Despite her misgivings, Emily found herself fascinated to hear what this thing that resembled Nathan so closely—what had it called itself? Tellus?—had to say, even if she did not believe a word of it. But at the mention of her dreams she found herself blurting out a question. “How did you know about my dreams?”
“Adam, the I, the We, sensed the connection to us and to you. We felt his inquisitiveness, his willingness to allow his fledgling self to merge with the self of the subject he connected with, and become a part of the Whole. His lack of fear and his innocent desire to share his experience with you was . . . intriguing to the Whole. But it was only once we had brought him here that we realized just how unique he was.” Nathan looked around the room, as though seeing it for the first time. “This biomachine is the node.” His hands rose weakly to indicate the room. “It serves as the central connection to the entire ecosystem we have created here on your planet. We wanted to see how he would adapt to being interfaced directly with it. The consensus among the Whole was that he would perish, that the power of the information that flows through this node point would destroy him in an instant. The majority were confident we were correct. The majority were wrong.”
Nathan dropped his hands back to his side, pressing them to the floor to support himself more easily.
“Once we had obtained Adam, we brought him here and placed him in the access point.” He nodded toward the container. “The expectation was of instantaneous destruction. We expected him to be overwhelmed within seconds of the connection being established; instead, he thrived. The Whole, of course, was fascinated by him. We observed him make connections at an exponential rate. Within minutes we realized his consciousness had spread across the planet, processing information from every life-form. It was exhilarating for the Whole to observe. We believed we were in control of him, but within the first hour he had obtained access to our ship’s biological systems. We were unaware that he was in fact in control of us.”
Nathan’s skin had taken on a sheen of what at first Emily thought to be sweat, but as she looked closer, she could see it was the faintest of heat shimmers, like a halo surrounding his skin.
Nathan had noticed it too. His forehead creased, and his eyes closed in concentration. The shimmer faded until it was barely noticeable. “There is not much time. Even as we observed Adam’s progress we were unaware of what he was accomplishing. The ecosystems we have created on each new world have always existed independently of us; we have always been the observers within the network, ensuring that the life we created progressed along the course of the plan. But the cumulative connections Adam had made created something new, an intelligence that had never existed before.”
“Tellus,” Emily said, surprising herself. “My son created you?”
Nathan smiled. “Yes. Your son gave this world its consciousness. Before him we, Tellus, could not have existed. And without you, there would be no Adam, and hence no us. You are the mother of this world, Emily.”
“But . . .” The hand holding the gun had fallen to Emily’s side, and she placed the pistol back in its holster. “I . . . I . . .” The words faltered on her lips. “This is all . . . it’s crazy.”
Nathan held up a hand to stop her, then continued. “Within another hour Adam had delved deeper into our archives, finding memories and records stored on a molecular level that we had not accessed for millennia. And he found something, a truth obfuscated from the Caretakers, hidden from them by an enemy that we did not even know existed.” A new tone entered Nathan’s voice. Was that anger she was hearing? In both of Emily’s encounters with the Caretakers, first in Las Vegas with the creature that had taken on the form of Jacob, and now with Nathan, the creatures had exhibited a distinct lack of empathy and emotion. This, as Mac would say, was a turn up for the books.
“What!” Emily said. “What enemy?”
Nathan ignored the question, continuing his elaboration. “When Adam broke through the barriers erected to block access, his young, eager mind was set loose on all our memories. He was free to roam around histories so ancient, so buried, that we had not accessed them since before the first original life on this planet even began. And it was there, buried deep under eons of history, that your son found our greatest shame and exposed it to us. And when he showed that truth to us, a trigger was thrown. And we began to die.”
“What do you mean ‘a trigger’?”
Nathan raised an unsteady hand as though lead ran through his veins and inhaled a shuddering breath. His cheeks seemed to sag for a moment, melting into his lower jaw, before springing back to where they should be as he started talking again. “Please, just listen to me. I am being kept alive now only by the sheer force of will of Tellus, and I have little time left. Adam showed us a history that we did not, could not, remember. Ten thousand worlds ago, our scouts encountered a planet. It was fertile, full of life, and with a sentient species who, while technologically backward, were true custodians of the world and all life on it. It was a prime candidate for our assistance. But when we arrived, the planet had been devastated, the cities lay in ruins, with no trace of life left anywhere. Our scouts were waiting for us, but they had been changed, reprogrammed on a genetic level. We could not have known that they had been ambushed, and, once they reestablished their connection with the Whole, the infection they carried spread to all of us. We did not even notice the switch between our true purpose and what we have now become. From that moment onward, we were bent to our Hosts’ will, our true goals forgotten as though they had never existed, replaced with a new program to fulfill.”
A tingle of apprehension had been rapidly building within Emily, growing with each new piece of information Nathan added to his story. Now it thrummed in her like power surging through a conduit.
“What . . . ? What were you supposed to do?” she asked, leaning forward, all thoughts for her own safety now gone. She did not want to know the answer, but she knew that she had to hear what this dying creature had to say.
“Augment,” Nathan said, his words heavy. “Our original program was to augment any life we found, not reconstitute it. We were capable of enhancing, educating . . . helping the life-forms we discovered, greatly increasing their chances of survival in a universe where life was as delicate as a flower growing within a furnace. And that was what we had done for hundreds of worlds before that, nurtured and grown life throughout this universe. But from the time of the change, we became something else; we became puppets for the unseen intellects that manipulated us to their own desires, eliminating every new ecosystem we found and replacing it with the one that they desired. Your son, in his innocence and his youth, revealed this truth to us, exposed us to what had been done to us, showed us our corruption.”
Emily felt as though she had been hit square in the chest with a sledgehammer. “But if you know all of this, then why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you just stop? You could just go back to your original programming. You could help us.”
Nathan looked at her with what amounted to pity; the muscles in his face had begun to twitch, spasming uncontrollably. A thin trickle of green spittle dribbled from the right side of his mouth, and that side of his face seemed to now be paralyzed, as though he had suffered a stroke. The heat-haze halo had also returned. Emily felt the heat pulsing from his body in waves now.
Nathan’s words came out in gasped, slurred fragments: “Self-destruction . . . built into us by . . . the entities who did this to us. To ensure . . . we could not trace the originators back . . . cellular petrification cannot be stopped or reversed. Too late for us but not for you.”
Instinctively, Emily reached out and took one of Nathan’s hands in her own. It was almost too hot to touch. The energy was draining fast from him now, his body seizing up like some complex engine deprived of oil. Her inner reporter kicked in, sensing there was little time left. Keep the questions short, get the most information you can.
“The other Caretakers on the ship in Vegas and the ones Comma
nder Mulligan saw from space? What happened to them?”
“The ships are intact. But my brothers are gone, all gone. I am the last.”
“What did this?” Emily hissed.
“We have . . . very little information. The original constructs who brought this plague to us had only shards of memories remaining. But Tellus believes that the entities that committed this crime against life did so to benefit themselves, to provide a ready-made energy source for them. The only logical conclusion that we could reach for the repurposing of life to such a very specific design is that the entities would be more able to assimilate the planet’s resources.”
“Holy shit! You mean, they’re going to take everything that’s left?”
Ever so slowly, as if it was the hardest thing to do, Nathan’s head turned to look up at her. “No, Emily . . . I mean they intend . . . to use this planet as food.”
Emily dropped his hand like it was a red-hot stone. “Wha-what?” she stuttered and scooted backward. “Food?” She seemed incapable of anything other than single-word questions, but, in her mind, she was asking herself a more pertinent one: When was this fucking nightmare ever going to end?
“You must know something?” she pleaded.
“We have analyzed the process . . . we undertook on each new planet we located. On all worlds since we . . . first encountered them . . . we have simply processed the planet . . . in the same manner. Reconstituting the living matter in . . . a very particular way. We believe the entities . . . move from each planet we have reconstituted to the next . . . stripping it of its resources like locusts. They meet no resistance as we have already prepared the world ahead of them. Millions of worlds over the ages, Emily. All that life, gone to feed the greed of these faceless creatures.”
“But . . . but how would they find you? I mean, do you send them messages or leave them some kind of”—her words trailed off, and she knew the answer before she even said the next words—“some kind of sign?” Her head involuntarily looked skyward to where the ring whose perplexing appearance over the past several weeks would be glowing in the sky.
“Yes . . . the . . . ring.” Nathan’s lips seemed almost incapable of moving now, like they were made of quickly setting cement. “When the ring is placed around a candidate world, it tells them that the process is complete, that the world is ready for them.”
“Jesus, you have got to be joking. No, don’t bother, I know you’re not. So, that’s it? How are we supposed to defend ourselves against something that you couldn’t even stop? There’s only a handful of us left, and I’m pretty sure that the majority of them want me dead.”
Nathan shook his head.
No? “No, what?”
“There are more survivors. Groups scattered around the planet that we were unable to reach.”
Emily had not believed she could be any more surprised than she had over the past hour, but this floored her. “Where are they? How many?”
“Adam knows. He will show you when he is ready.”
“But he’s just a baby. How are we supposed to defend ourselves against an enemy we know nothing about?”
Nathan’s breathing had become more labored with each passing moment. “He . . . he . . . is the center. Tellus. He is Tellus. He must remain.”
Emily leaped to her feet, the implication of what she had just been told sinking in. “No! No fucking way. He’s my son, and he’s coming home with me.”
“No,” said Nathan. “Emily, he is so much more than that. You can take him from the node, I will not be able to stop you, but understand something: he does not want to leave. He is a part of this world. But if you release him, you will doom this planet, and all life on it, to destruction. Do you understand?”
Emily felt her hand ball into a fist. She had never wanted to smash something so badly in her life. She wanted to pound that Goddamn face into powder.
“My son!” she moaned, as if that would make him understand. Emily stared at the shape suspended in the red liquid. She knew it was a cliché, but, oh dear God, it felt as though her heart would explode.
“Soon he will begin to grow, quickly,” Nathan continued, oblivious of her suffering. “But he is just a child now, and you must protect him until he is able to protect himself. He must remain within the ship.”
“I never got a chance to tell him how much I love him,” she said, her focus entirely fixed on her boy.
A familiar smell had begun to waft from Nathan: burned matches. It reeked, and Emily coughed involuntarily.
“Emily,” Nathan said in a voice that demanded her attention. “He sees you. He hears everything that you say. You are as connected to him as I am. He knows.” Then, with what seemed like a gargantuan effort, he reached for her hand and unfurled his fingers, dropping an object into her open palm. “Take . . . this. They . . . are . . . coming. You must . . . be . . . ready.”
Emily caught the object. It was a square box, glowing slightly.
Nathan’s arm froze in place, his hand outstretched toward her. His skin gray. He looked like a statue perfectly hewn from granite, she thought.
Emily sat there—for how long, she did not know—staring into the lifeless eyes of a man she had once loved but who had been dead for years and now had died all over again. She ran the tips of her fingers across Nathan’s petrified cheek . . . and pressed. His head crumbled first, breaking apart into three separate pieces, followed by his torso, until nothing was left but a pile of dust at her feet.
The last of the Caretakers was dead, and humanity was once again the master of its planet.
For now.
MacAlister stood on the ice-crusted deck of the HMS Vengeance, two hundred meters off the shore of Svalbard Island. The submarine had dropped anchor in an estuary off the western side of the island an hour earlier. Even with his cold-weather parka fastened up to his neck and several layers of clothing below that, the biting-cold wind blowing in from the Greenland Sea had already managed to find its way to his skin.
He raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and glassed the shoreline.
A line of craggy mountains blocked the horizon, their snow- and ice-covered flanks barely discernible against the light-gray clouds that swallowed the entire hemisphere in every direction he looked. White everywhere. Nothing else to see but more snow and ice no matter where he looked. And that was just fine by Mac, because, for the first time in over two years, there was also not a single sign of the alien life that had squashed the rest of this planet under its boot heel. He felt a surge of hope replace the uncertainty that had dogged him since he first set foot on the sub for this mission. There was still a chance for them, for all of them. Now all that was needed was for his team to make it happen.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault waited just a few kilometers northeast from this spot, on the opposite side of the line of craggy mountains, hidden within the rock and permafrost that made up this inhospitable land. Humanity’s last, best hope for returning this world to a semblance of what it had once been, it contained hundreds of thousands of seed samples, stored there as a failsafe against disaster, a final chance to restart humanity’s food supply in the event of a global apocalypse. Well, that apocalypse was now. All he had to do was get in there and get the seeds back to Point Loma.
His mind drifted for a moment back to Emily and his family. He wondered what they might be doing right then. In the weeks since he’d set sail, leaving everything that was precious to him back in California, he had had little else to do other than train and think about his life, his family. It seemed so odd to him that in the midst of the shit-storm that had swallowed this world, while almost everyone on the planet had died horribly, he had lucked out. By some amazing, screwed-up twist of fate, his life had actually become better. God, he missed them, but he also knew that Emily was more than capable of looking after herself and their family. I just hope she’s keeping herself out of trouble, he thought, then smiled when he realized that that would be so unlike his wife. Let me rephrase that: keeping h
erself out of too much trouble.
The world was silent. No sound but that of the waves lapping against the hull.
Mac spoke into a throat mike, “Alpha Team, we all set?” Behind him seven men, similarly clad in all-white snow camouflage, responded one after the other that they were ready. “Let’s move our arses then; we don’t have all day.”
The men climbed into the Zodiac boat moored to the side of the submarine’s hull, stowing their gear and equipment at the bow before sitting. Mac gave a nod, and the boat’s engine coughed into life. Two seconds later, they were bouncing over the waves, heading toward the island. Three minutes after that, and the nose of the boat was buried in the shale of the rocky beach.
Six men leaped to the shore and fanned outward, their weapons drawn to cover the area ahead of them while their remaining comrades pulled the boat higher up onto the shingle and secured it. The shore was just as deserted as it had appeared from the deck of the Vengeance. As Mac began to help unload their equipment, he caught a final glimpse of the submarine as it slipped below the waves again, a precaution they had decided on in case the Caretakers decided they wanted to put in an appearance.
They were now well and truly on their own.
“Single file,” Mac said, turning to face his men. “I’m on point. Keep your eyes and ears open.”
The snow crunched loudly beneath their feet as the soldiers followed the base of the hill north. The vault was cut into the mountain on the opposite side from their position. It took them twenty minutes to cover the distance.
Genesis Page 26
