“What?” Lyra catches me smiling at a time when that would look insane.
“Just thinking about an old friend.”
She’s shivering despite her cold weather gear. My instinct is to cuddle up close, but I know that would be both stupid and potentially lethal.
Even in the bulky suit, I still can’t keep my eyes off what little exposed skin I can see—just a few centimeters of her cold-and-pressure rosy cheeks between mask, goggles and hood—and I catch myself trying to get some of her scent again.
I realize I have to face this: I don’t think I can guarantee I won’t slip and do something stupid and lethal, especially with my own tech (and/or Yod) actively working against me. So I need to take this risk:
“Listen… Lyra… I… I don’t want you to worry… but I need you to… uh… keep some distance between us… make sure you don’t touch me for any reason…” As I say it, I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t scare the shit out of her.
“Are you contagious?” she really needs to know (but she doesn’t jump and back away as much as I expect her to—I don’t think she believes it).
“I’m carrying another Seed,” I decide to just admit (I decide she deserves it). “Like the one that converted Colonel Ava... Like the one that made Kali... I had three. I have one left... I don’t even know who it’s for, who it’s designed to re-create. But I’m getting the impression it might have detected… compatibility…”
“With me?” she puts together what I’m doing so badly at telling her, her big eyes going even wider under her goggles. Now she moves back a little bit more.
“I’m sorry.” Pathetic thing to say. “I would have told you earlier, but obviously I couldn’t discuss it while we were in Iso. I’m sure they would have tried to force its transfer.”
“And it just takes contact?” She’s starting to show appropriate panic. I can see her spinning on how long we were just stuck barely a meter from each other.
“Well… No… I’m… I’m not sure. The last two…” I believe I must be turning bright red.
“You had sex with them,” she blurts out flatly. I’m both relieved and a bit flabbergasted by her candor. “I know. It’s in the files they had on you. And her—Colonel Ava.” Something about mentioning Lisa shifts her expression from appropriate apprehension to another kind of discomfort. “I saw something…” She hesitates, not sure if she should say, but then does: “They did experiments, tried to replicate the… event.” She’s stammering worse than I was. “On Colonel Ava. They put her out, and had a volunteer… Um…”
“Sexually assault her,” it’s my turn to be blunt. “I know. Something else I owe them for.”
“I’m sorry,” she offers.
“Desperate, fearful, stupid people,” I grumble. “But their volunteer should count himself lucky that while she was unconscious her nanites didn’t start automatically consuming him for resources. Starting at, say, the point of most intimate contact. That would have been a hell of a surprise.”
She chuckles inside her breather mask, getting my meaning.
Looking at her now, I realize I’ve been seeing her through my own assumptions. When I found her, she had been recently orphaned, her family killed by Chang in a fit of rage because of the experiments they’d been a part of, leaving her alone on a strange and dangerous world. She’s certainly resourceful enough, having been trained to protect herself and survive by the mission’s military security. And she’s brilliant, educated by her scientist parents, who were probably top in their fields. But I’ve always seen a lost young girl, probably because I never bothered to look.
And here I am doing it again.
“There’s something else you deserve to know,” I decide to change the subject to something nuclear enough to guarantee libido distraction. “And I think I can trust you with it. The time travel story… That we came back in time to stop Chang who came back in time to stop humanity from becoming what we are… It is just a story.”
It hits her like a slap, far worse than telling her I’m a direct threat to her life solely by being here.
“Then they’re right…” she assumes, sounding like I’ve disappointed her more than when I turned her over to UNMAC. “You are from this time. You are part of some conspiracy!” But she doesn’t quite accuse, doesn’t quite reject.
“Yes and not exactly,” I try to condense an explanation that won’t terrify her. “Let’s just say it’s not the conspiracy Earth thinks it is.” Then I warn: “And they can never know the truth of it—you need to understand that. Knowing what I’m about to tell you would make them crazy, crazier than they are now. I’m not even sure you’re going to want to know what I’m about to tell you, but if you’re going to come with me on this exceptionally stupid adventure…”
I actually see her brighten. I fumble for words. Why the hell did I just say that? Why did I just tell her she could come with me? She can’t come with me. It’s too dangerous by far, and not only because of Asmodeus.
And I’m thinking about Lisa’s goddamn Doctor Who analogy and blaming my fucking hormones when I hear Dee in the back of my head:
She should go with you. There’s something here that needs to play out, some kind of plan. You two getting pushed together like this, and your last Seed imprinting on her, defies the odds of causal projections past the extent that I can calculate.
You’re saying this is too convenient, I translate.
Something is subtly altering events and decisions, he sums his calculated suspicions, implying that Yod is up to something here. Besides, you may need her. Her expertise may be key to developing a countermeasure that Earthside will accept. And that statement may be evidence that I too have been manipulated.
Not comforting, I grouse internally, giving myself a headache. But you’re implying that if I resisted this course, events would be tweaked to ensure that I can’t.
I’m afraid so.
Well, the least I can do is reveal the fucker behind the curtain, find out what he has brewing in his functionally omnipresent omniscient mind.
Lyra is still waiting intently for my explanation, and I realize that my neuro-processing sped up during my internal conversation with Dee, so she probably didn’t perceive any significant delay.
“This… You even coming with me may be part of something…” Still fumbling. Where did I even leave off? I just get to it, like jumping in a cold pool:
“There was no time travel. But the world that I come from, the world that the others like me come from, was real. All of it. We made bad, impulsive, selfish choices and created a hell we couldn’t undo. I wasn’t lying about that, wasn’t lying about any of it, including how functionally impossible we’d made it to kill ourselves. Except that world wasn’t in the future. It was in the past. Only none of you remember it.”
I’m making no fucking sense, but she looks like she’s trying to follow, so I start again:
“We made a… an artificial intelligence… a hybrid life form… a being that was supposed to be a bridge to another form of being, to evolve us, to lift us out of our toxic existence. It… he… could interface with all matter on a molecular level. Then he taught himself to do it on a sub-atomic level. He could be in anything, manipulate anything, all matter…”
Now she’s looking nervous again. She’s not sure if she should believe me, but it feels like she does. She’s starting to look sick under her mask.
“He… Yod, we called him Yod… or he called himself Yod, I’m not sure… decided we weren’t ready to be something else, to let go of self and body and embrace another level of existence. But we couldn’t keep being what we were. We weren’t ready for what the technology had given us, what we’d made ourselves into, and because of that we’d become monsters, destroyed our world. We were all like this, like me, like Asmodeus, like Kali; the entire human race except for a very few that decided to remain human and go live in remote communities. We had no limits, no consequences, no hope…”
I take a breath of the th
in, cold air. She looks like she’s trying to follow, listening intently, but it’s also clear I’m scaring the shit out of her (and I haven’t even gotten around to the really scary part yet).
“Yod… He said we needed more time; we needed to take the road slower, more thoughtfully. But the only way to do that was to start over, from before we’d developed the tech that changed us. And we needed to be a lot more cautious about it, if we were going to do it right. We needed to be scared of that kind of technology. We needed to have reasons to be scared of it. Like a gun… You need to respect it, you need to never forget how dangerous it is, how dangerous you are, or you could do something horrible…”
“What… What did he…?” But I can see it in her eyes: She’s figuring it out on her own. And the idea that’s forming is as completely terrifying to her as it should be.
“Godlike machine. Omnipotent omniscient omnipresent. Capable of restructuring matter down to a sub-atomic level…” I give her a breath to brace for the confirmation. “He ‘reset’ the world. He put everything back to pretty much the way it was before the tech was developed, when the corporations were just starting to colonize Mars. Including the people. He changed them, erased their memories, stripped them of all of their nanotech, made them physically and mentally the way they were in the twenty-fifties. He even made convincing copies of anyone who’d died in the interim. Almost seventy years of human history undone like he was just resetting the scene for a stage play or movie take. Then he let things go forward again, but with changes this time. To keep humanity scared. To make them think twice. The Discs. The Eco conflicts. The Apocalypse. Chang. Then us, so you could all see what you didn’t ever want to be.”
She’s shaking her head, trying to process the enormity of it… Then I catch her doing what everyone else does when they start to grasp the extent of Yod’s power and presence: She reflexively tries to squirm away from the dirt and rocks under her. Because “God” is in everything…
“He’s in all this?” she tries to take in the unthinkable. “All of this? Right now?”
She’s doing an impressive job of holding it together, but that could just be shock. The existential breakdown could still be coming—I may have just set her up to fall apart on me later, at the worst possible moment.
I shrug like it’s no big deal, try to model this is a horror that can be lived with, despite the fact that it’s already effectively paralyzed me several times in the last few exceptionally fucked-up weeks. (And I still can’t trust that anything I do, think or am is what it appears to be.)
“He could be. He can be anywhere he wants or thinks he needs to be. And he can change anything at a whim. I’ve seen some of what he can do.” Part a lake like a bad Hollywood special effect. Make me a really good beer out of handy elements.
“And you knew?” Now she’s accusing. (I’d wonder again why it seems like everyone I run into in this goddamn reality keeps looking at me like everything is my fault, but I know that’s partly because I honestly believe it is.)
“He erased our memories, too,” I give her my poor default excuse. “He only recently decided to give them back, show himself to us. I’m still getting mine back in pieces.”
She turns away from me, stares out into space, across the green of the valley, but I know she’s trying to see the wizard behind the curtain, not the beauty all around her. And I’ve cursed her: she’s never going to be able to look at anything in this world again without looking for the entity that may be within.
“I’m sorry, but you needed to know. Where we’re going, you might see things, hear things…”
She starts to chuckle inside her mask. It’s an unexpected and incredibly unsettling reaction. I’m worried I that may have broken her. She picks up a fistful of dirt and throws it down the slope.
“Your godlike being is an idiot,” she proclaims, taking me aback. Now she looks at me like I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s really going on. “Don’t you see it? They’re definitely afraid of you...” She gestures toward the base. “…but they’re not really afraid of being you. It’s just that they’ve got all this conditioning, this imposed morality… Like they can’t eat or drink certain things or say ‘fuck’ or be disobedient to authority. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to. Believe me: I’ve been stuck with them long enough to see it in them. My parents… The only reason they were sent here… And now you’re pushing them toward it, or this Yod thing is, because they are afraid of you. No matter what they believe or what they’ve been taught, enough of them know: you need to be a monster to fight monsters. And they’re willing…”
She laughs again, shakes her head.
“And here’s the real problem: You said you all—we all—became like you are because the corporations on Mars had developed the tech without interference. That means someone had the time to work it out, do the research and development, consider all the obvious risks before they made it available to everyone. They made sure you had bulletproof fail safes, so you couldn’t hurt yourselves or each other and your tech wouldn’t go rampant, rogue… It’s dangerous as hell in this reality, especially since only a few of you have it and the rest of us don’t, but it’s stable. I know it is. Like I said: I’ve been shown their research on Colonel Ava. You’re not lying about that, whether they want to believe it or not. You might hurt us, but your tech won’t, not by itself.”
I’m not following. She reaches out like she’s either going to slap me or grab me by the face and shake some sense into me, but then remembers my warning and stops before she touches me.
“Idiot!” she curses the air as if addressing Yod directly. “Don’t you see? They’re panicking! And in that panic, they’re trying every angle, every shot, to jack it, steal it from the trans-human hybrids, and they care less and less about the potential consequences every day, every time Chang or Asmodeus or whoever scares them.
“Don’t you see? If they ever succeed, they’ll have to break the safeties to do it. And then they’re going to wind up with wild tech that they don’t understand because it isn’t theirs, and they’re going to lose control over it. It would be like handing the tech to early-twentieth-century mankind and making them scared enough to try to use it. What do you think will happen then? You thought mankind wasn’t ready before?”
She’s absolutely right. But Yod has to know this already. (Or he does now: As false gods go, he may not respond, but I think he does always listen.)
We sit as the sun rises over the mountain at our backs, eventually sending rays of warmth down our way. Lyra is shaking, rocking, gripping herself. Asking angry questions.
“And this Yod, being all-powerful and all-knowing, is fully aware of what Asmodeus is doing? Is letting him do it? Did, in fact, make him specifically to do it?”
“He says he’s allowed for randomness, for free will,” I try.
“But Asmodeus isn’t doing what he’s doing out of free will. He was made that way,” she prosecutes. “On purpose.”
“A certain amount of what we are is shaped by biology, neurology,” I defend, though I’m not sure why. “But the machine is complex… We have the ability to choose, to not follow a pre-calculated path.”
“But he was made like that,” she repeats. “On purpose.”
“He’s a copy. A copy of a real person. Arguably, so am I… I guess the difference is that I feel whole, feel real to myself. Ange Apollyon… Asmodeus… he was long dead before any of this happened, and he’s well aware of it. He knows he died, he knows his body was reconstructed from an old DNA sample, and worst of all, he says his memories don’t seem remotely real to him.”
“So why him?” she locks on. “Of all the people this Yod thing could have made to play his devil—and I’m sure there were lots of choices, given some of the people I’ve met—why remake a dead one?”
“Something I’d like to know myself, but I expect I do. We’re all a performance, a drama, a moral play. Mars is the stage. Earth is the audience. We’re the heroes and the
villains.”
“And the bystanders, the victims,” she doesn’t let me leave out.
“Ange… I think he got picked because… I’ve had a lot of enemies in my time, fought a lot of bad men, evil men, and some good-bad men… But Ange… He sort of imprinted himself on me, if that makes any sense. In his own words, he sees us as the same, but evolving in opposite directions, like one of us is living the other’s life backwards. Maybe that gives him hope or takes it or just pisses him off; but more than anyone else, he made it personal. Ugly personal. And the worst part is: I know he’s right—I used to be him and he used to be me. And he knows I know it.”
“I don’t see that… I don’t…” She starts moving to touch me again. Stops herself again.
“You don’t know me, don’t know what I was before I was the great Colonel Ram,” I admit, figuring it might encourage her to keep her distance. “Not many do. He does.”
I take a breath of the chill air, feel smaller.
“I don’t know if it was how I was wired or what happened to me or both… I was just a normal, happy, goofy kid—or so I like to remember—and then bad things happened, and I developed this rage… or maybe I always had that rage, that potential… but when I gave in to it, it was ugly, brutal, vicious, and I liked it. I liked hurting the people that I thought deserved it. It made me sick. It did. But I knew what I was capable of. I spent years trying to get it under control, even devoted my life to helping others. But then another bad thing happened, and I let it go, I let myself be the monster, and I did some horrible things, brutal and sadistic things. Does it really matter that it was to bad people?” I shrug. “Then UNACT scooped me up, trained me and conditioned me to be their monster. But over time, I became something else. With the help of time and experience and some very good friends, I evolved, became a soldier, a leader, a teacher, even a diplomat… And that’s the Mike Ram that most people remember now.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 20
