by A. R. Daun
The first few hours of its life were driven by the need to find the girl and exact vengeance on her, but as the identity of the subsumed person who had once been the ranch cook was further assimilated, new desires were emerging into its consciousness as if from hidden springs whose waters had suddenly overflowed. Its attention had shifted subtly from the girl to the man who accompanied her, and somewhat surprisingly, new and conflicting emotions had bubbled up that added to its confusion.
The dual imperatives that had slowly emerged as its principal goals could not have been more at odds with one another. The stronger urge was to find the man and destroy him, but not from any base hatred of the person. Instead, it was a cool and calculating ember that had been slowly growing in its center, one that it knew might, with the right set of circumstances, develop into a conflagration that would totally consume it.
The other need was more localized. It throbbed along its left side, a yearning that pulsated as if in rhythm with its non-existent heart beat, and paradoxically enough a feeling of revulsion radiated out from this area whenever thoughts of harming the man crossed its mind.
It was maddening, an itch that it could not scratch. The creature prowled the edges of San Antonio's River Walk with its lit restaurants and tiny shops, retreating into the shadows of the vegetation that crowded along the water's edge whenever pedestrians passed by on the narrow walkway. The flamboyantly colored river boats filled with tourists that motored along the river were easier to dodge, and the creature barely glanced at them as they passed, filled with people too engrossed in taking pictures on their digital cameras and cellphones to even notice the large hulking form that stalked the verdant shore.
A quick stabbing pain from its side drove the creature to huddle in the deep shadows beneath the arch of one of the footbridges that crossed the River Walk at staggered intervals. The patterned trunk and thick adventitious roots of a huge Philodendron bipinnatifidum hid it from the boats, and the creature rocked back and forth in pain as it felt something within it start moving.
It felt a fist-sized bump appear along its side. The creature gazed in wonder and some alarm as the protrusion bulged like an overripe cantaloupe slightly below its left armpit, then slowly expanded to the size of a basketball over the course of several minutes until it could not even lower its arm. This was accompanied by shifts in the complex siliceous endoskeletal framework that ramified throughout its body, as the bulge swelled between two parallel strands and forced them farther apart.
The creature moaned as the pain from its throbbing side came in waves. It touched the growing lump, which had ballooned into a spherical shape that drooped, like a water droplet forming on a spigot before slowly being pulled down by gravity. The lump felt stretched and was rubbery to the touch, and the creature wondered what would happen if it used its foreclaws to rip it open.
“Are you a troll?”
The high piping voice came from the creature's right. A little boy in matching shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt was staring at it with wide open eyes. The boy was not more than six years old, and he was standing precariously close to the water, perhaps at first attracted to the passing boats.
The creature tensed. It realized that the growing lump would slow it down, but it knew that it was still fast enough to rush out and pull the boy under the bridge before anyone could see it.
“Danny, you get off the grass and come over here now!”
The shrill commanding voice came from the pedestrian walkway, and the boy glanced quickly at the speaker, then looked back at the creature.
“Bye,” the boy said, waving his hand, then turning and running on pudgy legs back to his mother.
A loud liquid sound reverberated to one side. The lump along the creature's side had finally extruded completely from its body and had plopped unceremoniously onto the ground. It lay like a deflated jellyfish, with bits of soil marring its mirror shiny surface.
The creature's eyes moved from tracking the retreating boy to eying this unlikely object which had been a part of itself. It poked at it with its sharp fore claws, but the thing resisted the pressure applied to it and started pulsating weakly as if it had somehow come to life.
The creature snorted. A dim part of its mind suddenly realized that the conflicting urges that had almost paralyzed it earlier had suddenly disappeared. It mulled on this for a few milliseconds, then with one last parting look at the object that had been a part of it, the creature slipped into the surrounding foliage as it continued following the pheromone trail that was leading it slowly but surely towards its destiny.
Behind it the silvery object lay in a forlorn heap. It continued to pulsate for a few more minutes, then slowly flattened and thrust out amoeba-like protrusions along its edges, searching for sustenance. Tiny hair-like cilia grew on its undersides and it started propelling itself forward along the grass covered sandbank, leaving behind a swath of ground utterly devoid of any living thing. Its body engulfed and ingested the smallest bacteria and protozoan, and even the tough Bermuda grass that covered the path was not immune to its quiet depredations.
And it grew as it ate. It increased in size from approximately the diameter of a dinner plate to a picnic blanket in the space of several hours as it foraged along the riverbank. By the time dawn broke the next day it had grown so large that it started to forage on even the low hanging shrubs and decorative plants that had been planted along the water's edges, and its color changed from a silvery gray finish to a dark emerald green. It incorporated chloroplast-like organelles along its surface to soak in the sun's rays, and this in turn had accelerated its metabolism and growth to such a high degree that by the time the new evening came its mass had passed the 120 kg mark.
It spent the night under another of the bridge pedestrian archways. It weaved a tough cylindrical cocoon around itself, and beneath this protective covering it forced a series of drastic changes to its still relatively simple body plan. The undifferentiated cells that made up most of its bulk initiated a rapid series of mitotic divisions before the sudden proliferation of specific mRNA molecules triggered groups of the cells to undergo cellular differentiation and form new tissues, which in turn congregated to form nascent organs.
A few hours before the light of the second dawn, a hairline crack formed along the surface of the cocoon. It ramified through the upper parts of the protective covering before whole pieces started flaking off like so much dandruff, and from one of the gaps a hand coated in viscous slime emerged. It gripped the edges of the crack, and another hand rose up to join it, both tensing as they started to break off larger pieces of the cocoon in a bid to free themselves.
A head emerged from the wider opening created by the hands. It too was covered in a layer of glistening slime, but beneath it the face had an arresting profile, with full lips and a wide but not overly-generous nose, and flattened but long eyelashes that sheltered under masses of jet-black hair.
The thing that was now Gani gasped and took in his first great lungful of air.
CHAPTER 41
Year 149 A.R.
USC Cinematic Arts Complex
Los Angeles, CA 90007
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
- Beilby Porteus
John grinned and the mouths of a hundred million Risen avatars twitched upwards in a grotesque parody of his gesture.
Events were unfolding just as he had hoped and predicted. He had imbued one of the Moreton Fig trees that stood in front of the old USC student center with his essence, and that particular specimen had taken to the inserted nanites as if it had been born for it. Through some fortuitous and still unknown series of events, it had even developed a kind of dim but focused sentience.
John chuckled at the name it had given itself: The Devourer of All Things. How droll, he thought, how positively hilarious that the engine of his drive for conquest had inadvertently been created with a flair for the dramatic. Genghi
s Khan had his unstoppable mounted cavalry; Queen Elizabeth the British Royal Navy; and John Chen, former USC biology student and aspiring medical doctor, had a mere plant, but one that spanned the continent and ingested every living thing in its path, both Risen and not, then processed them to swell the ranks of John's already numberless hordes of avatars.
His main avatar crouched in the shadows of a statue of Douglas Fairbanks, which stood at the center of the USC Cinematic Arts Complex. Around the central plaza loomed the Mediterranean Revival Style buildings which used to house one of the most prestigious and exclusive film schools in the world. Old George Lucas himself had laid out the original designs for the complex, and John always thought the architecture was reminiscent of those found in the fictitious capital city of Naboo in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
As a new student at the university and a fan of old cinema, he had always been fascinated by the school, and especially the new complex. A $175 million donation from Lucas had formed the financial basis for its creation in 2010, and most of the buildings and facilities were named after famous people who had strong connections to the university. Anchoring the complex were the George Lucas and Steven Spielberg Buildings, which housed a multitude of 3D and digital theaters, and close to them was the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, the country's only fully digital training center. Various other smaller facilities like the The Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Center for Animation completed the ensemble.
He thought it was fitting that he was quartered here at the dawning of this new age, and with himself as the central character. This place where dreams had been created, and where the vast talents of innumerable artists, and actors, and writers had slaved day and night to create entire new fantasy worlds for the enjoyment and edification of the masses.
“I am the new George Lucas!” He crowed, and his hundred million avatars shivered in pleasure and mouthed the words in time with him.
Hell, he was even better. The old directors and producers worked with film, while his canvas was the entire country, perhaps even the entire world. They moved the imaginations of millions with their work, but he moved actual mountains and changed landscapes with a mere whim. They catered to only the minds of people, he subsumed the vast mountains of human flesh that had been left after the Rising and molded them to whatever he desired.
He reached up and run one diamond hard claw along the flanks of the Fairbanks statue.
“My magnum opus,” he told it grandly. “I am the destroyer of worlds, the creator of a new dawn in the evolution of mankind.”
He looked to the east, and a troubled expression flickered on his gargoyle face. Out there, beyond the arid desert and past the wind-swept plains that had been reclaimed by vast grasslands, was something that might be the last impediment to the completion of his work. He had sensed them even from the beginning as a discontinuity in the sea of avatars that covered the land, but was noticeably absent in several areas along the southeastern seaboard.
“Who are you?” John asked, and the question ricocheted as a sibilant whisper from the mouths of a hundred million avatars that prowled the City of Angels all the way east to the desolate urban ruins that dotted the Texas landscape.
“Who are you????!!!” He shouted, as he leaped from his perch below the statue to an overhanging balcony on the George Lucas building, and then once more to the red-colored tiled roof.
He paced maniacally back and forth along the sloped surface of the roof. He was in a rage, and he swung his muscular arms in wide arcs, the razor sharp claws singing in the still air, aching to disembowel some imaginary enemy.
John had assumed that he was unique. He had imagined that he was the only person left in the world, and that he would have free rein to mold the remnants of the past into whatever form he desired. He had slowly realized as the days had gone by that the creatures around him were not alien beings bent on invading and conquering the earth, although as an avid science fiction reader the thought had tickled some fancy in him. Instead, he had come to believe that they were once people, but through some process of mutation, perhaps due to some rampant nanotech plague that had rippled through humanity like a scythe, had somehow been transformed into these killing machines.
And he believed that out of all the human beings in the world, only he had been spared the conversion to a mindless state. His physical body may have been lost in the process, but his mind had survived the transition, and now had the ability to roam at will through the bodies of the avatars under his control. He could simultaneously be receiving sensory impressions from dozens of avatars spread across hundreds, perhaps even several thousands of miles. The limits of his power were constrained because his mind could not take in the avalanche of stimuli from more than a few dozen avatars before it shut down due to sensory overload and he blacked out. But his ability to send commands was only limited by the availability of avatars that formed a continuous network spanning his entire domain.
John leaped back down, his muscular forelegs taking him first to the balcony, then cushioning his landing at ground level. If there was some other person who had survived this transformation, he would need to know about it. This was his show, and he did not intend to share the limelight with anyone else.
His consciousness leap-frogged eastwards from one avatar to another in a circuitous route that took him from Los Angeles to Phoenix by way of Las Vegas, and then to El Paso and finally to San Antonio in Texas. The City of Angels gave way to the neon-draped ruins of the Las Vegas Strip, and then to the sprawled urban landscape of San Antonio in a kaleidoscopic series of images almost too fast to register.
It settled at last onto a group of a dozen avatars south of San Antonio. In the far distance to the east, John could see with two dozen pairs of eyes a wall of dark brown that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and whose height he knew surpassed that of small mountains. He also knew that this wall formed an almost solid barrier that continued for several miles beyond, and that the entire gargantuan structure was inexorably moving eastwards at a rate of just a couple meters every hour, around 50 meters every day. What looked like a constant shower of rain particles blew backwards from the wall, settling into a vaguely ominous gray mist that shrouded the lower half of the structure.
It was of course the Devourer of All Things. The newly sentient world tree was slowly swallowing up the world, and the inhumanly acute eyesight of the avatars allowed John to see the rain for what it really was: thousands upon thousands of newly formed avatars, elongated creatures made of sharp edges, all bared teeth and unsheathed claws, as they were literally spit out by the Devourer in the wake of its glacial passing.
John grinned. He had the dozen avatars under his direct control start sprinting towards the far off wall in long leaps and bounds. He thought that if someone had chanced upon the scene at that moment, they would perhaps cringe back in shock and fear - not because of the unnatural appearance of the fast moving predators, nor because of their deadly demeanor - but because of what shone on their almost-faces: unadulterated joy.
For I have gone a-hunting, John thought. And smiled again.
CHAPTER 42
Year 150 A.R.
San Antonio, Texas
Gatherer of Memories from Times Past grew.
It grew in more than the physical sense, as the Devourer ingested and processed matter. But like an oyster slowly accumulating calcium carbonate to craft its pearl, the Gatherer wrested information from the passing detritus as it built up its vast store of knowledge. It was a giant sieve, filtering data and permanently storing information that it found interesting in tightly packed biological matrices composed of dense interwoven strands of DNA.
If the Gatherer had been prone to boasting, it might have declared itself the largest information storage medium that had ever existed in the history of the planet. It knew that sometime before its awakening, some had estimated the total storage capacity of every human technological device at around 295 exabytes, which was an aston
ishing number, equivalent to a stack of CDs which would reach to beyond the moon. But each gram of the Gatherer's storage DNA held around 1000 terabytes of data, the equivalent of 40,000 twenty-five gigabyte Blu-ray discs. This ballooned to 1000 exabytes of data for each ton of the biological matrix, and the Gatherer had several hundred metric tons hidden deep within the massive body of the ever-growing Devourer.
This vast library of information was where the Gatherer spent most of its time. Indeed, the Gatherer liked to visualize itself not as the dense concentration of nanites and banyan biological remnants that composed its physical structure, but as an elegantly dressed and coiffed gentleman of leisure, poring over long-lost scrolls in a room that stretched to infinity and was filled with towering bookshelves packed with ancient and dusty tomes.
It was also here that the Gatherer liked to think. The days when it thought of its stay with the Devourer as a grand adventure sans any untoward consequences were long past. Gone too was its belief that its companion's creation and adaptive evolution had somehow been a spontaneous and fortuitous event, borne out of the same nanotech plague that had cleansed most of the world of humanity.
In the first few months of their time together, the Devourer had been a black hole. It consumed all biological matter before it, and it grew enormous, a living mountain of nanites and living matter. But several years into their friendship, the Devourer had started producing a new breed of Risen, one that was fast and fiercely predatory. They had plopped out of the leeward side of the Devourer's main body like over-ripe fruit dropping from the branch, the protective sheaths that enveloped them during birth liquefying on contact with the ground to release the terrible beasts inside. They came first in their dozens, then in their hundreds and thousands as the Devourer had devoted more and more of its internal resources to their production.
When the Gatherer had inquired about them, its friend had been unusually silent. This was a surprise, since the Devourer usually liked talking for days on end about all the things that the Gatherer had learned. It was simple soul, but one that was not contemptuous of those who were more learned. When pressed, the Devourer had simply replied that it “had to do this”, an answer that was frustratingly unenlightening as well as somewhat worrisome, since it hinted at some outside control that somehow had influence over it..
