by Steve Alten
The burble allowed me to stand. I approached Oscar, who pressed a suckered palm to the inside of his acrylic prison, his soulful yellow eyes staring at me.
I reached out with my right hand to press against the container, a lump forming in my throat. “Sorry, pal. I really fucked up this time. I’m gonna get you out of this, I promise.”
Leaving the cephaloped, I stood alongside the transhuman version of Andria Saxon. Wires and conduits ran down her bare spine, her breasts concealed behind a steel plate that swallowed her lower torso — assuming one even existed.
“Andie, why does the Creator wish to see me?”
IT IS NOT FOR ME TO KNOW.
I tried another tact. “Andie, do you possess memories of our time together in Virginia?”
YES.
“You appeared much different then.”
THE CREATOR HAS IMPROVED UPON MY ORIGINAL DESIGN.
“Of course he has. May I hold your hand?”
Cocking her head, she reached out with her right hand and I took it in my left. It was surprisingly warm, with a powerful pulse that beat alternately along either side of her wrist.
“Andie, do you miss being human?”
MY FUNCTION IS TO SERVE THE CREATOR.
“Which you do very well. But do you miss being human? Do you ever miss me?”
WHEN I DREAM OF BEING HUMAN, YOU ARE THERE.
“What if I could help you to become human?”
She released my hand. I SHARE PART OF ANDRIA SAXON’S DNA, I SHARE HER MEMORIES, BUT I AM NOT HER. I AM A HUNTER-TRANSPORT.
“I think you are more. Release my friend; allow your human compassion to have a greater voice in your consciousness.”
I AM NOT PROGRAMMED FOR HUMAN COMPASSION.
“Of course you are. You share Andria Saxon’s DNA.”
THE CREATOR SAYS YOU ARE MANIPULATING ME.
Without warning, I collapsed to my knees, my body subjected to near-unbearable gravitational forces. Andie … don’t. I collapsed onto my stomach. ABE, get her to respond.
SHE IS IN COMMUNICATION WITH ANOTHER ENTITY.
Can you eavesdrop?
THE COMMUNICATION IS NOT THOUGHT-ENERGY BASED. THE ENTITY IS COMMUNICATING THROUGH A BIOLOGICAL LINK.
I managed to turn my head so that I could see the eastern horizon. As the predawn gray chased away the night, I could make out a dark shadow towering over the jungle. It was a mountain plateau — a geological blemish that seemed out of place in the densely forested terrain, and we were heading right for it.
The transport shook violently as we passed over a rocky periphery enclosing a vast valley.
WARNING: FLUCTUATING … MAGNETIC FIELD … INTERFERENCE CAUSED BY A GEOLOGICAL ANOMALY.
What kind of geological anomaly?
TERRESTRIAL IMPACT CRATER … CREATED BY A LARGE MOON METEOR. CRATER DIAMETER: 22.7 MILES. COMPOSED OF A FRESHWATER GLACIER LAKE AND TWO ISLAND MASSES. APPROACHING LARGER MASS.
The ride smoothed as we traveled beyond the steep rise. A vast valley bloomed into view, its depths obscured by a dissipating early morning fog. For several minutes we hovered above the gray mist — until the sun cracked the horizon and lifted the veil and my eyes widened in wonderment.
I suppose one could describe the habitat as a forested city, but that would be as fitting as defining a computer as a glowing rectangular box. Materializing out of the haze was a living, breathing, self-sustaining entity — combining the biodiversity of the redwood canopy with a futuristic environmentally birthed metropolis a million years in the making.
Still battered by the crater’s magnetic interference, ABE nevertheless managed to flood my brain with undulating waves of information — a mind-numbing play-by-play of scientific theory that boggled my consciousness even as it threatened to drown me in the abstract. If the Great Die-Off had exposed a major weakness in human society it was modern man’s dependence on transportation in order to feed the masses. For decades, America and other nations had relied on industrial farms to grow and transport food, sacrificing nutrition for preservatives, compensating a lack of soil quality with fertilizers and pesticides — all of which required oil, so much so that it took ten calories of oil to produce and deliver one calorie of food. When the oil ran out, the inevitable happened.
In an attempt to prevent the inevitable, scientists in the early 2000s turned to genetic engineering. By altering, replacing, or resequencing pairs of genes within strands of DNA they discovered they could enrich or improve on nature’s original design. This led to an exciting new field — synthetic genomics. Though it couldn’t prevent the death of four billion people, the GDO survivors did manage to develop bio-fuels with reduced carbon imprints, designer foods enriched with cancer-preventing nutrients, smart-clothing made from genetically altered fabrics, and aero gels like the ones used to construct Oceanus.
The intellectual agenda on display below our hovering transport dwarfed all that.
Instead of altering the DNA of an existing life-form, the habitat’s designer had used synthetic biology to combine the genetic attributes of many different life-forms with building materials to create an entirely new “living system.”
Rising out of the fog-enshrouded waters of a sparkling azure lake were monstrous genetically enhanced redwood trees that towered hundreds of stories high and several square miles wide. Synthetic biology had transformed the bark and barn door — size leaves into organic photovoltaic composites that used the sun’s rays to power the trees’ glowing hives. These biosphere habitats were budding directly out of the redwood tree trunks, each pumpkinlike growth as large as Oceanus.
Far from stopping there, the trees’ highway of limbs had been engineered to sprout vertically stacked food depots. Dozens of these organic greenhouses grew like wild mushrooms from every limb — each structure a genetically enhanced ecosystem, nourished by the trees’ innate water distribution system.
From my limited vantage I counted fifteen mature tree cities, with dozens more juvenile systems being cultivated from other areas of the crater, the developing sites dammed off from the lake. As we hovered past one of these dry beds to land, I caught a glimpse of an exposed root system that resembled the tentacles of a kraken.
The marvel of these engineering feats exhilarated me — my ego basking in the knowledge that the seed which had spawned this new world had come from a simple protocol.
And then I looked at Oscar and felt shame.
We began our descent, the crushing g-force waning as our altitude diminished. I pressed myself into a sit-up, managing to regain my feet as the transport touched down onto a vacant docking portal, the framework of which was poised above the lake on pilings. Dozens of Hunter-Transports stretched end to end across the water, creating an elevated walkway that led to the entrance of the Holy City.
In the distance, a strange procession was heading our way. Fearing for Oscar, I decided I needed an ally.
I approached Transhuman Andria as her synthetic platform appendage locked down on to her assigned recharger. She gazed up at me, her human upper torso quivering, her white eye lenses now glowing crimson red.
“Andie, are you okay?” I reached for her hand—
— ABE stopping me. WARNING: TRANSHUMAN ANDRIA IS BEING RECHARGED WITH 125,000 VOLTS OF ELECTRICITY. AVOID FLESH-TO-FLESH CONTACT.
Can she hear me?
YES.
Andie, are you all right? Are you in pain?
EXISTENCE … IS … PAIN.
Adrenaline coursed through my bloodstream even as my heart ached. For whatever reason she had been created, this life-form deserved better.
And then another nightmare of synthetic biology made its appearance, and the sorrow I felt turned to fear.
28
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
— HIS HOLINESS TENZIN GYATSO, the fourteenth Dalai Lama
In retrospect, the genetic engineering involved in creating the monstrous beings nimbly advancin
g toward me from across the recharging docks must have been far less challenging than designing a humanoid hovercraft, and yet the interfacing of the two species into this particular brute seemed a far greater accomplishment.
The human element was distinctly Monique DeFriend. Like Transhuman Andria, she was hairless, with white transparent lenses for eyes. Her exposed breasts offered a more brazen look, aided and abetted by her flesh tone, which was a blazing violet hue. What was as impressive as it was sinister was the way her waist melded so easily into the black widow spider’s narrow pedicel — the delicate marriage of the human spine into the arachnoid nerve center, the prominent roundness of the insect’s abdomen and its inspired anatomical placement — creating the sensual if not disturbing illusion of being Monique’s buttocks, albeit a massive one … all culminating in her centaurlike carriage riding aloft and in full command of those eight deadly seven-segment legs, their pointed claws clacking along the hard surface of the transports like approaching steeds.
The two bald, bare-breasted, strikingly violet human arachnids loomed over me, each as wide and as tall as a tank, their dexterous front legs twitching like nervous thoroughbreds. As for me? My mind was gone, my bio-chip fighting the paralysis of fear.
THEY ARE NOT HERE TO KILL YOU.
It was Transhuman Andria, her thought energy probing my psyche just in time to soothe my scattering consciousness — her hand reaching out for mine, warm and moist from the bloody object concealed in her palm.
KEEP THIS WITH YOU. THINK OF ME.
It was her finger. She had snapped the bone, wrenching and twisting the digit until the flesh had torn free … her ring finger!
I suppose there was a message in the gesture, but the circumstances weren’t exactly conducive to deep thought, and so I shoved the bleeding appendage into my sweat suit pocket, just as the spider-woman on my right hoisted me high off the ground into the human arms of Transhuman Monique 1. The female’s incredibly strong upper torso quickly grasped my wrist in her clawed fingers and positioned me atop her insect abdomen as if to ride her like a horse — which is what I did, if you call holding on for dear life “riding.” But where to hold on to? As we raced toward the Holy City my first instinct was to reach around her and cup her naked breasts, but that was too repulsive. I thought about grabbing her in a headlock, and she must have read my thoughts because her clawed hands expertly reached behind her back and grabbed my wrists, pulling my arms around her waist as a wet sheet of webbing shot out from the spinneret behind me, adhering me in place.
Pinned by the reeking soured goo, pressed against her lavender-pigmented back, I turned my face away and saw the second transhuman spider-woman trailing us, the pod holding Oscar webbed to the top of its abdomen.
My mount scurried across the photovoltaic backs of the Hunter-Transports, the scarlet eyes of these miserable transhuman sentries sparkling in the rising sun, the advancing daylight burning away the remaining fog to recharge their anatomical solar cells.
Awaiting us was a Manhattan-size cluster of synthetically engineered redwoods, each tree its own high-rise community. The trunk of the tree loomed before us a mind-boggling quarter mile in circumference.
At the base of the tree was a garden of giant carnivorous pitcher plants. One variety was adorned with velvety gold and magenta leaves folded into slippery chutes designed to send any enticed invader plunging into a pitfall trap — a twelve-foot-deep gullet filled with digestive enzymes. Fuchsia-colored flypaper traps belched toxic aromas and butterwort leaves covered in stalked glands secreted a sticky milklike mucilage. Dancing around the vine-covered surface of the trunk was a jungle of blood-red Venus flytraps, their hinged leaves adorned with six-inch fangs.
Surrounding the carnivorous garden, running beneath the pier that served as a docking station for the Hunter-Transports was the lake — a placid looking waterway hosting forty-foot lily pads. Floating along the surface like miniature green islands, these growths camouflaged twisted tubular channels — digestive systems, according to ABE. As we galloped by I saw several of the lily pads twitching with what appeared to be the half-eaten remains of a seven-foot horn-rimmed toad.
And then we were through the garden of snapping plants and climbing straight up the sheer vertical tree trunk, the webbing at my back all that was keeping me from tumbling off the spider-woman’s abdomen. A hundred feet … three hundred feet and my stomach tensed in fear, my mind muting ABE’s unnerving altitude calculations as I whispered the mantra, “Don’t look down … don’t look down—”
Passing seven hundred feet I looked up and saw the undercarriage of a bridge that blotted out the sun — the first in a series of lower limbs, this one looking as wide and as long as the Golden Gate. Its expanse reached out a mile or more to connect with another redwood. And above it were a dozen more limbs that rose thousands of feet, each a living Mecca of genetic engineering that supported an unimaginable alien world concocted by the freakish intelligence of a machine that knew no boundaries.
In a state of near panic, I reached out to ABE, desperate to know if thought communication with this new creature was possible.
THERE IS A DIFFERENT SENSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRESENT AMONG THESE SPIDER BEINGS. THEY ACT COLLECTIVELY, THEREFORE ANY MESSAGE DELIVERED WILL BE RECEIVED BY THEIR ENTIRE NEST.
I don’t care. Ask them where I’m being taken.
“Oh, shit!” I squeezed my arms tightly around Transhuman Monique’s stomach as the creature inverted to climb up and around the gargantuan tree limb.
QUERY ANSWERED: ROBERT EISENBRAUN HAS BEEN SUMMONED BY THE CREATOR.
In the last twelve hours I had been clubbed, kidnapped, squeezed to the point of near suffocation, and rendered helpless by human creatures that resembled the women who had been aboard Oceanus. As strange as it was, I could deal with these beings (sexual fantasies aside); I could probably even handle the dizzying heights as long as we didn’t invert again. But the thought of finding myself at the mercy of a psychotic computer that now took pleasure in torturing species it deemed expendable seemed akin to being summoned by Dr. Mengele to his laboratory in Auschwitz — a fear that terrified me to the bone.
ABE … engage Superman protocol!
Superman was an emergency protocol that duplicated the brain’s basic response to extreme duress — a powerful, superhuman condition that enabled a panicked parent to lift the rear axle of a one-ton car to free their trapped child or a hiker to run with the speed of a world-class sprinter when confronted by a ferocious grizzly. It was a desperate, dangerous tactic — one I had never used before, uncertain if my biological chip could pull me out of a physical overload on par with a commercial jet igniting an afterburner.
In a microsecond of thought, ABE fired up my adrenal glands, blasting my bloodstream with a flood of cortisol and adrenaline as it simultaneously readied my body’s sympathetic nervous system to accommodate an incredible burst of sustained physical activity. My blood pressure soared, my heart raced dangerously, pumping globs of oxygen-enriched blood in excess of two hundred beats per minute.
My senses focused like lasers. Colors magnified, exotic smells assaulted my nostrils, and sounds crackled in my ears as time appeared to slow down, even as my blood-engorged muscles threatened to tear through the fabric of my sweat suit.
Digging the balls of my feet into the spinal column that fused the spider with the woman, I stood, my quads stretching the webbing at my back, the slack enabling the crook of my right arm to snake its way around Transhuman Monique’s throat. Pressing my left palm to her temple, I twisted violently, snapping the vertebrae in her neck.
The insect screeched its rage into my mind — ABE immediately silencing its thoughts — as the paralyzed being’s legs buckled beneath me. Reaching out to the tree limb we had just scaled, I gripped the closest tangle of vines in both fists and held on as the spider creature tumbled backward into space.
For a frightening moment the webbing held fast, forcing me to support our combined weights, then the silky
mass snapped and the violet preponderance of flesh and legs plummeted — nearly striking the second transhuman spider ascending to the tree trunk a hundred feet below.
Dangling a thousand feet above the lake, my overwrought muscles quivering, I quickly scaled the limb’s girth to stand atop the vast horizontal highway. The redwood trunk was to my left, a dense jungle to my right. For a fleeting moment I considered hiding in the foliage — until I looked up and saw the underside of a five-story sphere, the lowest of a dozen hives attached to the tree trunk like giant jabuticaba fruit. Glowing a golden yellow, the habitat bore rows of rectangular brown openings, each a potential sanctuary.
Looking down, I saw the enraged second Transhuman Monique shrieking silently at me. The eight-legged monster was racing up the tree, the pod holding Oscar still held to the spider-woman’s back.
Sprinting to the redwood’s trunk, I grabbed a vine and began climbing, the lower portion of the sphere a good sixty feet straight up. My pulse pounded in my throat, the vine tearing into my palm and fingers as I quickly halved the distance — the second hybrid spider three body lengths away … two lengths away … one—
Reaching the bottom of the hive, I heaved myself headfirst inside the nearest opening as I was attacked from behind by the trailing insect’s probing forward appendages. On hands and knees I crawled in deeper, pausing only when I realized the aperture was too narrow for the transhuman spider to enter.
I was in a tight tunnel, the walls composed of a brown fibrous, slightly sticky porous membrane. The only exit was straight ahead, illuminated by a bright incandescent yellow interior.
With no other options, I crawled toward the light.
Halfway in, I noticed the rush of air at my back, timed with the bellows effect of the membrane expanding and contracting all around me.
ABE, continuous theorization of surroundings.
THE MEMBRANE IS LIVING TISSUE, DESIGNED TO FILTER CARBON DIOXIDE FROM THE INTERIOR.
