Opening his eyes, he saw the comet hanging in the sky next to the sun. I’m not afraid, I’m just so tired. And then the voice again in his head, the anger, telling him not to give up, to get up. He pushed himself up on one elbow.
The priest loomed over him, blotting out the sun.
Bob’s mind circled around and around. I must exist in other universes. So my echo will live on. It doesn’t matter. Suffering is worse than just letting go. Oblivion is peace. His body slumped back into the sand.
“Don’t give up yet.” The priest was close, his breath on Bob’s cheek. “Open yourself to me, there is still hope.”
Bob closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the mind of the priest near. Open to me, the priest asked again, and Bob released, feeling the spirit of the priest flow into him.
“In the oceans, when you were surfing, do you remember?”
“Yes,” Bob replied, his mind floating.
“Your little friends, the plankton, you summoned them to support you if there was danger.”
Bob remembered. Those bright days on Atopia seemed endless. Carefree days he spent surfing with his friends, but he was always careful. He always kept a bloom of plankton nearby that he could summon up out of the depths, millions of tiny creatures that could, together, support his body if he was sucked into the depths.
“Call to them,” urged the priest.
Bob felt his mind spreading, his consciousness skimming the tops of the sand dunes. He tried calling out for help, but there was no response.
The priest was cradling him in his arms. “Let go and call again.”
Bob’s mind sank further, seeping into the desert floor. And then a tiny reflection, a small chirp in the vastness of mindspace, followed by another. And then a roar.
“You see? They come, they hear you.”
Bob opened his eyes. He saw only the burning eyes of the priest nested deep in the creases of his face. Bob’s mind was thundering now, but around them it was quiet, just the hiss of the sand in the wind.
The priest smiled. “Wait.”
Something fluttered in Bob’s peripheral vision. He turned his head. An insect circled and then dropped, landing on his arm. It stared at him, its antennae waving, it wings flexing. It was tan, with long legs, and looked like a grasshopper. A desert locust. It continued to stare at Bob, bending its hind legs to preen its wings. Bob turned to see another locust land on the sand next to him, and then another. Soon a cloud of them were buzzing around him and the priest.
Over the tops of the dunes, a murmur grew into a roar, and as the swarm descended upon them, Bob felt the relief of the sun finally dimming. His initial revulsion was replaced by joy at the sweet coolness of the insects’ wings on his skin. The swarm enveloped Bob, tens of thousands of them digging beneath him. At their urging, he rose up out of the sands on a writhing mass. Up, up, they pushed him, the swarm rising with his body, and then became airborne, carrying Bob’s body into the sky, westwards, toward the beating heart of central Africa.
22
SPANISH MOSS HANGING from the live oaks swayed in the breeze, and a woman, leaning over a crashed drone, looked up. Insects were buzzing, swarming, in the muggy late afternoon heat. Looking around again, the woman rolled up her sleeves and gripped a wrench between her teeth. She ducked her head into the access hatch of the drone.
At the edge of the water nearby, Vince peered around the trunk of an oak. He was caked in mud, soaked, after pulling himself through the bayou. “Connors?” he called out.
The woman’s head shot back out of the access hatch, and she grabbed the wrench from her teeth, brandishing it as a weapon as she turned. She squinted. “Vince?”
Nodding, Vince hobbled out of the water and started across the grass. The drone Connors was working on had crashed next to an old barn. A rusted propane tank sat beside it, its green paint peeling as if it were a slow-motion chameleon blending into the forest.
Vince stopped and tried to shake off some of the mud. “Yeah, it’s me.”
Hotstuff was walking beside him, her virtual projection as pristine as Vince was filthy. She rolled her eyes. “See, I told you we should have gone around.”
“I wanted to find her,” Vince replied in a hushed voice. “Why don’t you make yourself scarce, see if you can log into that drone?” He pointed at the wrecked mess Connors was working on. It must have been damaged in the attack.
“Sure thing, boss.” Hotstuff sashayed up across the grass and faded from view.
“I’m still plugged into your proxxi channels.” Connors shook her head. “I can hear you talking.” She turned from squatting on the turbofan air intake and hopped down to ground level. “So what happened to you?”
If she was happy to see him, Vince had a hard time seeing it. He plucked a piece of mud from his cheek. “Had to wrestle a ‘gator or two back there coming through the swamp—”
“I mean when they took you? Where did they take you?”
“Some voodoo ceremony.”
Connors smiled. “And did they stick any pins in you?”
Vince smiled back. So she was glad to see him. “Naw, they left that for you.” He paused. “I met Sintil8.”
Of course Connors knew who this was, but she surprised Vince by turning around to return to the drone. He closed the last few feet and leaned against the airframe. “Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?”
Connors had half of her body inside the access hatch. “Pass me the knife.” She reached out one arm. “And no, I’m not going to ask, not unless you tell me the truth.”
Vince spotted a blade with tape wrapped around it. He handed it to her. “I’m telling you the truth. He wanted to know what we were doing here.”
“Uh-huh.” Connors grabbed the knife and leaned further into the drone casing. “Mikhail Butorin doesn’t just talk to anyone. Why the hell would he want to talk to you?”
“Aren’t you happy I made it out?”
“I don’t think it’s any coincidence.”
“What? That you’re happy?”
Even from inside the cowling Vince could hear her snort. “No, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you made it out, or that you magically found me here.” She pulled herself from the access hatch and stared at Vince. “I’m getting the feeling that I’m a pawn in something”—she shook the blade at Vince—“and I don’t like it.”
They stared at each other.
“I’ve already told you what this is about. Trying to find my friend Willy’s body.”
“And why would Mikhail have any interest in that?”
“Because . . .” Vince took a deep breath, wondering how much he should tell her. “Because Willy’s proxxi found out something about Jimmy Scadden, maybe enough to derail the entire Atopian program.”
Connors’ eyes narrowed. “And what was it that this proxxi found out?”
“We don’t know, that’s why we’re searching for him.” He looked at the drone. “What are you planning on doing with that?”
Tapping her knife against the aluminum shell, Connors stared at Vince. “You expect me to believe that we just crash-landed next to New Orleans, and you randomly met with Butorin who just happened to be looking for the same thing you are?”
Vince shrugged. “Okay, it was me who contacted him. I thought he might be able to help us.”
Connors smiled. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She uploaded some schematics into Hotstuff. A three-dimensional model of the drone appeared floating in space between them. “This one is Alliance military hardware; I’ve got all the tech-specs. Should be able to rewire it for manual control, get us out of here.”
“Need some help?” Vince asked. Hotstuff was already helping Connors on the software side.
She grabbed a wrench and shook her head. “My brothers and I used to rebuild these all the time when we were
kids.” Turning, she stuck her head back into the access panel. “Why don’t you go and see about some shelter in that barn.” She pointed with the arm that wasn’t in the access hatch. “Get cleaned up. There’s some water purification tabs I scrounged, some food.”
A light rain started falling, and it looked like worse was on the way. Shelter was a good idea. Vince started up a private comm network with her while he walked to the barn. “Brothers? I didn’t know you had brothers.”
In the shared space that he’d opened up, she replied, “You never asked.”
The barn was in the process of being reclaimed by the encroaching swamp, and the knotted arms of wisteria vines engulfed it, dragging it back into the embrace of the earth. Vince kicked clumps of grass and weed away from the bottom of one door and pulled it, hearing the crack of rotten wood as it opened. “You’re right, I don’t know anything about you. Are you religious, Connors?” Inside it was dim, and his visual systems switched to low-light imaging. The interior was piled with junk—discarded aluminum furniture with legs sticking out, a rusted claw-foot bathtub, jumbled piles of wood. Vince stooped to pick up the body of a plastic doll, and then spotted its head nearby and picked that up as well. He tried reattaching them.
“My family was Catholic, but it never appealed to me,” Connors replied. “Too much fire and brimstone. Why, are you?”
Vince carefully stepped his way through the junk. Looking overhead, he was relieved to see that the roof seemed intact. “No.” Some planks near a far wall looked like they were in good shape, and he went to have a look. “Or, I mean I wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, you weren’t?”
Gingerly, Vince reached down to pull up one of the planks. He remembered his grandmother’s stories about always checking under the seat in an outhouse. Black widows and brown recluse spiders would just love a pile of wood like this. He inspected the timber he picked up. Covered in cobwebs, but it was straight and dry. “Did you know that Buddhists think that people in the past—the very long past—were basically immortal? And that the Jataka stories from India, written down thousands of years ago, talk about an infinite number of parallel universes, side by side, and that we create reality with our minds?”
“You know,” replied Connors after a pause, “I did not know that.” Her mind was obviously elsewhere as she tried to figure out the drone controls.
“Ever wonder why the prophets describe epiphanies as ‘out of body’ experiences?” Vince continued. “That when they talked with God, they felt like they were moving into another world?”
“I don’t know—because they were talking with God?” Connors emphasized the last word. Her sarcasm was obvious even through the virtual comm link.
Vince shoved aside debris with his foot to clear a wide patch of earth to make a fire pit. He worked in silence for a few minutes.
“Where’s this coming from?” asked Connors.
Vince picked up a rusted tricycle and inspected it. “When I met Mikhail, he was talking about Iran, about how the old Nazis were obsessed with it.”
“Seriously?” The avatar Connors was presenting in the shared discussion space frowned. “That’s what you talked about?”
“She finally believes something I say, and then she can’t believe what I’m saying,” mumbled Vince under his breath.
Satisfied he had enough space, he started laying down several of the thicker planks, and then put the rest cross-wise on top of them to create a platform. “Have you ever seen those images of Buddha with the multiple arms and heads? Like when Vishnu tries to impress the Prince in the Bhagavad Gita and takes on a multi-armed form?”
Connors grunted as she pulled out a circuit board. “I don’t know what prince you’re talking about, but yeah, I’ve seen the Buddhas with the arms and heads. What does this have to do with anything?”
“You’re going to laugh.”
“Try me.”
Having finished building the platform for sleeping on, Vince looked around for anything that they could use as a cover. The sun was going down. He sighed. “Doesn’t all of this sound a lot like pssi? Multiple phantom arms sprouting out with splintered minds, out-of-body excursions into other worlds—humans on the verge of immortality?”
He was right. Connors did laugh. He couldn’t blame her.
“Mikhail also mentioned the Voynich manuscript—have you ever heard of it?”
“No, I have not.”
Hotstuff pinged Vince that they had finished what they could on the drone, and that Connors was on her way inside the barn.
Vince uploaded the data he had on the six-hundred-year-old Voynich manuscript, and images of naked nymphs, unrecognizable plants, astrological diagrams, all written in an unknown alphabet, flooded the shared display space between them. Translation tools hadn’t been able to make sense of it, but they did confirm that it contained coherent information. None of the plants or animals were anything that had existed—at least, not in this world. In their shared space, Connors looked at it and sent Vince another frowning emoticon.
“When I was running around a few months back, trying to save my life from whatever future threat was trying to kill me,” Vince said, rummaging around in a pile at the back of the barn, “I spent a lot of time decoding ancient texts. I’m sure I saw something in there.”
“In where?” Connors was leaning against the frame of the open barn door.
“In the past. The end of ordinary reality is the start of the merger with the divine for Buddhists—so my question is, if we’ve reached the end of ordinary reality with pssi, what exactly would we be merging with?” Speaking of miracles, Vince found a metal case filled with what looked like tablecloths. He pulled one out and held it aloft. They weren’t even that moldy. They’d make great covers.
Connors nodded. “I think what you need to merge with is a good night’s sleep.”
Climbing back through the scattered junk, Vince tossed the metal case on the floor. It was going to be cold. They’d better get a fire going soon. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Anyone want to chat with the outside world?”
Hotstuff materialized sitting on a cross-beam above their heads. She was back to wearing battle fatigues. No sexy outfits anymore.
“You got it working?” Connors asked.
Hotstuff nodded. “Main avionics are shot, it ain’t getting airborne, but we can get comms working. A clean channel right into the main data trunks in the sky. But you’ve capped the connection on this side.”
Connors nodded and smiled. “Didn’t want you guys escaping.”
“So you’re going to contact your government buddies?” Vince looked down at the floor. “Last time you tried that, they flattened half of Louisiana.”
“There are still some people—”
“I think it’s time to give me a chance, no?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Look, you can chaperone, throw a security blanket around me, whatever you want.”
Connors lifted her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes.
Vince held his arms wide. “I’ve got a lot of friends, Connors, in a lot of places.”
“Okay,” Connors conceded, “we can try it your way. But I remain in control of the connection.”
Smiling, Vince nodded. He wondered if he’d be able to get in touch with Sid or Bob, or perhaps the Commune and Brigitte. He hoped someone was still left out there.
While Hotstuff and Connors began setting the parameters of the communication link, Vince retreated inside his head to look at the texts Mikhail gave him. Like the Nag Hammadi libraries, they appeared to be ancient pre-Christian Gnostic, but it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
The texts were written in precursor of Aramaic, so Vince’s automated translators were having a difficult time making sense of it, but in the Book of Pobeptoc an impossible
passage popped out at him: “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”
The Book of Pobeptoc. Was he seeing things? How could it be possible?
23
A SEA OF green sludge sat fermenting between rolling mountains of sand under a sky dotted with distant clouds. In a hollow between the dunes, on a dusty peninsula that jutted into the blooms of algae, was a shanty town of corrugated tin and mud brick. Everywhere was garbage. At the side of a putrid stream in the middle of the town a man in ragged jeans was sprawled out, shirtless, emaciated, and covered in sores.
“Wake up, young master.”
Bob opened his eyes to find the priest looking down at him, cradling him in his arms. The smell of rot and decomposing flesh nearly made him gag. He spat out a mouthful of water.
“Slowly.” The priest brought the cup to Bob’s lips again.
Taking a deep breath, Bob blinked and leaned his head forward, taking a sip. He was leaning against a wall of rough concrete blocks, in merciful shade. In front of him, a pig was rooting through a mound of plastic bags in a pool of water, and further, several young boys were stooped over, stepping through the muck, searching. One of them kicked aside a robot scavenger, pulling away a tin can for which the bot was going. The boy made a face at the bot and it scurried away. He deposited the tin can into a sack slung over his shoulder.
“Can you stand?” the priest asked.
Bob wasn’t sure. How did I get here? Closing his eyes he tried pushing himself up, and, trembling, his body responded, but only just. “Give me a minute.”
The priest nodded and offered more water. It spilled around Bob’s beard. Beard. Bob reached up to feel his face. It was covered in shaggy hair. It was the first time he had ever grown facial hair. It itched.
“We need to keep moving,” whispered the priest, looking toward the knot of children hunting through the islands of garbage in the stream. “You still want to get into the African Union, yes?”
Bob nodded. Across the filthy river, standing above the corrugated tin roofs, stood the local microwave array that received and transmitted to the space power grid. Africa was leapfrogging ahead, replacing old-style infrastructure with more efficient ideas like the matter-net.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 17
