The Broken God Machine (21 page)

The face materialized before him out of thin air, massive and looming. It
was curiously flat, somehow, with no more depth than a shadow, and yet it was
the size of the entire wall in front of them. The face’s complexion was dark,
darker even than Pehr’s, and its black, kinky hair was cropped close to its
head. It was clean-shaven, and it looked down upon them with soft, brown
eyes.

“I must say, sir, that you’re seriously late. I get that it’s not exactly
perfect out there, especially these days, but honestly … nine thousand, eight
hundred and ninety-six years? That’s a hell of a trip to the outer
fringes.”

The giant head seemed oblivious to the near-terror it had caused its guests,
and it was looking at them with obvious expectation. Pehr realized with a
dawning sense of horror that this thing expected him to provide some sort of
rational response. All he was able do was stammer. “Ah … I … that is …”

Then the face laughed, head rolling back – even though there was nowhere,
really, for it to roll – and said, “I’m just screwing around, man. I know
you’re not the Prime Minister.”

“You do?” Pehr asked.

“Sure. I mean, the security boys think you’re him – it’s all over the RDIS
network. That’s ‘Remotely Distributed Information and Security,’ if you care.
Those guys can’t think on their feet, though. Or off their feet. Truth be told,
they can’t think at all. We only built them to put together some basic
responses based on their available dataset. At first it’s pretty clever but,
man, you want to talk about lousy conversationalists? After a while it’s just
‘I’m sorry, I do not possess sufficient information to respond,’ over and
over.”

“A-are you Allen?” Tasha asked it, and the giant head smiled at her,
nodding.

“Sure am. Allen James Montgomery the third, head of comp-sci, mathematician
extraordinaire, and chairman of the science board. Well, really, I’m just an AI
construct that’s impersonating the guy who built me, but you … yeah. Judging by
those ‘call me Smoking Buffalo’ outfits, I’m guessing there aren’t many
computers in your lives.”

Pehr and Tasha had no idea how to respond to this and were having difficulty
doing anything more than gawking at this terrifying display of magic. After a
moment, the thing – Allen – went on.

“Right, so … uh … well, this is the mainframe. I know it doesn’t look like
much, but trust me, all of the information held in the city comes through
here.”

“You control the things outside, then?” Pehr asked. “The ones that almost
killed us?”

“The gardeners? No, I don’t control them – I just monitor them. They went
berserk a long time ago, but it’s nothing I could fix. Manual server reboot
required. They disabled the remote login as a safety precaution. That was a
mistake, obviously. The gardeners weren’t one of my projects … but I knew the
guy who built them.”

“He didn’t do a very good job,” Pehr muttered.

“Tell you what, Captain Neolithic … you try coding something that doesn’t
throw a single exception in ten thousand years and then get back to me,
‘kay?”

Pehr, who had no idea what this thing was talking about, merely sat down
cross-legged on the floor. He looked at Tasha, shrugged, and shook his head.
Let
her
deal with it. Tasha gave him a small nod.

“You’ve been in this room here for ten thousand years?” she asked.

“Mmm … sort of, yes,” Allen said.

“Don’t you get bored?”

Allen laughed. “Sweetheart, you should see the video games they set me up
with. Not to mention the sims. You have any idea what it’s like to have an
orgasm at about three hundred percent strength?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Tasha told him.

“No, of course not. Let me guess: you’ve never even been with a guy, have
you? Not even the dude over there who came all this way with you. You’ve never
felt the desire for him or for anyone else. Not ever. I’m talking sexually,
like … making babies. It’s not your thing, right?”

Tasha hesitated for a moment, her cheeks coloring a bit, and then said, “I
have never gone to bed with a man, nor wanted to, that is true.”

“Course not. Of
course
not. That’s not how we built you. Can’t go
around spreading that special DNA. Every hundred years or so one of you was
supposed to pop out, but you weren’t supposed to be making any more of
yourselves. Course, we weren’t planning on you guys disappearing for, you know
… ten thousand years.”

Tasha seemed now on the verge of tears, frustrated by her inability to
understand this thing that she had spent her life trying to reach. Allen seemed
to realize that he was upsetting her and he put his grin away, opting for a
more serious expression.

“Hey, sister, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” he said. “I just … it’s
been a long time since I talked to one of you, and the last one was a lot more
up to date on her history. Listen, this is gonna go
nowhere
unless we
aug you. There’s too much to tell. Too much you need to know. Can I ask you a
couple of questions before we get to that, though? I don’t even know your
names.”

“My name is Tasha. This is Pehr. I … I have been dreaming of this place
since I was born.”

“I know you have, Tasha. We built that into you.”

“I am not a machine! I was not
built
by anyone. I came from my
mother’s belly just like my sisters and brothers!”

“Whoa, right, no … you’re flesh and blood and bone. Pretty eyes, sexy legs …
you’re a hundred percent human, OK? You’re just a little bit more than human,
too. We co-opted a few sequences of your junk DNA to store some data, that’s
all.”

“I don’t know what that
means
!” Tasha cried, her hands balled into
fists, and Allen nodded. He took a deep breath – if magical, floating heads
could breathe – and continued.

“What happens is, every hundred years or so a girl like you comes along, and
she has dreams about this place, and about a guy who looks a whole lot like
your boy over there. See, he’s descended from a good friend of mine, the Prime
Minister Mombutabwe you keep hearing about. His gene patterns act as your key.
He gets you inside, and you fill us in on the state of things. That’s how it
goes. We knew there would be more … and we wanted them to come after us. We
really did. That’s why we set this stuff up, but we didn’t count on you
disappearing like you did. Where the hell have you guys
been
,
anyway?”

“We were separated ages ago. The mountains are forbidden to my people, now –
we consider them holy ground. This is supposed to be a city of the gods. And
Pehr’s kin, they … they …”

“We were separated from Tasha’s by the Lagos,” Pehr said.

“Oh,
those
guys are still around?” Allen asked. “Damn it. We set
the RDIS units to kill them on sight. I figured they were long gone.”

Pehr shook his head. “They live in the jungle and sometimes make war on the
villages of the coast. I have … lost much to them.”

“I’m sorry,” Allen said, and his voice sounded sincere. “Listen, we didn’t
make them, OK? They’re not like the gardeners … they’re not something we made
that turned bad. They were bad right from the start. After the Great
Destruction, man, all
kinds
of bad turned up in the world. I forget
who the Lagos used to be, but they were into gene manipulation. They mixed in
all kinds of animal species, trying to give themselves a better shot at
surviving. I guess it worked, if they’re still around. They’re bad news.”

“You know of the Great Destruction?” Tasha asked.

“Do I know of it? Honey … when a comet the size of Connecticut drops
directly onto the most holy city on the planet and kills about ninety percent
of humanity, it gets mentioned in a few history books. I wasn’t around for it,
but my grandfather was. From what I hear, uh … it sucked.”

“It’s nothing more than legend to us,” Pehr said. “Some terrible thing that
happened at the dawn of time, so far in the past that no one even remembers
what it was.”

Allen sighed. “Look … there’s no way for me to tell you everything you need
to know. Seriously. I could start talking now, and you would be
dead
before I finished. There’s just too much. I can’t tell you about it all … but
what I
can
do is offer you all the information you could ever want,
right now, instantly. Does that sound good to you?”

Tasha spoke with no hesitation. “Yes.”

Pehr thought about it for much longer. Unlike Tasha, he had neither dreamed
of this place nor felt any great urge, even now, to learn the long-lost secrets
of their ancestors. He had planned for a simple life: wedding and bedding Sili,
hunting boar, raising children in his village by the sea. That was what he
thought he had been meant for.

Now here he was in a far-away land with this girl who had become something
like a sister to him. He had fought through the Lagos and the metal thing,
fought through his near-death by dehydration, and fought through a horde of
homicidal gardening robots just to get here. Was he going to walk away now
without taking the opportunity to learn and understand? Was he going to go back
to being a hunter of tral or boar, living in fear that the Lagos might return
at any time, until the moment came when he was too old or too careless and he
died?

“Buddy, it makes no difference to me,” Allen said. “If you dig your life, be
cool. I’ll educate your girl, and she’ll help you get back to wherever it is
you need to be. You go on and have some babies … seed that Prime Minister DNA
back into the pool, and in another hundred years or so a new version of the two
of you will swing by and check in. It’s no skin off my back … the real me is
already long gone.”

Pehr shrugged. “I think that if I don’t learn more, I will always wonder
what I missed.”

Allen studied him for a moment, and he grinned. “There might be hope for the
rest of you after all.”

“What do you mean?” Tasha asked him, but the giant head floating above them
merely gave her a knowing look.

“Put your hands on the pedestal. The one you touched to call me. Both of
you.”

Tasha did what she was told, and after a moment Pehr did the same.

“What are you going to do to us?” Tasha asked him, and Allen laughed.

“Sister, you have to go through the process if you want a shot in hell of
understanding when I explain it. Close your eyes.”

Tasha and Pehr shut their eyes, nervous and edgy, fearing that this process
might bring pain, or terror, or both.

“Keep those eyes shut. It’s easier if you reduce the input. OK … connection
established. Oh, that is beautiful. Those brains are just waiting for it. This
is going to blow your mind, kids.”

Pehr breathed deeply. If something had happened, it was nothing he could
feel.

And then Allen told them, “Here it comes,” and in the next instant,
everything changed. Forever.

In scientific circles, the impact and subsequent violent purging of the
majority of living creatures from the planet was called the End-Holocene Mass
Extinction Event. To the rest of the world, what little of it remained, it was
known only as the Great Destruction. The comet that hit Jerusalem was larger
than any that had ever been tracked, dwarfing the size of the asteroid that had
killed the dinosaurs.

“They spent trillions watching the sky to prevent this exact thing from
happening,” Allen narrated, seemingly unable to sit in silence. “All of their
systems and satellites and probability algorithms, and they got three days of
warning that it’d changed course so drastically. Three days, man … what are you
going to do with nine-point-six
billion
people in three stupid days?
There was nothing they
could
do, except get as many of the best and
brightest – and the most well-connected – as far underground as possible.”

When the comet hit, nearly a billion human beings were rendered in moments
into little more than charred organic matter, their remains sucked up into the
atmosphere by the tremendous winds created by the superheated air. Billions
more died in the following hours as the blast encircled the globe, filling the
atmosphere with burning ash.

“It was bad,” Allen told them. “Most of the planet ended up as a desert, the
rain that
did
come down was full of acids and toxins, and the parts
that were getting rained on were so burnt up, it didn’t matter anyway. It
would’ve taken nature thousands of years to bounce back if we hadn’t helped
her.”

The polar ice-caps melted, flooding the oceans with fresh water, killing
most of the life found within them. Countless species on land and in bodies of
fresh water were driven extinct. Countless more died off within weeks, victims
of starvation, or dehydration, or simple changes in salinity. Ocean levels
surged and earthquake after earthquake wracked the globe. The world became
cracked and broken. Waterlogged. Earth became Uru.

Pehr saw it happening before his eyes from an uncountable number of sources,
everything from handheld home video to satellite feeds. It wasn’t that he was
watching anything, exactly. Instead it was as if he had
just
watched
... and listened, and smelled, and touched. Not one thing at a time but
hundreds, thousands, all pouring into his brain and becoming things remembered.
Images, video, raw data – all of it was just suddenly there. It was an
experience unlike anything he had ever imagined could exist.

The amount of knowledge being driven into his head was unmanageable,
impossible to bear. He worried for a time that his brain simply could not
handle all of this information, that his skull would disintegrate in the
attempt to contain it all. At last he realized that he
was
containing
it. His mind
was
able to digest and understand what it was being
shown. Whatever it was that Allen was doing to them, it was not just giving
them this knowledge but modifying their very physiology in a way that allowed
them to parse it.

The humanity that came out of Earth’s bunkers was unlike that which had
covered the globe when the comet hit. It was educated. Privileged.
Structured. Some on the surface had managed to survive the apocalypse, and they
turned to those from the bunkers for leadership.

Many religions had been wiped out entirely by virtue of having no
practitioners left, and those that remained were shaken to their very core.
Jerusalem – and an area approximately 830 miles in diameter around it – now sat
underneath thousands of feet of sea water. If the giant ball of ice had indeed
been hurled by God, the message God seemed to be sending was that it was time
to stop squabbling over chunks of land.

“Naturally,” Allen said, “We ignored that message completely.”

One would have hoped that the devastated remains of humanity, made up almost
entirely of educated people from developed nations, suddenly pulled together by
a loss so epic in scope that it defied comprehension, would have brought about
something approaching an era of utopian peace. Such hopes were quickly dashed,
as one of the first things humanity did upon emerging from its holes in the
ground was to begin warring over what little spoils remained in the wake of the
comet’s destruction.

Some entities struggled to hold on to preexisting national boundaries.
Others made desperate attempts to grab resources wherever they could be found,
regardless of who might already have laid claim to them. It was inevitable,
perhaps, that even as some groups were working desperately together in order to
aid the planet’s recovery, others were busy taking what they could and blowing
up those who tried to get to it ahead of them.

“There were sixteen nuclear detonations in the first two years after the
Emergence, and the wars went on for more than a century. In a lot of ways, the
bombs did more damage than the comet. Can you believe that? Mankind’s sitting
on the verge of extinction, and people are fighting about who gets the leftover
diamonds. Same as it ever was, man … apes killing apes.”

There was hope, however. During the Hundred Year Dark, as the era of nuclear
sparring became known, large chunks of the scientific community came together
in a desperate attempt to restore some balance to the globe. The concept of
terraforming, subject to a great deal of theoretical research in the years
leading up to the comet impact, had become suddenly urgent – a science fit for
practical research and application. It was no longer necessary to wonder if
other
planets could be made habitable for earth’s overflowing
population. The focus had shifted to making their own planet less hostile to
the shredded remains of humanity.

It took more than a hundred years, during which time the wars raged, fought
from bunker cities hidden far below the earth. By the time the scientists had
managed to repair even a small part of the surface, governments had changed
substantially. One of the larger entities had formed via cooperation between a
set of bunkers spread across the landmass that had once been California,
Mexico, and part of Central America.

This group was united under the charismatic leadership of a man named Nathan
Hoskins. A leading geneticist before the Great Destruction, his work had led to
the development of technologies that could extend the human lifespan by
centuries. None had benefitted more from this work than Hoskins himself, who
was able to push tirelessly through the long, dark years after the comet’s
strike. It was Hoskins who first proposed the concept of Havenmont, a
city-state unlike any other, in which science would be the principle religion,
allowing for the complete cooperation and intertwining of government, church,
and academics.

Not all who lived within the land that Hoskins came to govern were willing
to renounce their faith and take up the mantle of science, and for a time he
met with heavy resistance from many groups opposed to the idea of Havenmont.
Hoskins responded not with violence or oppression, but instead by forming the
First United Church of the Enlightened. The Church’s central tenet was that
science was the most holy of works: an attempt to unravel the mysteries of
nature and better understand what God, if any, was out there. Well-funded and
equipped with access at the highest levels of media and government, the church
began rapidly to convert the survivors of the extinction event to its
cause.

“I met Hoskins, near the end of his life,” Allen said. “What you have to
understand is that Nathan wasn’t a cynical man. He wasn’t pulling a con. He
believed what he was telling his followers. He’d always believed it, even
before the Great Destruction, and witnessing this random catastrophe only
strengthened his desire to understand the universe. We spoke a lot about math,
because man, I
love
math, and he asked me, ‘What is math if not the
language of God?’”

It was the Everstorm that made Havenmont possible. Deployed in the year 158
GD – one hundred and fifty-eight years after the Great Destruction – it began
the laborious process of returning life to the surface. Originally conceived as
a method to bring an atmosphere back to Mars, it turned out that the most
important function the Everstorm served was to scrub away the radiation that
was eating up most of the rest of the Earth. Pehr and Tasha and their societies
had never known it, but the Everstorm was the only thing that had kept them
alive all these millennia.

Havenmont was founded in the year 258 GD, and for more than six hundred
years it stood as a beacon of peace and prosperity amidst a world of chaos,
terror, and pain. In that time, satellite uplinks were reestablished, the globe
remapped, and the groundwork laid for the city’s true destiny. Hoskins lived
for four hundred years after the Great Destruction, but he did not survive long
enough to see these plans laid out. He left Havenmont in what seemed capable
hands. His successor, a brilliant molecular physicist named Joachim Baptista,
was elected president by the city’s governing board.

By the time of Hoskins’s death, Havenmont had achieved global recognition as
a beacon of light and civilization in an otherwise barbaric, dying world. Each
year, tens of thousands of pilgrims began the treacherous journey from their
bunkers to the city, often crossing great swaths of irradiated land that killed
many of their numbers. Under Hoskins, these pilgrims would simply have been
augmented and assimilated into the Church of the Enlightened, but under
Baptista’s rule, only the best and brightest found a sympathetic ear.

Baptista worked to solidify his rule in ways that Hoskins never had,
becoming something more like an emperor then a president. It was under this
rule that the first of the sprawling outer ghettos were founded, and soon the
great city was ringed with low-quality dwellings supporting hundreds of
thousands of people that the Baptista regime had found unworthy of entrance
into the city proper. In one of his most famous speeches, Baptista had spoken
at length on his reasons for this approach.

“What time there was, when we were in need of these lesser children of God
to clean our toilets, or haul our trash, or till our fields, has now passed. We
have machines to do this work for us, and have found them infinitely superior
to man at such menial tasks. Those who cannot contribute to Havenmont in some
greater, more meaningful way must be content with their lot in life.”

In the sixth century after the Great Destruction, Joachim Baptista was
assassinated and an impending civil war averted. Some claimed that the
ghetto-dwellers had risen up against him, while others believed that he had
been done in by members of his own church. Few mourned his passing.

The laws Baptista had put into place granting himself absolute power were
stripped away, and he was succeeded not by a single man, but by a parliament
composed of a combination of high-ranking church members and elected officials
who represented the city’s populace. Those who had been relegated for so long
to the ghettos were at last given representation in this congress, though the
gesture would prove largely inconsequential; the great work for which Havenmont
had been established was nearly complete, and its deployment would make the
city government irrelevant.

For their first Prime Minister, the parliament elected a relatively young
man who they felt represented the best that Havenmont had to offer, who could
connect both with the scientific elite and the common man in the outer ghettos.
That man was Nesagana Mombutabwe.

A pilgrim himself, Mombutabwe was born not in Havenmont but in a bunker
below the arid lands on the western half of what had once been Namibia. As his
bunker failed, he had come to the surface and journeyed by boat to the flooded
coasts of South America. From there he had made the perilous trek northward,
slogging from ruin to ruin through lands populated by a race of half-animal
ancestors of the Lagos, trying to avoid the great pockets of radiation that
dotted the continent.

Finally reaching Havenmont, Mombutabwe had required substantial treatment
for radiation sickness and an infection of jungle fungus that took one of his
feet. Once healthy, he had easily passed the tests required for citizenship
under Baptista’s regime, showing particular ability in the areas of biology and
sociology, and had immediately joined the Church of the Enlightened upon his
admission to the city. Over the next hundred years he became a pioneer in
cellular biology, working closely with a mathematical prodigy by the name of
Allen Montgomery.

“Nes and I really got along. He would come up with ideas that he knew could
work, but he didn’t have the math, so he’d bring them to me, and I’d tell him
he was insane and then stay up for a week straight coding and taking stims,
making it happen anyway. We were the ones who figured out how to attach data to
junk DNA and pull it out every few breeding cycles.”

Mombutabwe held his position for only a scant two decades, a trifling amount
in a world where the average lifespan of a member of the Church of the
Enlightened could be expected to last more than five hundred years. It was
during this time that the final work was done on the great experiment for which
Havenmont had been created, a project of such significance that its very
existence had been kept secret from the general populace.

Limited in space, unable to augment all of the city’s people quickly enough,
outvoted, and forced to enact the final plan by parliament and other
high-ranking officials, Mombutabwe and Montgomery had done the only thing they
could think to do: they seeded the population of the ghettos with the special
DNA that would eventually produce the purple-eyed girl and her protector. They
made sure that the RDIS network would grant access to anyone carrying
Mombutabwe’s genetic signature, and they deployed the artificial intelligence
that would govern the city’s mainframe until the time came when those left
behind were ready to start anew the project that the city had been built
for.