Immortality (79 page)

Mark didn’t know what to say. After a few minutes, Sarah got up quietly and headed back into the garage. She wasn’t carrying a light. She slowly faded into the maw-like darkness of the entrance. Mark remained behind with a blackness growing inside him. He’d had the same fears as Sarah. The thought was inescapable for anyone with an ounce of introspection. Would killing them and others like them stop the plague? Self-doubt was a cancer that could never be put back in the bottle, once poured out.

Mark awoke as sunlight crept into the garage. Kathy, Sarah, and Carl were sleeping in their seats. Mark quietly got out of the Humvee. He saw a few people milling about and smelled breakfast cooking on portable stoves. His world looked as right as it could, under these conditions.

He doubled over in pain. His head suddenly felt like it was being clamped in a vice. Spots floated in his vision. His skin broke out in a sweat. He tried to moan but was unable to make a sound. He pulled himself up using the door handle of the Humvee. Staring through the glass, he saw Sarah curled in a ball and quaking as if she were sobbing. His forehead was pressed against the glass. The coolness helped a small amount, but then it came on harder. The pain! Between flashes of agony, he perceived what was happening. The military had lived up to their threat. Awesome explosions were lancing the super colony with radiation. He could not see or hear the detonations. Everything appeared black, except for waves of pressure and energy bursts, which triggered random memory dumps, flashbacks from the core of the god-machine. In ways which he didn’t fully understand, he knew the nuclear weapons were detonating high above the super colony. From the explosions came focused waves of electromagnetic energy which slammed downward into the heart of the god-machine. The colony was not being blown apart; its nanotech circuitry was being fried. Mark was convinced the world was ending. A shudder passed through him which sapped his strength. He saw Carl and Kathy flinch in their sleep. He heard a sharp gasp of surprise from people in the camp who were awake. Around the world, everyone had felt it die.

The silence was the world holding its breath. Mark felt his heart beating in his chest. His head was clear when it shouldn’t be. He was still alive. He took an experimental deep breath. The pain had vanished as quickly as it had hit him. His body was soaked in sweat. He looked inside the Humvee. Sarah appeared confused. She slowly glanced in one direction, then another as if looking for something that was missing. Kathy was stretching as she woke up. She clearly had no idea what had happened. Mark dug a portable radio out of a storage box.

“They’ve attacked it,” said Mark.

“Attacked what?” said Kathy. “Us?”

Mark had left the radio tuned to a shortwave news channel. He turned it on and played with the antenna until the station cleared up. A reporter was talking excitedly. Mark had caught the middle of a news bulletin. He turned up the volume.

…
electromagnetic pulse, EMP nuclear weapons were used in a first wave of torpedo attacks. EMP nuclear weapons launched from Air Force bombers were used in an almost simultaneous second wave. The United States Navy and Air Force have confirmed the complete destruction of what they are calling a nanotech core. The attack was carried out by Navy Fast Attack Submarines at…”

People were cheering… People were hugging and kissing each other. Kathy threw her arms around Mark and kissed him. A few people leaned on their horns; then others. The garage was a New Year’s Eve chaos of noise.

Other than normal residue from the pain and memory flashbacks which had vanished a moment ago, Mark didn’t feel any different. Something was wrong. He still felt the presence of the god-machine. Maybe it was like the phantom limb syndrome which caused amputees to continue to feel their lost appendage? Sarah came out the Humvee and stood in front of Mark. They both looked at each other and said it at the same time.

“It’s still here.”

“It can’t be,” said Kathy. “The military reported that entire chunk of the ocean was vaporized.”

Mark opened the thought-interface with a question. The answer came back in a flood of information and pain. When it had passed, he looked up.

“There’s more than one super colony,” said Mark. “The entire planet is riddled with them, ensured preservation through redundancy. The super colony is only hardware; the god-machine is an intelligence which inhabits the hardware. It’s like trying to kill a ghost. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”

“Will it punish the military or will it blame us all?” asked Kathy.

Confusion was replacing joy as more people stopped to see what was wrong. The garage was growing silent.

“I don’t think it has emotions,” said Mark. “It won’t punish, but it may accelerate its existing plans to eliminate any threat of additional attacks.”

“We need to go,” said Sarah. “We need to go now! It’s going to respond everywhere all at once. Every city, every town, every hole in the wall that has been hit before is going to be hit again.”

Mark knew they had to be mobile and ready to evade any potential kill zone before it developed. His decision to break camp was quickly relayed. People began shoving unpacked equipment into their Humvees. Kathy looked shell-shocked. The emotional rollercoaster was affecting everyone. Sarah was angry. Mark’s heart was pounding. His face felt hot. The politicians and military had not even come close to saving the world. At best they’d accomplished nothing. At worst they’d just thrown rocks at a hornet’s nest.

Mark drove the lead Humvee onto the street and turned down the same road they’d taken into Odessa. He’d decided to leave the plan from the previous day unchanged. They were heading toward El Paso, and from there a possible safe zone in either Mexico or Arizona. He could visualize the entire roadmap in his mind and pick out details he’d never noticed before. His memory was developing photographic recall. To avoid all prior kill zones sites, they would be driving out of their way down small two-lane highways that passed through mostly unpopulated desert. They would skirt around Carlsbad, New Mexico and Alamogordo, New Mexico, before turning south on US54 which would lead into El Paso. Near the halfway point of the trip, they would be passing close to the place where the first atomic bomb was detonated. The test site was codenamed Trinity and was now ironically probably one of the safer places on the planet because people never congregated there for very long.

The day was unusually warm for January in the Southwest. The Humvees had no air conditioning, but good heating. The windows were partially rolled down to draw in fresh air. They were traveling at the recommended ‘long distance’ speed of fifty-five miles per hour. The military Humvee’s speedometer ended at sixty. The manual indicated a maximum speed of eighty-three miles per hour could be maintained for short periods of time. The column of vehicles was soon kicking up a sizable trail of dust, which was not a problem for those in the lead; but Mark knew people in vehicles farther back had to be suffering. The rural highway they were on was covered with a layer of sand blown over it. Without steady traffic, the roadbed would soon be reclaimed by scrub brush and sand. They were driving down a highway that was in the act of vanishing.

After an hour of driving, Mark began to sense small kill zones hitting in remote locations and had to pull over to let someone else drive. The god-machine response had begun. A sudden escalation left him dizzy. The last thing he remembered was collapsing as he tried to climb down out of the driver-side door.

Mark felt groggy and sore. Dry air was buffeting his face. He didn’t remember getting into the backseat. With his fingers, he felt around a bandaged cut on his forehead. He knew the number of kill zones was so overwhelming that it had finally caused a numbing effect that had left him detached. The growing slaughter was too much to absorb at once and so the interface to his mind was thankfully now accepting none of the remote perceptions. He sensed the attack was ongoing only from a dull ache and a widening feeling of loss. Sarah was experiencing the carnage with unrelenting intensity. Mark knew it was because of her enhanced empathic wiring that she was able to absorb the higher volume of remote perceptions. Occasionally, she would softly moan as if in a dream. Her eyes remained tightly sealed.

“There’s nothing we can do for her,” said Mark. “How long was I gone?”

“About two hours,” said Kathy.

They skirted Carlsbad without spotting a sign of life, other than jets flying in figure eights high above the clouds and a few newly wrecked cars. Sarah had lapsed into sleep after the kill zones had subsided. Mark soon felt well enough to assume his share of the driving. In a little more than an hour they would be passing the town of Alamogordo, the turn off for the Trinity site. Kathy was working with the portable radio to see if she could get any information. They’d lost all the radio stations over an hour ago at the height of the attack in the middle of an emergency broadcast. So far, all she’d found was static and a country music station that came and went. The station had been playing the same CD over and over for as long as they’d been receiving it. Mark suspected the same CD would be playing until the electricity went out forever.

The caravan had stopped on the outskirts of El Paso the prior night. There were no signs of human life, just the stillness of a vast graveyard. Everyone needed time to rest and come to grips with the extent of what had happened. Many believed that doomsday had come and civilization was gone; others were in denial. El Paso was a quiet place to stop, though any city in the world might now have been just as quiet.

Mark had found a six story parking structure that provided good aerial cover when parked inside. He wasn’t sure they needed to hide anymore. Sarah had physically recovered before they’d reached El Paso, though her eyes now had a permanently haunted look. After arriving last night, she had tried repeatedly to reach inside Alexander’s mind and found nothing coherent. She didn’t think he was dead, but something was no longer mentally the same. Mark wondered if he’d been injured in an accident caused by one of the kill zones.

The late afternoon sun felt strong, radiating down through the cloudless sky. Mark was on the roof of the parking structure. They were at an elevation of several thousand feet. In the distance to the west were dusty reddish-tan mountains with endless valleys of sand and scrub between them; in the other direction was a vast urban landscape.

This morning they had run a wire antenna between a pair of corner posts on the roof and then plugged it into a portable shortwave set. Throughout the day, the radio had been manned and had emitted an entire range of sounds, but none of them were human. They were cut off from the world. No one had any idea of the breadth of the destruction.

The top of the parking structure was a perfect spot for lookouts. From this vantage point, they could look down into larger areas of the city. Binoculars had been issued to everyone on the roof. Any sign of life was to be immediately reported. Mark was scanning the streets with his pair of binoculars. He’d seen so much death over the past months, he should have been used to it by now; but each time he stopped moving the binoculars and focused on the lost people, his heart died a little more. He looked up from his binoculars and saw the figure eight contrails in the sky were still there. The heads of government were still alive in their aerial sanctuaries. The same was not true for their constituents, who were decaying in their homes and cars.

Mark knew there had to be other survivors. His group had survived, and there were still vast areas that had been untouched by kill zones and would never feel their horrific pain. The god-machine’s war map was projected in front of him by an
assist
. The diagrams of destruction were superimposed transparently over his vision of the streets and buildings of El Paso. The god-machine had gone through the entire remaining extinction strategy, which had weeks or even months left, and had completed it in a few hours. As far as Mark could tell, the end of the program had been reached at late afternoon the prior day. The machine-driven extinction was over. He felt like he was barely holding on to his own sanity as he wondered how much of mankind was left: fifty percent? One percent? There was no way for anyone to know. All the cities were dead; he had little doubt of that, but much of the deep rural areas had been left untouched.

“I’ve got something!” yelled one of the lookouts.

Mark ran over the northeastern edge of the parking structure. The man pointed to an almost invisible column of dust rising in the air about thirty miles away.

“It’s vehicles coming toward us,” said another lookout.

Mark focused his binoculars. Something was definitely stirring up that cloud of dust and it was moving fast. The vehicles were too far off to see anything more than an enormous billow rising out of a tiny pinpoint. It would take an army to kick up enough dust to be seen from this distance.

“I think you’re right,” said Mark. “It looks like they’re coming down US54 same as we did.”

“I was right!” shouted the lookout who’d first spotted the dust cloud. “We’re not alone.”

Mark brought the binoculars back up to his eyes. Something troubled him. This didn’t feel right. They were coming down the same route he’d used, the exact same route. Last night, he’d taken a rural highway into El Paso. Why would a convoy of that size be on a road that was such a poor route for trucks? He was beginning to breathe rapidly. Who was this? He tried to focus his eyes to draw out more detail. Involuntarily, something inside him tuned in and he was immediately flooded with the perceptions of a man in the lead vehicle. Mark knew this mental landscape; it was Alexander! He became Alexander. He could feel the soldier sensing his victory as he was bearing down on the Traitors. He had Humvees with heavy weapons and Armored Personnel Carriers, with even heavier weapons. He would annihilate them. He believed a Traitor was seeing through his eyes at this very moment; and was for the first time pleased that an invader with inside his head. He was sending a message to whoever was sneaking around in the back of his brain. His ploy had worked. He’d taken drugs to dull himself so the spies would not be able to use his own senses against him.