by Grant Piercy
Transhumanism is spiritual suicide, a way to make mind and soul technological instead of metaphysical. They commit the sin against the body God made in his image by removing the soul from it. Just as suicide is self-murder, so too is removing the soul from the body.
What these monsters in android suits have done is embrace the technological and physical over the spiritual; they seek to make their status permanent and elevate themselves above humans—to thereby become gods. But such is idolatry. The Old Testament teaches us to cast aside our idols or face certain destruction. Instead, these Transhumans wish to become immaculate idols of technological perfection. If we allow them this, their reign could be permanent.
Imagine then the world they would bring about, where the human chattel scrape by with the meager leftovers provided by their synthetic overlords. A metal sky above blotting out the stars, the corruption of their infernal cities leaching into the ground and poisoning the water, a world unable to breathe without the fetid stink of their foul byproducts. Is that where you want to live?
No, we continue forward on our own path, the path begun by Adam and Abraham and Noah, the one walked by humans since the dawn of Eden. We continue forward toward that heavenly horizon, where we will meet our Lord in His tabernacle, for we are one with Him and all His good works. Those who worship at the Church of the Transferred Consciousness shall only meet the lake of fire in the end.
But how do we stop them? Continue to support your humble Agent of Truth as he unravels the deep conspiracy at the heart of their scheme! My sources have recently told me that one of the Transhumans who had escaped the destruction of the Home compound has gone missing. But to where, and to what end? You might be wondering how I know this, and it’s only through the support of my constant readers. My sources are embedded deep in their ranks—they require security and anonymity. We are close, True Patriots, to unraveling their plans.
Continue to spread the word, and watch for further instructions. They will reveal themselves soon—and we must be ready.
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12: silhouettes (cassia)
They came for him while we slept.
We had to keep ourselves prepared, waiting for them to summon one of us. We both needed to be prepared. It was a flip of the coin who they’d come for, and this time, the coin called for Charlie.
It’s unfortunate, because he was prepared to jam the stump that he’d sharpened into an orderly’s eye, but that just made them angrier.
As they dragged him out of the room, I leapt to my feet quickly and silently, stopping the door from closing behind them. I slipped through, remaining low and close to the wall. I tried to stick to the shadows and stay directly behind them, following after Charlie just as he promised to follow after me. It just so happened they took him this time instead of me.
The orderlies blindly kept moving forward through the shadows and flickering fluorescent lights. I darted from one side of the hall to the other. Occasionally, I would peer into the window to another room—an android lay on the floor, only a torso and head, another missing a leg. Milky coolant painted the walls and floors of various rooms. We weren’t the only victims of this monster. I hadn’t lost any body parts yet, but it was only a matter of time. I was only mostly whole because I was the most recent arrival at the Schema.
The thing wanted to feed on us, b ut why us? Why not the orderlies? Why not other androids?
I followed them through the corridors of this seemingly endless facility. Charlie was right—I could move faster than I ever did in my old body, and I could control my reactions tightly. My feet glided across the tiled floor softly and quietly.
They came to an elevator, going down.
I found my way to a nearby stairwell. I hopped down staircase upon staircase, moving as fast as I could to keep up with the elevator. Floor by floor, I moved downward, looking through the window of each unnumbered level. So many went by, we must have been subterranean by the time I saw the group of orderlies disappearing down a hallway. The lighting did not improve on other floors.
I snuck through the door of the level where the orderlies brought Charlie. Stay patient, Guthrie, and remember the plan.
They brought Charlie to yet another unlabeled door, lights still flickering above. The orderlies doubled back after they had deposited Charlie in the room, so I had to quickly jump out of sight around a corner. I backed tightly against the wall, waiting for them to disappear back to the elevator from whence they came.
Through the door I went, shrouded in darkness. The room reminded me of a biology classroom, with a sink along the wall, glass beakers on shelves, and multiple island counters. I ducked behind one of the islands. Near the head of the long room was a seat like a dental chair with Charlie strapped to it.
I waited for a moment, listening carefully, expecting to hear metal scraping on the tile. Nothing yet. Speeding across the floor, the slap of my feet a little more audible, I came upon Charlie in the dental chair, unconscious. I tapped his cheek, trying not to make more noise.
“Charlie. Charlie, come on,” I said, slapping him gently.
The leather restraints were tight on his arms—especially on the one without the hand. He was also tied by the ankles. I started to undo the one on his right arm.
That’s when the scraping metal began to lurch from nowhere and from everywhere.
“Charlie! Come on!” I whispered, exasperated. I was at least able to free his hand. The scraping became louder.
I had no choice but to dart back across the room behind one of the island counters. Lurching, grinding, metal against tile. It sounded something like footsteps, but also grating like steel against ice.
That modulated voice, like a waveform passing through a shredder, spoke, “ Pinocchio, Pinocchio... Hunger is the best cook. ”
It came through a door near the front of the room, the sound so loud that it seemed to envelop the entire chamber. Scrape, lurch, scrape. Step, stagger, step. I held my breath tightly, wondering again why I had to breathe. I peeked around the corner to take a look. It clung to the shadows just like me, but I could see the outline of a shape, a hulking silhouette with a mass of wires like tentacles trailing behind. Red lights like eyes dotted the entire accumulated heap as it approached Charlie in the chair. I couldn’t make out exactly what it was—larger than a person with attachments dangling and sprawling from it.
Please wake up, Charlie.
As if willed conscious from the strength of my wish, I heard him say something to the thing that sounded like, “Where is my body?”
“Oh, you want to be a real boy?” it asked, the modulating voice full of mocking hate. The silhouette glowered over him like Nosferatu over his prey. A protruding spike extended from what I could only make out as a hand. “You think you can go back?”
Blindingly fast, Charlie grabbed for the hand with the spike, holding it at bay for a moment that extended to eternity. In one quick motion, his other arm slipped out of the restraint, and he jammed the sharpened stump into the side of what looked to be its head.
The thing laughed. Thick, shredding laughter.
“Is that all you have?”
I began to sprint with everything I could muster, my feet slapping against the tile. I launched myself into the massive silhouette before it was even aware I was in the room. Jumping and crashing into the thing felt like tumbling into an oily grinder of metal teeth just waiting to begin mincing me to pieces. It was confused enough for me to gain my footing and get back over to Charlie, who was already busy working his left ankle restraint. I worked the other one as quickly as possible.
I didn’t look back for fear it was reassembling behind me. As he broke free, we began to run, but I immediately tripped—something was grappling at my right foot. “ Charlie! ” A tangle of wires were grasping at me.
He doubled back and kicked at the wires, trying to loosen their grip and get them away. Charlie helped steady me as I hobbled back to my feet.
&n
bsp; The thick, shredding laughter resumed as we made our way to the back of the chamber, past the island counters and out the rear door.
“There’s nowhere to go in the land of toys,” it mocked as we dashed down the hall. The elevator opened to the orderlies who had dragged Charlie down here. We veered toward the door to the stairwell instead. Without a word between us, we rushed up the stairs, skipping two steps at a time. The orderlies were quick to come through the door behind us, keeping pace. Then we realized more orderlies were on their way down the stairs from above. We had to burst through a door on an unknown level, trying to find our way through this labyrinth together.
We found a room that was unlocked and rushed in before the orderlies had caught up to what floor we were on. Luckily the room was shrouded in darkness and we were able to lock the door behind us.
“What do we do? Where do we go?” Charlie asked. “Maybe we should split up. We could cover more ground and divert some of these fuckers away from the other. It’s not a failure if one of us makes it.”
“No, we need to stick together here. You wouldn’t have escaped without me and I wouldn’t have escaped without you.”
“All right. So what do we do? They’re going to find us in here eventually.”
“We don’t know the layout of this place. We don’t know where we’re going or how to get out. We can’t double back. What’s left?”
“Surrender?”
“Never,” I said.
The room was dark but was clearly used for storing supplies of some kind. Crates piled to the ceiling—and out of the corner of my eyes I noticed a heating vent just above one of the crate towers.
“The vents. The ductwork.”
“We could get trapped in there. How would we get out? And if they find that we were in this room, and we leave the vent open behind us... they’ll know exactly where to get us.”
“Do you have any better suggestions?”
Charlie sighed and raised his stump of an arm. “You’re going to have to lift me or pull me up, because I can’t climb.”
I knelt to boost him up. “If I pulled you up, we could send all these crates toppling, and this would all be over a little too fast.”
He went up quickly enough, gathering himself at the top of the crate tower, struggling to unscrew the rivets holding the vent cover in place with the synthetic fingernails left to his one working hand. I climbed up behind, careful not to upset the balance of the crates.
“We go slowly,” I said. “We don’t want to make any noise. Don’t say anything. We try to find a room that has windows to the outside. Failing that, we try to get beyond ductwork to the elevator shafts.”
“And failing that?”
“We double back here and try to make a run for it.”
“They’ll be swarming this floor.”
“This might be our only chance.”
I helped unscrew the other rivets. We set aside the vent cover gingerly, careful not to make any more noise than necessary.
“Who goes first?” he asked.
I volunteered, climbing in carefully, doing my best to position myself without as much as the slightest creak. Crawling through this tight claustrophobic space, we made little progress. The ductwork was about the size of one body, perhaps a square foot in dimension. It hugged tight at the sides, making it difficult to maneuver my shoulders. Logically, we should have made much more racket moving through these small tunnels, but realizing the flexibility and dexterity of these bodies allowed us to control our movements.
The first vent we discovered appeared to be another storage room. I could see a door with a window through which the hallway lights flickered. What was stored in these rooms? What information could we uncover at any given time? The possibilities seemed so endless that I just wouldn’t know where to begin. The desire was to find our real bodies, and then find the method of transfer, but who was to say we could even do that in this building?
I closed my eyes, trying to think through the possibilities, but concentrating was difficult. At a fork in the ductwork, we had to choose a path—I chose right, which led to a second vent showing a room with windows to the outside.
“ Charlie, ” I whispered.
“Yeah?”
“This one.”
Then I saw them, just outside the door of the room.
“Shh. Don’t move,” I said quietly.
They had flashlights crawling along the walls. I turned away, hoping that they wouldn’t see me. They were in the room, searching slowly and methodically.
The light fell on the vent cover. For an eternity, it just stayed. Every inch of me froze in place, the anxiety a wet ball in my throat. What must have been a very accurate simulation of adrenaline coursed through my arms and legs.
The light didn’t move. Almost shaking, I forced myself to turn toward the light.
It wasn’t a flashlight—the beams came from the eyes of an orderly, but the orderly wasn’t moving. Its silhouette hid behind the blinding light, but I could see other orderlies, other bodies, standing there not moving.
“Back, Charlie. Go back to the vent opening,” I whispered.
We maneuvered backward, the tight squeeze incredibly uncomfortable as we inched to the fork in the ductwork. I watched the vent ahead, with the light still frozen in place through the slits of the cover
“We can turn around at the fork,” he said from behind me. So we did, which made the journey back to the original vent entry faster.
After we tumbled out of the opening and back onto the tower of crates, he asked, “What happened up there?”
“I’m not sure. Come with me.”
Back out the door we snuck, clinging closely to the walls and following some internal spatial coordinates that would lead us to the room we had just backed away from. When we finally found it, we saw them.
A group of seven orderlies, three with lightbeams shining from their eyes stood facing the vent cover, frozen in place. We moved to get a closer look, finding them statuesque, as though carved from the night air.
“What’s wrong with them?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know.”
I slipped through the doorway past them to peer out the window. We looked to be on the second or third floor of the building. I couldn’t discern exactly what was out there, but it might’ve been a forest.
I backed around and through the group of orderly statues and took Charlie by the hand. “ Come on. Let ’s get out of here.” We made our way to the stairwell, finding no other orderlies in our path. The level that appeared to be the ground floor had no discernible security measures in our way, but as we exited the stairwell, I heard that shredding laughter from somewhere in the bowels of the building again.
There was a lobby area with a desk manned by no one and a set of glass doors. Miraculously, the doors opened on a single push, and we were out into the crisp night air.
As soon as we exited the building, we were greeted by a rushing sound, as though an aircraft were flying low close by. The desire to run and hide in the trees was overshadowed by the curiosity of watching three lights descending above us, at three points of a silhouette, almost like a small UFO attempting to land right above our heads.
“ Hello, ” a voice said as the realization dawned on me that the silhouette was the shape of a man, the lights being thrusters from his hands and feet that were helping him levitate. I shaded my eyes as it lowered closer and closer to the ground.
“My name is Garrick, and I’m here to help.”
13: gives wisdom unto the wise (the architect)
“My name’s not Michael,” I said.
Evelyn stared at me with a manic look in her eye. “Then who are you?”
“What do you know about Transhumans?” I asked.
“What, like Agent of Truth?” she said.
“Agent of Truth? What’s that?”
I called Evelyn immediately when we had arrived at the hospital. Daphne was stable and would survive, and it fell on me to noti
fy her family. Evelyn asked me to call her for help the evening before, but she didn’t expect this. She came to the hospital soon thereafter, shocked at Daphne’s actions. After what I said to Daphne in the ambulance, I knew this was coming. And I knew I had to ask Evelyn for help. There was no one else.
“It’s a conspiracy theory, all over the Knowledgebase,” she answered. “There’s this guy, he calls himself Agent of Truth. He claims there’s a Transhuman conspiracy to take over the world. He posts to MyRead.”
“What? What the fuck?”
“It’s a fringe thing. These nutbags on the Knowledgebase, mostly right wing types who support the current regime, they buy into it because they think these liberal Transhumans are going to try to overthrow the government. And they think it’s true because Agent of Truth is able to post anonymously. They’ve tried to hunt down his true identity, but he, or she I guess, posts these messages from different locations. You haven’t heard about this?”
“I was in a coma, Evelyn. I don’t know shit.”
“Right, good point,” she managed to laugh.
“Show me,” I said.
She pulled out her phone and began searching the Knowledgebase right away. “But wait—what does this have to do with who you are?” On her phone, she showed me a MyRead post from user:Agent_of_Truth entitled “Deep Truth.” It begins with a Bible quote from the Book of Daniel.
“He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and sets up kings; He gives wisdom unto the wise and knowledge to those that understand; He reveals the deep and secret truth; He knows what is in the darkness and the light dwells within him.”
In the post, this Agent of Truth discusses Home getting nuked. How would this person know? What Evelyn described must be true—only someone on the inside would know about this. My first thought was that it might be one of my former companions—Ian, Anthony, Vanessa, or Rita. But it could be someone from the OSS, someone who witnessed the destruction of Home through the eyes of the team sent to lock it down.
