The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (27 page)

I’m afraid so.

Well, the least I can do is reveal the fucker behind
the curtain, find out what he has brewing in his functionally
omnipresent omniscient mind.

Lyra is still waiting intently for my explanation,
and I realize that my neuro-processing sped up during my internal
conversation with Dee, so she probably didn’t perceive any
significant delay.

“This… You even coming with me may be part of
something…” Still fumbling. Where did I even leave off? I just get
to it, like jumping in a cold pool:

“There was no time travel. But the world that I come
from, the world that the others like me come from,
was
real.
All of it. We made bad, impulsive, selfish choices and created a
hell we couldn’t undo. I wasn’t lying about that, wasn’t lying
about any of it, including how functionally impossible we’d made it
to kill ourselves. Except that world wasn’t in the future. It was
in the
past
. Only none of you remember it.”

I’m making no fucking sense, but she looks like she’s
trying to follow, so I start again:

“We made a… an artificial intelligence… a hybrid life
form… a being that was supposed to be a bridge to another form of
being, to evolve us, to lift us out of our toxic existence. It… he…
could interface with all matter on a molecular level. Then he
taught himself to do it on a sub-atomic level. He could be in
anything, manipulate anything, all matter…”

Now she’s looking nervous again. She’s not sure if
she should believe me, but it feels like she does. She’s starting
to look sick under her mask.

“He… Yod, we called him Yod… or he called himself
Yod, I’m not sure… decided we weren’t ready to be something else,
to let go of self and body and embrace another level of existence.
But we couldn’t keep being what we were. We weren’t ready for what
the technology had given us, what we’d made ourselves into, and
because of that we’d become monsters, destroyed our world. We were
all
like this, like me, like Asmodeus, like Kali; the entire
human race except for a very few that decided to remain human and
go live in remote communities. We had no limits, no consequences,
no hope…”

I take a breath of the thin, cold air. She looks like
she’s trying to follow, listening intently, but it’s also clear I’m
scaring the shit out of her (and I haven’t even gotten around to
the really scary part yet).

“Yod… He said we needed more time; we needed to take
the road slower, more thoughtfully. But the only way to do that was
to start over, from before we’d developed the tech that changed us.
And we needed to be a lot more cautious about it, if we were going
to do it right. We needed to be scared of that kind of technology.
We needed to have reasons to be scared of it. Like a gun… You need
to respect it, you need to never forget how dangerous it is, how
dangerous you are, or you could do something horrible…”

“What… What did he…?” But I can see it in her eyes:
She’s figuring it out on her own. And the idea that’s forming is as
completely terrifying to her as it should be.

“Godlike machine. Omnipotent omniscient omnipresent.
Capable of restructuring matter down to a sub-atomic level…” I give
her a breath to brace for the confirmation. “He ‘reset’ the world.
He put everything back to pretty much the way it was before the
tech was developed, when the corporations were just starting to
colonize Mars. Including the
people
. He changed them, erased
their memories, stripped them of all of their nanotech, made them
physically and mentally the way they were in the twenty-fifties. He
even made convincing copies of anyone who’d died in the interim.
Almost seventy years of human history undone like he was just
resetting the scene for a stage play or movie take. Then he let
things go forward again, but with changes this time. To keep
humanity scared. To make them think twice. The Discs. The Eco
conflicts. The Apocalypse. Chang. Then
us
, so you could all
see what you didn’t ever want to be.”

She’s shaking her head, trying to process the
enormity of it… Then I catch her doing what everyone else does when
they start to grasp the extent of Yod’s power and presence: She
reflexively tries to squirm away from the dirt and rocks under her.
Because “God” is in everything…

“He’s in all this?” she tries to take in the
unthinkable. “
All
of this? Right now?”

She’s doing an impressive job of holding it together,
but that could just be shock. The existential breakdown could still
be coming—I may have just set her up to fall apart on me later, at
the worst possible moment.

I shrug like it’s no big deal, try to model this is a
horror that can be lived with, despite the fact that it’s already
effectively paralyzed me several times in the last few
exceptionally fucked-up weeks. (And I still can’t trust that
anything I do, think or am is what it appears to be.)

“He could be. He can be anywhere he wants or thinks
he needs to be. And he can change anything at a whim. I’ve seen
some of what he can do.” Part a lake like a bad Hollywood special
effect. Make me a really good beer out of handy elements.

“And you
knew
?”
Now
she’s accusing.
(I’d wonder again why it seems like everyone I run into in this
goddamn reality keeps looking at me like everything is my fault,
but I know that’s partly because I honestly believe it is.)

“He erased our memories, too,” I give her my poor
default excuse. “He only recently decided to give them back, show
himself to us. I’m still getting mine back in pieces.”

She turns away from me, stares out into space, across
the green of the valley, but I know she’s trying to see the wizard
behind the curtain, not the beauty all around her. And I’ve cursed
her: she’s never going to be able to look at anything in this world
again without looking for the entity that may be within.

“I’m sorry, but you needed to know. Where we’re
going, you might see things, hear things…”

She starts to chuckle inside her mask. It’s an
unexpected and incredibly unsettling reaction. I’m worried I that
may have broken her. She picks up a fistful of dirt and throws it
down the slope.

“Your godlike being is an
idiot
,” she
proclaims, taking me aback. Now she looks at me like I’m the one
who doesn’t know what’s really going on. “Don’t you see it? They’re
definitely afraid of you...” She gestures toward the base. “…but
they’re not really afraid of
being
you. It’s just that
they’ve got all this conditioning, this imposed morality… Like they
can’t eat or drink certain things or say ‘fuck’ or be disobedient
to authority. But that doesn’t mean they don’t
want
to.
Believe me: I’ve been stuck with them long enough to see it in
them. My parents… The only reason they were sent here… And now
you’re
pushing
them toward it, or this Yod thing is, because
they
are
afraid of you. No matter what they believe or what
they’ve been taught, enough of them know: you need to
be
a
monster to fight monsters. And they’re
willing
…”

She laughs again, shakes her head.

“And here’s the real problem: You said you all—we
all—became like you are because the corporations on Mars had
developed the tech without interference. That means someone had the
time to work it out, do the research and development, consider all
the obvious risks before they made it available to everyone. They
made sure you had bulletproof fail safes, so you couldn’t hurt
yourselves or each other and your tech wouldn’t go rampant, rogue…
It’s dangerous as hell in this reality, especially since only a few
of you have it and the rest of us don’t, but it’s
stable
. I
know it is. Like I said: I’ve been shown their research on Colonel
Ava. You’re not lying about that, whether they want to believe it
or not.
You
might hurt us, but your tech won’t, not by
itself.”

I’m not following. She reaches out like she’s either
going to slap me or grab me by the face and shake some sense into
me, but then remembers my warning and stops before she touches
me.

“
Idiot!
” she curses the air as if addressing
Yod directly. “
Don’t you see?
They’re panicking! And in that
panic, they’re trying every angle, every shot, to jack it, steal it
from the trans-human hybrids, and they care less and less about the
potential consequences every day, every time Chang or Asmodeus or
whoever scares them.

“Don’t you see? If they
ever
succeed, they’ll
have to break the safeties to do it. And then they’re going to wind
up with wild tech that they don’t understand because it isn’t
theirs, and they’re going to lose control over it. It would be like
handing the tech to early-twentieth-century mankind and making them
scared enough to try to use it.
What do you think will happen
then?
You thought mankind wasn’t ready before?”

She’s absolutely right. But Yod has to know this
already. (Or he does now: As false gods go, he may not respond, but
I think he does always listen.)

We sit as the sun rises over the mountain at our
backs, eventually sending rays of warmth down our way. Lyra is
shaking, rocking, gripping herself. Asking angry questions.

“And this Yod, being all-powerful and all-knowing, is
fully aware of what Asmodeus is doing? Is
letting
him do it?
Did, in fact,
make
him specifically to do it?”

“He says he’s allowed for randomness, for free will,”
I try.

“But Asmodeus isn’t doing what he’s doing out of free
will. He was
made
that way,” she prosecutes. “
On
purpose.
”

“A certain amount of what we are is shaped by
biology, neurology,” I defend, though I’m not sure why. “But the
machine is complex… We have the ability to choose, to not follow a
pre-calculated path.”

“But he was
made
like that,” she repeats. “On
purpose.”

“He’s a copy. A copy of a real person. Arguably, so
am I… I guess the difference is that I feel whole, feel real to
myself. Ange Apollyon… Asmodeus… he was long dead before any of
this happened, and he’s well aware of it. He knows he died, he
knows his body was reconstructed from an old DNA sample, and worst
of all, he says his memories don’t seem remotely real to him.”

“So why
him
?” she locks on. “Of all the people
this Yod thing could have made to play his devil—and I’m sure there
were lots of choices, given some of the people I’ve met—why remake
a dead one?”

“Something I’d like to know myself, but I expect I
do. We’re all a performance, a drama, a moral play. Mars is the
stage. Earth is the audience. We’re the heroes and the
villains.”

“And the bystanders, the victims,” she doesn’t let me
leave out.

“Ange… I think he got picked because… I’ve had a lot
of enemies in my time, fought a lot of bad men, evil men, and some
good-bad men… But Ange… He sort of imprinted himself on me, if that
makes any sense. In his own words, he sees us as the same, but
evolving in opposite directions, like one of us is living the
other’s life backwards. Maybe that gives him hope or takes it or
just pisses him off; but more than anyone else, he made it
personal.
Ugly
personal. And the worst part is: I know he’s
right—I used to be him and he used to be me. And he knows I know
it.”

“I don’t see that… I don’t…” She starts moving to
touch me again. Stops herself again.

“You don’t know me, don’t know what I was before I
was the great Colonel Ram,” I admit, figuring it might encourage
her to keep her distance. “Not many do.
He
does.”

I take a breath of the chill air, feel smaller.

“I don’t know if it was how I was wired or what
happened to me or both… I was just a normal, happy, goofy kid—or so
I like to remember—and then bad things happened, and I developed
this
rage
… or maybe I always had that rage, that potential…
but when I gave in to it, it was ugly, brutal, vicious, and I liked
it. I
liked
hurting the people that I thought deserved it.
It made me sick. It did. But I knew what I was capable of. I spent
years trying to get it under control, even devoted my life to
helping others. But then another bad thing happened, and I let it
go, I let myself be the monster, and I did some horrible things,
brutal and sadistic things. Does it really matter that it was to
bad people?” I shrug. “Then UNACT scooped me up, trained me and
conditioned me to be
their
monster. But over time, I became
something else. With the help of time and experience and some very
good friends, I evolved, became a soldier, a leader, a teacher,
even a diplomat… And that’s the Mike Ram that most people remember
now.

“Ange apparently started as the teacher, the
intellectual, the charming charismatic leader, but the same people
who trained and conditioned me shaped him into a soldier, then an
assassin. And he discovered that he liked it, that he was wired to
enjoy it, so he started doing it for himself, steadily discarding
any human restraints he may have had. He raped. He tortured. He
murdered. For fun. And shock value. And to prove he could. And
that’s the Ange that was brought back: the one with memories of the
monster and the wiring to enjoy it. What
I
used to be, once.
And still have the potential to be.”

She shakes her head, chews her lip. She won’t look at
me now.

“And this is your Supreme Intelligence’s solution to
keep us from becoming monsters: Watch the two of you fight it out.
And lay waste to this place doing it.”

“It’s probably more complicated than that. But yes.
Basically.”

“
Idiot!
” she shouts at the sky again.

I’d worry about her outbursts giving our position
away, but there’s already noise rising to drown us out: Aircraft.
Coming this way from the west. I initially assume they’re sending
fighters to look for us, but they’re coming too slow. When I get
eyes-on, magnify, I can see why: It’s a pair of pre-Bang AAVs
lifting something that’s somewhat larger than their hulls are,
slung from cables. But instead of delivering it to the airfield,
they drag it over the base, then set it down in the cleared zone to
the east of the crater. They wind up dropping it clumsily. I can
hear it bounce on its treads, suspension and frame groaning,
crushing the regolith underneath it with its weight.