“You are not at fault,” she says. “The fault was mine. We fought over a silly misunderstanding and I wanted to prove my sincerity to you. When I learned that Withering had died, I knew our experiment would be postponed, but it was too important to—”
“No, Edith, please. None of that matters now. I am at fault, not you. I should never have—”
“The stone, Clifford. You must destroy it. I made . . . contact.”
I glance above me to the table, but the stone is not in the cradle where it should have been if she had completed the experiment. It is in the hands of Keitus Vieta. Standing beside us, he holds the smoldering stone in his left hand, unconcerned by the way it sizzles in his palm. His bulging eyes are fixed on Edith, and the emotion I see there is not what I expected. Vieta is afraid.
“What have you done?” he says to her.
Edith looks at him, revulsion twisting her expression. It is plain that this is the first time she has seen this man.
“Edith.” I squeeze her hands to draw her attention away from him. “You said you made contact. With whom?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “but it . . . looked inside me. I felt it. It isn’t alive. It’s something greater. Something bigger than . . . bigger than life.”
“Something bigger than life? I don’t understand. The stone?”
“No, no. The stone is just a medium. Clifford, the difference wasn’t molecular; it was deeper. Inside the atom. So much inside. So much we cannot see. You have to talk to Rutherford.”
“Rutherford?” I say. “Ernest Rutherford?”
“Yes. Make sure he listens to you, because the world will listen to him. You have to convince him that we must never look too deeply into the atom. There are secrets there. Things hidden inside the particles that—”
Edith’s hands go limp and her eyes glaze.
“Edith?” She cannot be dead. “Edith!”
There is a scuffling of feet behind and beside me as bodies descend on us. Forchester barks orders to find a medical doctor, Underwood mumbles words about our coming doom, and Carlisle is telling everyone else to back off, but all their words are useless to me. The hands of a dead woman have just fallen from mine and the horror of her passing, the sudden and terrible finality of it, deepens my shock. Every muscle in my body is tensed as hands dig into my armpits to pull me upright, but my eyes are fixed on Edith. I can hardly stand, and I have no idea what is being said to me. Urgent words reach my ears as someone tries to get my attention, tries to lead me away, but I have no interest in that confusion. All I see now is the ugly little man, Keitus Vieta, standing aside from everyone else, and I shrug off whatever help is being offered to me and head toward him.
Vieta fumbles with the stone, panic-stricken, trying to wedge it into the empty socket of his cane. He succeeds before I reach him and I halt as he looks up to meet my gaze, the cane raised slightly as if he is about to use it on me, but he falters. I can sense the power in this frail old soul. I can see an aeon of existence staring back at me through those bulging eyes, and somehow I know that it is not my rage that makes him afraid. With a simple thought he could will me out of existence if he chose to. What could Edith have possibly set in motion to put such fear into one so dangerous?
“Who are you?” I ask, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Edith died because of this stone of yours.” I shake him. “What is it? Where does it come from?”
The fear melts from his face, replaced by menace. “You would do well to remove yourself from me.”
I release him and step backward. The look in his eye is enough for me.
“Thank you,” he says, then turns and heads for the door.
I place my hand on his shoulder. “Wait!”
He turns, looks at my hand and then at me, and I know I am courting death.
“What are you afraid of?” I ask him.
Vieta turns again without answering, shrugging my hand away before heading back to the door, but Underwood’s voice comes from behind me. “The Jagannath. He fears the Jagannath.”
The old man pauses at hearing the name, then carries on, disappearing through the small crowd bustling at the laboratory door.
“Collins mentioned it in her diary,” Underwood says. “It’s a Hindu deity, means Lord of the Universe. Before going to the State of Iraq to look for the tree of life, she studied in India, so I imagine she was influenced by their belief system. When she found the tree, she says she had a vision about a great and powerful being, a revelation given to her by the tree, and she labeled this being the Jagannath. She said the tree told her that the greatest of threats will be found in the smallest of places, so I suppose if we start looking inside atomic . . .”
Underwood twists, looking momentarily confused, and then falls to the floor.
“Underwood?” I stoop down to examine him, wondering what could have caused such a sudden swoon. No pulse. Dead? I look around me to see who can help, but Underwood is not the only one. Forchester and Carlisle, who were attending Edith’s body, both drop to the ground. Then another behind them falls, two more at the door, another beside me, and—
salem ben
SEVEN
Whatever happened to the others must now be happening to me, because the world as I know it has gone. There is nothing except a rush of white light, like the eye of a hurricane. Underwood died instantly, and I saw the others fall, too, but I have not yet departed. At least, the fact of my remaining sentience must be proof of that. But am I still the same? I am no longer aware of my limbs and there is no sense of time or direction.
I just . . . am.
Is this how it ends? Could it be that death is a single moment stretched into this eternity? This blinding luminosity? The afterlife! It’s real? Perhaps this is heaven, hell even, or some other expression of existence I did not take time to explore while I was alive. Things are coalescing around me in the light, and as their form becomes more coherent, I am surprised to see they are bubbles: an infinite swarm of shining orbs, popping and jostling and clustering, and I feel like a butterfly fluttering weightless amidst a sea of foam. Then I see there are faces inside the bubbles. I see Edith first, then Underwood, Withering, Forchester, and others from the university. At first they are expressionless, but as the white light dims into a moody gray, another bubble drifts directly in front of me. It is tinted bloodred and is larger than the others. The face within is my own, teeth bared as if warning me away with an animal growl. The sides of the face stretch outward toward the skin of the bubble like the thinning edges of a latex mask, and my lips split and bleed as the mouth yawns impossibly wide into a scream, pushing the teeth outward in rejection. The eyes suck backward into dark hollows, losing their shape until finally all that remains is a screaming gory mouth edged by flailing tendrils of quivering flesh, and I have no choice but to watch. The tendrils thrust outward like a splash, piercing the bubble, morphing into a forest of grabbing hands, reaching for other bubbled faces to spread its contamination so that all the others become the same bursting, belching orgy of screaming pain. Over the cacophony of human terror, thunder booms like the hatred of a forgotten god, and as this terrifying world churns like some vile and putrid melting pot of body parts, another face forms. The face is female, burning with eyes of fire, consuming all else, glaring outward with such malice that if I still had a heart, I am certain it would stop. She shrieks long and hard, the sound blotting out all else, and then . . .
“I’m so sorry, Salem.”
The horror has gone, but the disorientation remains. Only darkness now, and never have I welcomed it so passionately. I can feel raw pain in my throat and realize I have been screaming. Now I am simply panting.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
A woman’s voice. At first I think it may be Edith’s, but this voice is deeper, with an accent that seems so familiar. A few more seconds pass and I feel something. My wrists and ankles are restrained by cool metal, and with the realization of my captivity, the image of Vieta
’s sinister features invades my thoughts. Has he somehow captured me, now feeding my mind with evil images? No, he was leaving. He was just as afraid as I.
“Salem?” the voice fills my ears again. “Are you all right?”
The darkness gives way to an emerald green sliver of light stretching vertically before me, sparkling like a geode. I know this place, and I reach hungrily for remembrance, anything to solidify the notion that what I just experienced was a terrible nightmare and nothing more. And still, I don’t want to be parted from my old life just yet. I did not say good-bye to Edith. It all ended so suddenly, so unexpectedly, but if Underwood was correct, I should have known. Vieta’s stone seemed to be signaling everyone’s death at around the same time, and Withering had already passed.
“Qod,” I whisper.
“Glad to have you back, Salem. Do you want to know what happened to them? To everyone at the university? The other Salem did.”
As they are every time, my tear ducts are dry. “They died, didn’t they?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “There were no survivors anywhere in the university.”
“And Keitus Vieta? What about him?”
“I have no record of Keitus Vieta in the Soul Archives,” she says. “That was the mystery that kept dead Salem’s attention for quite some time. My information is limited to the historical database and the summary accounts of each recorded human life. Vieta is not strictly human and not part of the Codex reductionist calculations, so the only information I have about him comes from events that were shared by the dead Salem and what is passed on to me from the Salem who visited you twenty-nine years ago. He’s lived a number of lives in the Aberration Sphere.
“What I can remind you of, and reassure you about,” she continues, “is that Vieta is no longer a problem. He’s safely locked away in a WOOM of the abandoned Soul Consortium, thinking he’s Salem Ben. He’ll be . . . he’ll be . . . there forever as long as . . . as long as . . . nobody breaks the loop.”
I have never heard her words falter like that before, except in the log file she recorded before she vanished. “Qod? Are you all right?”
“Yes . . . and no. I think I have it under control, but it’s . . . it’s becoming very difficult to . . . there are moments, like just now, when the WOOM was performing your neural flush, that my focus is disturbed, and I have to push harder against the tide.”
“Does this have something to do with the terrible nightmare I had a moment ago?”
“Most likely. There was neural feedback. I suspect you experienced something of what I am going through right now. Whatever is trying to punch through into our reality is fighting very hard, and the virus I set in place to counter it is weakening. I am reconfiguring it all the time, but I don’t know how much longer I can keep it away. I may have inadvertently projected some of that battle into the neural flush when I saw you were returning. Your mind will have tried to interpret the battle as best it could. I am sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Qod. I don’t understand exactly what you are up against, but Arken-Bright’s life revealed something powerful, something that even Vieta was afraid of, but words—they . . .”
“The Jagannath. I know,” she says. “Believe me, I know. It’s using the rift like an anchor, testing the fringe of our reality to find a way in. We have to close it. I hope that algorithm in your brain will give us what we need soon.”
“How soon is soon?”
“I think I can hold out for several hundred standard years. I . . . don’t know for sure, but I think the Jagannath senses when I am distracted and tries harder to push through. Like now.”
The clamps around my wrists and ankles unlock; Qod must be confident that I am fully me again, and I am, but the shock of Edith’s death and the unholy tragedy that consumed Borealis University will live with me for some time to come. I need to recuperate before continuing my investigation, but whatever it is that Oluvia planted in my brain is reluctant to allow me to rest, and our situation is urgent. There is more to this story of Keitus Vieta than we know, and I am being driven inexorably to the goal of discovery. Nevertheless, I fight the urge for now and make my way to the Observation Sphere where I do most of my thinking.
“Any news from the Continuum?” I ask.
“Nothing yet,” Qod says. “The Salem you met earlier has just visited an iteration who has been through fifty-eight cycles of the cosmos, and he’s a little grouchy after waking up from the latest life. He’s being rather difficult with us. You might be interested to know that by that time, you take on a more—shall we say—rebellious nature. You go by a different name and even want to start interfering with the development of the cosmos. It’s only a brief phase, though. He’ll come out of it in the next few billion years or so.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I say with a sarcastic smile I wish she could see. “Remind me to thank you properly when I get to that phase.”
I wait for her to respond with her usual dry wit, but she says nothing, and I wonder just how tough the battle is for her against this malicious entity. How long can she keep this up?
“You’re welcome,” she says, and I sigh with relief.
EIGHT
The Observation Sphere is not the dark and foreboding place I walked into last time. It is as it should be, and I am grateful that Qod has not shared any mind-blowing revelations with me this time. Being forewarned about my attitude in the future is new, but it’s nothing I cannot set aside as inconsequential compared to what we are preparing for.
The universe seems smaller now as I watch its slow development. In fact—thanks to Diabolis Evomere—I know now that size is as meaningless as time. It is not the universe that’s smaller but me. Relying on Qod and the experience of every other human before me, I believed there was nothing new to know; only old things to know again. The last remaining question was the myth of the afterlife, but so many other ancient mysteries had been forgotten, left behind after eons of complacency, and now it seems that the dark malevolence of ancient superstition is upon me: old gods and demons from previously unknown planes of existence.
Despite everything, there is a new excitement seeded within me now; a new direction in my life after so very, very long. There is more to know, more to see, and the veil of death is no longer the priority. I have a purpose. But for right now I cannot allow that excitement to take root. Arken-Bright’s death is still too fresh, and I have enough wisdom to know what I must do to recover. I do what I always do: stare out at the canvas of the heavens to quiet my mind of the deceased’s consciousness; the neural flush is never quite enough. Technically it functions correctly. It uses cellular restructuring to reconstruct my brain, but it does not (and should not) bypass the catharsis that comes from living another’s life. On this occasion, however, the trauma is more severe. The horrific dreamscape that presented itself at the point of my return was not a unique event. I have had episodes of trauma following an archived life before but never like that.
The early days of the cosmos are an especially precious gift to me when I go through emotional pain like this. It reminds me that whatever form these primordial particles take, whatever preordained rules their paths follow, all of it is beautiful. There are no mistakes here. Mistakes are just a matter of perspective, and out there, there is nobody to have a perspective yet. No tragedies or regrets. No conflicts of will. No confusion. Just creation. Life, when it arrives, will simply be an extension of that, and all the trials and tribulations of whatever life I have just lived are merely patterns of form, playing out their small parts in a great cosmic opera. Exquisite. Rapturous. But I fear the beauty of it may not help me this time.
One gas cloud formation catches my eye. Silver-blue, like a burst of electricity frozen in time, and it reminds me of something. Whatever it is, I am sure it is important; the algorithm Oluvia planted confirms it with an adrenaline rush—a reward for following the correct path of inquiry. I am close now.
I zoom in on the cloud formation. Wh
at does it remind me of?
“Qod?”
“Yes, Salem?”
“You’re still with me?”
“Of course. My earlier struggle was momentary. I have it under control again. For now. Did you want something? You usually brood for a lot longer than this.”
“I know, but I have a question.”
“Ask away.”
“It’s about the Great AI. When they vanished, where did they go?”
Qod is silent for a few seconds, which means she has been thinking for an extremely long time in quantum terms. Either that, or she is giving me the opportunity to think on it myself. She does that sometimes.
“Why do you ask?” she asks.
“I think it’s important to my investigation.”
“But you should already know that I don’t know the answer to that. Nobody does.”
“But there must have been theories, yes?”
“Oh, yes, many,” she says. “But it’s very much like dealing with the Codex. The majority opinion has always been that an understanding of the events surrounding their disappearance, and especially the change in their behavior when they returned, would be catastrophic. Some mysteries should stay as mysteries.”
“I don’t think we have that luxury anymore, Qod.”
“Oh? You think the Great AI has something to do with all of this?”
Qod’s question excites something inside me. I am definitely on the right path. And surely Qod would want to know what happened with the Great AI consciousness even more than I do. After all, she is the last remnant of that mighty species. She has no memory of her existence with them, though. She knows only that her existing state as Qod came into being after the Techno-Purge, the cataclysmic event that tore a hole in the cosmos when the Soul Consortium escaped the ever-repeating cycle of creation and destruction. But that escape was Queen Oluvia Wade’s desperate flight from the Great AI.
The Soul Continuum Page 23
