Doomware (35 page)

The boy was excited by the ship, and kept looking around and asking questions. Suddenly, he tugged hard on David’s hand, bringing him to a halt.

“Dad, look!” he cried. “A boy! I just saw a boy on those steps!”

Shawn was looking back the way they’d come, along a dimly lit corridor. David could see a set of steps on the right, but no boy.

“Really?” he said. “I don’t see him.”

“He’s gone now, but he was there.”

“What did he look like?”

“He looked like me. I mean, he was my age – I think.”

“Let’s keep moving, people,” said the fair-haired man, who was in the lead.

They continued on. David was surprised by the number of rooms and corridors in the ship’s interior. He’d expected they would go up, towards the bridge, but instead they went down, below decks. He noticed that Tarot was nervous in his usual kind of way: calm, watchful, the nervousness betrayed only to someone who knew him. He continued to ask questions of the crew, and was continually rebuffed. Ask the Captain. The Captain will tell you. Captain’s orders. David had heard the man’s name spoken in tones of deference so many times that an audience with him started to become an intimidating prospect. He felt like Marlow in
Heart of Darkness
, heading for a confrontation with the Captain’s Kurtz.

They walked down a long, stark corridor, at the end of which was a metal hatch adorned with a sign that read
Captain’s Quarters
. As soon as he saw the hatch David had a terrible feeling of foreboding. He felt very strongly that the hatch should not be opened, that they should not face whatever was waiting beyond it. He didn’t voice his fears, and watched as the fair-haired man tapped on the hatch three times with the barrel of his gun.

At that moment the boy squeezed his hand and whispered, “Hey Dad, I think it’s an anagram.”

“What is?”

A muffled “enter” came from beyond the hatch.

“The name of this ship.”

Before David could respond the fair-haired man spun the handle on the hatch, opened it and ushered them all inside. The first thing David noticed was the opulent appearance of the room compared to the austere drabness of the rest of the ship. There were Chesterfield sofas on either side of the room, gilt-framed oil paintings on the walls, and plush carpet a deep shade of vermillion covering the floor. In the centre of the room was a mahogany desk, behind which sat the Captain. He was busy writing in a large leather-bound log, and didn’t so much as glance up as they came in.

“It’s good to see you again, Tarot,” the Captain said, still failing to look up from his log.

The colour had drained from Tarot’s face. He looked at David and said, “Lorch.”

David had expected someone more fearsome- or repugnant-looking, someone pinched-looking and hunched over, their physical appearance deformed by the weight of their extreme beliefs. Instead, Lorch looked ordinary. Attractive, even. He had bright-green eyes, dark hair that curled in waves down to his collar, and a neatly trimmed goatee. He was wearing a pair of half-moon glasses, the likes of which David had never seen in real life, that were surely only being worn for effect.

“Welcome to the Cankered Host,” he said, continuing to write as he spoke. “Please, take a seat. I prefer my guests to be comfortable. Tarot on this side” – he pointed to the Chesterfield on the left with his pen – “companions on the other.”

The orders were given with the air of a man accustomed to having them obeyed. David and Tarot looked from each other to the two men from the helicopter, who had sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders and pistols in holsters on their hips. They clearly weren’t in a position to argue. They took seats where Lorch had indicated, Tarot on one sofa, David and the boy on the other. The fair-haired man closed the hatch, and he and his counterpart stood flanking it.

“Imagine my surprise,” Lorch said, “when I was informed that one of those found fleeing from a mob baying for his blood was none other than my old sparring partner, Tarot Dugas.”

With a little flourish of his pen, he finished whatever he was writing, leaned back in his chair, and finally looked up. There was a pause while he took in Tarot’s appearance.

“Would it be” – he paused, searching for the right word – “
disingenuous
of me to enquire as to how you’ve been keeping?”

Tarot stared at him, his face a pale mask, expressionless. “How did you do it?” he said tonelessly.

A trace of a smile twitched at the corners of Lorch’s mouth. “Note how you didn’t ask
why
I did it. You already know the why, don’t you Tarot? Deep down, I think you’re a believer, are you not?”

“So you don’t deny it?”

“Who would deny such a magnificent achievement?”

“
Achievement?
” Tarot uttered in disbelief. “Haven’t you seen what’s out there? Haven’t you seen the death and the destruction and the hordes of zombies?”

Lorch tutted with disdain. “Zombies. I do so detest that word. Zombies are supposedly cadavers reanimated by witchcraft – a ludicrous notion if ever there was one. The creatures out there are not zombies.”

“Then what are they?”

“Unfortunately, they are evils that were apparently necessary for the greater good.”

“A greater good that’s left you holed up in here on a floating prison.”

“This is a time of transition; the world has known times like this before.”

“You still haven’t answered my question: how did you do it?”

David sat there watching and listening, motionless, but his mind racing. So it was true. Acybernetics had massacred mankind. And he was sitting in the same room with the greatest mass murderer the world had ever known. The body counts of all the worst murderers in history combined – Khan, Himmler, Pot, amongst innumerable others – didn’t come anywhere near to equalling Lorch’s death toll. Only now did their predicament dawn on him. Lorch had killed every cybernetic he’d ever known: his mother, his father, his grandparents, his great-grandparents, friends, enemies, neighbours, strangers; they were all the same to him. He’d wiped out every cybernetic in existence except one: the boy sitting next to him. If this omission was discovered it was impossible to think he’d balk at killing him too. Far from being saved, the boy was in even greater danger. Slowly, he slipped an arm around Shawn; as he did so, he felt the shaven-headed man following his every move.

“The how is irrelevant; it’s the end result that matters,” said Lorch. “My goal was always the reassertion of the natural order, the resurrection of the true human race.”

Tarot’s voice retained its customary steady rhythm. “You’re calling zombification the natural order now, are you? Not to mention the fact that offliners have taken control of the zombies you created – was that part of the plan too?”

Lorch considered this for a moment. “Obviously, the zombifications – as you call them – were unintentional. The virus we call Cy-Vi Nine Three Seven was designed for a singular purpose: to shut down every computerised system on the face of the earth. Of course, in the case of cybernetic brains, these shutdowns happened to result in the euthanasia of their owners.”

This was said so forthrightly, with such casual aplomb, that it was difficult to credit the fact that Lorch was talking about the deaths of billions. Judging by voice alone, he could just as easily have been talking about what he might eat for dinner that day.

“You sick bastard,” David said in an undertone, almost to himself.

Lorch turned a scornful glare on him. “And you are?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing… at the moment,” Lorch said, before his eyes shifted to Shawn. “And who is this young man?”

“He’s my son.”

“What a good-looking boy.”
 

David pulled Shawn to him until his head was pressed against his chest. He was worried the boy would say or do something to give away his cyberneticism. When Lorch spoke next his head swept slowly from side to side, his eyes taking in the occupants of the room.

“You say I’m sick, but I say it was the rest of the human race that was sick, infected with the malaise we call brainware. In the name of so-called ‘progress’ they went too far, tightening the grip of their infection with little or no thought for the consequences, wilfully transforming themselves into godless hybrids: half-human, half-machine. Brainware warped their experience of the human condition. The eradication of pain dulled their senses. The fictitious worlds inside their heads became more real to them than reality. The easy access to data handed them a wealth of information, but also a poverty of wisdom. It made them lazy and weak, indulgent and dependent – complacently so, happily so. It was the drug and they its addicts. It was the master and they its slaves. And thus, happily drugged and enslaved, they told themselves it was the way they were meant to be, exulting in its powers, going so far as to wonder how human beings had ever survived without it, ignoring the taint of blasphemy inherent in such thinking.

“Meanwhile, we – the
real
human race, the true children of God – we were treated as if we were freaks, spat upon as if we were unclean, derided as if we were the abominations against God and nature. You remember what that felt like, don’t you? Well, no more. Something had to be done to restore the natural order of things.”

With this monologue David got an inkling of Lorch’s skills as an orator. The man was poised, charismatic, verging on mesmeric, difficult to look away from and impossible not to listen to. There was a gravitas in his bearing and a self-assured conviction in his words. David could imagine him delivering an impassioned speech to a crowd of people and converting them into ardent followers, moulding their beliefs with the sheer strength of his own. He was like Hitler: a monster by anyone’s definition of the word, but still a public speaker par excellence nonetheless.

“By the way, my anonymous friend,” Lorch said to him, “your first words to me weren’t very charitable considering it was my men who saved your life and the life of your son. I abhor a lack of manners.”

David was so stunned by this he was speechless.

Before he could collect himself, Tarot said, “So you took it upon yourself to dish out your final solution to the problem of cyberneticism.”

“Make no mistake: this wasn’t my purge; it was God’s. There have been such purges before: floods, plagues, disasters. If I had failed to heed His call it would have been akin to Noah refusing to build the Ark.”

David let out a bitter laugh. “Yes, but Noah didn’t bring the flood himself, did he?”

Lorch regarded him coldly. “It was God who made our bodies reject the cybernetic poison in the first place. I merely made the Acybernetic Initiative live up to its name. We
seized
” – he clenched his hand into a fist – “the initiative, and now the meek truly have inherited the earth.”

“I think you’ll find that zombies have inherited the earth,” Tarot said. “Zombies and outlaws.”

Lorch stared at Tarot for a long moment, not rising to the challenge in his words, hesitating as if trying to make up his mind about something. Then he opened a notebook-type computer on his desk and tapped at a couple of keys. The Initiative clearly had technology they’d made immune to the virus; either that or the items of tech were so old they had no uplink, rendering them immune by virtue of their disconnection from virus-spreading data streams.

“The virus was created by an entity named Holohive,” Lorch said, “a multipolar synthetic intelligence capable of passing even the most stringent Turing tests.”

“‘Multipolar’s just a fancy way of saying it would’ve been banned by TITANN, isn’t it?” said David.

“Not exactly, but you are, nevertheless, correct. TITANN protocols would have seen Holohive deactivated and everyone involved with him thrown into prison – had the police found out, that is. For years even the derivation of his name was a closely guarded secret.”

On the wall behind Lorch a screen lit up with an image of a neural net chamber: a grey metal sphere, its smooth surface dotted with lights, suspended on stalks inside a transparent cylinder. Below the chamber appeared seven words.

H
igher
O
rder
Lo
gic
H
euristic
I
mmunosuppressant
V
irus
E
ngineer

“Holohive was loyal to the ethos of the Initiative. He believed in the necessity of ridding the human race of cyberneticism. Of course, he was programmed to be that way from the outset, but over the course of years it went much deeper than mere programming. We needed him to have absolute conviction in the cause, otherwise he would’ve lost interest in finding a way to break through all of the antiviral measures in place. It took time, but of course he did find a way. He turned those antiviral safeguards against themselves. You see, the release of Cy-Vi Nine Three Seven was preceded by the release of a decoy virus. This decoy virus ensured the issuing of a level twelve alert, which in turn ensured the proper functioning of Nine Three Seven.
 

“As soon as the real virus was released, Holohive’s usefulness was at an end and he was deactivated. He’d understood this would happen and had been prepared to accept his fate – or so we’d thought. Unfortunately, it turned out he’d developed an exceptional gift for deception, as well as an uncommonly strong will to survive. Only one structure apart from his own neural network was sophisticated enough to host Holohive: a cybernetic brain. Unbeknown to us, he’d designed the virus to reactivate, after a short period of time, the cybernetic brains it had infected. His intention was for the bodies hosting these brains to become like automatons, subsisting at a very basic level, merely doing enough to keep their brains alive. You see, Holohive’s plan was to transfer himself into as many of these brains as possible, ensuring his survival, and creating an entirely new species he could mould as he saw fit.

“But even a synthetic intelligence isn’t infallible. He failed to understand the critical nature of emotions, of instincts, of primeval reflexes, to the proper operation of a cybernetic network. He disregarded those vagaries of the ancient limbic system, those secret sectors of the brain whose functioning, even now, we don’t fully comprehend. In short, he underestimated the importance of the biological – the
God-given
– part of the brain. By the time reactivation occurred the biological hemispheres had been fundamentally altered by the many organic reactions to the process of death inherent in every living form, robbing the cybernetic hemispheres of the consistent symbiosis they required for proper functioning, corrupting them beyond anything Holohive had believed possible. These reactivated cybernetic systems became the so-called zombies we see plaguing this world, brought to ‘life’ by the nanotechnology coursing throughout their bodies, though of course none of them is actually alive. Each is merely an unholy imitation of life.”