The Golden City

by John Twelve Hawks

  “I looked at a few of them. But after awhile I just wanted to get to the next level.”

  “That was my also my reaction,” Matthew said. “But then you entered the third building.”

  “The staircases and corridors went off in every direction. There were dead ends and windowless rooms. I got lost a couple of times.”

  “It was frustrating.”

  “Definitely.”

  “And frightening?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Did your frustration and fear make you wish you were back in the first two buildings?”

  “Not really. Maybe I was lost, but at least it wasn’t boring.”

  Matthew held his stone cup with two hands and stared at the surface of the tea. The soft drone of the wind blowing around the towers reminded Gabriel of the lowest note on a wooden flute.

  “During my stay here, here I’ve tried to understand this world using the theories I learned when I was studying physics. I think that the buildings are a lesson for anyone who finds their way to this world. The first two buildings show us a universe where our destiny is predetermined. There’s no freedom of choice; there’s only one direction for humanity. The entire structure has been set up by some all-powerful architect, and we are children forced to trudge through the rooms in the same direction.”

  “And the third building?”

  “It’s a model of the chaotic nature of reality. You can take this staircase or another, get lost and wander back the way you came.”

  “You sound like Maya talking about her random number generator.”

  “Quantum physics shows us that you can’t predict the position of subatomic particles. An electron or a photon of light is never in a particular place. It’s in a sort of super-position of all possible places at the same time. It’s only when something is observed that all these possibilities collapses into one actuality. What this means is that all options are possible and there are an infinite amount of pathways. We don’t live in a deterministic universe.”

  “Okay. Fine. The universe is random and chaotic. But knowing that isn’t going to change anything.”

  “I disagree, Gabriel. Religions and governments that follow a determinist model have caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. The strangest aspect of this rigid view of history is that the founders of every major religion believed in free will and made choices throughout their lives. Moses decided to lead his people out of Egypt, Mohammed decided to preach in Mecca, and Buddha sat down beneath a Bodhi tree. For me, one of the most significant aspects of the Passion story is that Jesus made a choice to enter Jerusalem and be crucified. The deterministic view is added on by followers after the founder’s death. When people decide that a certain way of faith is destined and inevitable, hatred and intolerance follow. Instead of saying ‘the Light is within you, choose the Light,’ the message becomes ‘agree with our version of history or we’ll kill you.’”

  Gabriel frowned and shook his head. “That’s what the Tabula believe.”

  “Their views are shared by many governments and political parties. The two failed ideologies of the twentieth century—Communism and Fascism—both advocated a deterministic model of history. Communism was supposedly a ‘scientific” theory that predicted the inevitable collapse of the capitalistic system. And Adolph Hitler believed that the so-called ‘master race’ was destined to take over the world.”

  “Maybe they failed, but we’re still fighting with each other.”

  “People don’t believe they have power. Because they’re scared, they want magic spells and secret passwords. It takes some bravery to accept the implications of free will and negative consequences. But we can’t solve our problems with surveillance cameras and tracking programs.”

  “A member of the Tabula would say that the world is a dangerous place. We need safeguards to protect us.”

  “I’m not going to deny that there’s pride and anger and greed in the Fourth Realm. We can find those negative qualities in our own hearts and see them in others every day. But the Panopticon is a system that automatically assumes that everyone is guilty. It can never conquer fear. It actually makes people even more suspicious and frightened because it ignores the inherent connections between us.”

  “Are you talking about our spiritual connections?”

  “I’m always wary of calling anything spiritual, Gabriel. It’s such a fuzzy, vague word. What I’m saying is that we really are connected to each other, and that the Panopticon tries to ignore this particular reality.”

  Gabriel laughed. “I don’t think you can prove that with physics.”

  “Perhaps we can. When I was in graduate school, we studied something called the EPR Paradox. In the 1930’s, Einstein and two other physicists had come up with a thought experiment that attempted to show the illogical nature of quantum theory. Physicists knew that electrons and other subatomic particles revolve like two kinds of tops with their axis pointing up or down. Often one of these particles paired up with its opposite so that their up and down movements cancel each other out and became zero.”

  “So what’s the paradox?”

  “The three physicists described an experiment where an atom was blown apart and two paired particles flew away from each other at close to the speed of light. If one particle was spinning down, then quantum theory predicted that its lost twin had to spin up. Einstein wrote that it was ‘spooky’ to believe that something that happened at one point of the universe influenced another point light years away.”

  “Of course. That’s impossible.”

  “It might sound impossible, but a number of experiments have shown that Einstein was wrong. French scientists measured paired photons several kilometers apart and discovered that the particles were still linked together, joined by their wave function, acting in response to each other. The entire universe is a strange sort of spider web connected by gossamer strands of energy.

  “These theories both describe and explain what we see in reality. The walls of the Panopticon cannot last: freedom is the essence of our lives—not surveillance and control.”

  Gabriel nodded his head. “You could be right. But I haven’t met any gods here who actually know the truth.”

  “Maybe their departure was a gift to mankind. The human race is clever enough to make its own choices. The ultimate power that created the realms will always exist, but perhaps our good angels are telling us: ‘You’re not children anymore. Stop making excuses and accept responsibility for the fate of your own world.’”

  Gabriel stayed silent for awhile and finished drinking the tea. He thought about Maya and all the problems waiting for him back in the Fourth Realm.

  “I’ve come up with a plan to stop the Tabula,” he said. “But I don’t know if it’s going to work. Only a few hundred people are committed to the Resistance. According to Michael, we’ve already lost.”

  “And do you believe that?”

  “I have one opportunity to get past the barriers and speak directly to a great many people. I wanted to find you because I didn’t know what to say. I think you should come back and make the speech yourself.”

  “You said that the Tabula have my body locked up in a room.”

  “I’ll talk to Maya and we’ll find a way to get you out.”

  Matthew turned away from his son and gazed at the mountains. “I know that I’m sitting here with you and we’re talking and drinking this tea, but I don’t feel completely human anymore. I’ve been away too long and I’m not attached to our world. If I spoke to people, they would sense that my heart has lost its connection to their hopes and desires.”

  “But what about your physical body?”

  Matthew shook his head. “I’m not really connected with that either.”

  “What are you telling me, Father? Are you going to die?”

  “That may happen fairly soon. But this is just one stopping point of our eternal journey. Every human being has the power to send their Light forward to another world, but they only discover that when they pass on.”

  Gabriel reached out and touched his father’s arm. “I don’t want to los
e you.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m still here for awhile. The gods have vanished, but this place is a suitable residence for a questioning mind.”

  “I’m the one who has to leave,” Gabriel said. “I’ve got to return to our world.”

  “I understand. You love someone in the Fourth Realm, and you’re worried about all those people who are losing their freedom.”

  “So what do I tell them?” Gabriel asked. “How can I convince them to step away from the Vast Machine?”

  “Unlike me, you’re still connected to their lives. Instead of ‘telling’ them what to believe, try to answer the questions that are in your own heart.”

  “I’m not one of the gods. I don’t have all the answers.”

  “That’s a good start.” Matthew smiled broadly. At that moment, he resembled the father who had made kites for his two sons, then watched these fragile creations rise up above the trees. “Look outward, Gabriel. This city is beautiful at sunset. The golden towers don’t have their own energy, but they do reflect the light ”

  33

  I f a physicist living in Los Angeles had dropped by Mar Vista Park that afternoon, he might have seen a classic example of something called “Brownian motion.” The children moved in erratic patterns like tiny bits of pollen suspended in fluid, bouncing off each other and floating away in opposite directions. Someone gazing down from the heavens might have decided that these particles of life behaved like the electrons in a quantum game of chance.

  * * *

  Sitting on the benches near the child’s play area, the adults saw cause and effect instead of chaos. Shawn was thirsty and kept running back to his mother for a sip of apple juice. May Ling was playing with two mean girls—Jessica and Chloe—and sometimes they accepted her and sometimes they ran away. The positions of the adults also followed a certain order. A group of elderly Chinese men and women sat on the east side of the play area, proudly watching their grandchildren; Mexican nannies with expensive strollers stood on the opposite side, chatting on cell phones or gossiping in Spanish.

  Ana Cabral was separate from both groups. She was Brazilian, not Mexican, and she was watching her own children—eight-year-old Roberto and his four-year-old brother, Cesar. Ana was a small woman with a large handbag who worked mornings at a plumbing parts store. Although she didn’t own a closet full of clothes, her tennis shoes were new, and her blue headband matched the color of her blouse.

  At this moment, little Cesar was playing with his dump truck in the sand, and Ana’s only worry was that an older child might pull the toy from his hands. Roberto was more of a problem. He was an active boy who had come out of her womb with his hands clenched into fists. Because of the dirty air, he suffered from asthma, and Ana had to carry an inhaler in her handbag in case of emergencies.

  Roberto needed to run around with other boys, but Ana felt better when her sons were inside the house with all the doors locked. In the last few weeks, twelve California children had disappeared from playgrounds and schoolyards. The police in San Francisco said they had arrested a suspect, but two days ago a little girl named Daley McDonald had disappeared from the backyard of her home in San Diego.

  Don’t think bad thoughts, Ana told herself. Victor is right. You worry too much.

  She glanced into her bag, made sure the inhaler was there, then leaned back on the bench and tried to enjoy the day. A little blond girl wearing pink overalls was watching Cesar play with the truck while Roberto lay belly down in one of the swings and pretended he was flying. Ana heard the sound of traffic behind her and the voices of the nannies. Back in Brazil she would have known each woman and the history of her family. That was the most difficult thing about Los Angeles—not the gangs and learning English, but the fact that she was surrounded by strangers.

  Mar Vista Park was dotted with picnic areas and Scotch pine trees. The hazy Los Angeles sunlight gave the landscape a slightly flat, colorless appearance, like the drawing of a park in a faded illustration. If Ana looked left, she could see a large soccer field with artificial grass. On her right was a fenced-in concrete oval that was used for roller hockey. The play area was at the center. Four plastic and metal structures built to look like beach shacks were surrounded with sand. If you left the sand and walked across a strip of dead grass, you came to a red brick building that was used for basketball games and Boy Scout meetings.

  Beyond that was a side street where someone had parked an ice cream truck.

  * * *

  Wearing a radio headset, Martin Doyle sat in a windowless compartment between the ice cream machines and the truck cab. He leaned forward and stared at a monitor as a little girl wearing a pink sun dress approached the truck and ordered a vanilla ice cream cone with chocolate sprinkles.

  A Tabula mercenary named Ramirez was in charge of selling the soft-serve ice cream. He took the child’s money, handed her the cone and watched her walk away. “What are you doing?” he asked Doyle.

  “I’m not quite ready to start the target search. Give me a few more minutes.”

  Doyle continued watching the monitor. He had a scar on the back of his right hand where the Tabula had inserted a radio chip. An even more powerful chip had been injected into his chest—between his chest muscles and his sternum. I’m a slave, he thought. Boone’s little robot. These days, the team was traveling all over California. If he kept alert, there might be an opportunity to escape.

  The high-tech equipment gave him access to private homes and public playgrounds, but he was never allowed to savor the experience. When the team wasn’t working, Doyle lay in bed and ran through his memories; it felt like he was touching each image, holding it up to the light like a cherished photograph. There was Darrell Thompson, the little boy alone in a backyard decorated for a birthday party. Everyone else had gone inside for cake, but Darrell was still jumping on the Moon Bouncer. Doyle remembered Amanda Sanchez, the girl who cried, and Katie Simms, a blond charmer with a band-aid on her scraped knee.

  The images he cherished most were the quiet moments when the children first encountered him. Doyle enjoyed the look of surprise on their faces and their frightened smiles. They always stared at his face, really looked at him in a very intense way. Did they know him? Was he going to be their new friend?

  Doyle swiveled in his chair, reached up to a shelf, and took down a clear plastic box that held a dragonfly clinging to a twig. He shook the box gently and the insect moved its wings. The dragonfly had been turned into something called a

  HIMEMS: an acronym for the term “Hybrid Insect: Micro-Electo-Mechanical-System.” Ramirez and the other mercenaries simply called them “robobugs.”

  For many years, the CIA and various European spy agencies had used insect-sized spy drones designed to resemble dragonflies. These high-tech surveillance tools could hover over an anti-war rally and take photographs of the demonstrators. According to Boone, the mechanical dragonflies had several vulnerabilities. They couldn’t hover for more than ten minutes and were blown sideways by strong crosswinds. But the biggest problem was that the drones were obviously little machines. When one of them fell onto the Champs-élysées during a Paris protest against global warming, the marchers had irrefutable evidence of government spying.

  A HIMEMS looked exactly like an ordinary insect. When the dragonfly was in a nymph stage, a silicon chip and a tiny video lens were inserted into the larva. As the dragonfly grew larger, its nervous system became attached to the chip, and its movements could be controlled by a computer.

  Carrying the plastic box with him, Doyle pushed open a sliding door and stepped around the driver’s seat. He opened a second door and strolled over to the picture table near the park’s soccer field. Making sure no one was watching, he opened the box, took out the twig, and carefully placed the HIMEMS in the middle of table. The hybrid dragonfly was a Blue Darner with a long body, strong, transparent wings and bright blue spots on its abdomen.

  The dragonfly had been captive in the box for several weeks and seemed startled to be outside. Doyle felt that he understood the
dragonfly’s surprise; he had also been a prisoner, and it was a shock to be back out in the world. Slowly, the insect moved its two pairs of wings, feeling the wind and the afternoon sunlight. Doyle tapped his finger on the table, and the startled insect flew away.

  Doyle returned to the ice cream truck, stepped into the compartment, and activated the HIMEMS program on the computer. The first image on the monitor showed something dark, with a rough texture, and Doyle guessed that that the dragonfly was resting on a tree branch. He attached a joystick to the computer and gently pushed the lever forward. The dragonfly responded like a toy airplane, taking off and heading east. Doyle could see the parking lot and the tops of some trees.

  In San Diego and San Francisco, he had learned how to control the hybrids. You couldn’t direct precise movements, but you could send the dragonfly in a general direction and then make it stop and hover. Using a HIMEMS meant that he didn’t need to draw attention to himself as he watched the children. Doyle had escaped his fleshy, fumbling body. At that moment, he was a dark angel, floating above the children, watching three boys wander away from the play area.

  * * *

  The Chinese grandparents were leaving, and Ana checked her watch. It was almost five o’clock. She would let the boys play for a few more minutes, and then she had to get home and start making dinner. Cesar was still playing with the blond girl, but Roberto and two other boys his age had gone over to the park building. They stood near the doorway—probably watching some older boys play basketball.

  Something passed through the air near the edge of her vision. When she looked up, she saw an insect right above the swings. What did they call that in the United States? A dragonfly. In Brazil, sometimes they called it a tiraolhos, which meant eye thief.

  As the dragonfly darted away, Cesar approached her carrying the dump truck. “Broke,” he said in English, and held up the toy.