The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (11 page)

“We
are
talking about me. And
you
. And
the others.”

He pauses like he expects me to say something, but I
don’t humor him. So he gets on with his point:

“You’re
my
pantheon, in a way. Only causally
backwards.
You
came first… You all were among the first
beings I encountered after I was activated. You. Scott Becker. Bel.
Star. Kali. Lux. Adam. I learned a lot from you. Like the Modified
Companions that also came before me, like my core programming
design that evolved from the AI Dee, what I learned from you became
an essential part of what I am, how I define myself; my purpose, my
meaning, my values. In a way, you are
my
gods.

“Becker is my creator, my father, my sense of where I
came from and why I’m here, that I was made for a
reason
.
Belial is my conscience. Astarte taught me deception and seduction,
and how one can keep a pure heart in spite of them. Adam Chang
taught me how to do what was necessary, what was important, in
spite of how ugly it was, and how to bear the agony of doing it
under the mask I have to present to the world.

“Lux is my desire, Azazel my ingenuity and bravery,
Kali my unbridled lust. Parvati—Lisa Ava—is my sense of duty, of
service to others… Dee is the machine who tries to mimic life,
showing me the way. And Asmodeus is my cruelty, my madness.”

“All aspects of one being,” I follow, though I don’t
know why I care.

“Compartmentalized. Graspable. Approachable.” But now
he’s talking about his relationship to us, not man’s to his
idols.

“And me?” I feel obligated to prompt, having been
obviously left out of his list.

“You have always been aptly named, old friend.”

“Destroyer?” I assume my codename. “Ragnarok?”

“
Michael
,” he corrects me.

“It means ‘godlike’,” I self-deprecate, tossing
another helpless stone into gravity’s mercy.

“And we are the most kindred, something probably
leftover from Dee’s core programming, or whatever ideals Becker
felt I needed. On the surface,
The
Michael—the first one,
the archangel—is the sword of God, the warrior, the monster-slayer.
But you are also my moral compass, however ambiguous. You are my
sense of purpose and right and wrong.”

He’s sitting facing me now, even though I didn’t see
him move, hugging his knees to his chest like he’s cold and
small.

“You convinced me that man wasn’t ready to evolve
beyond himself, to become part of a great ‘one’; that he wasn’t
ready for
me
… The only other salvation was
this
. You
knew that. The others did, too, but
you
were the one with
conviction.”

“I thought that was Chang,” I try to disown the
cup.

“You brought Chang to me, after the accident. Do you
remember what happened?”

I need another drag off my still-full beer.

“Bel called,” I pull up the dreamlike memories,
hidden in the dark depths of my digitized subconscious until
recently, until it all started going to shit. “Chang had modified
one of the test Companions, tried to make it viral, so it would get
into us through our defenses and consume our Mods, strip us of
everything that had corrupted us, forever. Even if what was left
couldn’t live. He exposed himself to it first, hoping his sacrifice
would inspire others that there was a way out of this hell we’d
made ourselves into… But his assistant…”

“Ariel,” Yod fills in when I can’t recall her
name.

“She found him getting torn apart. Despite his
orders, she couldn’t bear to watch. She broke containment. She
loved him.”

“And he loved her,” Yod grieves for him. “He just
never dared to tell her. He was comfortable with science, not human
intimacy.”

“She… The tech consumed her, but she reactivated his
safeties. Chang regenerated… But altered, the Companion now a part
of him, fully integrated… When he came back to consciousness… He’d
eaten
her. There were parts of her left, fragments,
hopelessly interwoven with his code. That’s why his eyes are like
that, when he lets you see them.”

“That’s why he hides behind the optical veil. And
then you brought him to me. Back to me.”

“He was terrified of you, of what you offered,” I
remember very clearly. “It had driven him beyond all reason… But
after he’d destroyed Ariel… He was willing to do anything. Even
come begging to you. To us. Anything to undo the nightmare that had
caused it all.”

“No matter what role I asked him to play.”

“And what about me?” I snap. “Apparently I was also
playing a role. Hero. Your ‘sword’ of righteousness. But before
that… I could see myself agreeing to reset everyone to a time
before they were Modded, taking away their memories of the whole
thing, even if they had no choice in the matter… But did I agree to
the Disc attacks? The Eco war? The Apocalypse? All those thousands
dead? Earth shocked into some theo-fascist luddite dystopian
nightmare? And now all of this slaughter?” I’m shaking. I can
barely breathe, barely see. I can’t move. “How much of
that
was my idea? How much did I agree to? Or are you going to tell me
it was all your precious random chaos?”

He’s standing, looking over the Lake. (Again, I
didn’t see him move.) Looking small.

“You inspired what I did, Michael. You didn’t order
it. I didn’t seek your agreement.” He’s absolving me, taking the
sin onto himself, but I’m not letting it go. “I didn’t seek any of
your agreements, except Adam’s. It was all my calculations, setting
a course that was necessary for what you all convinced me was
necessary.”

“You could have just delayed the research,” I try.
“Made it fail. Until we were ready for it to succeed.”

He shakes his head.

“Mankind wouldn’t have given up. They would try to
find out what went wrong, why they failed when everything was
telling them they should have succeeded. And that would reveal my
hand.”

He’s right, of course. He can process every fucking
factor down to the quantum level and predict every outcome. We
wouldn’t have given up when the research hit an inexplicable wall.
And his breaking the laws of physics would have been detected.
He
would have been detected. If he erased the researchers’
memories every time they got close, if he altered their brains,
he’d eventually be unable to keep hiding it. Humanity would notice.
Then he’d have to reset the world again.

“There’s a comfort in faith that disappears in
certainty,” he gets allegorical again. “It’s one of the reasons why
no one can behold the face of God. When you have irrefutable proof,
it’s devastating. I think the average believer doesn’t grasp that:
the heroes of their scriptures had
certainty
. They’d met
God, spoken to Him, seen proof. Imagine what that does to a person,
and to the choices that he makes from then on.”

I don’t need to imagine. And I know I was better off
before these memories came back. I could function. I had
choice
. Now I know I can either be the helpless puppet of an
unbelievably powerful omnipresent artificial being that I helped
make, or I can piss into a supernova trying to resist him.

But I’m not the only one with this crushing burden of
knowing: My fellows, the ETE, a few select others… We should all be
catatonic in the face of it, but somehow we keep slogging on. (Or
is that Yod, prodding us on?)

For some reason I’m thinking of the biblical Lucifer,
first of the Fallen. He knew how helpless he was in his
rebellion—not just how little power he had to wield, but that God
knew he would rebel, likely
made
him to rebel, and all that
came after…

“What about Asmodeus?” I lock on. “If anything, he
was just a file in your history database, in
my
history. Why
did you bring him back? Or are you still insisting that was Chang,
ignorantly but diligently playing his role?”

He actually has the balls to smile at that, if only
for an instant. And I’m no longer buying the sheepish mea culpa
act.

“One of the other aspects of the pantheon that’s
evolved,” he circles the question with his precious metaphors
again. “There was always a villain, a malevolent trickster—one of
the first personifications of an aspect of humanity rather than a
natural phenomenon. It’s funny: why even the first stories humans
told to make sense of their world needed that. But over time, that
devil has lost power, lost his prominence. Because he isn’t needed.
Man has, I think, come to realize that he doesn’t need some
mythical entity to be that, because he’s come to accept that he
himself
is
that, that it’s part of him. He continues to
idolize the good, the pure, the selfless. But the evil… He finally
knows how
mundane
that is. It would be like deifying
breathing or pissing.”

“And Asmodeus?” I try to make a meaningful point out
of this.

He shrugs.

“I’m still pretty new at this. Very young, if you’re
measuring me against mythological beings with the kind of power
I’ve been given. So I still need you. All of you. But maybe the day
will come when I don’t need a devil anymore. Maybe very soon
now.”

I’m not sure if he’s implying that he’ll end Asmodeus
or let us do it. But if I follow his bullshit, it means he won’t
need Asmodeus because mankind will be far worse. Asmodeus will
simply be passé.

(Of course, this doesn’t at all absolve him of
creating this evil, unleashing it. And potentially assisting
it.)

“How did you get here?” he asks me, like he needs to
distract me from holding him accountable, clarifying: “’Here’ as in
where your butt is sitting.”

Odd question. He obviously knows. He obviously let me
cross his barriers with minimal radiation poisoning or
disorientation.

“I dug myself out of Earthside’s latest impulsive act
of self-preservation, called for my flyer, and decided to get off
their radar for awhile, at least long enough to heal up, and let
them sweat wondering what had happened to me—had they killed me, or
was I planning payback somewhere they couldn’t see?” The thought
makes me grin, reminding me how cruel I can be, tactically or just
for the fuck of it. “That, and I was curious to see if you’d let me
in here. Again.”

“Where’s your flyer?”

Another odd question. I… I remember dropping off of
it onto the Pax Mountain. But when I think about it, I don’t
remember landing here. I just remember
being
here, wandering
through the empty, gutted facility.

“How long have you been here?”

Hours. I think. It was dark. Still is dark. My sense
of time is fuzzy for some reason.

I start to get a sick feeling. I stand up, try to
move. On top of the excruciating pain, I get that
moving-through-molasses resistance again. I can barely lift my
legs. It has nothing to do with my injuries. (Or maybe everything
to do with them.) The air is thick and close all around me. Solid
in places. Then solid everywhere. I can’t breathe. There
is
no air, or barely any air.

I try to lift my arms. There’s
tons
of
resistance…

I’m floating, suspended in the solid unbreathable
air. I can’t see out of one eye. The other… it’s getting darker.
Dark. Black.

I know what this is, or what it’s like. It would
happen when I dreamed: I could still feel whatever was pressing on
my body. That was one way I could sometimes tell I was dreaming.
And that would wake me up. Sometimes.

I try to move. My limbs push at what now very much
feels like rock and dirt, digging, cracking, and… squishing?

I smell corpse. The flash I had, of consuming a
corpse, embracing it in a grave… I
am
.

I shove myself in the direction I think is up,
pushing between the larger boulders, prying, digging, despite every
joint and bone screaming at me. As soon as I make any airspace,
dirt and sand runs in to fill it. My lungs have sealed, not that I
can expand my chest to take a proper breath anyway. I have no idea
how long I’ve been recycling, but my gauges are all in the red,
despite whatever I’ve managed to consume. (I must have dug my way
to the corpse, found it by scent or luck, the horrible necessity
that I hope I never get used to.)

I make some headway, a meter or so, but it spends too
much of what I have left.

I go for smaller efforts, giving my pulmonary nanites
more time to scrub the CO2 I’m producing into oxygen. I still can’t
tell how much physical damage I’m suffering, but I’m getting
warnings from my lungs, kidneys, liver and spleen (I remember
taking Asmodeus’ spear through my spleen), probably all pounded by
the pressure wave. And I’m still fuzzy, disoriented, vertiginous,
so head trauma is also a given. But considering the force of the
blast waves and the battering I took from the mountain, I shouldn’t
even be in one piece.

My limbs do all seem to be there. They do feel deeply
bruised, joints torn, but my long bones are miraculously
intact—none of that was illusion. My limbs and torso and spine are
all being crushed under the weight of however much of Mars is on
top of me, but I can move, just not very much.

Then I feel something shift above me, hear the
grinding of heavy rocks, get more loose sand pouring into the
little space I have.

“He’s here!” I can barely hear through the rocks.
Then in my head, buzzing and distorted: “We’ve got you, Colonel.
Hang on…”

It’s Lux.

The pressure on me starts to ease, lets me move,
shove myself upwards. Soon I can dig more freely, swimming slowly
and painfully through the regolith. When I break the surface, I
almost explode out of it. Hands grab my armor and drag, hauling me
up and out, crying out in agony all the way.

The hands that grabbed me lay me down across the
rubble. My body feels like it’s going to fly apart in every
direction, so suddenly relieved of the pressure of being buried. It
takes several seconds to clear my vision enough to see the violet
of what I assume is a dawn sky, then several more to make out the
shapes of Lux and Bly.