Immortality (70 page)

In the hours that followed his decision, Mark repeatedly opened the thought-interface. Each time, the torrent of information hurt more than the last. He couldn’t find a way to throttle the flood of data. The surges had clearly been designed for a different user, a different species which possessed far larger short-term memory capacity than humans. He knew he was retaining only small pieces from each information flood, but it was enough. It was a beginning.

In his random hunt, he had found no programs related to controlling or tracking kill zones, but he had found other clues; and he was learning more about using the god-machine. Pieces of the complex puzzle were making sense, and one thing was clear: he didn’t need psilocybin or LSD anymore. In fact, he now understood that he might not have needed the drugs at all. If he’d been able to consciously control his dreams, he could have operated the subconscious thought-interface while in that natural state of altered awareness and achieved the same results. Psychologists had a name for this altered state of awareness: lucid dreaming. Controlling dreams was the same as controlling the subconscious, which was the fountain from which all dreams flowed. In their esoteric teachings, many religions had instructions for various kinds of meditations and inner-journeys with goals of enlightenment. At their core, these meditations and inner-journeys were controlled dream states. Were these teachings only a coincidence or had information been leaking from the god-machine into religious culture since human time began?

After assembling what he’d learned, Mark cautiously settled on the first command to try. He was reasonably certain he understood what the command did. He was going to run a program whose name in the ancients’ language was represented by a single symbol, a pair of crisscrossed lines with an oval floating above it. What he’d retained from the last data-flood’s fading memories had convinced him this program provided chronological access to recorded historical events. He’d learned the ancients’ runic language was more complex than written English in structure, because each character could represent a word as well as an alphabetic letter. This symbol in the ancients’ language roughly translated into the word ‘timeline.’

Mark moved his finger close to the symbol and got a dim impression of a fast moving wind. The pressure on his finger felt wobbly like he was pushing against a repelling magnetic field. His heart was beating rapidly. He held his breath and pushed his finger into the symbol. He was instantly ripped from the real world.

He was floating inside what appeared to be a pure white space of infinite size. In front of him was a tablet and selection globe similar to the command catalog. Instead of containing runic phrases, the tablet was covered with minuscule windows which contained moving scenes like film clips. He rotated the globe and, as expected, the tablet paged to a different set of film clip windows amid a flutter of sensory ripples. Some of the pages contained tiny windows of scenes which were clearly recognizable, while others contained only blurry, moving ghost shapes in its windows. He cautiously moved his finger closer to a window containing a scene of the seashore. As he started to push against the resisting pressure, the white void in which he was floating began to fade into a sample of the seashore scene. The experience was complete immersion of all his senses – sound, sight, smell, and touch. Even as a ghost-scene, the projection knocked the wind out of him as it tore at his mind, threatening to blow him fully into this alternate world. He felt like he was in two places at the same time, with all his senses blended into a single combined experience. The sample scene was a frozen moment in time. He was inside a human body which was not his own, with all the texture and nuances and senses that went with it. There were birds suspended in midair, unmoving. There was a pair of smallish, bare human feet below him, standing in the receding surf. There were waves frozen at crest. The sample was low intensity, so it only partially registered on all his senses. He could hear sound, perceive smells, and feel a sea breeze on his face and icy water between his toes, but only as a single musical note, a single instant of perceptions extended into infinity. Superimposed on his vision were the time, date, and location in longitude and latitude. It was odd that the display was in English. He wondered if the interface was adapting to his way of thinking as it had with the kill zone map. The date was over three thousand years ago. He wondered where the longitude and latitude lines crossed. A transparent world globe appeared which pinpointed the location as the coastline of Greece on the Aegean Sea. As soon as his thoughts shifted back to the scene, the globe vanished. He didn’t push any harder with his finger, which he knew would immerse him deeper into the recorded scene and set it into motion. He wasn’t ready. He knew he would be engulfed and it scared him. The loss of himself into that unknown body would be almost like dying. He removed his finger from the tablet. All his senses returned to the experience of floating in the center of a white void.

He believed he understood the nature of the recordings. Each one contained the complete sensory perceptions from a person who was alive at a specific place and point in time. There was no other way to explain the perfect total immersion of senses, including touch and smell. While the pages of tiny windows seemed to be infinite in quantity, Mark couldn’t imagine that the god-machine would store the total life experience of every man and woman who’d ever walked the face of the earth. Surely, the recordings had to be limited to those events the god-machine considered worthy of archiving.

Mark returned to a page of ghostly blurs and wondered what they held. Why were they different? Randomly, he chose one to sample. Before his finger began to feel the backward pressure, he was trembling with apprehension. He suddenly feared he’d experience things no human was meant to experience and that madness would follow. Going against instinct, he moved his finger deeper into the magnetic backpressure. Nothing happened. His senses still had him floating in the void. He pushed his finger to within a hair’s breadth above the tiny window, while constantly checking for any small changes in perception; then he found it. There was a vague sensation of warmth that was new. He withdrew his finger and the warmth faded. He tried another ghost window. He held his finger just over it for what seemed like minutes until he noticed an odd taste in his mouth. The taste was granular and earthy. He withdrew his finger and the taste vanished. He tried a few more ghost windows, all with the same results – a faint sensation of some kind and nothing more. He suspected this breakdown in sensory projection occurred for the same reason the command catalog’s help system failed. The interface was producing indecipherable experiences because they were projecting non-human sensory data; these blurry ghost scenes were the recorded perceptions of non-human life forms. Some of these ghost windows had to be historical events from the civilization that built the god-machine. The entire world of the ancients could be right at his fingertips waiting for him to study it, if he could only crosswire his senses into something approximating the ancients’ physiology. He sighed. Viewing these records was probably hopeless.

Mark went back to the human pages of history. He previewed dozens of scenes until he found one that seemed fascinating and safe; just right for his first complete immersion. The scene was ancient Egypt. In the distance, he saw pyramids and the lights and activity of what appeared to be a festival. The time, longitude, and latitude were floating at the horizon over a black star filled sky. A full moon was casting light onto the sands and time when many historians thought Moses had fled from the Egyptians. Mark held his finger a moment longer at the preview level and then fully pushed it into the tiny window.

What was left of the white void disappeared as he felt a sensory blow. The frozen projection jumped into full motion. Mark was inside a man who was in every way and with every sense alive. He felt a heart beating, muscles working, and breath drawing. He had no control over what the man did. He was along for the ride and nothing more. He experienced the man’s thoughts and feelings, but retained his own identity. It was as if he were a separate observer merged into the back of the man’s existence. There was mental chatter in a language Mark could not interpret, but there were also non-verbal ideas which translated directly.

The night was delicious and refreshingly mild. In the distance loomed the great pyramid. Moonlight and stars reflected in its dark surface as if it were mirrors of ice. Mark realized he was the first modern human to see how the pyramids looked with their polished limestone still in place. Evening insects buzzed and palm leaves stirred. The man was enjoying every bit of the night. On his belt was a broadsword. Over his shoulder was a small animal-skin flask of cool water. He was a leader of men, a fierce soldier. There were ten others traveling with him through the sand. They moved in total silence like predators on the hunt. The man was proud of his men. Mark grew worried this was not an innocuous event. Up ahead, torch lights and the outline of a great building could be seen. Atop the walls were armed guards dressed in waist-shirts and bronze jackal masks. Mark understood from the man’s thoughts that these were royal bodyguards. He realized the man was stalking human prey, possibly royal human prey. He could feel tension and adrenaline mounting. A hand moved aside some leaves to reveal a line of sight. He was looking down over a stone wall ten feet below him. In the blend of moonlight and torch glow, he saw a teenage boy and girl in a small rectangular pool of water cut into a deck of stone. Flowers were floating in the water. There were golden challises of drink and plates of food. There was a small pile of clothing. The teenagers were nude and in a motionless embrace. The royal bodyguards looked outward, not inward. One bodyguard turned his gaze directly into Mark’s eyes. Mark was panicked until he caught himself and realized that the bodyguard was actually looking at a soldier dead thousands of years and not him. There seemed to be a flicker of recognition in the bodyguard’s eyes, but nothing happened and the jackal mask ultimately turned away. How had the bodyguard failed to see a man who was ten feet from him?

Mark was filled with questions and unable to reach into the man’s mind to recall even the simplest of answers. No matter how real this felt, the experience was still only a single-dimensional recording being replayed. Now, others of the soldier’s cadre were positioned at choice spots along the wall. Mark saw arrow tips poking out of the foliage and aimed down. How could the royal bodyguards not see this? A thought floated up from the background of mental chatter and Mark understood everything. The royal bodyguards had been promised a Pharaoh’s reward and then ordered not to see a thing, or face eternal death. The assassins were elite servants of the high priest,
the Prophet of God
. Pieces of information began to surface as fast as Mark could assimilate them, as the man’s thoughts focused on memories from when the plot was conceived. The young couple was the Pharaoh’s last born son and his concubine. Pharaoh would be driven mad with the loss. Hebrew slaves would be scapegoats for the crime. Arrows sung through the air. The teenagers looked up. Their eyes grew wide as their bodies were punctured with quills; another volley flew. The pool water began to swirl with a stain, a dark cloud which was the life’s blood of a Pharaoh’s son and a teenage girl who would never see adulthood. The royal bodyguards sounded an alarm and took up pursuit in a direction leading away from the assassins. The servant of
the Prophet of God
silently withdrew with his men. Soon they were running through foliage and open stretches of sand. Mark’s vision was full of abrupt movements and flashes of moonlight. His heart was racing from the exertion. He heard labored breathing. Sweat was soaking his face and his back. They stopped running. Up ahead, murdered slaves lay in the sand amid discarded bows and arrows. The men picked up branches which were precut into makeshift rakes. They walked backward past the bodies and toward a stone roadbed, dragging the rakes to erase their footprints from the sand. Once they were all on the road, the elite assassin,
the Hand of God,
paused to examine his work. He saw hurried footprints leading from the direction of the assassination to dead bodies strewn in the sand. The royal bodyguards would be along soon to claim success. Their lives also would be measured in hours.

The experience ended unexpectedly. Mark found himself again floating in space. At one instant, his heart was beating fast and he was covered in sweat. Now his own heart calmly thumped and his skin was dry. Mark emptied his mind, which caused him to exit the timeline program. He found himself back on the roof. A leaf had blown from a tree and was trapped against his leg. A dog bayed somewhere far off in the night. He looked at his watch and realized less than a minute had passed since he’d plunged into the timeline program.

~

Morning light was softly filling shadows cast by objects on the roof. Mark had been outside all night. He looked off into the horizon of white clouds and sky. The sun was a faint warmth on his face. He should have been drained from working all night but instead felt as fresh as if he’d just awakened. He had accomplished so much. Far up in the sky, a jet was flying in a slow figure eight, the symbol of infinity. He felt sadness for the powerful who had taken refuge in the air. They were doomed to return to the Earth in fear.

Mark had identified and tried other programs after his experiments with the timeline program. Except for a few, all the programs he’d tried were listed on the first page of the tablet, and all those on the first page had turned out to be important core functions. The programs which he’d selected from subsequent pages had all turned out to be less important. He was not convinced yet, but it looked like he’d just gotten his first piece of solid luck. If most of the important programs were on the first few pages, it would make deciphering the interface much easer. If he’d thought about it earlier, he probably could have predicted this good fortune. After all, the god-machine was at its essence nothing more than an advanced computer with its interface built inside the operator’s head, instead of a keyboard and screen. Good usability design often included sorting menu items in the order most frequently used.