Fate of the Gods

by Matthew J. Kirby

  Monroe walked to a computer terminal near a very large wall-mounted screen, and switched it on. Natalya and Owen waited as he navigated through the Aerie’s database.

  “Let’s see what they’ve done with all my work,” he said.

  Several minutes went by, until Monroe seemed to find what he was looking for. He switched the image from his computer monitor over to the big screen.

  “There it is,” he said. “And they’ve added all the current data.”

  Natalya studied the images in front of her. On the left, she saw representations of DNA fragments, one next to her name and picture, and another next to Owen’s. Each of the teens Monroe had brought together possessed a link in a larger chain displayed on the screen. To the right of that, Natalya saw a timeline of world history that traced the appearances of the Trident and its prongs.

  “This is the Ascendance Event,” Monroe said. “There are two dimensions to it. On the left, you see the results of my work studying the DNA from humanity’s collective unconscious.”

  “The what?” Natalya asked.

  “She wasn’t there when you explained that,” Owen said.

  “Oh.” Monroe looked in her direction. “Right. So, psychologists have theorized that human beings all have an ancient, shared collection of memories, which explains why so many people are automatically afraid of snakes and spiders, and why stories of heroes are so similar all over the world. We call it the collective unconscious.”

  Natalya looked at the screen again. “And you found DNA for it?”

  “Yes,” Monroe said. “You can think of it as an embedded signal in our genome. But in the present day, it only survives in fragments. I’ve been trying to put together the complete sequence for years, without success. Then I found you two and the others.” He pointed at the screen. “Between the six of you, I now have all of it.”

  “Wait.” Natalya looked again at the images, evaluating the meaning of what he was saying. “What are the chances of that?” she asked.

  “Not tremendously unlikely.” Monroe smiled. “But it doesn’t stop there.” He pointed at the second half of the screen. “The six of you also happen to be connected to the history of the Trident through your ancestors, across time and even continents. And to answer your question, the odds of that, combined with the collective unconscious, are so low, it might as well be impossible. Yet here we are. Which means that all of this can’t be due to chance.”

  “If it’s not due to chance,” Natalya said, “that means … are you saying it’s intentional?” Even as she asked that question, she wondered who, or what, could bring something like this about.

  “Intentional is a tricky word,” Monroe said. “It implies consciousness, for one thing, which is not what I’m saying. I don’t think anyone or anything is steering this ship. But it might be that the autopilot has kicked in.”

  “But that means someone had to program the autopilot in the first place, right?” Owen asked.

  Monroe sighed. “Let’s not overextend the metaphor. I’m a scientist. I stick to what is observable and measurable, and that’s what you’re going to do while you help me.”

  “What can we do?” Natalya asked.

  “We have two questions.” Monroe moved to a whiteboard and grabbed a dry-erase marker. He pulled the cap and started writing, the tip of the pen squeaking, and Natalya smelled the light fumes of the chemical ink. “First,” Monroe said, “what is the nature of the collective unconscious DNA? Isaiah thought of it in terms of power and control. He wanted to know how he could use it as a weapon. But I don’t think that’s its purpose. Second, how does the collective unconscious relate to the Trident? As we’ve discussed, it can’t be a coincidence that both of these dimensions have emerged at the same time. I believe they’re part of a larger event. In fact, I think the collective unconscious might even hold the key to stopping the Trident.”

  “How?” Natalya said.

  “I’m not sure,” Monroe said. “But if you look at the history of this weapon with your ancestors, it’s almost like the ascendance of the collective unconscious has taken place in response to the Trident. But we need to understand the collective unconscious before we can conclude that.”

  “Okay,” Owen said, and took a seat at one of the workstations. “So how do we understand it?”

  “That’s where things get interesting,” Monroe said.

  “Interesting how?” Owen asked.

  “Now that I have the complete sequence for the collective unconscious, I can use the Animus to create a simulation of it.” Monroe snapped the cap back on the marker.

  Owen leaned forward in his chair and looked over at Natalya. She took a seat of her own in an ergonomic chair made of white mesh and plastic. She was trying to imagine what a simulation of the collective unconscious would look like, but couldn’t.

  “How would that work?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s really just memory,” Monroe said. “Old memory. The oldest memory, actually. This DNA goes back to the beginning of humanity. But it’s still memory, which means the Animus can use it.”

  Owen pointed back and forth between himself and Natalya. “And you want us to go into this simulation?”

  “Yes,” Monroe said. “And to answer your next question, no, I don’t have any idea what it will be like. It could make no sense at all, or it might be full of archetypes.”

  “Archetypes?” Natalya said. “Like from stories?”

  “Basically,” Monroe said. “Archetypes are images found around the world that have a shared meaning. Like the way most everyone can recognize the figure of the wise old mentor, or the fact that just about every culture in the world has its own version of a dragon. The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes and instincts.”

  “Will it be safe?” Natalya asked.

  Owen frowned at her. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “No, she’s right,” Monroe said, and nodded for her to continue.

  Natalya looked at Owen. “Think about synchronization. How is that even going to work with this simulation? What about desynchronization? And then there are the Bleeding Effects. What will those be in a simulation like this?”

  “Exactly,” Monroe said. “This simulation comes with risks because we don’t know how your minds will receive it or cope with it. If I’m being candid with you, it could be extremely dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?” Owen asked.

  “You won’t be going into this simulation in the memories of an ancestor. You’ll be taking your own mind fully into it. If you get lost in the simulation, or too deeply traumatized by it, you could do irreparable damage to your psyche. Your mind could break.”

  Those were the very things Natalya feared, though she wouldn’t have necessarily put it into those words. A broken mind sounded terrifying.

  “And you want us to go in there anyway?” Owen asked.

  “The decision is yours,” Monroe said. “It always is. But no, I don’t want you to go in there. I don’t want any of this. But our situation is dire, and this is the best way to understand what the collective unconscious really is. Maybe the only way.”

  “Why don’t you go in?” Natalya asked.

  “That’s a fair question,” Monroe said. “One answer is that I can’t. You might have heard something about it from Isaiah and Victoria. When I was a kid, my father was …” He bowed his head, and the skin around his eyes tightened, as if he felt pain. “Well, let’s just say he left marks. Deep scars. Physical and emotional. I tried to use the Animus as a way to go back and confront my father. All that did was open up old wounds. And it created new ones.” He paused. “Bottom line, you can’t change the past. Now a normal Animus simulation can be dangerous for my mind, but a simulation like this would be impossible.”

  In that moment, the way Natalya looked at Monroe changed. He had his own past and his own secret pains, which she had never deeply considered. But he had also said that was only one answer to why he couldn’t go into the collective u
nconscious. “Is there another answer?” she asked.

  “I also have very little of the collective unconscious DNA,” he said. “They’re not my memories. Same with Griffin and Victoria. For the simulation to remain stable and make synchronization possible, whoever goes in there needs to have as much of that DNA as possible. That means you six are the best candidates, and of the six, you happen to be the two here working with me.”

  “Lucky us,” Owen said.

  Natalya felt some pretty fierce apprehension about this, but she had also become intensely curious about what she would experience in the simulation. What would she see if it worked? This would be like going back in time to the beginning of mankind. These would be the memories that every person on earth shared, to some degree. Regardless of who you were or where you came from, these were the memories everyone had in common. Natalya wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to catch a glimpse of them. If she got in there, and things seemed dangerous or harmful, she could always quit. But until then, she planned to try.

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  Monroe nodded. “I admire your bravery.”

  “I’m in, too,” Owen said. “But I want you to do something for me.”

  Natalya wasn’t surprised by that, and Monroe didn’t seem to be, either.

  “I think I can guess what that might be,” Monroe said.

  Natalya could guess, too.

  Owen stood up and folded his arms. “I want you to let me see the real simulation of my father’s memories. You couldn’t before, because you didn’t have the right kind of Animus in your bus.” He looked around. “Now you do. I don’t trust what Isaiah showed me. But I trust you.”

  Monroe looked at Owen for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay. You do this for me, and I’ll do that for you.”

  “Deal,” Owen said.

  Monroe turned back to the workstation, and the images vanished from the large screen. “I’ve got some more extraction and calculation to do, and then the Animus has to render the simulation. I don’t need you here for that, so if you want to wander, you can. Just don’t go far. We’ll start the minute the simulation is ready.”

  Natalya and Owen looked at each other, and then both turned toward the lab door. Before they had exited, Monroe called to them.

  “Thanks, you two,” he said.

  Natalya nodded, and they left.

  Out in the hallway, Owen asked her, “Where do you want to go?”

  They could always go back to the common room, but there wasn’t much to do there, other than just sit and stare at each other. “Let’s just walk around,” she said. “Maybe get some fresh air.”

  He pointed in the direction of an outside door down the hallway.

  They walked toward it, and found that it led to one of the Aerie’s many patios and balconies. Two benches there formed an L and faced the forest that covered the mountain and surrounded the facility with the scent of pine. The tops of the oldest, tallest trees swayed back and forth in a breeze, their arthritic branches creaking.

  Natalya took one of the benches, and Owen took the other. The warm sunlight felt good on her cheeks, and she lifted her face toward it, her eyes closed.

  “Are you worried at all?” Owen asked. “If this simulation is as dangerous as Monroe made it sound …”

  “I think we have to take the risk,” Natalya said. “The stakes are too high.”

  “You’re probably right.” He paused. “What did the Piece of Eden show you?”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. He was asking about the effect of the fear prong that Isaiah had used against them back in Mongolia. Each piece of the Trident had a different power and effect. The prong they had searched for in New York caused others to put blind faith in the person who wielded it. Natalya hadn’t experienced the power of that first relic, but she had felt the fear caused by the second.

  “You don’t have to answer if it’s too personal,” Owen said, then paused and stared off into the trees. “I saw my dad. He confessed to everything. Even killing that guard. And he didn’t feel guilty about it. He was smiling.”

  It made sense that would be his fear, and Natalya nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s hard to get that out of my head, you know?” he said.

  She did know. The Piece of Eden had shown her something, too. A nightmare she’d had for a few years now. Not every night, but often, and it always played out the same: she was walking to visit her grandparents after school.

  Natalya loved their tidy, plain apartment with its old wooden floors, so full of her grandfather’s jokes and her grandmother’s cooking. After school, she was supposed to go straight there, but instead she stopped in a park to use a swing set. Laughing, she tucked her legs, then stretched out her toes as far as they would go, over and over, back and forth, trying to get as high on the swing as she could. After what felt like several minutes had passed, she got off the swing to be on her way, and that’s when she noticed it. The sun had almost set. Somehow, she’d been swinging for hours, not minutes, and now she was very, very late. Her grandparents would be so worried about her. So she sprinted all the way from the park to her grandparents’ apartment, but when she finally got there, ready to blurt out her rehearsed apology, lungs burning and out of breath, she noticed their door was ajar. But not by much.

  That dark gap, only an inch wide, looked and felt all wrong.

  She didn’t want to open the door the rest of the way. But she had to. So she pushed on it, cold with fear, widening the utter silence beyond, and then stepped through.

  The first thing she always noticed in her nightmare was the blood. It was everywhere, tracks of it splattered up the walls and even on the ceiling. Then she noticed the bodies of her murdered grandparents. She saw what the killer had done to them, and she wanted to look away, but she couldn’t, and even if she did, the image would remain in her eyes.

  The police and her parents always arrived shortly after that, with sirens and screaming. Her mom shouted at her, shaking her, asking her why she hadn’t been there. Natalya should have been there. That’s when she always woke up.

  And that’s what the Piece of Eden had shown her, though it had felt more real than her nightmare ever did.

  “It’s okay,” Owen said, bringing her back to the mountain, the Aerie, and the patio. “You don’t have to tell me. Sorry I asked.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Natalya said. “I don’t—”

  The door opened behind them, and Monroe waved them inside. “It’s ready,” he said.

  After he’d recovered from the effects of his desynchronization, Grace listened as David explained that his ancestor, Grace’s ancestor, owned a slave. Grace wasn’t surprised. Vikings enslaved other Vikings. Grace had known that, but she hadn’t stopped to think their ancestor might have been a part of that system, and she could understand why it made David so angry.

  “I don’t know how to synchronize with that,” he said, still sounding rattled.

  Victoria lowered her tablet. “What do you mean?”

  “For me—” David put both his hands out in front of him. “Okay, when I’m in the Animus, I have to find common ground with my ancestor so I can relate to them. If I can’t see things the way they see them, I can’t synchronize with them.”

  “Interesting.” Victoria folded her arms and tapped her index finger against her lips. “So you need agreement with your ancestor. And this is something you can’t see the way a Viking would see it.”

  David nodded.

  That wasn’t how synchronization felt to Grace. For her, it was like letting someone come into her house. She didn’t have to accept everything about them to do that, but then, she hadn’t ever tried inviting in a slave owner before.

  Victoria turned to her. “Do you want to give it a try?”

  Grace didn’t think she had a choice if she wanted to find the Piece of Eden before Isaiah did. “I’ll give it a try,” she said.

  David slumped down lower in the chair and sighed, and
she couldn’t tell if he felt relieved or annoyed. Maybe a bit of both. He’d made it pretty clear that he didn’t need her to protect him anymore, or bail him out of trouble. But the piece of the Trident in Mongolia had shown her that he did. This needed to be done, regardless of how David felt about it.

  “Stay out of trouble,” she told him.

  Then she walked over to the Animus, and Victoria helped her climb in and suit up. When Grace was strapped and secured, Victoria brought the helmet down and placed it over her head, plunging her into emptiness.

  Are you ready? Victoria asked.

  Grace took a deep breath, preparing herself for the hard part. “As ready as I can be.”

  Good. In three, two, one …

  Grace endured the painful intrusion of the Parietal Suppression, traversed the momentary disorientation of the Memory Corridor, and emerged into the Viking world of Scandinavia. She stood in the doorway of her home, watching a man approach, carrying some kind of thick staff across her land.

  Grace sensed her ancestor waiting outside the walls of her mind, ready to inhabit her with his memories. She didn’t find his presence aggressive, or combative, but rather patient and strong. She felt in him a gruff kindness that probably wasn’t obvious to everyone who knew him, and in that way he reminded her of her father.

  But then she thought about his thrall. His slave.

  Sudden anger reinforced her walls against him. In the face of that evil, what did it matter how patient or kind he was? He wasn’t anything like her father.

  Grace? How are you doing?

  “I’m okay.”

  You haven’t locked in yet.

  “I know.”

  The simulation won’t stabilize until—

  “I know.”

  Grace didn’t need Victoria to tell her that. What Grace needed was to figure this out, and quickly, because this was for David. She faced this challenge so that he wouldn’t have to, because that was what she’d always done. Like the times she’d hurried him out of the store before he noticed the security guard following them around, or the times she told him not to speak back to the gangbangers as she walked him past the corner where they hung out. She always placed herself between him and trouble.