The Omega Project (38 page)

Of course, my “genius” had also given life to GOLEM, rendering me history’s biggest hypocrite.

Now, man was all but gone, and yet the practice of killing innocent beings in God’s name was still alive and well. Ironically—maddeningly—in reshuffling and resequencing human DNA, GOLEM could have eliminated the “evil gene” from the
Homo sapiens
menu, but the computer needed its genetically engineered children to maintain a cold veneer of indifference when it came to the processing and disposal of the cephaloped race.

Having seen the remains of the dead, I could only imagine what evil awaited us in GOLEM’s death camp.

*   *   *

A predawn gray bled its way across the eastern sky, revealing the main gate—a pair of twelve-foot-tall bare metal posts. Nothing ominous looking like the entrance to Auschwitz, nothing as high tech as the security checkpoint at the Pentagon—simply two nondescript metal posts.

Again, I had underestimated humanity’s ruling artificial intelligence.

Prodded by the ghoulish Nosferatu sentries, I stepped across the threshold. Oscar was trembling against my chest—when my consciousness was instantly inhaled through a funnel of white energy, every cell in my body swimming in its warm, embracing, and quite intoxicating light. Gravity’s weight was shed from my body, my flesh liberated, my spirit tingling.

How long I remained in this state of harmony and bliss, I have no idea, but at some juncture I opened my eyes to blue skies and the sun’s warmth on my face … and Bella Maharaj.

“Wake up, sleepyhead.”

I sat up and realized that my body felt refreshed. I was in a grassy meadow, human Bella kneeling beside me. She was wearing a sheer white frock and a smile …
But where was Oscar?

“Oscar’s safe, and so are you. Come, I’ll show you.”

She held out her hand and I allowed her to lead me across the manicured lawn to a three-foot crevice that cradled a shallow brook of soothing sparkling waters which flowed east across the acreage. We followed the stream in silence, the sounds of nature better than any conversation.

“You are wondering if this is heaven?”

I smiled. “It feels like heaven should feel.”

“What you are experiencing is the Creator’s love.”

“I definitely feel something. Bella, where is Oscar?”

She pointed ahead. I could see in the distance a large oak tree rooted in a pond that fed the stream. The oak was sixty feet tall, with outstretched limbs twice that length … and nearly every square inch of bark was covered by eight-foot-long, furry-brown bodies.

Cephalopeds …

As we approached, I realized the creatures were hugging the tree as if suckling off the bark; moreover, they were pushing and prodding one another, jostling to maintain the maximum amount of direct physical contact. Dozens more were on the ground, fighting one another to be the next in line—Oscar among them.

I ran to the pond, then waded over to the big male. Reaching out for one of Oscar’s tentacles, I held fast, hoping the physical contact would allow ABE to once more bridge our interspecies communication gap.

To my surprise, Oscar brusquely pulled his appendage away, as if he had no idea who I was.

My eyes caught movement and I tracked a body falling from one of the upper branches. The cephaloped struck two of its kind on the way down; it was already dead by the time I dragged its carcass from the pond.

The animal’s fur was covered in blood.

ABE, theorize. What’s happening here?

INSUFFICIENT OBSERVATIONS TO FORMULATE A WORKING THEORY. SUGGESTIONS: ANALYZE CEPHALOPED BLOOD. INSPECT THE TREE.

Sloshing knee-deep through the pond, I approached the tree. Gripping the distal end of the nearest cephalopod tentacle in both hands, I forcibly peeled the appendage away—to reveal cactuslike needles protruding from the tree trunk’s bark, each three-inch thorn dripping in blood.

The creature belonging to the tentacle shoved me aside, slapping its arm back in place before another animal could occupy the spot.

Their demeanor had changed. Something in the tree sap was blocking signals to their vagus nerves. Something addictive …

I looked around. The sky, the weather, the environment, the setting … I was surrounded by a sinister perfection.

“Ike?”

I turned, taken aback to find Andria standing by the edge of the pond. Her ebony hair was long and wavy, the way it was on the day we first met; her taut body nude beneath the sheer white frock.

My heart pounded, pumping blood to my loins.

She offered me a wicked smile as she entered the pond, the water rising along the sheer fabric of her garment, causing it to cling to her body.

Sinister perfection …

“Ike, isn’t everything so beautiful?”

“Andie, why are you here?”

“Baby, I’m here for you.”

“And why am I here?”

“You are here because I need you. Our world needs you.”

Dharma whispered into my subconscious.
“What is the meaning of life, Robert? What is this crazy world of ours all about?”

“That’s just it, Dharma. None of this is real, it’s all an illusion. It’s like each of us is in our own Omega dream.”

“Let me share your dream.” Andria peeled off the wet fabric.

WARNING: TESTOSTERONE LEVELS DROPPING.

I backed away, my feet sticking in the muddy bottom.

ABE, this isn’t real. Reboot my senses.

WARNING: TO REBOOT THE FIVE SENSES WOULD REQUIRE STOPPING ROBERT EISENBRAUN’S HEART.

Andria reached for me—

Do it … now!

And suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

Collapsing to my knees, I looked up. The sky was spinning and the cephalopods were falling from the tree like leaves—Andria’s flesh fragmenting into cellular dust before everything went black, adrift in silence.

Life is but a dream …

32

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

—A
DOLF
H
ITLER

BREATHE.

I took a breath as commanded, and then another, the aching organ pounding in my chest beating stronger with each inhalation. Seconds later sound returned to my brain, followed by the scent of a strong disinfectant, which prompted me to open my eyes.

The bizarre hummingbird-like creature fluttering above my neck had a hypodermic needle for a beak and a tiny cyclops lens for eyes. The left side of my chest hurt where it had injected the shot of adrenaline directly into my heart—a medical treatment that was wearing on me.

Convinced I was alive, the battery-powered version of Tinker Bell flew away.

I was back in GOLEM’s sphere, strapped to the same surgical table. Then again, to say,
I was back
was to infer that I had left, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure. It was very possible that everything that had transpired after my threat to GOLEM to “internally sterilize my own sperm” could have been artificially implanted memory—from the computer’s mind game with the dead Andria clone to my awakening on the Hunter-Transport … and everything that followed my passage through the gates of the cephaloped death camp.

All one glorious mind-fuck.

Lifting my head, I looked around. My eyes widened at the transformation within the spherical chamber, my bio-chip translating all I was witnessing.

The oak tree that had dominated my last internal vision now occupied the airspace above my spread-eagled body, only the tree wasn’t a tree, it was a giant machine for aphaeresis—a process whereby blood is siphoned from a donor and the desired components extracted, with the unused remains returned—the entire procedure contained in a looping cycle. In this case the tree—a multitiered labyrinth of mechanically moving parts, was simultaneously siphoning DNA strands from the blood of hundreds of cephalopeds at a time and squeezing droplets through clear vinelike tubes on its way to the trunk’s collection basin.

Dozens of robotic arms extended from the sphere’s tubular walls. The telescopic devices operated in an incredibly coordinated multitasked singularity of purpose. As the drained, dead eight-legged donors were peeled away from their perches and dropped into one of several disposal tubes, another robotic arm would replace each fresh carcass with a live specimen extracted from a conveyor of oval traps. Fluttering around this living assembly line of bodies and bodily fluids were hundreds of the mechanized hummingbirds—miniature mobile sensors that fed bytes of information to GOLEM.

Then there was the “island of misfit toys,” something more akin to Mengele’s genetics lab. Set off in their own multitiered, bacteria-free acrylic habitat were the seedlings produced by GOLEM’s genetic engineering experiments—bizarre genome creations combining the DNA of multiple species with artificial devices in an attempt to harvest and sustain unique new life-forms. They were occupied by hairless rats with human faces and lizard-tongued humans that possessed tentacles, and by bats hanging upside down from perches using their opposable thumbs. Even more freakish was GOLEM’s garden of mutations, which featured rows of sunflowers equipped with human mouths and voice boxes that cried like infants and infants that sprouted upper torsos from trees.

There were also attempts to harvest aquatic species. Rows of water tanks contained human tadpoles and infant mermaids and human squids—genetic abominations of nature that struggled to coordinate gasps of air with gill slits, blue blood with hemoglobin red, each fleeting moment of life observed by GOLEM’s sensors, each tortured death dictating the next pairing of chromosomes into a slightly altered DNA strand as the supercomputer created life in the same manner one would solve a Rubik’s Cube.

The glowing orb of artificial intelligence responsible for this orchestrated mayhem hovered motionless above the fray, its internal solution strands churning like stars in a spiral galaxy.

The computer took a quantum second to glance down at me, its silence confirming my status as a solitary speck of stardust caught in a cosmic storm, and then the master … sorry, the mistress of its domain floated out of its genetics factory and disappeared into the night sky, perhaps to visit another facility on another continent.

I glanced down at my groin and my rage grew. A device covered my penis and I had no doubt it had milked my male organ of semen during Andria’s alluring cameo in the meadow dreamscape.

Infuriated, I slammed the back of my head against the surgical table. “What have I done?”

GOLEM had succeeded in saving the human race. In doing so, it had unraveled the very secrets of the human genome, and, through genetic engineering, it was rewriting the blueprints for life on our planet.

But what was its ultimate goal?

Searching for clues, ABE replayed an excerpt from my last conversation with the computer:
“GENERATING A LINE OF MALE-INSEMINATED OFFSPRING WILL LEAD TO NEW VARIATIONS OF TRANSHUMANS NECESSARY FOR FUTURE SPACE ENDEAVORS.”

Space endeavors?

My God, it means to seed the universe with its creations.

As if to confirm the working hypothesis, Dharma’s voice filled my subconscious.
“The children of GOLEM are an aberration against the Creator and must be stopped.”

“No shit. But how does a flea stop a pit bull?”

GOLEM IS A MACHINE. MACHINES CAN BE SHUT DOWN.

Yes, ABE, but how?

And then I remembered the doline.

To protect the cephalopeds, the mysterious Blessed Heavenly Ones Who Nurture had rigged the crater’s entrance with a powerful electromagnetic pulse … and now I understood why.

ABE, is it possible to use parts from the EMP array guarding the crater entrance to build a weapon powerful enough to disable GOLEM?

UNLIKELY. HOWEVER, AN EXPLOSIVE DEVICE YIELDING A SIGNIFICANT EMP WAVE CAN BE CONSTRUCTED USING EQUIPMENT FOUND ON
OCEANUS
.

Excellent!
I squirmed and tugged and fought the straps that bound my arms, waist, and ankles to the surgical table, but I was getting nowhere.
ABE, any bright ideas on how to escape?

SEEK ASSISTANCE FROM TRANSHUMAN ANDRIA.

You mean the Hunter-Transport? How do I do that?

ABE replayed the tortured being’s last message to me:
“KEEP THIS WITH YOU. THINK OF ME.”

Her ring finger! The severed digit was still in my pocket. She had given it to me, knowing its physical presence would allow us to communicate through my bio-chip.

Andria, I’m being held in the Creator’s lab. I need you, Andie. Please.

TRANSHUMAN ANDRIA HAS ACKNOWLEDGED THE COMMUNICATION.

Is she coming?

UNKNOWN.

Damn …
Raising my head again, I searched the maze of cephalopeds that were stuck to the aphaeresis tree, hoping to locate Oscar—a seemingly impossible task. And then I saw him. The big male’s inert body was being lifted by one of the robotic arms to be placed on the machine. My eyes followed the dangling carcass as it was outstretched on a vacant perch high overhead—until my sight line was obstructed by another mechanical hummingbird. For some reason, the annoying medical sentry was flitting around, two feet over my head.

“I’m fine. Now go on, git!”

The winged sensory device passed over my chest, pausing to hover over my left thigh and the sweat suit pocket holding Transhuman Andria’s finger.

WARNING—

It knows. I figured that out.

The hummingbird retracted its beak, replacing it with a scalpel. Landing on my upper quadriceps, the creature began methodically slicing through fabric and flesh to access the severed digit—

—just as its owner descended through the hole in the sphere’s ceiling. Still reading my thoughts, the Hunter-Transport slowed to hover next to my surgical table, its transhuman pilot backhanding Tinker Bell and its bloodstained scalpel across the lab.