The Broken God Machine

by Christopher Buecheler

  Tasha seemed now on the verge of tears, frustrated by her inability to understand this thing that she had spent her life trying to reach. Allen seemed to realize that he was upsetting her and he put his grin away, opting for a more serious expression.

  “Hey, sister, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” he said. “I just … it’s been a long time since I talked to one of you, and the last one was a lot more up to date on her history. Listen, this is gonna go nowhere unless we aug you. There’s too much to tell. Too much you need to know. Can I ask you a couple of questions before we get to that, though? I don’t even know your names.”

  “My name is Tasha. This is Pehr. I … I have been dreaming of this place since I was born.”

  “I know you have, Tasha. We built that into you.”

  “I am not a machine! I was not built by anyone. I came from my mother’s belly just like my sisters and brothers!”

  “Whoa, right, no … you’re flesh and blood and bone. Pretty eyes, sexy legs … you’re a hundred percent human, OK? You’re just a little bit more than human, too. We co-opted a few sequences of your junk DNA to store some data, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know what that means!” Tasha cried, her hands balled into fists, and Allen nodded. He took a deep breath – if magical, floating heads could breathe – and continued.

  “What happens is, every hundred years or so a girl like you comes along, and she has dreams about this place, and about a guy who looks a whole lot like your boy over there. See, he’s descended from a good friend of mine, the Prime Minister Mombutabwe you keep hearing about. His gene patterns act as your key. He gets you inside, and you fill us in on the state of things. That’s how it goes. We knew there would be more … and we wanted them to come after us. We really did. That’s why we set this stuff up, but we didn’t count on you disappearing like you did. Where the hell have you guys been, anyway?”

  “We were separated ages ago. The mountains are forbidden to my people, now – we consider them holy ground. This is supposed to be a city of the gods. And Pehr’s kin, they … they …”

  “We were separated from Tasha’s by the Lagos,” Pehr said.

  “Oh, those guys are still around?” Allen asked. “Damn it. We set the RDIS units to kill them on sight. I figured they were long gone.”

  Pehr shook his head. “They live in the jungle and sometimes make war on the villages of the coast. I have … lost much to them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Allen said, and his voice sounded sincere. “Listen, we didn’t make them, OK? They’re not like the gardeners … they’re not something we made that turned bad. They were bad right from the start. After the Great Destruction, man, all kinds of bad turned up in the world. I forget who the Lagos used to be, but they were into gene manipulation. They mixed in all kinds of animal species, trying to give themselves a better shot at surviving. I guess it worked, if they’re still around. They’re bad news.”

  “You know of the Great Destruction?” Tasha asked.

  “Do I know of it? Honey … when a comet the size of Connecticut drops directly onto the most holy city on the planet and kills about ninety percent of humanity, it gets mentioned in a few history books. I wasn’t around for it, but my grandfather was. From what I hear, uh … it sucked.”

  “It’s nothing more than legend to us,” Pehr said. “Some terrible thing that happened at the dawn of time, so far in the past that no one even remembers what it was.”

  Allen sighed. “Look … there’s no way for me to tell you everything you need to know. Seriously. I could start talking now, and you would be dead before I finished. There’s just too much. I can’t tell you about it all … but what I can do is offer you all the information you could ever want, right now, instantly. Does that sound good to you?”

  Tasha spoke with no hesitation. “Yes.”

  Pehr thought about it for much longer. Unlike Tasha, he had neither dreamed of this place nor felt any great urge, even now, to learn the long-lost secrets of their ancestors. He had planned for a simple life: wedding and bedding Sili, hunting boar, raising children in his village by the sea. That was what he thought he had been meant for.

  Now here he was in a far-away land with this girl who had become something like a sister to him. He had fought through the Lagos and the metal thing, fought through his near-death by dehydration, and fought through a horde of homicidal gardening robots just to get here. Was he going to walk away now without taking the opportunity to learn and understand? Was he going to go back to being a hunter of tral or boar, living in fear that the Lagos might return at any time, until the moment came when he was too old or too careless and he died?

  “Buddy, it makes no difference to me,” Allen said. “If you dig your life, be cool. I’ll educate your girl, and she’ll help you get back to wherever it is you need to be. You go on and have some babies … seed that Prime Minister DNA back into the pool, and in another hundred years or so a new version of the two of you will swing by and check in. It’s no skin off my back … the real me is already long gone.”

  Pehr shrugged. “I think that if I don’t learn more, I will always wonder what I missed.”

  Allen studied him for a moment, and he grinned. “There might be hope for the rest of you after all.”

  “What do you mean?” Tasha asked him, but the giant head floating above them merely gave her a knowing look.

  “Put your hands on the pedestal. The one you touched to call me. Both of you.”

  Tasha did what she was told, and after a moment Pehr did the same.

  “What are you going to do to us?” Tasha asked him, and Allen laughed.

  “Sister, you have to go through the process if you want a shot in hell of understanding when I explain it. Close your eyes.”

  Tasha and Pehr shut their eyes, nervous and edgy, fearing that this process might bring pain, or terror, or both.

  “Keep those eyes shut. It’s easier if you reduce the input. OK … connection established. Oh, that is beautiful. Those brains are just waiting for it. This is going to blow your mind, kids.”

  Pehr breathed deeply. If something had happened, it was nothing he could feel.

  And then Allen told them, “Here it comes,” and in the next instant, everything changed. Forever.

  Chapter 21

  In scientific circles, the impact and subsequent violent purging of the majority of living creatures from the planet was called the End-Holocene Mass Extinction Event. To the rest of the world, what little of it remained, it was known only as the Great Destruction. The comet that hit Jerusalem was larger than any that had ever been tracked, dwarfing the size of the asteroid that had killed the dinosaurs.

  “They spent trillions watching the sky to prevent this exact thing from happening,” Allen narrated, seemingly unable to sit in silence. “All of their systems and satellites and probability algorithms, and they got three days of warning that it’d changed course so drastically. Three days, man … what are you going to do with nine-point-six billion people in three stupid days? There was nothing they could do, except get as many of the best and brightest – and the most well-connected – as far underground as possible.”

  When the comet hit, nearly a billion human beings were rendered in moments into little more than charred organic matter, their remains sucked up into the atmosphere by the tremendous winds created by the superheated air. Billions more died in the following hours as the blast encircled the globe, filling the atmosphere with burning ash.

  “It was bad,” Allen told them. “Most of the planet ended up as a desert, the rain that did come down was full of acids and toxins, and the parts that were getting rained on were so burnt up, it didn’t matter anyway. It would’ve taken nature thousands of years to bounce back if we hadn’t helped her.”

  The polar ice-caps melted, flooding the oceans with fresh water, killing most of the life found within them. Countless species on land and in bodies of fresh water were driven extinct. Countless more died off within weeks
, victims of starvation, or dehydration, or simple changes in salinity. Ocean levels surged and earthquake after earthquake wracked the globe. The world became cracked and broken. Waterlogged. Earth became Uru.

  Pehr saw it happening before his eyes from an uncountable number of sources, everything from handheld home video to satellite feeds. It wasn’t that he was watching anything, exactly. Instead it was as if he had just watched ... and listened, and smelled, and touched. Not one thing at a time but hundreds, thousands, all pouring into his brain and becoming things remembered. Images, video, raw data – all of it was just suddenly there. It was an experience unlike anything he had ever imagined could exist.

  The amount of knowledge being driven into his head was unmanageable, impossible to bear. He worried for a time that his brain simply could not handle all of this information, that his skull would disintegrate in the attempt to contain it all. At last he realized that he was containing it. His mind was able to digest and understand what it was being shown. Whatever it was that Allen was doing to them, it was not just giving them this knowledge but modifying their very physiology in a way that allowed them to parse it.

  The humanity that came out of Earth’s bunkers was unlike that which had covered the globe when the comet hit. It was educated. Privileged. Structured. Some on the surface had managed to survive the apocalypse, and they turned to those from the bunkers for leadership.

  Many religions had been wiped out entirely by virtue of having no practitioners left, and those that remained were shaken to their very core. Jerusalem – and an area approximately 830 miles in diameter around it – now sat underneath thousands of feet of sea water. If the giant ball of ice had indeed been hurled by God, the message God seemed to be sending was that it was time to stop squabbling over chunks of land.

  “Naturally,” Allen said, “We ignored that message completely.”

  One would have hoped that the devastated remains of humanity, made up almost entirely of educated people from developed nations, suddenly pulled together by a loss so epic in scope that it defied comprehension, would have brought about something approaching an era of utopian peace. Such hopes were quickly dashed, as one of the first things humanity did upon emerging from its holes in the ground was to begin warring over what little spoils remained in the wake of the comet’s destruction.

  Some entities struggled to hold on to preexisting national boundaries. Others made desperate attempts to grab resources wherever they could be found, regardless of who might already have laid claim to them. It was inevitable, perhaps, that even as some groups were working desperately together in order to aid the planet’s recovery, others were busy taking what they could and blowing up those who tried to get to it ahead of them.

  “There were sixteen nuclear detonations in the first two years after the Emergence, and the wars went on for more than a century. In a lot of ways, the bombs did more damage than the comet. Can you believe that? Mankind’s sitting on the verge of extinction, and people are fighting about who gets the leftover diamonds. Same as it ever was, man … apes killing apes.”

  There was hope, however. During the Hundred Year Dark, as the era of nuclear sparring became known, large chunks of the scientific community came together in a desperate attempt to restore some balance to the globe. The concept of terraforming, subject to a great deal of theoretical research in the years leading up to the comet impact, had become suddenly urgent – a science fit for practical research and application. It was no longer necessary to wonder if other planets could be made habitable for earth’s overflowing population. The focus had shifted to making their own planet less hostile to the shredded remains of humanity.

  It took more than a hundred years, during which time the wars raged, fought from bunker cities hidden far below the earth. By the time the scientists had managed to repair even a small part of the surface, governments had changed substantially. One of the larger entities had formed via cooperation between a set of bunkers spread across the landmass that had once been California, Mexico, and part of Central America.

  This group was united under the charismatic leadership of a man named Nathan Hoskins. A leading geneticist before the Great Destruction, his work had led to the development of technologies that could extend the human lifespan by centuries. None had benefitted more from this work than Hoskins himself, who was able to push tirelessly through the long, dark years after the comet’s strike. It was Hoskins who first proposed the concept of Havenmont, a city-state unlike any other, in which science would be the principle religion, allowing for the complete cooperation and intertwining of government, church, and academics.

  Not all who lived within the land that Hoskins came to govern were willing to renounce their faith and take up the mantle of science, and for a time he met with heavy resistance from many groups opposed to the idea of Havenmont. Hoskins responded not with violence or oppression, but instead by forming the First United Church of the Enlightened. The Church’s central tenet was that science was the most holy of works: an attempt to unravel the mysteries of nature and better understand what God, if any, was out there. Well-funded and equipped with access at the highest levels of media and government, the church began rapidly to convert the survivors of the extinction event to its cause.

  “I met Hoskins, near the end of his life,” Allen said. “What you have to understand is that Nathan wasn’t a cynical man. He wasn’t pulling a con. He believed what he was telling his followers. He’d always believed it, even before the Great Destruction, and witnessing this random catastrophe only strengthened his desire to understand the universe. We spoke a lot about math, because man, I love math, and he asked me, ‘What is math if not the language of God?’”

  It was the Everstorm that made Havenmont possible. Deployed in the year 158 GD – one hundred and fifty-eight years after the Great Destruction – it began the laborious process of returning life to the surface. Originally conceived as a method to bring an atmosphere back to Mars, it turned out that the most important function the Everstorm served was to scrub away the radiation that was eating up most of the rest of the Earth. Pehr and Tasha and their societies had never known it, but the Everstorm was the only thing that had kept them alive all these millennia.

  Havenmont was founded in the year 258 GD, and for more than six hundred years it stood as a beacon of peace and prosperity amidst a world of chaos, terror, and pain. In that time, satellite uplinks were reestablished, the globe remapped, and the groundwork laid for the city’s true destiny. Hoskins lived for four hundred years after the Great Destruction, but he did not survive long enough to see these plans laid out. He left Havenmont in what seemed capable hands. His successor, a brilliant molecular physicist named Joachim Baptista, was elected president by the city’s governing board.

  By the time of Hoskins’s death, Havenmont had achieved global recognition as a beacon of light and civilization in an otherwise barbaric, dying world. Each year, tens of thousands of pilgrims began the treacherous journey from their bunkers to the city, often crossing great swaths of irradiated land that killed many of their numbers. Under Hoskins, these pilgrims would simply have been augmented and assimilated into the Church of the Enlightened, but under Baptista’s rule, only the best and brightest found a sympathetic ear.

  Baptista worked to solidify his rule in ways that Hoskins never had, becoming something more like an emperor then a president. It was under this rule that the first of the sprawling outer ghettos were founded, and soon the great city was ringed with low-quality dwellings supporting hundreds of thousands of people that the Baptista regime had found unworthy of entrance into the city proper. In one of his most famous speeches, Baptista had spoken at length on his reasons for this approach.

  “What time there was, when we were in need of these lesser children of God to clean our toilets, or haul our trash, or till our fields, has now passed. We have machines to do this work for us, and have found them infinitely superior to man at such menial tasks. Those who cannot contribute
to Havenmont in some greater, more meaningful way must be content with their lot in life.”

  In the sixth century after the Great Destruction, Joachim Baptista was assassinated and an impending civil war averted. Some claimed that the ghetto-dwellers had risen up against him, while others believed that he had been done in by members of his own church. Few mourned his passing.

  The laws Baptista had put into place granting himself absolute power were stripped away, and he was succeeded not by a single man, but by a parliament composed of a combination of high-ranking church members and elected officials who represented the city’s populace. Those who had been relegated for so long to the ghettos were at last given representation in this congress, though the gesture would prove largely inconsequential; the great work for which Havenmont had been established was nearly complete, and its deployment would make the city government irrelevant.

  For their first Prime Minister, the parliament elected a relatively young man who they felt represented the best that Havenmont had to offer, who could connect both with the scientific elite and the common man in the outer ghettos. That man was Nesagana Mombutabwe.

  A pilgrim himself, Mombutabwe was born not in Havenmont but in a bunker below the arid lands on the western half of what had once been Namibia. As his bunker failed, he had come to the surface and journeyed by boat to the flooded coasts of South America. From there he had made the perilous trek northward, slogging from ruin to ruin through lands populated by a race of half-animal ancestors of the Lagos, trying to avoid the great pockets of radiation that dotted the continent.

  Finally reaching Havenmont, Mombutabwe had required substantial treatment for radiation sickness and an infection of jungle fungus that took one of his feet. Once healthy, he had easily passed the tests required for citizenship under Baptista’s regime, showing particular ability in the areas of biology and sociology, and had immediately joined the Church of the Enlightened upon his admission to the city. Over the next hundred years he became a pioneer in cellular biology, working closely with a mathematical prodigy by the name of Allen Montgomery.