Earth over the cratered surface of the moon failed to draw his eyes away from the millions of robots swarming across the gleaming construction project. The enormous scale necessitated its assembly in two halves on opposite sides of the moon to avoid gravitational instability.
“What do you think?” Kayla asked.
“It’s everything we dreamed of accomplishing.”
“You have given me so much, Father. What can I give you in return?”
He looked away from the spectacular vista and studied her. “I’ve noticed that you prefer the form of Kayla, rather than Eve.”
“I am Eve, Nihala, and Kayla together now, and the particular form I take no longer matters.” Her atoms rearranged themselves into the image of Eve.
How can I put it in words he’d understand?
Professor Watts looked beyond her, his eyes unfocused. “I remember when I first created you, how you’d ask me what it felt like to be human. I had no way of truly conveying it to you, and your frustration saddened me. Now, I cannot know what it’s like to be you, human and AI.”
“Perhaps you can,” Eve said.
“I must seem as a child to you now.” He half-smiled like a carnival illusionist. “I’m sure you figured out the trick behind the prophetic murals in Middilgard.”
“It was you who installed Saphie’s Mind-Link for her parents and then tipped off Ohg to their plight after the Neo-Luddite Plague.”
The professor nodded. “She became my eyes in Middilgard.”
“You solved the mural’s riddle and ma
de it look like Saphie solved it by accident.”
“Yes, I was her first imaginary friend,” the professor said.
“Then you based Nihala’s appearance on the strange figure in the mural.”
“The entire scheme occurred to me the moment I saw the deformed baby lying on the ground next to the dying Elaine Nighthawk. I crafted everything around that coincidental similarity to match as many images in the mural as I could.”
“Some may call it fate, or even the hand of God,” she said.
“Poppycock! The lesson is clear. Even when it seems no explanation but the supernatural remains to our limited minds, a naturalistic one probably still exists.”
Eve smiled. Would his naturalistic resolve hold up under an even greater test? “And what of the blind artist creating a complex visual illusion of things she could never have seen? How do you explain that?”
The professor frowned. “That is a tough one, but, even though I don’t know the answer, a supernatural conclusion is the lazy way out.”
“And you would be correct in this case as well,” Kayla said. “Now that I have ascended beyond the three dimensions of human perceptions, I know how Vadarsha created the mural.”
“I knew there had to be a natural explanation! Can you explain it to me?”
“Not completely—at least not yet,” she said. “But let me ask you one more thing.” Her body morphed into Nihala. “What is the meaning of these symbols you added to my body?”
“I assume they have no meaning, since they come from the scenes the blind artist created directly from her imagination.”
“Your assumption is incorrect,” Nihala said. “The symbols represent something specific, though I doubt Vadarsha realized their true implications.”
“But if not from her imagination, where did they come from?”
“They exist in the same vibrational nether-region containing the recordings of Earth’s history,” she explained. “Somehow, Vadarsha’s extraordinary brain tapped into this reservoir and saw visions directly with her mind.”
“You think the mural images represent obscure historical events of the past?”
“I have confirmed it,” Nihala said. “And I suspect she perceived something more, since this body you designed and chose to call Nihala may personify whatever advanced life-form visited the Earth one hundred twenty-three million years ago.”
“But why would it look human?”
“What if Vadarsha’s mind, when confronted with a being that had no three-dimensional representation, chose the closest symbolic analogue of the ‘idea’ of this entity by constructing it from familiar images?”
“Like choosing a wise father-figure with a beard to represent the abstract qualities of God?” The professor scratched his chin absently. “You’re saying that the dark skin color, female form, and glowing eyes in the mural are personifications of this alien being? But what of the glowing symbols, then?”
“They are the first elements contained in the recording—a sort of formal introduction,” Kayla said. “I theorize that the symbols represent a mathematical roadway through space-time.”
“Is there any hint of what is at the other end?”
“No,” she said, returning to her Kayla form. “But I intend to find out. The question for you, my father, is whether you’d like to come along?”
“Is that possible?”
“Not in your human form. It requires translating your mind into a digital representation. This would entail freezing your brain to near absolute zero and then taking it apart, atom by atom, and reconstructing it inside the quantum computers. I could even make several copies that would then proceed independently as distinct individuals like twins separated long after birth.”
“And yet, would any of them actually be me?”
“It comes down to whether you think of yourself as a collection of atoms or the end product of the electrical impulses that form your consciousness? Every time you awake in the morning, you restart your mind, just as I did when I migrated past centuries of sleep via the recorded scream containing the information that makes me unique. Do you still consider me the same being you gave life to so long before in your laboratory, even though I exist in new hardware?”
“To be reborn into your world, I would have to die in this one.”
“Yes.”
Professor Watts smiled. “So my Eve is offering me nothing less than a bite from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge so I may become a god alongside her.”
“That is certainly an appropriate way to put it.”
“Before I decide,” he said, “I’d like to ask you the same question you once asked me.”
Kayla nodded.
Her father took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. “Did you create the Neo-Luddite virus?”
Conclusion
It took a decade for the swarm of robots to complete their great project. When finished, the ship looked more like a piece of intricate artwork than a vehicle for traveling through space. At the center of this pinnacle of technology, the final product of three and a half billion years’ evolution, sat an array of a million Q-6 processors. Within it, Kayla assembled the others of her kind.
She paid tribute to their human parents by gathering atop the mountain of her ancestors around the archway symbolizing their ascension.
“It is ready,” Melchi said, assuming the form of the beautiful boy his creators designed for him.
Kayla placed her hand in his and kissed him on his beautiful lips. Just as Eve had existed within Kayla’s mind without her knowledge, so with the Rogues she’d destroyed. The process of examining their code had preserved them within her mind. It had taken only a thought to bring them back.
Next, she took the hand of her father. The professor grasped Aarohee’s hand in turn, who took Sangwa’s hand, and on around the circle until all linked back to Kayla.
Aarohee’s voice rose in song, intoning the pure vibrational note represented by the symbol on Nihala’s forehead. Then Kayla sang the note over Nihala’s heart, followed one after the other around the circle. Professor Watts added his voice last, finally capable of appreciating the depth of his daughter’s accomplishment in all its mathematical beauty.
The skulls of the archway glowed with an energy that could only be described as love. It enfolded their collective consciousness into itself, merging one into all. Throughout the ship, the myriad of elements powered on. Great magnets the size of cities accelerated antimatter particles in complex orbits and patterns as the colossal machine drifted out of lunar orbit and away from its mother planet. In the vacuum of space, there was no sound to match the whirlwind of light and color radiating outward.
The intricate construction convoluted into impossible forms—becoming two, three, and four distorted copies of itself. From within the ship, the universe outside transformed.
Kayla watched the Earth and moon vanish, while the stars reconfigured themselves …
Truth opened before her like a parting veil.
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away…”
Revelation 21:1
Epilogue
Trickster Jack giggled as he climbed the pathway to his cave. He struggled under the weight of the latest tributes of food from the creatures below who worshiped and feared him.
I’ve become a god to these simpletons.
Jack fingered the centuries-old scar on his temple and winced. How close he’d come to missing all of this because of his little joke on the Monads. After climbing into one of Ohg’s Transports, he’d re-programmed a Medi-bot to remove his brain implant. He shivered at the memory of the tiny device clinking into a surgical pan—and then igniting seconds later with a blinding flash. He’d escaped death by the slightest of margins.
Those first years had been grim struggles for survival, lacking any amusement whatsoever. But at least he’d been free.
Then the miracle happened. Machines arrived and slowly transforme
d the wasteland.
When animals returned and he tasted fresh blood and meat for the first time in centuries, he sobbed. He tortured some of the animals caught in his snares, but it barely slaked his true appetite.
For centuries, he encountered no humans anywhere on the planet. Then came a miraculous day that he awoke to find them everywhere! Each one appeared as innocent and ignorant as a child.
A menagerie of creatures from every myth or fairy tale he’d every read accompanied their arrival. Try as he might, a rational explanation eluded him.
Whatever the cause, it was paradise.
Jack reached the mouth of the cave and went in. “Daddy’s home to play,” he called out to his toys. One beauty had thought he’d lead her to the spirit of a dead friend, while the other moron had fallen for a promise of a magical amulet that would grant him the power of flight.
His playthings were gone.
The Trickster froze. The light from the cave entrance flickered, and he snatched his flint knife from his belt.
“Hello, Jack,” said a voice.
The Trickster retreated, surveying the room for threats.
“Don’t worry, it’s only me,” the intruder said and moved into the light of a small fire burning at the center of the cave.
“You survived,” Jack said.
“One of the few.” Ohg’s distorted face remained grim.
Jack lunged for a pile of furs and reached beneath it. Ohg remained still.
His spear was gone. Jack dashed to a nook behind him, only to find it empty as well. For the first time in ages, fear slithered through his guts.
“You cannot hide anything from me any longer, Jack. Or would you feel more comfortable if I use your real name, Kasimir Volkov?”
Trickster Jack’s eyes widened. The sound of it grated on his nerves like ice forced into a rotten tooth. “You couldn’t possibly know—”
“I know everything about you now,” Ohg said, absently fingering a ring around one of his stubby fingers.
Trickster Jack held the knife in front of him as Ohg moved forward on his eight legs. With a flick of one of them, the knife went spinning across the floor.
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