Charger Chronicles 3: Charger the God

by Lea Tassie

  Reader took a closer look at Dr. Jules' metal face as she soothed his brain again. He'd been scratching with his metal claws, for the face was crisscrossed with scars. The man was mad. How long could he last in this condition? She would make him happy for a little while with some morphine; he could smoke it and thus draw it into his lungs.

  She bade him wait while she brought his drug. She had morphine, of course. In this non-technological world, it was the best pain-killer, though highly addictive. Still, he was already addicted, so giving him some wouldn't make things worse. It would be a relief to have him stoned; she hated being in his mind.

  Doctor Jules' metal hands eagerly grasped the pipe she handed him and soon he relaxed into a stupor.

  ***

  Three days later, Dart materialized on Reader's front doorstep. "You have company, I see," he said, pointing at the garden bench where Doctor Jules slumped, his metal limbs in a tangle.

  She invited Dart inside, brewed some tea, and told him the story of her strange visitor. "I've been keeping him stoned while I decide what should be done with him. He's quite mad, you know. He wanted to wake up far into the future but the future looks nothing like he thought it would. His old, familiar world has disappeared entirely. Nothing of his body remains except the brain and the organs to support it. And he's trapped inside a metal body which he thinks is making him itch."

  "No wonder he's mad," Dart said, "in both senses of the word. Is he psychotic?"

  "Probably. His brain still functions after a fashion, but if he's off the morphine for more than a couple of hours, it becomes so chaotic that I can't predict what he'll say or do. Not only that, but he seems to feel pain everywhere in that metal construct and, though it's a phantom pain, it's driving him even more frantic."

  "Can't you change his mind?"

  Reader shook her head. "I tried, but it won't stay changed. It's uncontrollable."

  She shrugged. "As long as I keep him on morphine, he's harmless. But it's a nuisance having him on my garden bench. Perhaps I'll give him a small house in one of the villages and have my people look after him. They could give him the drug."

  "I think that's a good idea," Dart said. "But what happens if they accidentally give him an overdose?"

  "That would solve the problem, wouldn't it?"

  "I'm surprised at you," Dart said. "I thought you'd be eager to save his life."

  "He doesn't have a life." Reader sighed. "When he's free of the drug and his brain is working, he's insane and very unhappy and could well be a danger to my people. When he's on the drug, he's comatose and comfortable. So he needs to be kept comatose."

  "So what you're saying," Dart said, giving Reader a thoughtful look, "is that you will let whatever happens happen. That you're not going to interfere."

  She seemed puzzled. "I suppose that's what I'm saying. Yes, of course. Doctor Jules is the result of a failed experiment. As long as he does no harm, what happens to him is not my concern."

  "I just wanted to be clear on that," Dart said. "Because I have something far more important to tell you."

  Reader's smile changed to a frown. "More deer disappearing?"

  "Not just deer. In the last few days, I've seen rabbits disappearing, and a full-grown brown bear. Here on this continent."

  Now she looked shocked. "That's too close! Did you investigate?"

  "Of course," Dart said. "But nowhere could I find any trace of the animal that vanished or any disturbance of the ground. It's almost like the animal was vaporized as it was being sucked into the ground."

  "That's frightening. Have you felt any vibrations underfoot, the way I did?"

  He nodded, and pulled his cloak a little more firmly around his body. "Nothing has attacked me. In fact, the vibration lasts only a second or two and then stops."

  "The thing may not have a brain," Reader said, "but that doesn't mean it can't sense life. In fact, it must do so if it's targeting animals. It must have sensed life in you and me, so why didn't it attack us?"

  "Well, we're the most powerful beings on this planet, except for Charger R/T. This underground creature may not be sentient, but it must be able to distinguish between what's edible and what will bite back."

  "We have to do something!" Reader exclaimed. "I don't want it absorbing any of my people. Or their livestock."

  "I agree, but not only because of your children. Whatever this thing is, I suspect it's spread underground everywhere. The other day I noticed my redwood tree is drooping. Then that the trees all around were doing the same. So I dug up the ground in a small clearing."

  "And?"

  "Nothing," Dart said. "And I do mean nothing! No worms, no mycelium, no life of any kind. It means the trees are not getting enough nourishment. The mycelium forms a mantle around a tree’s feeder root in a symbiotic relationship. Symbiosis means they feed each other."

  "Dart, this is serious!"

  "I know. If it continues, all the plants will die. And if the plants die, so will the animals. And so will people. Which means that Charger R/T's plan to save you, and thus give humanity another chance, will have failed."

  Reader got up and paced back and forth in the small kitchen. Suddenly she stopped. "Wait a minute. What about the ocean? Won't life in the ocean survive?"

  "We've found this plague, whatever it is, on two continents. I think that says it's underground everywhere, including beneath the ocean."

  "Have you tried to kill this thing, Dart?"

  "No. Killing is Charger R/T's department, not mine. I don't want to interfere."

  Her eyes blazed in outrage and her hair crackled with electricity. "But it will attack my children! Don't you care? And if you don't, why did you go to all that trouble, training me and sending Earth out of harm's way so that humanity could continue?"

  "It was an experiment," Dart said. "It may be that humanity won't survive, no matter what we do. In which case, it will be a failed experiment, like Doctor Jules. And, if it fails, something better may evolve. I'd like to see what happens."

  "I don't believe this!" Reader cried, her hands balled into fists. "Oh, I wish I could get inside your mind! I'd change it so fast your head would spin!"

  "Sorry, not going to happen." Dart rose. "It would seem that our powers are in balance. You can't change my mind and I can't change yours. Even though you seem happy not to interfere with Doctor Jules, you're determined to interfere on behalf of your children. Your maternal programming is too strong."

  ***

  Three days passed. Reader moved Doctor Jules down to Arcadia and appointed Pine as caretaker. Pine was nervous about his new duty, but thrilled to be the personal servant of a god. Reader wondered if she'd made a mistake in letting her children think of her as a god, but because of the blue shard and her own powers, they'd have regarded her as magic in any case. It really didn't matter, of course. The word 'god' had always been just a synonym for 'magic.'

  On the fourth day, Willow, headwoman of Camelot village, came panting up the path. "My Queen! A sheep has disappeared! I saw it go!"

  "Show me!"

  But, as had happened before, there wasn't even a bit of fleece to indicate where the sheep had vanished into the earth. Reader paced back and forth, probing with her mind, but found nothing. And, as she had long ago discovered, the blue crystal shard took orders, but did not answer questions.

  A week passed and so did a dozen head of cattle. By the end of the second week, more sheep and four humans had disappeared. The villagers were terrified.

  Reader went in search of Dart and found him in his redwood aerie. The needles on the tree were turning brown. "We have to do something about whatever is killing animals and people! If this goes on, there won't be any living things left except you and me."

  "Birds," Dart said. "We'll still have birds."

  "Don't be stupid!" she cried. "You're callous and cruel, you're…" For once, she was at a loss for words.

  "We'll have to call on Charger R/T," Dart said. "He can decide what to do." He pa
used. "As long as you understand that we're both risking our lives. When Charger R/T is angry, he's capable of killing everything in sight. Including us."

  Reader's lips quivered. "We can't call on R/T. He's dead."

  Dart's head snapped up. "Dead? My father is dead?"

  "I tried to save him," Reader said. "I tried to give him peace, but all he wanted to do was kill every last human. He visited Charger on Neo Terra the night before Charger was due to burn up and die, and he asked Charger to help him wipe out humanity."

  "I'm beginning to see where this is going," Dart said. "So Charger killed Charger R/T?"

  "With my help, yes," Reader said. "It's Charger R/T who is buried on Neo Terra. I sent Charger back to 1432 in what was called Texas, here on Earth. There weren't many people around back then and I thought he'd be happy there."

  Dart shook his head. "I don't believe this. You killed my father. You killed your own hero."

  "It was either that or my children," Reader said.

  After a moment, Dart sighed. "I understand that. I don't like it, but I do understand it. Then we'll ask Charger to judge what should be done."

  "I'm afraid to ask him," Reader said. "He might be angry at what I made him do."

  "You haven't seen him since?"

  "I've left him alone, which is what I thought he'd want."

  "All right," Dart said, "then maybe we can bring back Henry instead." He rose. "But before we go looking for Henry, I want to find out where this strange underground predator came from and perhaps that knowledge will tell me what can destroy it." He paused to look at Reader. "You do understand that if this predator kills every living thing on Earth to feed itself, eventually it, too, will die for lack of food. It would be interesting to see what evolution comes up with after that."

  "I don't want to lose my children," Reader said.

  Dart wrapped his black cloak tight around himself. "Go back to your valley and do what you can. When I find out what we need to know, I'll come for you."

  "Please hurry!"

  She wanted to say more, but Dart had already gone.

  Reader blinked back to the river valley and her three villages, Arcadia, Camelot, and Harmony. She'd planned on naming the fourth village Felicity, but building that one would have to wait.

  There had been more deaths during the short time she was gone, and she helped the villagers drive the remaining animals into their barns. Surely the predator wouldn't be able to reach them through concrete floors.

  She became more cheerful as she worked. She'd done the best she could for Charger and, since he and Henry were sort of the same person, she was sure he'd be on her side. Even Charger R/T had liked her. Otherwise he wouldn't have rescued her from an ordinary life that she could barely remember now.

  Back in 2075, she'd been Elizabeth, the nine-year-old daughter of Andy and Lucy Kent. Charger R/T, on one of his bounces through time, landed in Somalia and saw her playing with red jackal cubs in the Somali forest. He'd been struck by her innocence, by her youth, natural energy, and love for life. And by her lack of fear.

  When he offered to lift her up so she could watch an elephant browsing in the trees nearby, she willingly took his hand, then sat on his shoulders to watch. She hadn't even thought he was ugly, just different.

  Charger R/T had decided to preserve her as the perfect human and keep her hidden so she wouldn't be infected and ruined by the rest of humanity. Since she was already escaping from an argument with her mother, and from her two bratty little brothers, she thought this was a wonderful idea. So he put her into hibernation, treating her as tenderly as a precious jewel.

  She'd been there for more than 2700 years, almost as long as Doctor Jules had been in hibernation. But Charger R/T's science was better than the doctor's. She'd wakened unscathed when he and Dart started the Reader program and used her body and mind to help create the computer program that became Reader.

  No, she didn't need to worry. Henry/Charger would do what she wanted. And he wouldn't kill her because he needed someone to look after the humans. He wouldn't kill Dart either, because Dart was his son. Sort of.

  Chapter 21 Judgment day

  Charger sat in front of his small campfire, enjoying the heat and flickering flames. It tended to get chilly at night on this part of Earth, though the days were generally sunny and hot. It was good to be alone, good to rest. The occasional pair of yellow eyes that flashed at him from the darkness were nothing to worry about. Only coyotes, curious to see if he was good to eat, but deterred by the flames and the aura of power surrounding him that they sensed but did not understand.

  "Some gift that damn voice gave me!" Charger muttered. "I guess it thought I'd be at peace here. Ha! I'm so far back in time that this place isn't even America yet." He poked at the fire and added another log.

  "Trouble is, the voice didn't stick around to see what happened. I should have known humans would find another way to fuck up my life. These damned Indians won't quit attacking me and, because of that, they will continue to die.”

  When he'd first wakened, in the middle of Texas, the native Indians were curious about him, but then became frightened because of his great size and power. As soon as one of them screamed, "Wendigo!" they were all terrified. And, like most frightened beings, their reaction was to attack. He'd already killed four hundred and eighty-six of them and still they kept coming. He had no desire to kill but, now that he was young and strong again, he had no desire to die, either.

  Watching the coyotes gave him an idea. They built dens where they raised their young. He'd build himself a den that would keep the natives out. He knew how to do it, too, because in one of the places he'd been, there were sandstone blocks perfect for a wall, just like the blocks those crazy Egyptians had used to build pyramids.

  Charger threw another log on the fire and thought back, again, to the last days of his life on Neo Terra and the long conversations he'd had with that scruffy dog and her pups. Well, it wasn't what you could call a conversation since he did all the talking. She just listened. But there had been something about the way she did it that made him think maybe she wasn't really a dog at all.

  Then it came to him; the dog was the same being as the voice that had made him kill Charger R/T. She'd hung around, listening to his stories and his trials and decided to use him to get rid of R/T.

  Not that he blamed her. If that voice/dog was Reader, actually travelling back in time from 4800 CE, where his younger self said she'd been programmed to save humanity, she was only doing what she was designed to do. He'd been fucked around by humans enough that he didn't want to have anything more to do with them, but killing them all wasn't the answer. Getting away from them was.

  Except the damned Indians wouldn't leave him alone. Charger rolled into his blanket and stared up at the myriad of stars shining in the dark sky. Well, he was tired of running and tired of fighting. Tomorrow he'd start building that rock wall. Not only that, he'd build an underground chamber where he could be free of all the creatures wanting to spill his blood, including the coyotes.

  ***

  Dart sat on Reader's garden bench. He noticed that the orchard was looking brown and sick. Often, now, he felt that slight vibration under his feet. Reader looked almost as tired and discouraged as her orchard.

  "Have you found out what we're up against?" she asked. "You've been gone longer than I expected."

  "It's a very strange story, not easy to put together. First, I had to get a piece of this underground monster so I could analyze it, which meant suspending myself from a tree branch, in hopes that it wouldn't be able to sense me if I wasn't touching the earth."

  "But that worked?"

  Dart nodded. "I waited until a rabbit disappeared right below me, then jammed my sword into the earth and managed to slice off a small chunk before the thing shrank back into the earth."

  "Was it horrible?"

  He shrugged. "Not especially. Just a very thick sort of ooze, of no particular color. It tried to get away from m
e and rejoin the main body, but I put it in a jar and blinked to a lab in that big empty city on the coast."

  "Doctor Jules called it Seattle. And?" Reader looked impatient. "What did you find out? We have to hurry, you know. I'm losing more people and animals every day."

  "Once I analyzed the thing, I put the results into one of the Taskoid computers," Dart said. "They recorded absolutely everything. And so I know what it is and where it came from. It's DNA."

  "DNA? How could it be?"

  Dart leaned back and cradled his mug in both hands. "Let me tell you the story. It began in Berlin, in April of 1945. Conrad Dengler, a doctor specializing in experimental medicine and a long-time member of the Nazi party, had a laboratory hidden deep below the city. He had been experimenting on Jews for years and his research notes on DNA were extensive."

  "You didn't tell me this story before," Reader said.

  "I didn't know the story then. Dengler never made it into the history books. But he had summarized his notes and recorded them. The world at that time agreed on five components of DNA: A, T, C, G, and mC. His work predicted a sixth component: mA. And more exciting still, a seventh, which he decided to call X. This seventh factor made it possible to create two stable DNA strands linked together to create a stable mutation.

  "But Dengler didn't get the chance to gloat for long. The director of the lab summoned him to a meeting, where he was told that the Russians were at that very moment marching into Berlin. Germany was preparing to surrender. Dengler was instructed to burn his records and destroy his experiments."

  "And I'll bet he didn't," Reader said.

  Dart nodded. "You're right. He may have destroyed much of what was in his little empire but he couldn't reconcile himself to getting rid of the most ambitious experiment he'd ever conceived, using component X of DNA. I suppose he hoped for some kind of miracle that would bring him back to life so he could work on it again."