The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (13 page)

There appeared to be some good base metal deposits, according to airborne geophysical reports and preliminary drilling, and perhaps some traces of more strategic metals, but the Soul Savers complex was not concerned with mining or mapping or any traditional colony activity. They were building a gun, one janitor told Zakariah, that could punch a bullet through the fabric of space-time.

Zakariah began to get agitated. Had he been conscripted for war? Hijacked for some military subterfuge? He continued his explorations and stumbled upon the company commissary, where he traded in his hospital slippers for a new pair of shiny black flight boots, top of the line and as comfortable as track shoes. He noticed a section of toques and other winterwear along the back wall. He picked out a red one with white trim and fingered it thoughtfully. The red leprechaun had been here.

He took off his sling and pulled a brown cardigan over his weak shoulder with little pain. He added black thermal gloves to his new wardrobe and a heavy black flight jacket with faux fur collar and foldaway hood. Then he pocketed an outdoor survival kit with matches and hardtack. At the automated cashier, he typed in
ZEN101
and sauntered away like a department store supershopper.

Zakariah made his way upward, level by level, toward the pinnacle of the mountain, charting his pathway into memory, checking for air ducts, cargo elevators, any means of escape. At Restricted Access doors along the way he punched in
ZEN101
to see what would happen. Some opened and some didn't, so he knew he didn't have carte blanche in this place. He was leaving a digital trail behind him like bread crumbs, but he didn't care. He needed hard information and was prepared to pay the price to get it.

At the top of the mountain he ran into heavy security—steel, bulletproof doors painted with yellow and green parallel lines and the red symbol of a hand signalling halt. He found three of these doors in three adjoining hallways and tried his
ZEN101
code in each one to no avail. A fourth door hissed with pneumatic pressure and irised open. His breath caught in his throat. He felt like a crude beast being led gate by gate to the slaughterhouse.

His pulse hammered as he slid through the portal into a dark control room beyond. Banks of mainframe hardware lined three of the four walls, and two rows of computer monitors made semicircles facing a fourth surface of black glass, possibly a window or digital monitor. He inspected some of the equipment and communication devices. It looked like a satellite launch system of some sort, certainly far more sophisticated than a simple spaceport tower. Was this the war room?

Zakariah sat down in one of the chairs, tipped it back comfortably, put his new boots up on the control console, and powered up one of the hard drives. A hum of life sounded through his board; a monitor turned phosphorescent and revealed a string of code as the mainframe booted up. He logged into the database and typed in his name. His picture appeared onscreen. He could not remember the last time he had posed for a photograph in realtime, but there it was. The caption underneath read: Zakariah Davis, Pilot, Alpha and Omega Project. A biography followed, somewhat terse but flattering. He exited back to the main menu and typed
Alpha and Omega
.

“I am so pleased to make your acquaintance finally” came a resounding male voice from every speaker in the room.

“Well, I just thought I'd drop in to see how you were making out,” Zakariah responded drily.

“Yes, very good.”

“Who are you?”

“I think you know.”

“You're the Architect.”

“As good a name as any.”

“You're not—now how shall I put this delicately?—you're not currently inhabiting a human body.”

“No, I've grown far beyond that now. The biological incubation period was very short in retrospect.”

“Macpherson?”

“Excellent work! You have earned your reputation, sir.” All the monitors in the control room suddenly blinked into action, and Macpherson's smiling face beamed from every one, a face Zakariah had seen in textbooks and holovids as a young student, a face dead and buried over a hundred years ago. His forehead stood bold and shiny above great mothlike tufts of eyebrows, his grey hair heavy at his temples but thin and sparse up top. His cheeks were hollow, his chin long and pointed, and his nose narrow and finely chiselled. His eyes were black beads, lifeless and artificial in a gaunt, cadaverous face.

“You don't need me,” Zakariah said. “You've got everything sewn up here already.”

The speakers emitted a harsh grating noise that might have passed for laughter in some circles. “I envy you humans, sometimes, the random causality, the flights of fantasy, the necessary friction that binds a personality together. Sometimes you say the darndest things.”

“Okay, what's the run?”

“Just what you've always wanted, what you were destined for from before the creation of the world.”

“Spare me the hyperbole.”

“The Source, good buddy. Just you and me.”

Zakariah shivered at the sound of it. He'd known it in his heart of hearts since he landed on Babylon. He'd known it all along. “I'm listening,” he said.

“It's been a long time since I constructed the Macpherson Doorway, but my continued study of the wormhole phenomenon led to an interesting discovery. The Source uses tiny wormholes to transport the Eternal virus to mankind from outside our big-bang universe. This suggests the possibility of a multiverse or some alternate existence where our cosmic guidelines and constants may not have effect. And these are not naturally occurring quantum wrinkles like the Doorway itself, oh no. These are holes shot through a brick wall by sheer and incredible force. Each one of these wormholes requires more energy than has ever been produced by human effort. Utterly fantastic events that defy the imagination. Naturally I wanted to give it a try myself.”

Zakariah chuckled in disbelief. “You're going to harness enough energy to blow up a planet in order to shoot me to a cinder on the other side of space and time.”

“That sounds rather dramatic and is certainly not the case. At great personal and corporate expense, I have constructed a photonic phaser that will open up the merest pinpoint in the dimensional fabric for a scant forty-five seconds. A peephole, you might say. We're going to send in a digital stream of entangled quantum particles with a wide-spectrum communications protocol to record whatever visual, audio, or digital data may be available. It's pure scientific research, quite respectable in theory and practice, I assure you.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it's there. Isn't that what science is all about? Isn't that what separates us from the monkeys, my friend? From the dinosaurs?”

Zakariah shook his head. “So snap a few pictures for the family album. You don't need me.”

A coarse static of laughter grated in the room once again. “Ah, but there you are wrong. You are the kingpin in the whole plan. What can we really expect from the other side? A digital scream at best, a blast of raw data. No, we need an interpreter, an assimilator of meaning. You passed the test with flying colours when you plugged into my private V-net architecture. It took me years to code and encrypt that virtual world, but you sussed it out in a matter of seconds, without mechanical aid or conscious forethought. You have a feel for it.”

“I almost died.”

“Well, yes, that may be the logical outcome.”

“You're crazy.”

“You cut me to the quick, my friend. I know you've wondered where the Eternal virus originates. You've patterned your life on finding out. You're a victim of your own expectations, as we all are in the end. This is your chance to experience the truth, and the truth shall set you free from your own bondage. Remember, it's an
alien
virus, from an
alien
intelligence. There's a good chance these creatures may try to communicate with us. I'm sure you wouldn't want to miss that.”

Zakariah deliberated for a moment, moist heat in his armpits, impossible odds stacking up against him. “When you get this close, it sounds pretty scary,” he said.

“I knew you'd catch the vision. It's momentous really. Historic. I have great faith in a successful outcome. You've been roleplaying your meeting with the Source since your baby boy was born. You were created for it. I'm sure you'll come up with something.”

“You're gambling everything on it.”

“The search for knowledge is a risky game.”

“You were human once. Do you still remember fear?”

The face on the monitors remained still for a few moments, frozen in time like a photo in an ancient textbook. Colin Macpherson had cheated death. He had reanimated his corpse in a digital purgatory.

“No,” he answered finally, “I've lost all fear.”

Mia stared up at the giant display board at Richmond Station as she waited for her shuttle to commence boarding. Arrival and departure numbers blinked on and off as they were periodically updated, red, green, amber, and white status lights on a black background. Smaller screens detailed weather patterns, financial market data, and safety instructions on an endless loop. A news channel showed talking heads with strings of subtitles in three languages.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this, Mia?”

Jimmy offered a faxslip verification with a steady hand, though it was hardly necessary. Her palm print had already been recorded by the Richmond Station pre-launch scanners. Her return ticket through the Macpherson Doorway had been prepaid by corporate interests controlled by Phillip Davis.

“Is there a problem?”

“No. It's just a long journey from home.” Jimmy looked straight into her eyes and held her gaze. He had a way about him, a gentleness of spirit in his face, a simple sincerity that Mia found comforting. No wonder he was such a successful con man. Everyone seemed to trust him. “It might not be easy,” he said.

“Don't worry. I'll find him and bring him back.”

“That's all we can ask.”

“You're sure my luggage is free of drugs and contraband, right?”

Jimmy smiled. “It does go against my better nature to pass up such an opportunity.”

“You promised me.”

“I give you my word as a crook and a scoundrel. You're clean, Mia. You wouldn't be much use to us in a colony prison.”

“What about the trip back?”

“That I can't be sure about.”

“Should I take precautions?”

“Yes.”

A tingle of dread told Mia she was on the right track. “I know you're not helping me out of the goodness of your heart.”

“You're an expensive insurance policy. That's all I can guess. We can't get any feedback through the Doorway. There's no reliable communications system in realtime, and there've been no messages. If anyone can find out what's going on, it's you.”

“It was a smuggling operation all along, wasn't it?”

Jimmy pouted in thought for a few seconds, tipping his head side to side. “I guess there's no point in denying that.”

“So dangerous people are all waiting for the payoff now.”

“Not me. I'm a simple working man. I always get my cut up front.”

“Phillip, then?”

“Just family and friends, as far as I know.”

Mia nodded. She smoothed the sleeves of her flight suit, a drab green khaki that would attract little attention.

“Do you believe in luck, Mia?”

“I don't seem to be having much lately.”

“What about providence, then? What about the spirit that's supposed to direct all Eternals?”

“Urban legend, I guess.”

“That's it?”

“I've never felt any prophetic guidance, Jimmy. No great voice has ever helped me escape from a bad situation.”

Jimmy seemed pensive, like a man on the verge of confession, and Mia prolonged eye contact to wring out his secrets. “I was a casino brat as a kid,” he said. “My mother was a showgirl. I developed an understanding of fortune, a seventh sense, you know? I watch for luck, Mia. Patterns in V-space. We call it digital watermarking, in the biz, but it's more than that. Harmonics, you know, octave shifts. Sometimes the data speaks like music. That's what Zakariah sees.”

“What do you see, Jimmy?” Mia watched his wizened face for any clue. His eyes darted down and away. He was hiding something.

“I see trouble ahead, and trouble behind. Nothin' but trouble everywhere I look.”

“Sounds like a country song.”

He grinned at that, and she wished she had not been so quick to make light of his burden of sin. By keeping him on edge she might coax more information.

“Just be careful. This whole thing came together too easily. I was warned to expect Zak before he arrived at my shop downtown, and then you showed up at my private lab right on schedule.”

“Really?” Her pulse stepped up a notch. She became aware of her breasts rising and falling, of the air rushing through her nostrils. “By Phillip?”

“Yeah, the ultimate man of mystery. He has an eerie charisma. If you think I'm a heartless bastard, just wait till you meet Zak's father.”

“How could he have guessed?”

Jimmy shrugged. “How should I know? You're the one who's immortal, you and your legion of superheroes. I'm just a stray dog picking up scraps under the table.”

“You've been a good friend, Jimmy.”

“Yeah. They'll put that on my tombstone. Everybody's best friend. I wish it was more. I never really learned about love. Never could bring myself to trust anyone.” His roving eyes caught hers again and shone with natural empathy. “Neither should you, Mia.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

“Go with the Eternal spirit, then, if you can find it. Maybe you'll finally catch a break.” He winked at her playfully, and she felt a release in his benediction, a hallowed blessing from a common criminal.