Immortality (77 page)

The mall was a good place to spend the night. For some odd reason, this one had never been looted. It felt strange walking down the empty causeways, gazing into store windows full of merchandise. The place was like a museum dedicated to some lost age of mankind. She and Mark had gone through the entire mall. They’d found fresh food in the refrigerators of a restaurant. Together, they had cooked dinner for everyone and eaten in the gallery of the mall with fountains tricking down nearby. Afterwards, many of their party had looked in the stores. The displays were filled with everything a modern human could possibly desire, but there was nothing here worth taking. All the luxuries were free, and yet it all had been left behind, undisturbed this night. Kathy wondered if other travelers had been through here and seen the same things and reached the same conclusions. Life was simpler now. Everything revolved around survival. Designer shoes didn’t matter. Jewelry didn’t matter. Fancy electronics didn’t matter. All those shiny toys were completely worthless now.

Kathy closed her journal and walked into the center of the Humvee circle. She sat down next to Mark. There was a ring of twenty people all talking with him. Sarah was sitting on the opposite side of the circle, with Ralph asleep beside her. Sarah had been quiet for the past couple of days. At times, Kathy had thought she was brooding; but she’d been wrong so many times about Sarah that she’d given up trying to figure the young woman out. Roadmaps were laid out on the ground in front of Mark. He had been drawing on one with a yellow highlighter pen. He was shading in kill zone areas to avoid. He had started doing this, in case he was injured or worse. If the maps survived, then there was still some hope; but Kathy knew no one believed that. The maps were only a source of comfort for Mark. If they lost him, they would all soon scatter to the wind.

Kathy looked at everyone’s faces. It was odd how alive she felt and how alive everyone looked. There was something so primal in this migration and its shared hardship. All their actions felt so deeply rooted in the essence of life. She suspected part of the reason for these feelings was that the constant motion during the days and the deep resting at night must have been close to the natural rhythms for humans since they roamed the primal savannas in search of food. She and Mark made love every night. She felt guilty thinking that if they survived, she might look back at this time as the best moments of her life.

She picked up Mark’s hand and held it. She ran her fingers over the back of his hand. His skin felt like unblemished silk. At night before sleep, they often talked about the little changes that were occurring in him. The changes were both emotional and physical. The physical was visible. His body was doing more than healing; it was trying to perfect itself. The freckles on his skin were fading. His hair looked thicker and softer. His eyes looked somehow different too. Mark said his night vision was improving and he no longer needed glasses. She had no idea what might be going on inside his organs. She’d brought field medical kits with her but nothing that could help answer those questions. All she had was medicine, first aid supplies, and instruments that didn’t need batteries.

The group conversation was almost the same every night. The discussion was limited to one of two topics in which everyone in their small band was fascinated. Tonight they were talking about what it was like to be enhanced by a machine. Mark had started calling himself a hybrid and the term had stuck. In their tribe, there was a small click of people who wanted to become hybrids. Mark had started instructing them in ways to reach the thought-interface using mental focus, but so far none of them had been successful in the smallest measure. There was discontented talk of trying to obtain drugs like LSD and the shortcuts it could offer. No one except Kathy and Sarah knew that Mark had a small bottle of LSD which was being saved for the future; but there was little chance the drug would work on even a small percentage of their tribe. Medical records were full of people who took overdoses and suffered permanent mental breakdowns; and those that didn’t have breakdowns were not interfaced to the god-machine, they just had occasional flashbacks. The evidence was clear that LSD was not all that was needed. Unless someone had the right kind of latent predisposition, taking LSD was a game of Russian roulette; and the odds were very long against winning the lottery of machine enlightenment. Mark had repeatedly stressed this, and he was correct according to Kathy’s medical view. From the beginning there had to have been something different about Mark and Sarah. They’d survived kill zones where others had died. They had prior subconscious communications with the god-machine which came out in dreams and premonitions; and in Sarah’s case, this might have been occurring her entire life and possibly even in earlier generations. Kathy suspected the same might be true for Mark. Both Mark and Sarah probably shared a subtle difference in brain chemistry or structure, maybe a common genetic difference. Consuming hallucinogens made it easier to use their latent ability to work the interface. Kathy wondered if their brains had some crucial similarity to the creatures who built the god-machine.

“If it was as simple as taking hallucinogenic drugs, then we’d have a world full of drug addicts communing with the god-machine,” said Mark.

“What about schizophrenics?” someone called out.

“I don’t know, but that’s an interesting question,” said Mark. “Some schizophrenics speak with invisible people or even god. Maybe schizophrenics are in some faulty way connected to the god-machine? Maybe the predisposition that Sarah and I have is something related to schizophrenia?”

“You know there’s some evidence that there’s a structural difference in the brains of schizophrenics,” said Kathy.

Noel stood up from the circle of people. He was a small man with a very bright mind. He looked several people in the eyes and then stared at Mark.

“What’s the point of any of this crap?” he said. “Part of the reason I came with you was so that I could learn to become like you. I think there’s something you’re not telling us.”

“Did anyone else come only for this reason?” asked Mark. “The quest for the fountain of youth is a very old story which ends badly.”

People in the circle looked at each other. No one said a thing, then a woman named Alice raised her hand, and then another person raised their hand, and another. Soon eight hands were raised.

“Noel, be careful what you ask for,” said Sarah.

“It’s alright,” said Mark. “Who wouldn’t want access to the Library of Alexandria and a lifespan long enough to read it? The big question is what’s really going on inside my body. Is it the fountain of youth or just a different way to die? We don’t really know what Sarah and I have done to ourselves. We could be dead or burnt out in six months.”

“Now just wait a minute!” said Noel. “We’re all going to die. That’s a fact. How many people here can say they wouldn’t jump at the chance for perfect health even if they knew for certain it had risks and they’d end up half machine?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Kathy.

She was sorry she’d spoken the instant the words had left her mouth. Had she just helped Mark or hurt him? Though he wasn’t showing it outwardly, she knew any confrontation troubled him; and she’d just contributed to a confrontation. Since they’d been on the road, Mark seemed to be gradually adopting pacifism; it was not the weak kind of pacifism of a coward, but the strong kind built on conviction. He’d also begun displaying an uncanny ability to defuse confrontations. Mark continued speaking with Noel. Soon Noel was losing momentum; then he fell silent. Mark had somehow painted him as misguided; though Kathy could not identify a single thing Mark had said that would lead to that impression.

Eventually, the conversation moved on to the other group topic that was often discussed, kill zones. Kathy privately knew Mark had given up hope that he or any one person could stop the god-machine’s rampage; but discussing how it could be stopped was cathartic and important for the health of the group, so Mark indulged himself and others in it. Days ago, he’d explained the command catalog and the ancients’ language. He and Sarah still spent most of their time searching for any connection between programs and kill zones. Kathy had been stunned by how similar their descriptions of some god-machine interfaces were to everyday computer software. Were there other similarities? Our programs were full of bugs. Could the murder of our entire race be due to a bug in the god-machine’s programming?

“Why do you think you haven’t found any trace of kill zone programs in the catalogs?” asked Carl. “I mean isn’t it strange? This is a doomsday weapon and there’s no command and control. It’s like building a nuclear submarine and forgetting to add controls for the missiles. Who in their right mind would do that?”

“I’ve been searching and searching for ways to control it or make it stop,” said Mark. “I’m still convinced that if we quit being a threat, it would stop killing; but governments have no intentions of trying the way of peace. I’ve spent every available moment trying to understand this machine and so has Sarah. I have serious doubts that kill zone controls exist. I know the god-machine is carrying out this holocaust, following an exact plan. I’ve accessed a strategy map which proves this to me. The mystery is why’s there no means of operator control? One way this makes sense is if extinctions are not part of the original programming, but an aberration. If kill zones are something the god-machine evolved on its own, then there’s no reason for a user interface to exist. It simply was not engineered for use by organic life forms. That’s one possibility…

“The other possibility is that we just haven’t found the controls yet. Sarah and I suspect the command catalog also functions as a mental keyboard. I know each phrase is a command or program name, but I also think the phrases can be combined to create more complex tasks. In other words, it’s a language; and that means there’s got to be sentences. The point is, this would make the interface as complicated as the ancients’ written language. No one could ever be sure kill zone controls don’t exist.”

“I’ve been thinking,” said a programmer named Barbara. “What if it’s a virus? We have computer viruses. What if some kind of virus program evolved out of the network and then embedded itself into the nucleus of the god-machine? The virus would have no human interface and it could have completely different goals than the original system.”

“What you’re describing is a code mutation,” said Mark. “It’s a good hypothesis, but there’s a problem. Whatever their origin, the extinction and kill zone programs are now major parts of the rules of the god-machine. A virus would not be so deeply integrated. This is no rogue program that’s hanging on like a loose tumor. This holocaust has the full will and planning of the god-machine behind it.”

“I wish they would just blow the son of a bitch up!” said Paul.

“Me too,” said someone else. “Destroy the fucker!” shouted a third.

Mark was asleep. The dream surrounding him was the first he’d had that was not a god-machine-conjured nightmare. Sarah was in his dream. The instant she touched him, a powerful infusion of memories flooded his mind. They were not normally assembled memories – some ran backward in time like a reversed video, others were frozen moments, and some were just normal scraps of time. The dream was a series of disjointed experiences, like shards of a broken mirror imperfectly reflecting a whole image in its pieces. He knew if the shards could be reassembled, everything would be explained. He saw memories of dreams filled with bodies floating in the Hudson River. He saw memories of god-machine war plans projected onto a map. He saw memories of Alexander’s fighters murdering an entire town. He saw memories of Atlanta in ruins. He saw memories of him and Sarah mating.

Mark awoke gasping for breath. The tent he was sleeping in was dark. The air was cool and damp from the nearby sea. The surf rumbled like a distant storm in the background. Every fractured part of the dream was deeply troubling. Atlanta was going to be hit by kill zones today. He knew this with the same kind of certainty that he knew his own identity. Innocent people would die today. Alexander would attack today. He knew there was nothing he could do to prevent any of this. Kathy was sleeping next to him. He put his arms around her and pulled her close to his chest. She murmured something in her sleep. He looked up into the starry sky through an open flap of their tent. He knew he would be awake for the rest of the night. How long would this holocaust go on?

Morning light was glowing through the fabric of the tent. A fine dusting of sand had drifted in during the night. Mark picked up his head. He heard helicopters moving in their direction. The sound was definitely more than one and the racket was getting louder. He rolled out of the sleeping bag. Kathy woke looking disoriented. Mark grabbed his pants and pulled them on.

“What’s that?” mumbled Kathy.

Her eyes grew wide. Mark ran out of the tent barefoot into the sand and stopped next to Sarah who had just run out of her tent. She had a troubled expression. Out over the waves, a column of helicopters was coming right at them skimming over the water. In seconds, one was upon them. They were clearly some kind of military birds, painted grey with racks of what could be missiles hanging on each side. Before he could do anything other than stare, the first chopper had roared past. The sound was deafening. In an equally spaced column, nine more rocketed past like an airborne train. The last one peeled off, swung around in a wide circle, and then stopped in a dead hover no more than a hundred feet above the dunes. Mark shielded his face from grit being kicked up. He looked over at Sarah. She was waiving hello with one arm while the other covered her eyes. She was gambling with their lives. Suddenly, the chopper tipped forward, roared off over their heads, and was gone.

Kathy had joined Mark. Everyone in camp was staring in the direction the helicopters had disappeared. The sound of their rotors continued fading. Mark had no idea if they would be coming back. Was this an accidental discovery or had they been spotted by remote surveillance? They’d camped with the Humvees outside for the first time since fleeing Atlanta. They’d been unable to find shelter and the beach was tempting, so Mark had decided to stop for the night. They’d cooled the Humvee’s heat signatures by dragging buckets of water up from the surf and dousing the hoods. Mark wondered if camping out in the open had been a terrible mistake. Every minute that went by without the choppers returning was a good sign, but not good enough.