I could never explain that to Karrie, or to Ella, for fear of ridicule.
I opened my eyes and approached the great double doors of the chapel, pushed them open and stepped inside.
The pews were filled with kneeling monks, and the sound hit me in a wave. Heads bowed, cowls hiding their faces, their voices soared to heaven.
Ahead, raised in the pulpit, I made out the small figure of the Abbot, arms spread wide as if in welcome so that he resembled the great crucifix behind him on the bulkhead.
I progressed down the aisle.
Heads turned, faces stared at me.
I felt real fear, then. I must have made a sound of alarm.
“Ed?” Karrie said.
“They’re . . .” was all I could bring myself to say.
“Ed!”
To a man the monks wore cranial addenda, matt black augmentations embedded in their skulls. Some had receptors instead of eyes; others, as if in some perverted rite of mortification, had replaced all their facial features with embedded sensors, silver panels etched with arcane sigils of alien design.
“They’re cyborgs . . .” I whispered.
“Ed, get yourself out of there!”
Instead of obeying her frantic command, I continued walking toward the altar, and as I went, I made a sickening observation.
The closer to the altar, the more augmented—I should say ravaged—the rows of monks became. Not for these pious devotees the simple sensory implants of their fellows further back. I made out naked monks enmeshed in silver webworks, their etiolated flesh pressing between cheese-wire filaments of God-knew-what provenance. Others were encased in exoskeletons, the interface between machine and flesh weeping blood like some unholy stigmata.
I was at the altar now and staring up at the Abbot, or rather what remained of him. He was naked and wore his augmentations like some chitinous carapace, and the only part of his face still human was a mouth twisted into a demented smile.
“Kneel,” he said, and like a lamb I knelt before him.
Karrie was screaming now for me to get the hell out.
The Abbot made the sign of the cross above my head, and intoned, “We have beheld the work of the Lord and have returned to spread the word.”
The chanting ceased suddenly, and in the following silence the Abbot spoke to me.
They had found the race that, he said, had moved throughout the galaxy eons ago and seeded worlds with the stuff of protolife and then returned to their homeworld and settled into what they called a state of blessed Uplift.
The Seeders, as the Abbot called them, had undergone a radical surgical procedure and melded with their inventions, AIs that bequeathed them insights into the nature of being not granted to puny biological intelligences.
Then the Seeders had offered the Abbot and his monks the opportunity to join the blessed. “You might say they wished to salvage us,” said the Abbot.
He gazed across his flock, and his smile became beatific. “We accepted their offer and were Uplifted, and oh . . . the joy! We looked upon the truth, and marveled. We realized how blessed we were and how cursed we had been, purblind with our limited senses, our nascent minds incapable of grasping the true nature of reality.”
I managed to ask, “But did you find God?”
Before the Abbot could reply, a voice yelled in my earpiece. “Ed, she’s gone—” It was Karrie, and in the sensory overload of the moment, her words made no sense.
“Ed, are you there? Ella’s left the tug! She’s in the second bell and making for the ship. She took something from stores. I followed her, but I couldn’t make out what she’d taken. Ed, if you can hear me, go to the bell and get yourself over here!”
I moved my lips to say something, but meaningful words were beyond me.
The Abbot was saying, “We are like children come to adulthood, granted awareness—”
Another voice intruded upon my consciousness. It was Ella, shouting at me, “Ed, I’m coming for you. Get back to the bell. I’ll see you there.”
“Ella?” I intoned, incredulous. She was coming for me. Did that mean she perceived some danger? Did that mean she cared? Was it possible, I wondered.
“Ella?”
“Ed, I decoded their communiqué. I understood only a part of what they said, but that was enough . . .” Her voice broke up, obscured by static.
The Abbot smiled down at me. “Yes, child, we did find God.”
He was beatific as he declaimed to me. He spoke of abstruse philosophies that my tug captain’s mind had no hope of grasping; he spoke of intellectual destiny, of the manifest truth hardwired into the universe at the level of quantum strings. “We beheld the genome of God and were blessed.”
I reached out to him, as if for help. I said, “But did you learn . . . did God tell you . . . is there—” I sobbed, “—is there an afterlife?”
The Abbot laughed, a sound less human than mechanical, and cried aloud, “There is but one destiny for those of piety, and that is life everlasting when the state of Uplifted grace is achieved.”
“But?” I pressed, “for mortals like myself?”
He turned silver sensors upon me, and I interpreted his blind gaze as one of great pity. “There is but one road to salvation,” he said, “and that is to enjoin us in blessed Uplift.”
“Maria,” I wept. Into my head flashed the last image I had ever had of Maria, alive: a tiny girl in a red dress, screaming as the wave took her . . . and then, later, laid out to rest before the altar of the church.
“Ed!” Ella’s voice cut through my grief. “I told you to meet me at the bell!”
“Where are you?” I said.
“I’m coming for you!”
“Ella . . .”
“Ed, listen to me. When I monitored for life earlier, and didn’t find any—that’s because they’re dead. Get out of there, Ed!”
“Dead?”
“Biologically dead!” Ella shouted at me.
“But they said they’d found God—”
Ella asked softly, “How can the dead find anything, Ed?”
Static cut off her words, and above me the Abbot smiled.
I fled the Abbot and his accursed acolytes. Their renewed chanting followed me all the way from the chapel and down the corridor as I ran like a man possessed, haunted by visions of Maria. I cried two names as I went, those of the only people who had ever meant anything to me.
At a sound from behind me, I turned.
The first of the monks were hurrying along the corridor towards me. As I stared, incredulous, those in front raised weapons and fired. Hot vectors missed me by centimeters and turned the walls to slag.
I sprinted.
Ella collided with me at the corner of the junction, with the blessed Virgin Mary smiling down at us. “Ed!” she cried with relief.
I don’t know what I replied, if anything. I did not want to ask if she really cared; I was content enough to interpret her actions as solicitous.
She looked up, past me, toward where a phalanx of monks rounded a corner, chanting.
Only then did I see what she had taken from stores. The fusion bazooka was lodged on her hip, as ugly as she was beautiful. She pushed me behind her, roughly, then knelt and fired. The leading monks exploded in beautiful flame, like votive candles.
Then she half dragged, half carried me along the corridor, turning from time to time to lay down covering fire. The monks loosed vectors after us, and Ella screamed with what sounded like human fury and pulled me along after her.
Long minutes later we came to the holes in the skin of the ship where our bells had cut through.
Then she took me by the shoulders and shook me. “Ed! Listen to me. These people . . . they’re dangerous. You can’t imagine their power and their commitment. They think they have the monopoly on the truth.”
“Ella, I simply wanted to know—”
She stared at me, and I saw compassion in her eyes. “I know, Ed. I’m sorry.” She pushed me towards the bell. �
�Get back to the tug.”
“And you?” I resisted her pressure.
She stared at me, as if calculating something. “They want to convert you, Ed. They want to convert the human race to . . . to what they have become. And they have the means to do it. They’ve got to be stopped.”
She pushed me, and I resisted, terrified of what she planned. “Ella!”
“Please forgive me, Ed,” she said, and reached up and inserted something into the input socket of my suit. Electric pain lanced through my body, and consciousness dwindled.
The last I knew, Ella was bundling me into the confines of the bell. I heard the hatch hiss shut and passed out.
Karrie helped me out at the other end and hauled me up to the flight deck. I recall little of those long minutes. My head was full of Maria’s futile death and whatever Ella planned across the vacuum in the monastery starship.
Karrie eased me into the sling and opened a communication link with Ella.
The screen before us wavered, then resolved itself. I stared into Ella’s magnified features. She was staring into her wrist screen and talking to us. Seconds later Karrie located the audio channel and Ella’s words flooded the flight-deck.
“. . . Listen to me. Get the tug out of here, okay? And purge the smartware core—I wiped what I could, but I might have left something.”
“Ella?” Karrie said.
“They beamed codes across, blueprints,” she said. “They call it the Uplift Bible. If that stuff got into the wrong hands . . .”
I leaned forward, desperate. “Ella, what the hell are you doing?”
In reply, she panned her wrist screen. She was in the engine room, dwarfed by the monstrous forms of the fission reactors.
“Ella . . .”
She stared into her wrist screen and smiled at me, and I thought she mouthed, I love you.
But I was wrong, of course. I was delirious and mistaken, for Ella was not human, was not capable of such sentiments.
I stared at Ella’s beautiful Venezuelan face as she smiled out at me. “They must be stopped,” she murmured, and adjusted the setting on her fusion bazooka.
“Ed?” Karrie cried beside me.
“They’re coming for me, Ed. This is the only way.”
Ella’s face disappeared from the screen, and the picture became a crazy blur as she swung her weapon and aimed at the reactors.
“Ella!” I cried.
A roar, followed by an actinic explosion. The screen went blank, and I transferred my gaze to the outer viewscreen and stared at the bulk of the St. Benedictus.
Seconds later the starship bucked. It seemed to heave once as the reactors detonated deep within its innards. In places, as multiple explosions ripped through the ship, outer panels glowed red hot; in others, where the carapace could not hold, the stained-glass viewscreens exploded outward and scattered through the vacuum like confetti, scintillating in the light of Altair.
Then the ship slumped and listed to starboard, truly becalmed now, and I whispered, “Ella . . .”
Much later I maneuvred the tug toward the St. Benedictus , and Karrie activated the grapples. Together we obeyed Ella’s final instruction and purged the smartware core.
I wondered if what I had told Ella before I left for the starship had somehow instigated her actions. Had my avowal of love made her see the sterility of mechanistic existence and the fate wished upon us by the monks of the St. Benedictus?
I wondered, as I set course and boosted the main-drive, if my words had damned Ella to eternal oblivion.
Karrie smiled sadly, reached out and took my hand. I squeezed.
We towed the monastery starship toward Altair III in silence.
The Kamikaze Code
James Lovegrove
Down in the lowest levels of Chilton Mead, there was a room. It was a room with cataracted lighting and emphysematic ventilation, a room with sound-proofed walls painted a joy-proof brown, a room large enough to hold sixteen basic self-assembly desks and chairs, and on each desk sat a computer, and in each chair sat a writer.
There in the very bowels of the UK government’s advanced military research and development facility, in the duodenum or even ileum of that largely subterranean establishment buried deep in the landscape of rural Wiltshire, the sixteen writers toiled at their computers from nine to five every weekday, with a half-hour break for lunch. They were under instruction to turn out no fewer than 4,400 words a day, with extra financial incentives for hitting the target dead on, give or take forty words either way.
Further conditions of employment were that the sixteen must produce original fiction, that they must strive to be as true to their own literary “voices” as possible, that postmodern experimentation was welcome (within limits), and that each day’s output should be complete in itself and of the highest standard achievable. In effect, each writer was expected to sit down every morning and compose a brand new short story before clocking-off time.
Why?
It was not for the writers to know, and they themselves were reluctant to inquire into the matter too closely.
Why?
Gift horses. Mouths.
Because the pay was good. No, the pay was excellent. The writers were taking only a tiny sip from the multibillion-pound lake that was Britain’s annual defence budget, but even that comparatively minuscule amount was enough to sustain them comfortably and was without doubt more than they could expect to earn by their pens out in the big wide world. So the work was grueling, yes, a frightening drain on their inner resources, and the attrition rate was high: at least one writer a month dropped out due to sheer imaginative exhaustion. But the rewards were substantial, and that was the main thing. Even if their stories never saw publication, even if the tales would disappear off their hard drives every night and they never laid eyes on them again, the writers were happy.
These, after all, were men and women who specialized in short fiction, who were either unwilling or unable to attempt a full-blown novel or even novella, sprinters rather than marathon runners, and there weren’t many outlets available for their chosen literary form. A handful of websites and small-press magazines, which paid a pittance if they paid anything at all. The odd anthology, which offered a reasonable rate but often demanded that the commissioned stories conform to some kind of theme or, worse, be set in a preexisting fictional universe dreamed up by another, markedly more successful, writer. Now and then a newspaper, although newspapers seldom gave valuable column inches to short works from those who weren’t already established authors, and novelists to boot. A single-author collection? Again, solely the province of the well-entrenched, top-tier writer who’d notched up a number of novels.
Apart from these few limited opportunities for paid publication, the market for short stories was nonexistent. The great fat era of the pulps, the Golden Age of magazine fiction, when a scribe could make a decent living banging out brisk little yarns and novelettes, was long gone. Nowadays the world sought its regular quick fix of plot and narrative elsewhere, in soap opera and drama serial and in the true-life, real-time character arcs of blogs and tabloid tittle-tattle.
Naturally the sixteen authors often wondered what they were doing down there in that drab sub-sub-subbasement at Chilton Mead, what possible earthly use the Ministry of Defence could have for the eighty short stories it took off them each week. If, as they’d been told, the things weren’t seeing print anywhere, what became of them? Where did they go after they vanished from the computers? What was the point of the entire exercise?
But speculation was futile, not to mention counterproductive. Being aware that you were writing something that nobody would read was disheartening and could dampen your creative fire. Better not to ask too many questions and just keep hammering away at your keyboard, with half an eye on the wage packet. Better to remember the overdraft getting whittled away and the bills that were no longer quite as alarming as they used to be and to treat the whole experience as paid practice, a chance to hone and
refine your craft. Burnout would come eventually. Better to enjoy this profitably prolific period while it lasted.
For one of the writers, a youngish man by the name of George Lewis, time spent at Chilton Mead was definitely not time wasted.
Since his early twenties George had flailed away at a literary career, failing to finish several novels while effusing a stream of short stories, most of which he managed to sell but not, of course, lucratively. By camping at friends’ flats till they got sick of him and turfed him out, he was able to keep his overhead low, but he still never really made ends meet. His life was one long continual lurch between breadline and deadline.
Then, out of the blue, had arrived the letter from the MoD. An interview somewhere in the mazy corridors of Whitehall, an invitation to go to work at Chilton Mead for as long as he could manage, his signature on a copy of the Official Secrets Act, and that was that. George had become an indentured servant of the Establishment.
Artistic compromise?
Well, yes, to a degree.
But freedom too. Freedom from penury, perpetual frustration, the whims of editors, the chilly disregard of the proper publishing realm. The liberty just to sit there all day long and do what he loved best, while reaping riches at the same time—it was a trade-off George was comfortable with. The government was even putting him up in a country house hotel not far from Chilton Mead and had lent him a car so that he could commute along the A481. He scarcely spent a penny on living expenses, and meanwhile a princely sum was totting up in his building society savings account.
And then there was Jennifer Egan.
Jennifer was the computer technician at Chilton Mead. She was a more or less constant presence in the room of sixteen writers, there to ensure that no software glitches or hardware breakdowns interfered with their labors. She was brunette, bespectacled, and boldly pretty. Her features might seem somewhat at odds with one another—mouth too generous for her nose, nose too long for her eyes, eyes spaced too far apart for her mouth—but together they conspired, in their jostling contrasts, to form a very attractive whole. What counted as far as George was concerned was that she was in his league, and he was smitten.
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