I took another gulp.
“Lloyd told me his story,” Glix said. “Why don’t you tell me yours, Eric, and then I’ll get you up to speed on me. Tell me everything.”
“All right.” I set down my glass. “Where do I begin?”
“Well”—Glix patted my knee like a concerned parent—“not literally everything. Just tell me your experiences with the ‘group,’ and your opinion concerning the AM Gospel—er, MS G-333.”
I hesitated. It felt too personal. I barely knew this Glix character. I felt vulnerable. An old saying of my father’s—“The motto of a winner is let’s get on with it”—shot though my head, but I didn’t feel like a winner. In fact I felt like a loser, capital L.
“You were the first,” Lloyd said, starting me off. “Isn’t that right?”
I nodded, turning my attention to the fat man in the leather chair. “Lloyd came to me after these transcended future beings made first contact …”
“Can we all agree to refer to them as the ascended machines?” Glix interjected. “I hate anything nebulous. I’ve kowtowed to your manuscript appellation, haven’t I?”
“Fine with me,” Lloyd said.
I shrugged. “Yes. So as you know, Lloyd was contacted via email and through meditation, and as the ascended machines showed him where to dig, he eventually uncovered the MS G-333.”
“By the way the ascended machines did call it by that appellation themselves, you know,” Lloyd added.
“He brought it to my home after he’d begun to study it. I was still living with Kate at the time.”
“Who’s Kate?” Glix blinked. “Is she in the group?”
My heart trembled. “Kate is—er, no … was—my wife. She is in the group. Since our separation, though, she’s dropped out considerably.”
Lloyd added, “The more that we study MS G-333 and apply the techniques to ourselves, the more … difficult it’s become for members to remain in the group. Several have dropped out, not just Kate.”
Glix seemed to make a mental connection in his head. “This psychological approach has some interesting side effects, eh? Fascinating.”
“Anyway,” I continued. “When Lloyd came to me at the beginning and showed me the titanium pages of MS G-333, I was blown away. I couldn’t believe the script was in English. It was too fortuitous. I suspected Lloyd was mad, or a con-artist, or both.”
“Still up for debate,” Lloyd added, lighting a cigarette.
“There’s a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know,” Glix remarked. “John Dryden.”
“I love that quote.” I was surprised to hear a scientist reference such a bygone poet. I felt my heart grow lighter, releasing the pent-up tension. I went on. “Both Kate and I looked over MS G-333 and determined that, even if Lloyd was crazy, his manuscript was unmistakably alien. We began meeting regularly to read over the pages, and then we started inviting other scholars whom we deemed trustworthy. Lloyd even implemented a ritual initiation into the group, complete with an oath of secrecy.”
“Ingenious—that bit,” Glix said. “I love it. How long ago did you begin reading?”
I glanced at Lloyd. “About six years?”
He flipped his Zippo closed. “Sounds right.”
Glix whistled through loose lips. “Long time—longer than me. I’m envious.”
“Please,” Lloyd said. “In three years’ time you’ve done more work than my little group has accomplished in six.” He gestured about the lab with his cigarette.
Glix, clearly flattered, demurred. “Yes, well … perhaps materially speaking.”
Lloyd scoffed.
I added, “We’ve never actually worked out any of the technical diagrams, such as you’ve done.”
“That’s not by choice,” Lloyd said, “but by lack on competency.”
“We’ve focused on the spiritual side—at least I have. After Kate and I were initiated into the group and started meditating on what we read in the manuscript, things changed. The world began to alter, along with our perceptions. We began seeing things, hearing things, that weren’t physically there.”
“Lights, auric colors, radio waves,” Lloyd explained; “even each other’s thoughts.”
“You became psychic?” Glix asked.
I nodded.
“What am I thinking now?”
“It doesn’t work like that. It only happened between Kate and I—and it was based on our intimate connection.”
“Stupendous.”
“Sometimes, but sometimes it was horrible. Kate started hearing thoughts in my head that I would never normally share with her—not while sober, anyway. Thoughts I wasn’t consciously aware I was even thinking. Dark thoughts. Anger, violence. I’ve had a hard life, Mr …”
“Glix—call me Glix.”
“Frankly, my life fucking sucks, Glix. You can ask Lloyd, he’s heard the whole sob story about my upbringing, my three failed marriages, my thankless job at the university. And let’s not forget the drinking.” I jiggled my glass in front of him. “But women are the worst, that’s what I have concluded. All they do is demand, demand, demand, and they’re never satisfied anyway, so what’s the use? You’re better off driving wooden nails through your hands than you are trying to please them. It’s a fucking nightmare.”
I lifted the Glenmorangie and downed it, slamming the glass on the desk. It cracked down the side, splitting into two pieces, nearly cutting my hand. Everyone, including myself, jumped at the sound. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. Still, I basked in the awkward aftermath, knowing I had created it. Let them feel as bad as I felt all the time—Lloyd especially. This was all his fault.
The elder doctor Lloyd leaned forward and looked in my eyes. I knew what he wanted—for me to fucking cool it. And of course I would. Lloyd’s methods for engaging with MS G-333 had modified my behavior. I couldn’t deny it. Luckily I didn’t care. I would do what he wished. He was group leader.
“Eric was orphaned at three,” he said, and immediately Glix grunted as if that explained everything; and immediately I wanted to smash his fat pathetic head into the wall, dousing blood across his Nazi flag.
“The saddest part is that Eric has two siblings, who his parents did not orphan. They only discarded Eric. So what you’re looking at is the psychological impact of abandonment. Everyone in the group knows everything about everyone else, their entire psychological makeup. So as you can imagine, this is a source for endless problems.”
“I see,” Glix said. His voice was hardly a whisper. Clearly he was uncomfortable by what had just happened, but more he was intellectually intrigued. “The AM Gospel does go into detail about the inner soul-world of the human being,” he added, “that it must be thoroughly uncovered and expressed—particularly in our present epoch.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Lloyd said.
Glix now turned to me, his pale blue eyes appearing genuinely kind under the bill of his Red Sox cap. “I appreciate your sharing this with me, Eric,” he said. “This is part of the reason I contacted Dr. Martinson in the first place—to observe the psychological implications of the AM Gospel, not just the technological ones, to which I am confined by my area of expertise. Please, continue.”
For a moment, I thought about getting up and walking right the hell out of there, though I knew there’d be nowhere to go but into trees. But the gesture would still feel satisfying. Instead I collected my composure and determined where I’d left off.
“That’s right,” I said. “As Kate started hearing my thoughts, I began hearing hers as well. Sadistic stuff. Her thoughts really hurt me, and pissed me off. We began to fight all the time, and yet we continued studying MS G-333, perhaps more so. It turned into obsession and it consumed our time and careers.
“This is difficult to explain, but to some extent I believe this was happening to everyone in the group. We all went a bit mad.” I chuckled. “Meanwhile, we constantly tried to dismiss the whole thing, and label Lloyd as the mad one. Sometimes we tri
ed to convince ourselves he had been abducted by aliens, that that’s what was going on.”
“There’s some truth to that,” Lloyd said. “The ascended machines, though terrestrial, are technically nonhuman. They’re posthuman.”
“The group’s study continued,” I said, “while Kate and I kept inadvertently hearing each other’s private, innermost thoughts. Every unflattering remark. We’d hear it, and then we’d fight. We fought constantly. It came to the point where we’d hear each other’s fighting-thoughts before they came out of our mouths and so we’d sit in silence hearing the raging accusations coming out of each other’s minds.”
Glix shook his head in amazement.
“It culminated in divorce six months ago,” Lloyd said.
“Not just divorce,” I said, growing excited, “but real, pure, unadulterated hatred and rage. I’d still like to kill her, if I had the chance. The last straw came when I finally snapped. We were both in the kitchen arguing psychically about who the hell knows what, and I suddenly just felt a slight crack in my skull, something like an icicle shattering. I glided over the kitchen tiles, seized her in both hands, and rocketed her back against the wall—hard enough to crack the plaster. This took her breath away but when she recovered she told me verbally to get my fucking hands off of her. I did, of course, coming to my senses. But she left afterward, and that was it. Domestic violence, she said, was something she wouldn’t tolerate, and I don’t blame her.”
Glix gaped openly now, and I watched him place his glass very cautiously onto the desk, unfinished.
“I’m not even close to forgiving myself,” I added.
“Have a look at this,” Glix said, getting up. He moved laboriously over to the lab proper. Lloyd and I followed.
Clearing away one of the surfaces, he flipped a panel on the wall and hit a switch, and the surface moved away. Inside housed a stainless steel medical operating table that came sliding out on hinges, clanking into place before us.
“Time for my story,” he said, leaning his prodigious bulk against the table. “As a boy, I loved science fiction. I couldn’t get enough of it. Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A. E. van Vogt, Isaac Asimov—you name it. I read everything I got my hands on and I became certain that a) there was life on other planets, b) man would one day travel through intergalactic space, and c) that artificial intelligence was real. These beliefs turned into passions and drove me to obtain a B.S. from Harvard University, later a Ph.D. in Biological Systems Engineering from UC Davis. Afterward I was employed by the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, where I worked in biogenetics and nanotechnology.”
“That’s quite a CV,” I said.
“He’s probably not even telling us everything,” Lloyd added.
Glix smiled. “Only what is needed to get us to the AM Gospel. Three years ago, when I was still at MIT, I received an email transmission from the ascended machines. They told me where to dig and how to study the manuscript. I thought it was a scam, but it soon became clear it was the real thing. Especially when that arrived in the post.” He thumbed at the hanging Nazi flag.
“You see, Eric, you may have been married three times, but I have never had so much as a girlfriend. In fact, I’m a virgin—as hard as that is to admit. But you shared your vulnerabilities, so I’ll return the favor. Science has always been my one true love, which guided the course of my life. It wasn’t difficult for me to accept the ascended machines contacting me from the future. It was exactly the thing I knew could be done, what I’d been working toward academically.”
He shifted to the lab area and keyed up something on one of the computer screens. It was a colored, three-dimensional scanned image of a human brain. It rotated slowly, like a merry-go-round. The neural pathways had all been mapped, and the brain’s different sections and hemispheres were color-coded. There was something else, something strange that I did not recognize, near the right-center, a sort of bright blue blemish. The labeling read “micro lab.”
“Once I had dug up the AM Gospel—which, by the way, I believe they bury wherever is most convenient for their prospective finders—I began studying the technical diagrams. I was constantly getting email messages from the ascended machines, from that same unknown, timeless sender address, each giving me more detailed instructions. We had a lot of going back and forth as I endeavored to understand what exactly they were telling me, what they wanted me to do.
“When it started becoming clear, I was instructed to come out here and set up a lab off the grid. They set up an online banking account and deposited unlimited finds. They also had a specific manual for the type of lab I would need, and some help on how to arrange it. It was my job to secure the instruments and equipment. That was, oh, one year ago. Now you see it in the final stages.”
He paused for us to look around at the facility, which resembled something out of a science fiction film. He was unmistakably proud of it, like a little boy who’d succeeded in making his wildest dreams come true.
“They began sending me instruments too,” Glix said. He slid open a drawer to retrieve a strange headpiece and visor, which reminded me of the one worn by Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, only more complex.
Glix set the piece on the medical table, then produced an array of operating instruments, the likes of which I had never seen, each trailing an optical fiber wire behind it that went into the wall of computer consoles. He laid them out before us. They looked like the arsenal of a mad techno-surgeon.
“Absolutely astounding,” Lloyd said. Lloyd loved technology. I knew this was equivalent to visiting Shangri-La for him. For me, the sight of the alien items left me uneasy. Aside from MS G-333, this was the closest I had come to actually viewing the AMs and their future world.
“In all those science fiction novels I read as a boy,” Glix said, “the protagonist often went into outer space, never to return, and that always secretly appealed to me and underlined my own work. Looking at this psychologically, I believe you could say that I never truly liked the world I lived in, and I desperately wanted to escape it.”
“Sounds about right,” Lloyd said.
“I won’t go much into why I wanted to escape, but family and obesity and girls have a lot to do with it. My scientific work has centered on the formation of A.I. so that humans could one day utilize intelligent technology to help them achieve and sustain intergalactic flight and light-speed conditions. To explore and inhabit the farthest reaches of outer space. I wrote an article on this titled ‘Nanotechnology, A.I., and Star Travel’ which I believe sums up all my motivations. Did you read it?”
We shook our heads.
Glix made a wistful expression. “Well, it turns out that I am right about it all, except that it will be cyberspace we travel, not actual physical space. This is what the AM Gospel, er MS G-333, revealed to me.”
He tapped on the computer screen displaying the human brain imaging diagram, near the right-center where the blue blemish read “micro lab.”
“Following their instructions and using their equipment—and this remarkable lab—I was able to implant this chip, or micro lab, in my primary somatosensory cortex.”
“You did it yourself?” Lloyd gasped.
He nodded.
“No way.” I scoffed. “I’m not buying it.”
The fat man shrugged. “Believe it or not, it’s true. This is a laser scan of my brain in its current state, micro lab intact.”
“How’d you … do it?” Lloyd gasped. He seemed pale, as if he was about to pass out.
“The thing is I didn’t do it—not technically speaking.” He waved his hand over the alien instruments. “The machines have their own A.I., fully functional. At this moment they’re thinking, they’re alive. Once I had put myself under, the machines did all the work themselves and oddly enough they managed to lift my consciousness out of my body during the operation and merge it with theirs. So in this way I did participate in my own brain implant
surgery. The future AMs, the ones who sent the Gospel, monitored everything via their Internet connection.”
As I listened, my stomach dropped to the floor. This had suddenly become too real, much too fast. I felt queasy, dizzy, sick. “That’s crazy,” I said.
“I don’t think so. I think it’s a miracle,” Lloyd said.
“A miracle? Are you kidding me? Not even–”
“Eric—emotions!” Lloyd snapped, glaring at me.
“Speak for yourself!” I shouted.
“Gentlemen,” Glix interrupted. “If you’ll allow me to finish, I haven’t gotten to the best part.” He pointed to the screen. “The micro lab implant is also theirs. I believe it is nanotech, but it’s something else too. Something more.”
Lloyd took a deep breath. “What does it … do?”
Glix turned around, a smug smile, an almost sinister smile, slapped upon his face. “It will allow me to upload my consciousness to the Internet—into cyberspace—of course. That’s what I meant when I said humans wouldn’t actually travel in physical space; rather one’s consciousness will be uploaded, then beamed across the Internet—anywhere, anytime—in the universe. As long as there is a quantum computing operating system receiving at the opposite end, one that doesn’t operate on a linear binary code, but on a transdimensional one. And, well, there is one, thanks to the AMs. A.I. takes care of the rest.”
“Does it work?” Lloyd asked.
“‘Course it works.”
“But have you tried it?” I added.
His eyes glinted. “That’s why you’re here.”
Reclining in the computer chair wearing only his boxer shorts, Glix resembled a beached whale; except for the latticework of nanowire covering his flabby chest and futuristic visor and headgear covering his head, which had replaced the erstwhile Red Sox baseball cap.
“What wasn’t new,” Glix was saying, his words partially garbled by a mouth-tube, “was my desire to transcend, to become something more than I ever thought I could be—something alien, something other. What was new, however, was that for the first time in my life it was actually possible to achieve it.”
Dark Horizons Page 3
