99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  “Crap,” Reed said, resigned.

  John nodded in silent agreement with Reed. “So what you’re saying is that at some time in the future we’ll all be similar to you Gods in power,” John said. Singularity’s speculation was so outré as to be beyond appalling.

  “I’m stating something far more specific,” Singularity said. “I’m saying humanity will become exactly as we 99 Gods are, and in the not-so-distant future. I’m saying the 99 Gods are a tangible representation of the technology of the future. We show both the promise and the peril, and it’s our responsibility to turn what we represent into promise.”

  “In your belief.” John wasn’t sure whether he should vomit or break out in laughter. He greatly doubted God’s plan behind the 99 Gods had been so absurdly materialistic. Doubt, though, swam through the back of his mind, revolving around the question of ‘why else would the Angels have made a God named Singularity if the Singularity concept wasn’t important?’ He ignored his unanswerable question for now.

  “Yes.” Singularity’s eyes focused on infinity, lost as was Inventor in these ivory tower abstractions.

  John chewed on his lip and thought. Despite his spell, these two didn’t strike him as allies. In fact, they sounded pro-God. “Then what’s the conflict?”

  “It appears, at least to the two of us, that some of the Gods would rather take advantage of the current situation and use our God-given abilities to stop the development of technology while it’s still possible,” Singularity said. “Instead of welcoming the future and guiding it, they’d turn back the clock and establish a permanent and unchanging dictatorship of the Gods, with the Gods on top and the other mortals left behind forever in a technologically stagnant wasteland. Become Gods in the pagan sense of the word.”

  “That’s just wrong,” Inventor said. He took a rumpled Kleenex out of his pocket and blew his nose with a honk. He tucked the dirty Kleenex back into his pocket. “The turn-back-the-clock Gods are going to make the world into their slave farm and take us back to the old days of serfs, nobles, despotism and state run religions.”

  “By ‘they’ you mean the leaders of the 99 Gods, such as Dubuque?” John said.

  Inventor snorted. “No, not at all. Dubuque’s not half bad as a God,” he said. “I like the way he’s pissing off the fightin’ fundies. No, I’m thinking of the might makes right types, such as Miami, Atlanta, Nairobi and Lima. They’re the ones I see setting themselves up as monarchs.”

  John kept his face studiously blank. Dubuque had gotten to these two if they thought Dubuque was on their side. “I understand. You two have given me a great deal to contemplate. I thank you for your time and effort.” He toyed with the idea of pointing out the dangers of Dubuque’s neo-theocratic City of God ideas, and discarded it. Such an observation would only lead to conflict.

  After a few more minutes of chatting, Inventor and Singularity left, flying off in some physical device (likely made by Inventor) that moved quicker than John could follow. Reed had paled, curled up in his chair, throughout the last half of the conversation.

  “There’s no hope, is there?” Reed said. “There’s going to be war, the bad guys are going to win, and naïve Gods like those two are going to end up silenced and enslaved.”

  “There’s always hope, my man,” John said. “As much as I hate to say it, I’m afraid we’re going to have to go talk to Atlanta. We don’t have any other potential allies left.”

  33. (Dave)

  Dave got out of the rental, stood and leaned up against it, sweating profusely. Today wasn’t a good health day. The world swam around him, and pain rocketed up and down his back, slowly and gradually settling in the back of his head. The car’s thermometer read only 81 and he had been running the AC on full, but he felt weak, overcome by the heat.

  He checked his watch and added an hour. Damn. A full ninety minutes late on his pills, but even that shouldn’t have had such a strong effect on him.

  “Face it, this disease has made me an old man before my time,” Dave said to himself. He didn’t like to admit it, but soon, too soon, he would no longer be able to escape Denver. Housebound, then bedridden. Then beyond all that. “I’m not desperate. Not yet. I could take Portland’s offer and live with myself.” Maybe the woo-woo thing had been a mistake.

  He didn’t want to unless he had to, though.

  He looked out over the parking lot and noticed the sign above on the light post, which read 8 K. Of parking lot three. Dubuque’s headquarters shimmered in the distance, not any supernatural aura but simply heat rising from the acres of asphalt. Dave craned his neck until he found the sea of trailers where Jeremy had sent him, and the lines of people, the endless lines.

  “I thought I told myself never to get stuck in an endless line for a divine audience,” he said. He shook his head and began to walk, as unsteady as a drunk. He mopped his brow after ten steps, sweat soaking his hand. “I’ll never make it.” He had never been an athlete, but he had never been sedentary either. His environmental geologist job provided him extensive exercise, along with the mountain hiking Tiff used to drag him out to do. Now he couldn’t walk more than ten steps without panting. “I’ve got to make it.”

  Ten more steps, then more energetic, he pushed it to twenty. He almost fell when he reached to steady himself on an SUV. He took deep breaths in a hope to slow his beating heart.

  “Sir? Mister?” Dave turned his head to find a boy – no, a young blond man, early twenties – riding up to him on a golf cart. “You okay?”

  Dave shook his head. The young man got out of the cart and came up next to him, surreptitiously sniffing. Checking for alcohol, Dave guessed. He had no idea what he smelled like, save foul, a side effect of the cadmium, his medications, and all those overloads on his system.

  The young man bowed his head and concentrated, then lifted his shoulders. “You have an appointment. Climb in and let’s go.”

  Dave smiled, chalking one up for Dubuque’s organization.

  “Save for the most extraordinary circumstances, Dubuque no longer heals or performs miracles in person,” the well-groomed Lucy said. She sat behind an immaculate desk topped with four neat stacks of paper in a sparse cubicle, one of eight identical cubicles in the trailer. Despite Dave’s annoyance with the entire idea of divine bureaucracies, Dubuque’s main operation had one, a large one. Without any high-end back door contacts, as neither Jeremy’s card nor the golf cart kid had counted for much beyond a quick pass through the first two layers of flacks, he had been forced to wade through the bureaucracy one bureaucrat at a time. They were all sympathetic to his problems, but rules were rules, even here. “This doesn’t mean we’re turning you down. Not at all. The Living Saint’s expanding his operation and his ability to help people, which means more work for all of us, including him. Instead of in-person, or through any form of normal bureaucracy, he’s helping via prayer. That’ll do the trick for you.”

  “Prayer?” Dave said. “I didn’t think Dubuque encouraged people to worship him directly.” In fact, Dubuque had made several public statements agreeing with Portland’s contention that direct worship of Living Saints, or any of the 99, offended God Almighty.

  On the other hand, he did remember Diana’s offhand comment about prayer.

  Lucy, a smiling and good-looking blonde woman in her mid-30s, nodded at Dave and moved paperwork around on her desk. The title on her nametag read “Special Assistant: Healing”; if the previous functionary had the story right, Lucy regularly dealt directly with Dubuque. While he waited for Lucy to respond, Dave heard a half-dozen conversations in the vicinity of the trailer cubie, some over a phone, others in person. Even after golf cart kid’s help, Dave had waited in three different lines for two damned hours in the still stifling Oklahoma late-season heat just to watch cubie lady shuffle papers and think.

  According to the scuttlebutt he had picked up while waiting in line, Dubuque had chosen this place not only because the mega-church was available, but because of the abund
ant expansion room around it. His new headquarters, still unnamed, sat on nearly twenty acres of an Oklahoma City exurb, surrounded on two sides by businesses and on the other two by established large-lot housing developments. His original operation in the city of the Living Saint’s name had been located in a willpower created building, a temporary expediency that had attracted trouble the same way trailer parks attracted tornadoes. This time, Dubuque wanted a real building better suiting his needs.

  “It’s prayer to God, through Dubuque,” Lucy said, topping her stack of documents with a small glossy brochure. “Here.” She pushed over the entire stack to Dave. “We’re still working on the second document, which gives the details for how to pray, but the brochure on top gives the overview.” The second document was a stapled-together printout. “Underneath there’s a piece of paper with the password for the privileged sections of the website. Don’t lose it.”

  Dave quickly read the top brochure. He had never imagined such a thing, a technical instruction manual on proper prayer techniques, but as he thought about it while framing his next question, he decided he should have expected something like this from the 99. They lived in a technical age, and instruction manuals were one of the era’s main inventions. It wouldn’t surprise him to find out that Dubuque’s prayer interface was programmable. “Will this work if I’m living back in Denver? Do I need to live in one place, or in Dubuque’s territory? I do a lot of traveling.”

  “Praying from Denver shouldn’t be any problem at all. As I said, Dubuque’s expanding his reach. He’s discovered his ability to answer prayers long distance is one of his specialties, if not his premier specialty. Long-distance answers may not be something the other Living Saints can learn to do, even the other Territorials, so Dubuque has decided to shoulder this burden himself. He can answer prayers worldwide.”

  “So, what are the odds of an answer to my prayer?” Dave said. “I’m not trying to be greedy or grasping, here. On the other hand, if I’m just wasting my time, I’d like to know.”

  “I can’t judge the odds without knowing the details of your difficulty,” Lucy said. Dave nodded and told Lucy the medical details. Empathy grew on Lucy’s face as each minute passed. “If you’re correct, and your problems are beyond the ability of modern medicine to cure, then given your age and marital status, I’d say an answer to your prayer is almost certain.” She paused and thought. “No guarantees, of course. I’m just basing this on my experience.”

  Dave nodded. “I understand. Sounds like good news to me.”

  “Great!” Lucy said. She stood and held out her hand; Dave stood as well, as he recognized the ‘I need to end this meeting and get on to the next client’ ritual at work. “Study the second document, follow the procedures, and keep an eye out for changes to it on our website. Good luck and see you on Sunday.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said, and after shaking Lucy’s hand, exited.

  Clutching the documents and his invitation to the 9:30 Sunday service, Dave left Dubuque’s headquarters, and went back to his hotel to rest and read. Lounging on the hotel room’s one easy chair, he absorbed the document, marveling at the procedures involved. To him, this sounded a lot like Eastern Orthodox Christianity; saintly icons used to focus the mind in prayer and making a shrine as a way to build a relationship with the distant Dubuque, mixed with a modern understanding of information science. “God works through Dubuque, but Dubuque is only a Living Saint, not God Almighty,” Dave read. “For Dubuque to know when to heed your prayers, he must have a way to recognize you. Think of the shrine you’re making as a flag or semaphore; the shrine may physically hold Dubuque’s picture but in reality, the shrine is a picture of you, your choices and what you consider important in your tie to Dubuque, God, and Jesus. This is also the purpose of the ritual words starting each of your prayers. Once the Living Saint has you in his mind, he will then know the particulars of your prayer request and judge whether to let God work through him to answer your prayer.” To Dave’s amazement, there were similar sections in the document covering the procedures for people of the Jewish and Moslem faiths to follow.

  Dave’s phone yodeled some Beethoven. He put down the printed document and answered it after seeing Steve’s ID. Steve’s picture flashed up on the screen.

  “What’s up, Steve?” Dave said.

  “You’re in Oklahoma City, Dubuque’s new residence, aren’t you?”

  “Uh huh.” Crap! He didn’t want to have this discussion. He already knew what Steve thought about Dave’s activities.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone you were going to visit our nation’s preeminent Living Saint?”

  “Because it’s my decision, my life.” Dave chewed his lower lip, unhappy with Steve’s tone of voice and the smell of bridges burning in the distance.

  “I can understand that,” Steve said. “But…”

  Always the buts that made asses out of people. “I’ve made my decision to try to get help from Dubuque,” Dave said. No more hemming and hawing, at least with Steve. “I took a good long look at all the Territorial Gods in North America, and Tiff even got me a divine offer of help that would have left me enslaved to Portland.” He didn’t want to go into the details. “The decision wasn’t even close. Phoenix and Miami have been accused of having worshippers, which I and others” Dubuque and Portland, which he didn’t want to mention, either “think is a bad thing. Atlanta’s been linked to the Dixie Ripper” the media’s name for the serial killer active in the area “and may even be the Dixie Ripper, Akron’s focused on her new cable television career and has a spotty track record of granting healing requests, Montreal’s trying to be a sex goddess, Worcester’s not doing anything visible except hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, no office, no website, no visible organization, and Boise’s gone off into the wilderness to speak to the trees or something equally nonproductive.”

  “Uh, right. It’s not…” Steve stopped and paused. “Dave, I think you’re selling your soul to save your life,” Steve said. He had said this before. “I don’t trust any of the 99 anymore. Even Marty’s come around to my point of view about Dubuque. The so-called Living Saint may have a few modern trappings, but underneath the trappings he’s just another reactionary.”

  Uh huh, along with all those other turn-back-the-clock ecumenical types who thought well of Judaism and Islam. “What did you find out?”

  “Gays need not apply to join his organization,” Steve said. “Gays don’t get hired, period, end of question, no reason given. He won’t meet with any representatives from the activist organizations, or even take a position on the issue. To him we don’t exist. It’s all over the blogs I read.”

  Yah, and I know which blogs those are, too, Dave thought. “How certain are you about the facts behind these rumors and innuendo?”

  Steve didn’t answer.

  “Say, how’d you know I was in Oklahoma City, anyway?” Dave said. “Or, for that matter, that Dubuque’s relocated here?” The grand opening hadn’t happened yet. Although Dubuque wasn’t keeping the start of his ministry and the move here a secret, you had to search it out to know it. Dave had certainly missed the move himself, resulting in his fruitless trip to the city of Dubuque.

  “Dave, I’m trying to help you, not cause problems,” Steve said. “You’re not acting like your normal self or even sounding like your normal self. Where’d your ‘always act in moderation, stay on an even keel’ self go, anyway?”

  “It got sick,” Dave said. Then he figured out what was bugging him. “You know, Steve, the only one I know who’s good enough to do a long-distance hack on my phone’s GPS is Tiff. She asked you to call me, didn’t she?”

  Dave listened to the crackling and thumping of Steve shifting positions. “We’re all worried about your behavior, Dave,” Steve said. “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going or what you’re doing.” Steve paused. “I think she’s a mite pissed at you.”

  Sounded like a confession to Dave.

  He hadn’t told anyo
ne his plans because he had a hunch he would end up in a disgusting conversation like this.

  “Thanks for the worrying and the vote of confidence,” Dave said. “It’s still my life, though.” He clicked off the connection and tossed his phone on the bed in anger.

  “Oh, Dave, it’s you, son,” Dad said. “Hold on a second while I get your mother on the line.”

  Dave smiled. “How’re you doing, Dave?” Mom asked, a half minute later.

  “Not so good. Here’s the deal,” Dave said, laying out the latest updates on his hopeless medical problems, his job issues, and his decision to seek help from Dubuque. “I haven’t started up Dubuque’s prayer procedures yet. Tiff’s not happy with what I’m doing and thinks I’m crazy, as do at least two of my other Denver friends. What do you guys think? Am I doing the right thing here?”

  “Well, certainly do whatever you need to do to save your life,” Mom said. “Regarding Dubuque in specific, you’ve never liked to go haring off on your own. You’ve always had to have a group to lean on, partners and followers. Funny, though. You’ve never much liked following other people’s leads, either. That’s what’s bothering you, I’ll bet. You don’t have anyone following you.”

  “Uh huh,” he said. He knew calling his parents would turn out to be a good idea. “You’re right. I don’t like being alone in what I’m doing now, especially considering that this is, no pun intended, a life or death situation.”

  “Oh don’t give me that,” Dad said. “You intended the pun.”

  Dave laughed. “So what do you think?” he asked.