“Mr. Stockton,” Edelmann continued. “As I was saying, thanks to you I'll be able to complete the project I've been working on for years. The free will of the human will has been an obstacle to our species since it took its first steps. An obstacle, and, as you well know, a danger. We can put certain parts to sleep, certain instincts, but everything is still there, waiting crouched in some dark corner of our mind for the moment to reawaken, waiting for us to decide to give them free rein. That is the key word. Decide. I will change that. The neural implant that will take the human species to a higher level, free of its bonds, free of that evolutionary error that allows us to make mistakes. A chimpanzee cannot make wrong moral decisions. A human can. You have already seen the havoc this power can wreak on a person. You've lived for weeks with the feeling of being on the edge of an abyss, and all because of a wrong decision you made in a couple of seconds. We walk around, haughty, proud of our philosophy, our science, our ethics, when in reality we are more vulnerable than an ant. All that' s required is to apply pressure to the appropriate points.”
Lightning struck nearby, like a herald of the impending storm, and the thunder seemed to underscore the doctor's words. The roar of waves crashing wildly against the Titan's hull.
“It's nothing but a house of cards. One touch on the right card is all it takes to bring it crashing down.”
Dr. Edelmann took out the notebook with deliberate parsimony, without taking his eyes off Fox. He kicked the box, which slid hissing over the metal cover to Fox's feet.
A bead of sweat trickled down his temple until it was lost under the collar of his uniform.
“What's this?”
“Open it.”
Fox bent down and removed the duct tape.
He opened the box.
Mr. Hendrik, did you know the victim?
Suspicion, directed by W. W. House.
From inside he was watched by Nova's empty eyes, which now seemed only what they had always been: two pieces of colored synthetic glass. The wires protruded from her neck like a tangle of fine tentacles.
Fox looked at Edelmann as he felt the blackness grow in his chest, like that day on his rickety couch.
Edelmann wrote fiercely and looked up again. Fox tried to contain the force that pushed him to tear the man apart, and Dr. Edelmann, Bruce perhaps, noted each reaction in his notebook with a nimble scribble that further whipped up the blackness growing in Fox's chest.
They remained that way for what seemed like hours to Fox. Fox tried to withstand every reaction, even physiological, despite the murderous fury he felt towards the man in front of him. At the slightest twitch of his lips or the tiniest muscle in his face, Edelmann replied with a furious rant in his notebook.
The storm suddenly began to rage, with all the fury it had been holding back. Fox charged Edelmann like a bull, head bowed, and didn't even bother to put his arms out in front of him. They were right on the edge of the deck, in a place that was not protected by any fence. He broke the doctor's visor with three punches. On the third, one of the glass panes went into Edelmann's skull. Fox broke away, slowly becoming aware of what had happened. That's when he found the photo. But it was not the one in which he had seen, or imagined, that huge alien creature, but one in which he saw Dr. Edelmann holding a little girl of about two years old in his arms. He was looking at her and pointing at the camera to make the child smile.
A wave washed Edelmann's body away, but left the photo, to let Fox savor the moment. The wave lifted the body above the Titan's height. A flash of lightning, like the flash of anger in a man's chest, immortalized the instant. Another wave picked it up, and sank it forever.
In the solitude of the darkness of his bedroom, guilt spread through him like a thick, black tide. He noticed in his mouth the old taste of rust. He curled up in a corner as he tried not to think and fall asleep, but Edelmann's face impaled by the glass prevented him like an implacable guardian. And especially the look on that little girl's face, looking at the camera still quizzically, as if she wasn't quite sure what her father was asking of her. She had the same eyes as the doctor, the same warm, trusting gaze.
A beam of Kronos' light crossed the storm and his mind. He peered out into the hallway. All he could hear was the crashing of the waves, the perpetual rattle of the Titan and the storm pounding against its insane structure. The door to the laboratory was only a few steps away. He walked very cautiously. But the plates piled one on top of the other that made up the surface of the floor creaked and bent with a metallic clatter. He tried to step without stepping, as if he could keep his body in suspension. He tried not to wake Isaac, although deep down he knew that his caution had more to do with the possibility that at any moment Dr. Edelmann might emerge from the gloom, choking him with his cold, swollen hands, while whispering his diagnosis in a gurgling voice. Something brushed his face. At once he realized that it was none other than the halogen tube hanging in front of the laboratory door. He pointed the flashlight inside. Dust particles floated through the yellowish beam of light. The air was thicker and warmer in there. He walked to the place where he had been talking that afternoon with Isaac.
He understood at once how daring desperation had made him. Had he really come to think that Isaac would leave the catalyst there within reach of anyone when the lives of all Mankind were at stake? But when he directed the flashlight beam toward the countertop, there it was. He grabbed the catalyst and climbed back on deck with his heart leaping in his chest, more out of anticipation of what he was about to do than fear of being caught. The images of the three deaths overlapping in his head, and always in the background the image of that little girl, who looked at the camera curiously, a hairpin of flowers adorning her brown hair.
The storm was now at its wildest. The Titan was shaking like a nutshell. Fox stood at the edge of the deck, where the ocean had swallowed Edelmann, and put on the neural catalyst. It was cold, and the buzzing sound he had heard a few hours earlier was now reduced to the distant murmur of a mosquito. He watched the silvery patterns the storm and wind formed on the ocean's surface.
He closed his eyes. And he concentrated on thinking exclusively about the fact that when he opened them he would find Dr. Edelmann, somewhat disoriented, perhaps checking his notebook in the rain in search of some explanation for what had happened, wishing to return home. As he did so, he suddenly felt rather stupid. He imagined himself millions of light years away from Earth, with that contraption on his head, and thinking about bringing a dead man back to life. Then he felt something start to spin inside the neural catalyst, and at the same time the plate overheated and started to emit that high-pitched purring sound he had heard in the afternoon. He wasn't sure how much concentration time would be enough, so he held out a little longer, before the heat became unbearable. The Titan lurched so hard that Fox thought he would fall overboard. And above all he thought of a monster of colossal proportions that had just caressed the Titan's underside with its back. Then he remembered that he was still wearing the neural catalyst. He tossed it to the sheet metal floor, as if he had just discovered a scorpion on its head. As it had done a few minutes earlier with Dr. Edelmann's body, the ocean took the catalyst as well.
Manipulate? Certainly not! I'm talking about modeling, just as a sculptor is able to get something beautiful from a shapeless piece of rock.
Daniel H. Lewinson, Social Engineering and Mass Control
Dereck Simmons, president of WilkinsBank Eastcountry, sitting on a stone bench somewhere in the huge garden surrounding the Presidential Residence, was reading a book titled Social Engineering and Mass Control: A Practical Handbook for the Amateur. The author was Daniel H. Lewinson, a psychologist sympathetic to the party, who had succeeded in pushing the hollow ideology they offered to levels of unquestioned dogma. With his help they had achieved a milestone in the history of Humanity: the most deserted and empty ideological nothingness were the values now defended to the hilt by the masses. It was the defense of nothingness disguised as everything.
Holograms depicting riffraff wandered through the garden. They were controlled by the artificial intelligence program Aretza. The program had been born more than two centuries ago, with just a few lines in its databases, and then released to learn at will. Today, its services could be hired for a modest fee. Simmons used it to perform near-perfect riffraff simulations. It made his empire of self-imposed solitude less drastic.
At that moment a couple of ladies in their forties were walking past him. Their dialogue was something like:
“And then James said to me, he said are you coming to dinner? And I said to him like, I said, well maybe.”
“No way.”
“Just as you hear it.. And I said: oh, well I don't know.”
The holograms sat down next to him, in the free space on the left side of the bench. All around there were numerous benches that were completely free.
“Ladies, didn't you have anywhere else to sit? I'm trying to read.”
They looked at him with wide eyes. Then they continued talking to each other:
“Did you see how rude he was?”
“How is it possible?”
“That's what I say, the neighborhood is getting worse and worse.”
“You betcha. Well, I told him...”
Resigned, Simmons moved to a bench on a narrow, lightly traveled dirt road. He might as well have turned off the hologram system. But to him they had become like the little toy lamp a child keeps burning by his bedside, knowing that if he turns it off the ghosts may come.
In the chapter he had in hand, Lewinson explained ten steps to follow to turn any nonsense into the most important thing for the population. In one section he proposed what to do in case of a blockage. It was enough to select two words at random from a dictionary and establish any crazy relationship. The fundamental pillars consisted of injecting a sufficient dose of fear and disguising the matter with pseudo-scientific data that would make people feel very intelligent when repeating it to their acquaintances.
“Aretza, tell me two words!”
A young woman's voice reverberated from everywhere and nowhere:
“Hello, Dereck.”
“Two random words.”
“Bucket. Garlic.”
Simmons shuffled those words in every way he could think of. He imagined the riffraff wandering the streets with their heads stuffed in mop buckets, the only defense against the tainted garlic of Old Europa. He imagined million-dollar film and television campaigns in which they would embed the idea of the threat of the (perhaps mutant) garlic, and of course garnished with a lot of freedom of the rights of the freedoms to carry buckets, etc. Even the color of the bucket could mean something. The blue of sovereign citizenship. By the power of the bucket, and such. The national day of the right to carry a bucket. Associations that would pop up like mushrooms under his wings, in which he could house all the little birds he wanted. NO TO GARLIC demonstrations. ARE YOU STILL PRO GARLIC? GET INFORMED! Simmons salivated. Votes aplenty from the dumbed-down masses, conveniently numbed with fake research and Mevotex. Mental note: level two, the bucket as a way of life.
The hologram of a young man ran past him. His footsteps sounded like crunching gravel, but under his feet the dirt didn't move an inch. Around a lamppost, inside of which glowed a green neon tube coiled in a spiral, several mosquitoes buzzed merrily in their nonchalance.
As he watched them, the blackout occurred. It was a starless night, and the darkness was absolute. All he could hear was the chirping of crickets and the distant rumble of traffic, out there on National Highway 4. He pulled out the master control, and tried to turn the thing back on, but it didn't respond. So he walked in the direction he thought the residence might be. The cool night breeze had also stopped, as if it had somehow been connected to the web of lights, sounds and computer simulations that made up his little world.
The hole he fell into didn't seem too deep, but deep enough that he couldn't find his way out of it. In the fall he had hit his ribs, which now sent him a pulsating dull ache.
“Hey! Can anybody hear me?”
The crickets answered him with their incessant monotonal melody.
It had been more than a month since he had given the order to restore that hole, since the project for the swimming pool was never going to be resumed. But there it remained, like gaping jaws in the middle of the night.
He remained in the dark, huddled in that hole, struggling in vain against the increasingly intense cold. He began to feel his nose and fingers burning. The thought that he might not survive crossed his mind like a shadow. He began to dig, it was the only thing he could do. He dug using his hands as shovels, since he couldn't feel them at all. He huddled in there, in the hole within the hole, and threw over himself the earth he had piled up around him, leaving only his head outside his prison, like a dead man who had burrowed his way through his pit, only to find an even bigger pit burying him. His ribs hammered furiously, suggesting to him that perhaps there was more than a bruise there.
Behind the black curtain of the sky, a flash announced a new stage of the battle. And then another. He had studied the parasites thoroughly. That sounded like the dark matter cannons installed on their cruisers from the remains looted from the amoebic civilization a century ago. The technology used in those cannons had not yet been remotely matched by Earth engineers. Unrelenting firepower, which had no end and would not overheat.
His mother would tell him how as a little boy he used to say, smiling, his face all cheeks and eyes shining with innocence:
“Mom, when I grow up I'm going to make people happy.”
That memory pierced him like a sting that hurt him much more than his ribs, which were throbbing and sending him flashes of burning pain.
From a very young age he had immersed himself in towers of books on philosophy, politics, economics, history, while he watched his country gradually degrade into a formless, dark, anthropophagous mass that swallowed everything in its path. An expansive mass, like a drop of black ink on a strip of absorbent paper.
A new cannon shot outlined that thought, illuminating the hole for an instant. He could see numerous roots protruding from the earthen walls of his prison.
During his college years he had joined a young, revolutionary party. There he would be able to put into action everything he had planned for so many years. He would change things. When the party became more and more twisted, and opened its hands more and more to the lucrative system, too large sums of money were placed in front of his eyes. So he became convinced that after all, those ideals were nothing more than youthful delusions, and he let himself be carried along happily by the drift of progress and the relentless growth of his bank account.
He would have never imagined getting to the point of bringing the most bloodthirsty species in the universe to the Earth's doorstep.
A three-year-old boy wrapped in an astronaut costume his mother had made for him out of boxes of cookies. His mouth stained with tomato.
“Mommy, I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to make people happy.”
Simmons screamed in his pit.
When he awoke, he saw Janitor Jameson's huge mustache peeking over the edge of the hole. Jameson stared silently at that head that had sprouted from the earth like a pale mushroom. Finally he turned away.
“Hey, Jameson, don't leave me here!”
A little later Jameson threw the end of a rope, not bothering to look down there again.
But you are not taking into account that in a situation of sensory suspension it is impossible to differentiate between the darkness of the void separating the galaxies and the darkness of the deepest ocean abyss.
Olson Kramnik, Professor of Philosophy of Physics. Varsansk University
The ocean was calm. A dark mirror that flashed pale reflections. Fox felt a hammering in his temples like the heartbeat of a monster as big as a mountain.
During the slow passing of the minutes he paid attention to every creak and every jolt of the ship, wa
iting for the fateful moment of his encounter with the monster. Perhaps he only deserved to die there, twenty million light years away, engulfed by the monster created by the basements of his own mind.
He thought of letting himself die like that, almost as if accepting his just punishment. It was then when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of light on the calm water. He sat up and about seven hundred feet away he saw the catalyst floating on the surface of the ocean in the dim light of Kronos. That was like a blow, it forced him to make a decision that he did not even dare to consider. With the spacecraft stranded there like a harpooned whale, the option that opened up in his mind hit him with all its logic, leaving him breathless.
“The spider is back,” his daughter had once told him, her face flushed and soaked with tears. She was wearing her pajamas, which she had outgrown, but she refused to replace. In one hand she held the cracked elephant stuffed animal. The cotton stuffing was coming out of one side.
“Don't worry,” he said. Then he went into his daughter's room and did the famous anti-spider ritual, while keeping an impassive hero's face that he composed as best he knew how, as if he were saving the world. A hero in his underpants armed with an old broom.
The black ocean water swayed calmly. Come on, it's all right, Fox, it seemed to say. Just up to the buoys.
He wasn't really thinking of doing something like that, was he? He had only stood on the edge of the spacecraft to prove to himself that he was incapable, and that it was therefore useless to continue to give it any more thought. He put on a life jacket and climbed over the railing. Down there, the ocean gave him back a distorted reflection, hundreds of orange fragments. His heart was pounding so hard that Fox wondered if it might explode.
He dove into the darkness of the ocean. Even through the suit, he could feel the coldness of the water. The feeling of standing on a huge unknown void took over his senses, gripping his muscles. Stiffened by the cold and above all by terror, he began to swim. He could hear his own breathing inside the helmet as he took one stroke and then another, leaving the possibility of turning around further and further behind. Each time he dipped his head he had a brief glimpse of the abyss that loomed beneath his feet. He swam for what seemed like hours. When he glanced back he could barely make out the lights of the Titan. When he looked ahead again, he saw the Catalyst, bobbing in the calm waters of the Great Ocean. Fox took it.
Andromeda Expedition Page 15
