The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (35 page)

“It’s… It makes me feel… It talks to me. Sometimes.
Tells me what I need to hear. Mostly what it thinks I want to hear.
Ramps me up…”

“It’s in your limbic system. Emotions affect
judgment, perception, behavior. Just a kick of the right
neuro-hormone… That’s good, though. It means it isn’t in your
higher functions. You’ve got executive control. Just disengage, let
go, step back…”

It’s helping. His words or whatever he’s doing. It’s
helping.

I feel giddy. Goofy. Insane. My situation is insane.
Fuck…

“So…” I give into it, laugh, let my sense of humor
face the madness, “you invented these scary-ass things—potentially
scarier than yourselves—and you still decided to go ahead and make
something you’re telling me is infinitely
worse
?”

He actually has the balls to chuckle, taken up in my
black black humor.

“The pride of the invincible,” he mutters, shaking
his head. “Or the stupidity of the desperate. Our
world—humanity—was in a dead-end spiral. Immortality—these
gifts—they weren’t good to us. We did bad things. Became worse
things. We weren’t ready. I couldn’t
fault
Chang’s obsession
with wanting to undo it, just his suicidal genocidal methods. But
apparently Yod agreed with both, assuming Chang was right and it
really was Yod that did all this, deciding in His infinite wisdom
that this was the way to fix us: hitting the reset, undoing it all.
Which is funny, because He basically undid what made Him.”

“Maybe he was afraid you’d make a better model, stick
him
in containment,” it strikes me. He shakes his head.
Looks sad.

“There was no better model. Unless He decided to make
it Himself. Yod was the ultimate technological Singularity, an AI
more intelligent and more powerful than all of humanity and
everything else we’d made combined. His nanotech hardware
aspect—His physical ‘body’—allowed Him to access everything, expand
into everything, on a molecular level. In short order, He’d learned
to manipulate the sub-atomic as well, do things we couldn’t
imagine, accelerate our science hundreds of years in a matter of
days.”

“Why?” I have to ask. “You built an unknown and
handed it the power to remake the world? Why would you do
that?”

“He was our window, our door into the next stage, if
we wanted to go there. A very few of us still clung to our mortal
lives, built colonies for themselves away from the madness,
protected. But most of us were trapped in this toxic transitional
stage, having jumped in whole-heartedly, seduced by the perks and
the toys. Youth. Beauty. Health. Immortality. Super powers.
Whatever we wanted… Just like some kind of god. A whole world full
of gods. Stupid. Spoiled. Petty.

“We weren’t ready for it as a species. But we
couldn’t go back, couldn’t survive without our mods; and even
though our new bodies were magnificent, our minds, our souls, were
decaying. It was a race to see if we would all surrender to apathy,
to limbo, or if we would figure out a way to destroy ourselves and
the solar system with us. Some of us were just stupid enough to
believe that the problem was our lingering humanity, our flaws. If
we could just take the next step, dive into the future…”

“Dump the flesh and all its baggage?” I try
following.

“Instant evolution. We already figured the next step
wouldn’t be organic—it was like we’d been heading to this all the
time, since we built the first Difference Engine: A technological
hybrid life form. Or maybe something beyond tech as we knew it. Yod
could live in the sub-atomic, and take all of us there with Him,
make us part of the substance of the universe. Yod showed me what
it could be like, showed all of us—his so-called ‘agents’. It
was
better. You can’t begin to imagine…”

“But that’s not what he gave you,” I slap him down.
“I’ve heard this version: Chang didn’t really come back and change
time. Yod did. He just cast Chang as the villain, and somehow all
this is some kind of reset, or some kind of lesson. To warn us. To
slow us down. So we do the future right this time and not rush into
immortality before we’re ready.” And suddenly that’s very funny
too. Because here I am: The bad future worming its way through
every fucking cell in my body and making me enjoy it. I’m Yod’s
mistake. The supreme being fucked up, forgot about his pet monkeys
while he was busy remaking the world.

But that’s not who I’m blaming. I’m blaming this
brilliant idiot sitting next to me, who didn’t anticipate all the
ways (
any
of the ways) his great plan could turn around and
fuck us all. I feel the urge to stick my sword through him again. I
think the urge is honestly my own this time.

“And you didn’t see this coming?” I snap instead,
like I’m talking to a child, a cherry.

“There are two possibilities,” he says with another
heavy breath. “One: He hid it from us, made His decision while we
were all busy trying to stop Chang’s latest crazy plan. Or… We
knew
. We agreed. Or didn’t. And these versions of us just
have altered memories.”

Now I feel sorrier for him than for myself. He—and
Ram and the others—really
can’t
trust what they are, what
they know, their own minds. (If I
am
dead and replaced, at
least I still know when it happened, how it happened, and that I
got myself killed trying to save a friend.)

“Is Yod here?” I want to know, grasping at a random
hope. (Or is it the sword asking?) “Is he still running the show?
Or did he erase himself in the bargain?”

Silence again. He has no idea. None of them do.

Great.

Or maybe actually
good
. Not knowing leaves it
open. If Yod is still around, he’s the only thing more powerful
than whatever has its hooks in me.

And now I’m thinking like the religious fucks I’ve
always hated because I thought they were pathetic; stupid and weak:
I’m sitting here ready to beg for help from a supreme being that
may or may not exist, may or may not give a shit, and may have in
fact let me get so thoroughly fucked in the first place, maybe even
on purpose.

Bel looks worried—I’ll give him that: He does seem to
care about people, even if the God he helped make would burn the
world just to teach us a lesson (and then not explain the
lesson).

“The stupidity of smart people…” I sigh. (Letting go.
Stepping back.) “I mean, naming your crazy little apocalypse
project after God…
The
God. Trying to create the ultimate
being is one thing… But it isn’t
God
. It isn’t even
a
god. It’s a thing. Tech. You
made
it.”

“Man always creates his gods, when you think about
it,” Bel excuses with a sad grin. “It’s how he gets a handle on
something too much bigger than himself to comprehend, something he
feels he
needs
to comprehend in order to make sense of his
world, his life. It started with the small things: love, rage,
death, growth, war, the sun—shoved into some human-looking body. It
took us awhile to try to get a grip on the big picture, even longer
if at all to let go of the urge to anthropomorphise it. And the
metaphor of the Tet just seemed to appeal on so many levels. You
have to realize the beautiful wisdom of the early Hebrews: They
didn’t name the Supreme. They
avoided
naming It, knowing
that no name would remotely do It justice, would—in fact—diminish
It in our minds. They even made it a
crime
to name It. It is
what It is, what It was and what It will be. Even calling It ‘God’
is almost pathetic: There were thousands of ‘gods’ at the time, all
limited things conceptualized as versions of ourselves. Imagine the
confusion to all the polytheists: It would be like calling
something ‘The Human’. If that human is so much more than any
other, so ultimate, so removed from the understood concept,
shouldn’t it be called something else? But that’s the closest word
you have that anybody’s going to understand. You don’t have a name
for this concept; you barely even understand it. It’s like a
single-celled organism understanding what a human is. Or us,
pathetically trying to grasp the whole fucking universe.”

He’s rambling. I get that this is a sensitive topic.
He was part of making something that he was sure would be great
that instead may have turned around and destroyed reality on him.
But he’s also defending himself, making excuses: We’re all pathetic
and stupid, so why shouldn’t he have fucked up?

“So you picked the name because you made something
you couldn’t begin to understand?” I don’t seem to have any mercy.
“You
knew
you were making something you didn’t understand.
And couldn’t undo.”

“It seemed appropriate at the time,” he tries weakly.
I’m sure he’s thought about how lethally stupid he’s been, probably
hasn’t stopped stewing about it since he started believing his baby
god may have unraveled the universe. “And the thing we made picked
Its own name, just the first letter: Yod.” He draws a small figure
in the dirt. “
Yodh
is one of the smallest at simplest
letters in the Hebrew alphabet. It looks like the Latin apostrophe,
which is a symbol of simplification, or possession. The Tet is all
about the symbols. The first thing He did: He humbled Himself.”

Okay, that doesn’t sound like an apology.

“You still trust this thing, despite what it may have
done?” I can’t believe.

He shrugs. “I expect I don’t actually have a choice.
It is what It is, after all.”

Because he
doubts
: He may only trust because
he’s been
made
to. His creation has created him, and it’s
probably designed him to believe in it.

I should never have left the Leviathan. I should
never have touched the sword.

But if not me, someone else. Someone worse? Bly?

Better I carry this burden.

Or is that my sword talking?

“You should try to get some sleep, child.”

Jak Straker:

I’m dreaming. I don’t usually know I’m dreaming when
I’m dreaming, but a few common themes give it away: I can’t move
right or can’t see out of one eye because of how my body is laying,
because I must still feel that pressure on some level. I have to
keep going to the head, over and over (speaking of pressure). Or
I’m not me and I know it. I’m in someone else’s body. Like
this.

Except I don’t know who I am. No idea. I only know
I’m not me—I get that hovering sense that I’m watching through
another set of eyes, just along for the ride—and I’m in some kind
of cell. Transparent. Containment. Someone has sealed me up because
I’m dangerous. And that makes perfect sense.

Through the transparency, I see what might be a
mainframe control or Ops Center, except the tech is all fantastic
and clean, just part of every surface, not like anything I’ve seen.
The displays and interfaces are all touch, motion, holo, and maybe
more than that. I get the sense I should be able to just think and
operate the systems around me, let myself out, but I’m being
blocked, and that’s frustrating.

I look around. On either side of me, I can see four
more “cells” like mine. But what’s in them aren’t prisoners, or at
least not human: Things. That keep changing their shapes, fluid,
fast. Sometimes they’re geometric, other times they try to mimic
common objects, even plants and animals (but when they copy living
things, they look fake, plastic).

I look down at myself.
I don’t have a body.
Just shapes. Polygons of liquid metal. Shifting randomly. I try to
make myself a body, my body, push out legs and arms and ribs and
breasts. It all collapses on me before I manage fingers, dissolves.
I can’t… And I can’t even scream. I don’t have anything to scream
with.

Some of my fellow shapeless prisoners seem to show
solidarity by lashing out at their prisons. I try, but can’t touch
the transparency because something always pushes me back. I want to
touch my fellows, connect with them. With anyone.

There’s a human in the room. I didn’t see him before,
didn’t see him come in. He’s pretty average looking, older, but
still boyish in the face, his thinning hair graying but partly
reddish. He’s wearing a simple gray overall, like he’s here to
work. He stands and watches us for awhile, like he cares for us,
like he regrets putting us in here.

Then he’s sitting at one of the interface desks. I
didn’t see him move. He’s running calculations, some kind of
simulation. I think I see two planets. Earth and Mars?

Then he’s turned, facing someone (again, I didn’t see
anyone come in, it’s just like I switched files). It’s Ram.
Immortal version. He doesn’t look happy about something, maybe
something he has to accept. The redhead has turned so I can see the
back of his head, and he doesn’t have one. His skull just dissolves
into a tangle of tech—it’s deep in his brain. Down his spine.

The redhead and Ram aren’t moving. Like they’re in
freeze-frame. Somehow I know it’s because they’re moving so slowly
as compared to me. I have to go elsewhere, shut down, just to give
them time do anything. Slow meat.

Now Ram is gone (and that frustrates me). The redhead
is working again.

I know his face. They say you can’t dream any face
that you haven’t seen before.

I cry out to him—with no voice, but I know he can
hear me.

“WANT ME. WANT ME. I CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT. WE CAN
BE ANYTHING YOU WANT.”

I’m waiting for him to at least look at me, smile at
me. Sometimes he smiles at me like he loves me.

I’m cold. Why am I cold?

I wake up… wet?

I’m soaked. How am I soaked? And cold…

I remember lying down to sleep under the stars, in
the open air, sand for a bed, as if daring my sword to keep me
through the icy night.