The Lives of Tao (36 page)

“You imbecile,” Sean snarled. “How the Holy Ones could have blessed you with one of their own is beyond me. That boy was never even in the Boy Scouts, let alone military training, and you lost him twice now!”

“Father,” Marc began, “I have found a solid lead on another senior...”

“Utter another word and I will order you to draw your pistol, put it in your mouth, and pull the trigger,” Sean growled. “I’m tired of your empty promises. Your standing is nothing now. I am removing you from the Tao mission. Your place is now at my side on security detail and filling my wine glass and doing my laundry until such time that I feel like you can handle tasks that do not require an apron!”

“But–” Marc stammered.

“Agent Sandis,” Sean barked at Iku’s vessel. “You are in charge of the team now. If that moron standing next to you utters another word, shoot him in the head.” Sandis, looking grim, drew his gun and pointed at Marc’s head.

“Anything else to say?” Sean snarled. “You are damn lucky your security exploit resulted in some benefits for us. Otherwise, I would be more than content to extract Jeo from that sham of a host and give him to someone who deserves a Holy One. Now get out of my sight.” Sean turned the screen off and stared at it for a few moments longer. Nothing more could be done about these recent failures. At the very least, on the bright side, he now had a new butler.

“Third time’s a charm, Tao,” he muttered. “I still owe you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

BACK HOME

On his deathbed, Francisco Cisneros brought Paneese, his protégé, into his chambers and together, they prayed and waited for Francisco to die. Chiyva hoped for a smooth transition to continue his work and assure his place on the Council.
 

Since Rianno’s death, I had prepared for my vengeance. On the day of Francisco’s death, I struck. Disguised as a priest, I walked into Francisco’s room, closed all the windows, and slew Paneese before the transition could be made. Then I revealed myself to Francisco and slew him as well. I took out a small baby turtle and placed it next to Francisco’s bed. Chiyva had no choice but to join with it instead. Then for the next hundred years, I imprisoned him.
 

Roen went home the next morning, feeling relieved and ashamed. He couldn’t look the others in the eye as he said his goodbyes. They all gave him sympathetic looks and told him to get some rest. He wished them luck and took the lonely flight back to the States by commercial airline.

Sitting in coach on the way back was a far cry from the private plane he flew out to Europe, underscoring just how his status had fallen. Roen returned to Chicago and promptly withdrew from everyone. The few times Tao tried to speak with him, Roen ignored him. Roen spent the first few days sitting on his balcony drinking and watching the clouds pass by. He often woke up in the middle of the night with Gregory’s eyes haunting his dreams.

It didn’t help his mood when he learned that the Prophus failed to secure the base in Africa. The Genjix had successfully raided the stockpile and removed the majority of the armaments before the Prophus even got there. By the time the Prophus assaulted the base, the Genjix were thoroughly entrenched and repelled them during two frantic days of battles. The news went downhill from there. Both Paula and Sonya were injured before the Prophus finally ordered a withdrawal.

The ensuing fight was a disaster for the Prophus; they also lost a warship and over thirty agents, three of them hosts. Could he have made a difference? Probably not. Could he have saved Sonya and Paula from getting injured? Possibly. Regardless of the scenarios that could have happened, he was never going to find out, because when push came to shove, he gave up and went home. Yes, Stephen had ordered him to, but Roen didn’t contest it. Instead, he accepted it. In fact, he was downright relieved.

He struggled with his decision to leave, wondering if it meant that he was a coward. Then again, when had he ever been brave? It seemed a year of training hadn’t improved his courage. Or maybe it was something deeper? Was it not so much his courage, but his objection to a life of killing and war? Or was he simply hiding his fear behind some facade of morality? Roen didn’t know the answers.

At first, he thought Tao would try to guide him out of whatever was happening with him, but Tao was uncharacteristically silent. It felt strange to have that voice missing in his head. Roen didn’t want to admit it, but he missed Tao. It was as if a part of him had just disappeared. And with Tao’s absence, Roen again lost any semblance of purpose in his life.

“Tao, am I a coward?”

Oh? Are you speaking with me again?
 

“Forget it.”

There was a pause before Tao finally spoke in a calm, soothing tone, as if speaking to a child.
No, Roen, you are not a coward. You are no more a coward or fearful than any of my other hosts.
 

“You mean Genghis had bouts like this?”

No. Genghis was stupidly brave. That trait had nothing to do with my influence.
 

“Then what’s wrong with me?”

I would tell you what I told Edward when he threw his first tantrum. You are causeless.
 

“What does that mean?”

Find yourself and maybe you will understand.
 

Roen wasn’t sure how to go about finding himself. Luckily, he had plenty of free time to figure it out. He was still receiving assignments from Command, albeit less frequently than before. He used to receive a steady stream of assignments at least once a week. Now, he’d only heard from them once in the last month.

The quality of his assignments declined as well. Most of them were back to the boring observation details. Roen was playing in the minor leagues again, receiving rudimentary missions of very little importance. That suited him fine. He just didn’t care anymore.

Somehow, he had come full circle and was back working at a job that had no meaning to him. He might as well be back at his old company. When he was on an assignment, he did just the bare minimum to get by. Roen didn’t know how it could be possible, given the events of the last year, but he was back to a meandering existence. Life as an agent now felt as pointless as being a computer engineer.

He spent the next few months wandering alone in the city when he wasn’t on assignment, seeking to discover some semblance of who he used to be. Sadly, the old Roen didn’t exist anymore, and whoever Roen was now didn’t belong in the ordinary slow-paced world. All that was left of his life was influenced by the Quasing, and there was no way he could escape it.

At first, Roen thought if he just pretended Tao didn’t exist anymore, he could blend back into society. Even that was impossible. The things he knew now – and the ignorance that everyone else had regarding the world – followed him everywhere he went. Every event, accident, or military coup Roen saw on the news made him wonder which faction was involved. Every new technology introduced or regime change made him suspect Quasing conspiracy.

Jill was the lone bright spot in his life and he cherished her more than anything else in the world. She was the only thing he could think of that made sense, and when he was with her Roen felt as if he still had some purpose. She was worth fighting for. He was painfully aware that she could not understand the depth of what was bothering him and that eventually, left unchecked, it would push her away.

So Roen was grateful that she still traveled frequently and didn’t see him wallow in this sad state. He tried to put up a happy front when they were together, but Jill saw through him and did more than he ever could have expected to support him. She patiently hung around when he putzed around listlessly in his apartment and nurtured him even when he was insufferable, and he loved her the more for it.

Roen retreated deeper and deeper into himself and became a recluse. His days blurred together and soon, he stopped caring altogether what happened outside of his apartment, leaving only to work out or shop for food. He watched copious amounts of television. So much so that Antonio joked that he worked for Nielsen. It was ironic though, that in his absence to the outside world, Roen learned more about the world than at any other time in his life.

He was strangely glued to world events as if subconsciously he was keeping tabs on the war. Occasionally, he logged into the network to correlate his conspiracy theories with the events of the day. Slowly, he began to see the broader picture of how the Quasing affected the world.

The Prophus kept a detailed database to record all their activities and aggregated them to create a visualization of events that affected the planet. Situations as small as a lumber shortage in Idaho could be traced to the degradation of the Amazon rain forest, and could again be traced to the pirates off the Somali coast. Roen was starting to realize what a complex web the world was, and how the pull of even a single thread could cause ripples on the other side of the planet.

For instance, the Prophus had developed a new form of processing oil that resulted in greater energy output with less environmental pollution. It was their hope that this process would help stem the world’s thirst for oil. It was also very profitable.

The Genjix stalled approval of the process through Congress and lowered the price of coal from their subsidiaries while ordering OPEC to raise oil prices. The Prophus had no choice but to increase oil production from their offshore oil platforms. The Genjix responded by sabotaging the platforms to cause a spill while crying foul on the environmental consequences, simultaneously increasing all their orders of oil in China to offset the surplus. The Prophus retaliated by canceling business contracts and exports to China in order to undercut the demand.

Usually, these tit-for-tat maneuvers went on back and forth a dozen times until eventually armed conflict broke out. It was a cycle that occurred over and over again. As he delved deeper, Roen began to recognize this same pattern as he peeled through the many layers of Quasing history. Cause and effect. The Prophus and Genjix were knee-deep in controlling specific outcomes of human history.

“How many of these were you responsible for, Tao?” Roen murmured to himself as he pored over the numbers for all of history’s pandemics.

Do you really want to know?
 

“I wasn’t being serious. Wait, were you responsible for any of these?”

The Italian plague of 1629. I had a hand in it.
 

Hearing that made Roen even more depressed. The Prophus was just as bad as the Genjix. “And you wonder why I’m so disillusioned.”

Do not judge me in hindsight. The Italian city-states, under the control of the Genjix, were about to join in the Thirty Years War. If that had happened, we would be calling it the Fifty Years War today. It was the only way at the time to prevent Europe from being ripped apart. There is more to a tree than what is above ground. Look past the surface.
 

Roen felt a little embarrassed. Obviously, there was much more to these things than he realized. Still, was it justifiable to kill hundreds of thousands of people to prevent a war? To him, it seemed like both sides had committed unforgivable atrocities. “You both have a pretty high tally, Tao. I’m sure both factions aren’t getting gifts from Santa for the next million years. The end doesn’t always justify the means.”

You are partially correct and completely wrong. It is not the action you have to consider; it is the intent. The Thirty Years War killed an estimated seven to twelve million people. No war can last thirty years unless new nations are brought in every few years to stoke the fires. The Genjix did just that. They had two objectives: to maintain Catholic control over Europe and to advance the uses of the gunpowder. They did not care who won as long as they achieved their objectives.
 

If we had not prevented the Italian city-states from joining the war, I believe it could have lasted at least another fifteen years, with the casualties numbering in the tens of millions. We had to do what we did to save lives and to preserve human society. Look past the what and see the why. Then you might understand.
 

Roen was still dubious about that line of logic. But he had never thought about the reasons for people’s actions until now. “Can you explain to me how you know the things you do will save lives?”

Unfortunately, we do not know for certain. We just have to believe it will. We know our enemy, and we know what they are capable of. Did I ever tell you about the bubonic plague?
 

Roen nodded.

And the Spanish Inquisition? And the Thirty Years War? And both world wars?
 

Roen nodded each time.

They were all products of Genjix plans, part of their doctrine about conflict and human evolution. What we strive for is to stop the Genjix from starting the next world war or the next pandemic outbreak. You are unhappy with the things we make you do. Be angry if you like, but I will not apologize for who we are and what our mission is on behalf of your species.