The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (10 page)

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“We don't know.”

“Impossible.”

“No one knows the true Source of the virus. It is distributed by emissaries, most of whom know little or nothing beyond their own strict mission. The ampoules appear to the chosen at the times appointed. It is the Overlord policy not to interfere in any way. We provide all our resources as needed only upon request, as is our legitimate duty. We are servants, not masters. We are grateful for the grace of the universe, not scheming to manipulate powers that lay beyond us.”

Helena shut her eyes against a massive wave of nausea as realization settled in her bones. Her long journey had come to an abrupt dead end. The Source was not in the Cromeus colonies. The Source was somewhere further out in the void of space, beyond her reach. She could feel death hovering near her like a bony spectre. Her body longed to cry out in pain, to release pent-up tension in a tide of cleansing remorse.

“You cannot trace the Source?” she persisted. “Triangulate and map intercept points over time?”

“We would consider such efforts to be blasphemous, Director,” Prelate Markord stated angrily. “Whatever influence we might have exerted on your personal behalf, we have frankly withdrawn since your arrival. We know why you have come, Helena, and we cannot offer you what is not ours to give.”

She jumped to her feet in response, trembling with rage. “I have come for Mother Earth,” she said. “I have come for all Eternals. The virus must be made free and accessible to everyone, or Earth will continue to fester in violence and misery. You cannot sit up here wallowing in opulent self-righteousness while mankind destroys itself. The virus can bring brotherhood and peace in place of genocide and disease. The virus can bring renewal and rebirth instead of pollution and decay. The virus offers us infinity, and you cannot hoard it to yourself any longer!” Clutching her fists, Helena glanced quickly at the other two directors, swept a haughty glare across the row of watching monitors on the back wall, and stalked away.

She turned at the door and looked back to test the surety of this strange nightmare one last time. Ian Miller stood with a sad and resolute nod as the monitors blinked off one by one. Director Smith-Beauchamp bent to confer quietly with the Prelate.

Ian Miller caught up with Helena in the main foyer of the building as she took a protein pouch from a wall dispenser with palsied hands.

“You are absolutely right, Helena,” he said.

She straightened her shoulders and brushed hair from her forehead in a pretense of dignity, but could find no voice.

“A cup of tea perhaps? There's a sitting room behind the reception desk. Perhaps we could have some further discussion.” He offered an outstretched elbow.

Helena accepted and was led to a quiet chamber, an austere lunchroom with black plexiglass tables and vinyl chairs. A small kitchen in the corner offered coffee, tea, condiments, and a microwave oven. Ian Miller busied himself boiling two cups of water while Helena squeezed grey paste onto her tongue. She needed nutrients to steady her nerves. She needed strength.

“I must apologize,” she said from across the table and began to dab her eyes with a paper napkin.

“Not at all, my dear.” Ian Miller reached inside the breast pocket of his tunic and took a tiny bag of tea from a small purse. He dropped it in his steaming cup. “Earth tea,” he said with a smile. “It cannot be replicated this side of the Doorway.” He held up another bag with a query in his eyes.

“Sounds wonderful.”

He dropped it in and stirred it with a spoon, letting the leaves steep in the heat. When the drink reached an appropriate shade, he removed the tea bag and handed her the cup. “What I tell you now, I will deny if pressed. I have sufficient resources to maintain my position despite your efforts,” he said.

Helena brought her cup to her nose and hid behind it. “I understand,” she replied. She breathed deep the gathering aroma.

“Your little speech leads me to confide in you, Helena. I agree with every word. The Overlords are too narrow-minded to survive the future. I am Eternal, you understand, but I could die at any time. An accident, an uncommon disease . . .” He took a sip of tea. “The Soul Savers offer true immortality that can never be taken away. I've been uploaded,” he said. “In fact, I backup daily so that no new experiences are ever lost in either realm. I live in two worlds now, though waking life pales in significance to the wonders of augmentation. I can afford the best domain, the best of everything. I have a mansion prepared in digital space, a safe secure home with every human comfort. It costs much less than you might expect.”

Helena made no response. She felt weary, bone weary and drained by her emotional meltdown.

“I know you will appreciate enhanced life once you've tried it, Helena. Please come with me to experience some of the common areas where visitors are allowed. We have developed technology beyond flesh and blood. The sights, the sounds, the smells—it's all there and more than you can imagine. We have artists who live inside their fantastic creations; we have poets who pursue their craft in expressions far beyond human language; we have lovers who entwine their passions unhindered by the crude limitations of biology. All aspects of human evolution find their grandest design in the worlds created by Soul Savers. We are the future of consciousness, and eternity is but a step away.”

Helena stared into a face flushed with veracity, an inner spirit brimming with confidence. Uploaded immortality? Was this her future? Was this her only open door? “It sounds too good to be true,” she said.

Ian Miller took her right hand between his cup-warmed palms. “You can live forever, Helena. Your quest has not been in vain.”

As Zakariah watched in wonder, the black walls around him shimmered and twinkled and became pure transparent glass. Layer upon layer above and below were revealed, a perfect compartmentalized cube, a planned community. Zakariah could see everything in V-space, every figure, every action, every transient program code and macrofile. Invisible zoomtubes popped into place at precise intervals like elevators in an office complex. A musical symphony overwhelmed him, the sound of a thousand watchful eyes recording, correlating, and sending data downstream to a central nexus, a harmony of balanced order, an opera choreographed by one master.

On Earth the V-net had an organic functionality—it had holes, loopholes, empty places that no one bothered to code because they weren't needed yet. No programmer ever coded in a vacuum for the sheer joy of working, and why create a city in such precise cubist proportions?

The entire network was a chimera, a fraud. This V-space was an artificial construct, a trap. Worse yet, it was a means to an end, completely manipulated from above for some ultimate purpose, one order of magnitude removed, one leap of faith higher. He should have guessed. The perfect symmetry of the architecture. The difficulties he encountered programming alterations. The system was never designed to be free. It was a prison of the imagination. It resisted change by its very nature, and Zakariah knew he could never cooperate with the architect of such a system. He wanted risk and reward. He wanted piracy and punishment. He needed hope.

The Source. What about the Source?

Remembering his true mission, Zakariah roused himself to action. All the extant data lay before him, and the promised master key had been dropped into his lap. This was the smuggler's buried treasure, the chance of his lifetime. A new exhilaration gripped him as he dove for the nearest zoomtube and dropped to the data hub like an eel in oil. He quickly programmed search routines and rolled them out like fighter planes into the ether. They travelled east and west across an alien V-space, back and forth, inside and out, mapping the breadth and height of the Cromeus colonies in search of the Source—every reference, every nuance, every possible target.

They came up empty.

No cultivation labs. No power hungry marketers. No alien miracles.

Zakariah shivered.

There was no Source, not anywhere in this blighted solar system.

All the data hits led to the Overlords, an administrative collective of elder Eternals, but on close study it became apparent that they wielded no control, no critical initiative. They were hapless servants at best, pawns in a game they could barely imagine. Zakariah blanked out his subroutines in anger. Had he come this far to be turned back empty handed? Where was the Source? Does a virus appear out of thin air, out of the vacuum of space? Impossible.

Spent of all energy, Zakariah drifted back toward the home pathway to exit V-space at his appointed terminal, thinking about eternity, thinking about his family and the fabric of life. His crusade was over. He had risked everything and lost.

He met himself coming back. A five-foot-ten female Caucasian.

“You betrayed me, you disgusting bag of filth!”

“Helena, nice to see you, too. Don't come any closer. We can't operate twin avatars in the same place without feedback problems. You'll crash the system.”

“Don't get technical with me, you traitor. We had an agreement.”

Quickly Zakariah threw up an encryption screen like red velvet draperies around them, but he wasn't sure how long it might hold inside this glass menagerie.

“Don't worry. No one can trace anything directly to us,” he said.

“How could you be so self-centred and careless? You've caused political, economic, and social chaos on this planet, and you've ruined whatever chance we had to negotiate with the Overlords and ultimately obtain an activated sample of the virus. You've compromised the whole mission!” Helena's image was stroboscopic with emotion, flashing with rainbow hues of colour and interspersed with static interference—a pulsating discharge of psychic energy. “We've come a long way together, but I am not going to take the blame for your treachery.”

“No one can trace anything directly to us,” Zakariah repeated, edging away from a gathering buzz of dissonance. Helena was getting dangerously close.

“How did you do it? The Macpherson Doorway is so small and so carefully guarded. How did you manage to drive a truckload of hardware through in broad daylight?”

“Your image is breaking up. Are you sure you're in a secure booth?”

“Don't play coy with me, you traitor. I'll wring it out of you in person if I have to.”

Zakariah sighed. “I had a few trinkets sewn in the lining of my jacket. That's all.” He spread his hands theatrically in a faint hope of peace.

“But how could you have known about the assassination attempt? How could you have known the medics would send you through without a standard security scan?”

“Everything was under control.”

Helena stood frozen for a moment like a marionette with hanging jaw and bulging white eyes, her arms akimbo. “You hired someone to assassinate me!”

“No, no, Helena. Calm down.” Zakariah threw another encryption screen around them, a deep purple, fluffy blanket of silence.

“Calm down? I could have been killed!”

“Helena, a professional assassin never misses his mark,” Zakariah said, feeling an echo of pain in his shoulder as he spoke the words. “I was the target all along.”

Helena's image blinked out and returned more solid, darker, her face an ugly mask of outrage. “You poor, misguided, devious soul,” she said. “I want you out of my brain the moment we get back to Earth. You're fired, and you are going to jail forever!”

“No one can trace anything directly to us, Helena. I keep trying to tell you.”

“I don't care!” she screamed. She reached up behind her left ear and yanked her V-net cable from its socket.

Zakariah could feel the agony of her system crash inside his own head, a toxic flash of pain as his twin avatar severed the connection. They were wired as one, and he had betrayed her.

“I'm sorry,” he said to the deep purple darkness as his quest for the Source finally crumbled around him. He had failed his only son.

The baby, little Rix, lay balanced in the palm of his hand, so small, so helpless, insignificant to the universe, but more precious to him than all the chips on Main Street. Born five weeks premature and struggling for every breath, little Rix had broken every heartstring in a tired and desperate field runner. Zakariah had sworn to God that he would not watch his own son die, nor would he abandon his flesh and blood as his own father had done. On the altar of his soul, he had promised Rix the best medical care, the finest education, and the virus that would give him eternal life, the virus that Zakariah carried but could not transmit to his own dear son. Not by blood, not by tears, not with money or influence or power. How often had this promise come back to haunt Zakariah over the long years? How often had the cry of a baby called him back to the altar that now defined his existence? If a man makes a pledge and does not keep it, what is there left of a man inside him?

Back in realtime, back in the hospital ward beside his jury-rigged jackbox, Zakariah stared at a blank wall and tasted absolute defeat for the first time in his life. But in the core of manifold bitterness he found a scent of honey, a cathartic epiphany of cleansing, to let his purpose go, to finally let fate have its bumbling way.

He showered leisurely and shaved off his beard and checked himself out of New Jerusalem Central West on a temporary pass. At the nearest restaurant he was able to obtain credit in the Director's name. He ordered the most expensive item on the menu, a prime rib garnished with orange vegetables that seemed to be a hybrid cross between carrots and potatoes. His left arm was still in a sling, but the young waitress was kind enough to cut his meat for him and speak at some length. She explained in detail the foodstuffs and spices that had been used to prepare his meal and told him the roast was beef, from a genuine cow grown in a sealed terrarium, but it tasted gamey to Zakariah, with an acrid, lingering tang.