Messiah (49 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Messiah
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Angel shrugged. “Didn’t close
me
up. I’m here specifically for you. I was just another memory, before you stepped in here.”
“Not my memory.”
“No, not
your
memory. Answer my question.”
“Answer mine.”
“Two-thousand-three-hundred-and-sixty-four.” Angel folded her arms and said, “It’s time, Nickolai.”
He shook his head, knowing that there was little chance his concept of God would ever sync with creatures that had existed for aeons before the creators of his species had even evolved. His understanding of the divine was at odds with Brother Lazarus, and the canid monk was a contemporary of his, and when compared with the spans of time involved, practically the same person.
But all he had left was his faith.
“God is the creator,” he said quietly. “He is the first cause. When I look out at the universe, the width and breadth of it, and ask the void if there is a purpose to my existence, God is the only answer I receive. God is the name I give to my morality, the source of the first principles I use to define right and wrong. God is the wall around the universe that reason cannot penetrate. God is the unprovable truth. God is the reason I am here.”
He stared at Angel and waited for the Dolbrian avatar to declare him unworthy.
Instead, she unfolded her arms and gently clapped. “Kit, that was pretty damn good.”
“I passed your test?”
Angel shrugged, “Well, you didn’t fail. Kind of the same thing.”
“The Dolbrians see God—”
“Oh, crap, Kit. Don’t go there. You wouldn’t understand. Just accept that you’re close enough.”
The small light that illuminated the two of them winked out, and for a moment Nickolai stood in complete darkness. Then, like the transitions into his visions, he was standing somewhere else.
A light wind rippled his fur, cold and smelling like the depths of the earth. He stood on a pentagonal platform suspended in a vast space. He couldn’t see walls, ceiling, or floor in the darkness. What he could see of his immediate surroundings were illuminated by brightly glowing script tightly wrapping the pillar that pierced the center of the platform he stood upon.
The Dolbrian text scrolled upward, and he realized that the platform was descending into the darkness.
Angel still stood next to him.
“Another vision?” he asked her.
“Not the way you mean,” she said.
“What you showed me earlier, the scientists, the battle, St. Rajasthan . . .”
“Your one-time lover?”
“Were they real?”
“As real as I am, Kit. But again, not in the sense you mean. My boss has a long and exact memory, and can bring out avatars like me to play things out for you.”
“So you’re some AI construct?”
“Again, not in the sense you mean. Creating something with true independent agency for something like this would be morally questionable.”
“What are you, then?”
“A mask for my boss. A means to communicate.”
“Who is your boss, then? Who am I talking to?”
Angel pointed over the edge of the platform and said, “The Hub, Kit.”
He turned and sucked in a breath. Suspended below them, the Dolbrian script spilled across the face of the darkness, it twisted and spiraled below them, whorls wrapping around themselves as if he looked upon a galaxy from another dimension. As they descended, he saw depth to the writing, the lines of alien text spilling downward invisibly far, and spreading outward in all directions.
And the writing moved. It pulsed and twisted. Waves and ripples crested its surface like waves upon the ocean. And the more he stared at it, the farther he saw. Suddenly, the vastness of it all began sinking in as he descended.
“We’re not under the surface of Bakunin anymore, are we?”
“
‘Within’
the planet might be more accurate. I think ‘beyond’ might work, too.”
Nickolai looked up from the swirling universe of Dolbrian writing, and saw that thousands, millions, of similar pillars shot up from the infinite sea of light below him. Pillars like the one he rode downward upon, themselves wrapped in glowing script and vanishing upward into the darkness above.
“And those are . . .”
“The other Hubs. Every planet they built, all are tied to the same . . . ‘network’ you’d probably call it.” She waved a hand out at the light. “The Dolbrians weren’t a single race, one species. They were, they are, millions of races, species, trillions of individuals, all contributing to building this consciousness.”
“Why?”
“To come closer to understanding what you call God.”
Nickolai was silent for a long time as they continued to descend. Finally, he asked, “Why did so many Proteans fail to reach this point?”
“They saw good and evil as clear as you. Problem is they couldn’t ask
why
. It all boiled down to, ‘because someone said so.’
This
is too damn powerful to trust to a creature who can’t explain an external source for their moral compass.” She looked up at him. “If you get to define good and evil all by your lonesome, the definition is arbitrary and you’ll go ahead and move the goalposts whenever it’s convenient. Just look at Adam.”
“You know I came here to fight him?”
She pointed down at the swirling light. “My boss does.”
Nickolai looked down into the maelstrom of light. They had almost reached the knot of light at the base of their pillar. “Will I be able to?”
Angel smiled and laughed. She patted his arm and said, “Kit, you have no fucking idea.”
Date: 2526.8.13 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
The first fireball crashed into the heart of the tower complex that formed the center of Proudhon. The light from it turned the towers of the PSDC black before the buildings began to fold inward against the swirling light erupting from the impact site.
The other fireballs slammed into the ground to the east and west, in line with the one buried in Proudhon’s heart. One burrowed into the abandoned graveyard that had been Mosasa Salvage, where acres of dead and half-dead aircraft began spilling into a swirling amorphous maw. The other slammed into the eastern desert, a pillar of fire burning before the would-be pharaohs of Bakunin.
The forces of the Eastern Division of the Proudhon Defense Corporation began unloading everything they had against the invaders. Because the vast portion of their forces were arrayed between Proudhon and the western mountains—guarding against a more conventional attack from more conventional forces—the bulk of their arsenal rained down upon the glowing vortex of Mosasa Salvage.
They understood the principle,
as much energy in as small a space as possible
. Lasers and plasma cannons superheated the air between the front line and Adam’s vortex. The first missiles vanished into the swirling light, deconstructed without effect. However, the commanders compensated quickly, altering the timing of the fuses, and the second volley detonated before actually touching the swirling light.
A new sun rose in the west as antimatter bombs and more conventional nuclear weapons saturated a few square kilometers of ground, scouring the desert down to the bedrock, leaving a desolate, and lethally radioactive, crater of purple glass in their wake.
Within the city of Proudhon, the forces of the PDC were not as densely packed or heavily armed. Fighters streaked by the swirling mass framed by the twisting skyscrapers of the PSDC, but their bombs were not delivered closely or quickly enough to deter Adam’s hand moving on the face of the city. Their missiles, and the fighters themselves, were torn free of the sky by whipping tendrils of light.
One of the in-folding towers of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Company was hit by a tac-nuke that detonated before Adam’s hand could touch it. Light and heat broke upon Adam’s presence like a wave, rippling his mass like a stone thrown into a pond. The effect on the surrounding city was much more drastic. Windows blew in as the closest towers imploded and collapsed, a firestorm erupted in the central city, the smoke and toxic gases from the flashover spilling upward to form the rolling underside of a hellish cloud, a crippled twin to the one forming to the west.
The blast broke around a hemisphere cloaking one of the many concourses to the south. Within the hemisphere, a woman’s voice quietly spoke.
“
My turn.
”
Within her, she only had one mind, one source for control, not the small legion she had taken embedded in the doomed dropship. Still, she had been bequeathed much of the knowledge of Proteus upon her conversion. That knowledge maintained the shield that protected her and her still human twin self. That knowledge also spread to her extended body, crystalline forms that grew where she had stepped within the sublevels of Proudhon, and the concourse below her.
Within the tunnels under Proudhon, Toni’s self consumed ferrocrete, steel, and the earth itself, pushing its probes deeper under the firestorm that was Proudhon. The probes sped toward the center of the city as fast as the matter around them could be consumed.
She did not make Stefan’s mistake of imperfectly reproducing herself. She knew she was not skilled enough to create anything completely autonomous. Instead, when black pillars shot up out of the burning wreckage of central Proudhon, they were as much her as the arms on the body standing on top of the concourse.
Adam’s swirling hive was surrounded by Toni’s skyscraper-tall fingers. The light struck out at them, extending itself to attack one of the black pillars, and four more of Toni’s fingers shot up, impaling the probe, so its light turned gray and it lost its form, its outline disintegrating into the smoke and ash billowing up from the city below.
“
I got your attention, fucker!
”
But even as she defeated the single probe, the glowing mass sent out, at once, hundreds more. Even with a mind unrestricted by the limits of a fleshy brain, she was still only one mind versus thousands. She could not meet
every
threat everywhere.
Around the center of Proudhon, the grappling forces moved fast enough to be a blur. First black, then gray, then pulsing white as Toni’s presence was painfully disassembled by the more powerful and numerous disciples of Adam.
On top of the concourse, beneath the shield, Toni’s body dripped sweat and hyperventilated. She nearly collapsed to her knees, stopped only when her other self, her still human self, grabbed her shoulders and said, “Are you all right?”
Around them, the defensive shield flickered as Toni’s mental energies began to fade in the face of the onslaught. Even so, she still managed a grim smile.
“
Suckers,
” she whispered as her frontal attack on Adam disintegrated.
She refocused all her attention on the shield as she withdrew her extended body away from thirty deeply buried power cores underneath central Proudhon. While she spent her energy attacking Adam’s manifestation, part of her probing self had consumed and replaced the shielding bottling up the antimatter generators that had powered most of the city for a century. The devices were heavily shielded and protected by permanent superconducting magnets that held their volatile power source safe.
But meter by meter, Toni’s self quickly withdrew, opening wide holes in the fifty layers of shielding between the surface and the naked cores, a kilometer down below the site of the PSDC’s now-absent central towers. For a fraction of a second, there were thirty wormlike tunnels extending from Adam’s light-filled body down to the superconducting heart containing the antimatter cores of the power plants.
Then the superconductors disintegrated at Toni’s touch, and the magnetic bottle—intended to be stable for centuries—failed.
Beneath Adam, thirty power plants became thirty directed antimatter charges as their hearts became pure radiation streaming up through the holes drilled in their shielding. Toni’s black skyscraper-fingers were replaced by thirty fingers of sterilizing white light so bright that atoms within the atmosphere fused at their touch, releasing a secondary nuclear blast that leveled much of the still burning city.
The blast washed against the shield, and Toni II looked up from her collapsing twin to the fading pillar of light that now consumed the center of Proudhon.
The light gave way to fire and smoke, and Adam no longer writhed within. The shield around them faded, letting in the smell of the burning city. “I don’t believe it,” she whispered to the now-unconscious Toni. “You beat him.”
Toni II looked up, eyes watering, as the wind tore at the smoking haze. Something glowed to the East.
She stared it as it took on a vaguely humanoid form, standing at the eastern edge of Proudhon. The ground resonated with the volume of its voice.
“You shall not defy your coming salvation. It is time for all to choose.”
Toni II stared at the smoke-wrapped apparition and whispered, “Oh,
hell,
no.”

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