Title: Ghost of the Gods
Genre: Techno-Thriller
Author: Kevin Bohacz
Publisher: Mazel & Sechel
Pages: 437
Format: Paperback/Kindle
Purchase at
AMAZON
Was
it the accumulated wounds to the environment that had finally triggered
the nanotech plague or was it simply one more step in a shrewdly
crafted plan to replace us with humans 2.0? As I write this at least one
pair of these transhumans breathe the same air as us, and there are
likely many more. They may look like us, they may even be almost human,
but they are also cybernetic and will live for an extraordinary length
of time. Trust me, their goals are not the same as ours. It was not a
natural plague that almost drove humankind to extinction but an attack
from within, turning our own biology against us. Scientists discovered
all too late an artificial entity, a sentient machine foolishly created
in the image of god, had been studying us and genetically altering us
for longer than we can imagine. Perhaps it is because of this
god-machine that we evolved into creatures who can think and speak and
know our own mortality? This silicon god is so different from us that we
may never truly understand it, but what we do know is that it is
terrifyingly intelligent and it hates us. What we do know is that it
tried to eradicate us from the face of our planet and then stopped for
no discernible reason. What we do know is that its work is not done.
First Chapter:
Kathy Morrison – Pueblo Canyon, Arizona – January 21, 0002 A.P.
Northeast
of Sedona, Arizona, was the tiny settlement of Pueblo Canyon. Dr. Kathy
Morrison was walking through the crunchy snow, returning from a house
call. She was obsessed with a need to act that was growing more urgent
with each passing day. She did not see the sunrise or the stunning
Arizona red stone vistas that surrounded her. How could she remain
silent with all she knew? She had proof the govern- ments of the world
had lied and everyone was in danger. Entire librar- ies could be filled
with material published about the nanotech plague without a single page
accurately portraying the truth about what had happened two years ago.
On the Internet, official disinformation rapidly became historical fact.
Unimpeachable government officials and leading experts explained how
the plague was caused by genetically engineered COBIC bacteria. They
presented evidence showing that COBIC had been weaponized by the
addition of a lethal nanotech payload called a seed, supposedly the
first self-replicating nanotech ever devised by humans. The charges
stated that through a conspiracy of negligence and criminal intent, the
smart weapon escaped into the wild, where it multiplied. Both
development and release were declared crimes against humanity. Many in
the scientific community were wrongly sentenced to prison or death in
televised military tribunals.
Kathy walked past the settlement’s
schoolhouse and heard the smiling voices of young children inside but
could not smile herself. It was the government who was the true
criminal, not the scientists. Everyone, including schoolchildren,
learned the lie of how nanotech COBIC supposedly collected into a
waterborne supercolony and that the military had destroyed it, ending
the threat. None of the few who knew the truth dared mention the
god-machine or its deep infestation into the biosphere. That
information, as well as any proof of the truly advanced nature of this
technology, was violently suppressed. These seeds were everywhere and in
everything. Yet almost everyone be- lieved they were not infected, and
the government encouraged this lie with a mix of bribes, solitary
confinement, and worse. Reports to the contrary, which had been issued
by the CDC during the plague, were dismissed as part of the criminal
conspiracy. Only a small number of people knew the god-machine was the
true threat and that the military had failed to destroy it.
It was
to stop humankind’s damage to the biosphere that the god- machine had
begun its bloody work. The machine operated as if it was the very immune
system of the planet and humans had become an invading contagion. Long
before the threat was understood to be any- thing other than biological
or chemical, vast numbers of people were being murdered in what were
soon called kill-zones. The best doctors and scientists in the world
were initially out of their depth. They could not explain how this
agent, which killed with the devastating speed and 100 percent lethality
of a chemical weapon, only affected people and not animals. Its
selectivity was like a virus targeting very specific DNA. They could not
explain the zones of sudden death that were miles in diameter and
bloomed out of nowhere. Even more so, it was inconceivable that someone
standing one foot outside a kill-zone lived while those within the zone
died. It was far too late once they’d finally discovered what humanity
was truly up against.
On the day the old world ended, it was in
response to the U.S. Navy’s destruction of a supercolony that the
god-machine had struck back with an escalating barrage of kill-zones
like none before. In a matter of hours billions of people were dead.
When the nanotech plague ended that day for unknown reasons, the world’s
governments declared victory. Kathy was maddened that the public was
ignorant of every critical fact in a global catastrophe that had nearly
driven humankind to extinction. No one was safe. The horror could happen
again without warning.
Kathy washed her hands after seeing her
last patient of the morning, then headed to her study. The dining room
of the two story prairie farmhouse had been converted into an examining
room where she saw her patients. The house itself was at least a hundred
years old. Upstairs were two large bedrooms, one of which had been
converted into a study. She was the only fully qualified medical doc in
Pueblo Canyon, which meant she worked long hours. Her grueling residency
after graduat- ing from Harvard Medical had been easy compared to life
in Pueblo Canyon, but also far less rewarding.
Walking through the
living room with her coffee, Kathy stopped to tend the fire. The house
was heated by a large stone fireplace and stream radiators fed by an
ancient, temperamental oil furnace in the basement. The warmth from the
fire was soothing; the other rooms of the house were too cold and empty.
She picked up a favorite photograph of her and Mark Freedman from the
mantel. A tear ran down her cheek as she stared at his face. They had
lived together for a year after the plague before Mark had ended their
relationship and moved out. He had told her it was hopeless and he was
right. Now they were very close friends. He lived in a house only a
hundred yards from hers. She still loved him, though worked hard to
convince herself otherwise. She thought about how they had been thrown
together at the CDC’s BVMC lab in Atlanta when the plague was just
emerging. Mark was a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist. His years
of research on primordial bacteria had proven COBIC was a living fossil.
Thanks to him, this tiny creature had been crowned the oldest known
form of motile life on Earth. He had literally discovered the missing
link between the great kingdoms of plant and animal. This prize winning
work made Mark the expert on a bacterium, which was now also the carrier
of a nanotech plague. For this reason he quickly became invaluable to
the CDC and Kathy. His work with COBIC predated the plague by a decade
and had no connec- tion to nanotech infected COBIC, though in retrospect
the coincidences were hard to ignore.
Kathy was growing agitated
as she climbed the stairs. She’d been worried to distraction for the
past eight weeks since Mark had left Pueblo Canyon to find this thing
he’d started calling a singularity. He believed this singularity was
proof that more of his kind now existed and that when he found it he
would also find more hybrids like himself. He should have been back by
now. She refused to allow herself to imagine him dead.
The steps
creaked with sounds that had grown familiar, yet she felt vulnerable and
alone for so many reasons. Mark was their leader and with him gone the
weight of leadership was on her shoulders. She thought about all the
people at Pueblo Canyon who knew the dangerous truth about the
government’s lies. Most of the doctors and scientists who had fought the
plague with her had died in Atlanta at the BVMC lab. All of the
survivors from the lab who knew the truth now lived here in Pueblo
Canyon. If the government wanted to ensure their official lies were
never exposed, making everyone at Pueblo Canyon disappear was the smart
way to start.
Kathy sat down at her desk. The room had wonderful
light from a row of three old wood framed windows. The glass was not
insulated and radiated cold, making the space feel like a refrigerator,
but she didn’t care. The sunlight warmed her soul. Kathy sipped her
coffee while gazing out at her view of the small community. Pueblo
Canyon was such a peaceful, secluded place. A small collection of
buildings were scattered about the broad, uneven snow covered base of
the canyon. Smoke drifted from chimneys as people worked at various
chores. She spotted two men tending to livestock in one of the paddocks
just beyond all the buildings. They’d both been well respected medical
researchers at the BVMC lab. She had treated one of them a week ago for a
nasty animal bite. Not far on either side of the canyon floor,
mountainous red stone walls rose almost a thousand feet to meet the high
plateau. With its natural fortifications, it had been an ideal place to
end their exodus from a devastated world two years ago.
When
they’d arrived, Pueblo Canyon had been an isolated horse ranch abandoned
decades ago. Now it was in good repair with new structures being added
almost every month. Food had even been grown the past spring, summer,
and fall. A small crop of pumpkins had been especially successful. The
well water was sweet and the air was pure. At night the sky was filled
with so many stars that it filled the soul with wonder. Electricity had
been restored about a year ago. All wireless phones companies had been
nationalized. Through broadband wireless, the Internet was back and
thriving. All the original settlers had stayed on even after the
government had begun rebuilding, and the benefits of moving to the large
protectorate cities like Manhattan, Chicago, and Los Angeles became
substantial. Some of the settlers had contacted their extended family
members. As a result, their little community had grown, including more
than a few children. Without invitation, new- comers had even started to
arrive in Pueblo Canyon. In the beginning it had been rare for anyone
to stumble upon the reclusive settlement and even rarer for them to
stay.
Every so often a transient would arrive because of Internet
rumors. Conspiracy blogs claimed that certain small towns in New Mexico
and Arizona had been passed over by the nanotech plague because of
experimental government technology located there. Sedona was one of the
few towns that had made it onto everyone’s conspiracy list, along with
Roswell and Los Alamos. Sensible people wrote off the blogs in the same
spirit as crop circles or energy vortexes. There were, however, others
who made their living by searching for grains of truth buried in the
wildest rumors. Kathy was concerned trouble might start if a reporter
actually uncovered something even stranger than the experi- mental
government technology they were seeking. What would happen if they
uncovered a small group of ex-CDC scientists and doctors who had
discovered ancient technology and a truth more dangerous to the new
world order than a nanotech plague? The truth was that humans were no
longer the most advanced hominids on Earth.
By the time the sun
filled the canyon with light, Kathy had been typing rapidly into her
notebook computer for hours. From her windows she had watched the sun
travel a good distance. Its rays cast moving shadows along the
surrounding red stone walls, changing their appear- ance by the hour. It
was a natural diorama as surreal and beautiful as anything imaginable.
At different times of day, different stone shapes came into view and
then faded like ghosts. Some of the shapes appeared to be human faces,
while others were giants locked in mortal combat. Thousands of years ago
Indians had named these natural statues and spun legends around them.
Kathy’s eyes were growing blurry as she glanced up from her screen at
the red stone phantoms on the canyon walls. She was trying to get her
ideas completely down before she lost some of the details. She had
failed. She could think so much faster than she could type. It felt like
such a luxury to have a computer and elec- tricity to run it. Not so
long ago the best she had were spiral notebooks and a gas lantern. The
world they had lost was coming back in many ways, but it felt more like a
failed experiment being retried one last time than any kind of real
hope for a lasting future. She looked at the words on the screen. Her
journal had grown to thousands of pages of historical manuscript. She
was speaking truth to power. In these times, that was a dangerous thing
to do. The journal that she’d begun while they were fleeing from the
ruins of Atlanta had ripened from a whim into an obsession. Now all her
free time was devoted to her writing.
On the old fashioned paper
calendar on her desk, the square for today’s date read January 21. It
looked the same as all the other squares before and after it. A notepad
on her desk had the word
darkness sketched on it in different
sizes and lettering. Every version of the word seemed to embody despair.
The old world had ended on January 21 two years ago when the plague
reached its crescendo and then stopped.
Darkness was the name
given to that bloody day and what followed, a name that had spread on
its own until everyone had adopted it. Today was the
Eve of Darkness 0002 A.P. – year two after the plague.
The
plague had come so quietly, so unexpectedly. What everyone mistook as
isolated pockets of death in remote jungles was, in truth, the end of
times. Perhaps if she and the others at the CDC had been quicker to
recognize what was happening, more could have been done, more lives
could have been saved. Kathy felt terrible guilt under the glaring
spotlight of that historical fact. She knew it had been her
responsibility, her team of CDC doctors and scientists who were the
leaders in the fight. She’d had the best chance of anyone to stop the
nanotech plague and had failed miserably. As a result, a new world, a
new dark age, had begun.
Just as children leave the womb in
agonizing pain, this new world was born in the agony of an entire
species. Kathy knew her kind was doomed; those of the parent breed would
die out at a natural pace.
Though no one had found another hybrid
like Mark or her ex-patient Sarah, Kathy suspected by now there had to
be hundreds, and their numbers would be growing. You were not born a
hybrid—you made yourself a hybrid. Under the right conditions, nanotech
seeds could be forced to replicate in vast numbers and migrate deep into
the cerebral cortex, where they penetrated the nuclei of cells and took
root. The result was gray matter that was partially organic and
partially nanotech. Like a fossil slowly forming as its original organic
material is leached away and replaced with minerals, the nanotech seeds
slowly replaced organic neurons with nanotech constructs. Kathy was
deeply troubled by the entire concept. Once a brain had been infested
and nanotech circuitry now did the thinking, were you still the original
person or some kind of perfect computer simulation of what had once
been human? What about the soul, the essence of life? Was it still
there?
Kathy cared for Mark. She desperately wanted to believe he
was the same person. She prayed he was the same person but hoping and
praying was not enough. Doubts remained. Sarah acted so alien and at
fleeting moments Kathy thought she’d caught Mark acting like Sarah. The
risk of losing what made her uniquely human terrified Kathy and kept her
from trying to take that irreversible step of becoming like Mark. With
his nanotech mind and flawlessly maintained biology, he could live
endlessly with the body of a middle aged man. Even his skin had become a
faultless, smooth, expanse of silk without a single freckle or mole.
She would grow old and wrinkled. He would outlive her by generations,
maybe even forget her, and that thought stabbed shards of ice into her
heart.
Hybridization, the greatest adventure imaginable, was
within her grasp, yet her fingers refused to close around it. Even if
she remained herself after the transformation, aspects of her humanity
would inevitably erode away. Human life was filled with little rattles
and squeaks. Life was not perfect. It was never meant to be. If you
removed the specter of death, didn’t you also lose the very ingredient
that brings emotional vibrancy to life? Didn’t death give everything its
meaning?
In prehistoric times, seventy thousand years ago, some disaster had caused what evolutionary biologists call a
population bottleneck.
The number of Homo sapiens in the world had been reduced in that
bottleneck to six hundred mating pairs. Homo sapiens ancestor Homo
Heidelbergensis might have been alive seventy thousand years ago. Homo
Neanderthals were alive until twenty-eight thousand years ago. Homo
Floresiensis were alive until a mere twelve thousand years ago. Those
six hundred pairs of Homo sapiens went out to conquer the world and
replace all other human species. Every man and woman alive today was
descended only from the DNA of those six hundred mating pairs. There
could be a similar number of transhumans alive today. What would future
scientists write about this parallel circumstance that launched a new
human race? Was this a repeat of something that had happened seventy
thousand years ago? Kathy knew Mark believed the answer was yes. He was
unshakably convinced the god-machine had been shepherding our evolution
ever since we separated from the great apes. One night while they were
still together as a couple, Mark had explained to her that without a
genetic advantage it was extremely dif- ficult to become a hybrid, but
not impossible. Taking brain damaging overdoses of drugs as he and Sarah
had would fail if you lacked the required gene mutations. Part of what
this rare bit of mutated nucleic material did was entice otherwise inert
nanotech seeds into repairing damaged brain tissue, which contained the
mutation. Carried within this mutated DNA was a dormant blueprint of
changes needed to build neurons that had seeds for nucleuses. Large
scale repairs made by seeds using the DNA blueprints created clusters of
nanotech neurons capable of spreading the same restructuring into
nearby neurons. To her medically trained ears this sounded like a
terribly dangerous biological chain reaction.
Mark had then
explained there was a safe purely mental path open to almost everyone.
The instructions were stored forever inside the god-machine and our DNA.
If she could develop conscious control in her dreams, she could learn
to operate the thought-interface while in that state of altered
awareness. A very gradual all inclusive restructur- ing could then be
switched on. The mental switch was thrown by using an intense
single-mindedness to push the throughput on the thought- interface above
a threshold. This critical threshold was calculated based on the amount
of free-swimming nanotech COBIC in the body. Kathy knew scientists had a
name for this altered state of awareness Mark was describing—it was
called lucid dreams. Becoming a hybrid that way could take a lifetime of
dedication and practice. Mark had told her he could increase the level
of COBIC in her body, which would give her a huge advantage. Still, the
entire process sounded like a test of mental worthiness. Kathy could not
help thinking about how closely Mark’s description fit the teachings of
many religions from Tibetan Buddhists and their Dream Yoga to North
American Indians and their dream journeys. Were the similarities only a
coincidence or had information been leaking from the god-machine into
religious teachings for time immemorial?
Kathy glanced out the
windows at children playing in the snow and felt a deep sense of loss.
She could hear their faint shouts of joy. Where did children fit into
this coming transhuman world? How would this new race reproduce? Would
they give birth to hybrid infants, or would their children be born human
and then undergo restructuring? Without death, at some point birth
would have to stop to prevent over- population from destroying the
planet. Childhood could become rare or even obsolete. The entire human
population would age but not show it. Kathy imagined a planet inhabited
by physically perfect men and women who were nothing but gray
Methuselahs deep in their hearts. Would evolution also stop or would the
transhumans change over time evolving through self-reconstruction?
Kathy tapped out a few more sentences into her journal.
What a
horrible irony that immortality, the dream of every human, finally
arrives but with a price that is too high to pay. It is immortality born
from the death of billions of innocent lives. Who could choose to
benefit from that kind of bloodletting? I only hope the hybrids remain
more human than machine. I hope they do a better job of stewardship over
this little blue planet than we did.
Outside, a scattering of
snow had begun to fall. A cold wind rattled the window frames, and
Kathy wrapped the day blanket around her shoulders. At this higher
altitude over a foot of snow covered the ground. Thousands of feet lower
there was only rain and mud where in past years there would have been a
blanket of white. Many of the trees had autumn leaves and new green
leaves on the same branches. The surreal landscape was incriminating
evidence of what our disregard had wrought. The effects of global
warming had not stopped with the nanotech plague. For now, the symptoms
were continuing to worsen. Kathy sipped her cup of coffee. The dark brew
was a soothing reminder of a comfortable world that was forever lost.
She returned her attention to reworking the preface for her journal.
Approximately 30
percent of humanity survived the nano- tech plague. In the aftermath,
interruptions in food, medical, and shelter killed a quarter of those
who’d survived. Ironically, most of those who died in what is now
euphemistically called the “supply shortages” lived in the
industrialized world. Those with a simpler way of life survived in
larger numbers because they did not depend on support from big
industries and infra- structure. Industrialized countries, which had not
fared so well, lost closer to 90 percent of their people. Unchecked
fires swept through many of the great cities of the world, reducing
large swaths to charred rubble. The European and Asian land wars over
resources then destroyed much of the infrastructure that had been spared
in those regions. In North America droughts caused by global warming
further strained the food supply and sparked massive wildfires in the
western half of the continent. North America has now become a land of
two separate societies, the Protectorates and everywhere else,
collectively labeled as the Outlands. Two years after the nanotech
plague ended, life is slowly recovering and even beginning to flourish
in spots. Yet North America has become a much darker and different place than what anyone could have imagined.
Industry
and commerce are reemerging but with very dif- ferent markets and
goals. With the population so drastically reduced, and abandoned stores
overflowing with goods, much of what was considered toys of the rich are
now owned by the masses. From the richest to the poorest, everyone has
large screen televisions, computers, appliances, cars, and clothes. What
most do not have is basic security in the form of food, medical care,
and protection from crime. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is
still growing but no longer measured in material possessions. With
violence and deception having become the pocket change of everyday life,
that chasm is now measured in lifespan. Existence in so many places has
reverted back to something closer to that experienced by stone age
humans: a life that is short and brutal.
North America’s
population is precariously holding at thirty million while Europe is at
fifty. There are fears that the numbers are still falling. The
population of North America and Europe is tiny when compared to Asia or
Latin America. Asia still has over a billion people and Latin America
has about two hundred million. In North America the Native population,
which had been less than 2 percent of the total, is now closer to 10. A
viral rumor is that the scales had been tipped back by God for how we’d
abused each other. Ironically, this rumor is closer to the truth than
most would guess, except the acts of god were those of an ancient
nanotech machine and the misuse turned out to be what we did to the
environment and not just each other. In a pattern similar
to indigenous people, rural populations outweigh the cities’ but not for
long. As the protectorates become more established, the population will
inevitably migrate to the sanctuary offered by these new city states
run by the United States Alliance Government (USAG). This corrupt
partnership between the remains of the United States government and a
handful of the largest corporations in the world now controls all—
Distant
engine sounds jolted Kathy from her writing. It was the low rumbling of
a heavy vehicle. Was someone coming? She’d walked past the settlement’s
parking lot on the way back from her last house call. None of the
vehicles had been taken out. The sound grew faint, then disappeared. The
acoustics of the canyon and surrounding land could play tricks. Her
heart was pounding. For a brief moment she allowed herself to hope it
was Mark returning. So much could have gone wrong while he was out there
searching for his singularity. It could all be a trap. The complete
list of scientists wanted in connection with the nanotech plague had
never been published. Through friends still inside the government, Kathy
had learned Mark was at the top of the secret watch list of traitors.
As a Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist he was an obvious target.
His work with COBIC certainly added reason- able sounding grounds, but
the true reason for his appearance on that list had nothing to do with
his research. He was on that list because of what he had become. He was
on that list because nobody outside the top-secret maze of government
agencies could ever be allowed to learn that Mark was no longer fully
human.
Mark was risking too much to find this singularity. Kathy
wanted to believe he’d told her everything, but she could never be sure
all the ideas that came out of his mind were his own. His brain was a
nanotech organ connected to a global wireless network. In a very real
sense he had become a node in the nervous system of an artificial life
form, the god-machine. Kathy hated that cold, destructive silicon
monster. She was no longer sure Mark felt the same way. By his own
admission, the god-machine used the n-web to implant memories inside his
brain. That was how it communicated. Instantly he would simply remember
some fact or experience as if it were his own. With all that swirling
inside his head, the chances for delusion were very real. Mark believed
the god-machine was hundreds of millions of years old and that it was a
medical tool built by some lost civilization. Kathy could easily believe
the idea that the god-machine was originally a medical device. Just by
looking at how it had healed Mark of his diabetes was confirmation. Yet
she had serious doubts it was a hundred million year old relic. She was
an epidemiologist; part rational scientist and part medical detective.
In her mind, applying the principle of Occam’s razor to Mark’s relic
theory would lead anyone who was objective to the conclusion that a much
simpler explanation had to be the answer.
She thought of what it
would feel like to see him driving into Pueblo Canyon today. Her eyes
teared up, knowing she’d long ago betrayed him in her mind. Every day
while they were still living together, she’d feared a machine instead of
a man would wake up next to her in their bed. As his doctor she knew
Mark was still undergoing a slow conversion of his brain into nanotech.
She’d decided after he’d left, if he did become a machine it would be
better that he never returned. On the last day she’d seen him, it was
clear his humanity was still intact. His emotions seemed strong and
genuine. He was embarking on a great adventure. He would discover
whether hybrids were behind this singularity or not. Yet Kathy knew
there was something important he was concealing. She was his confidante
but lately there had been many things he had not told her. Hours after
he had gone, a neighbor had delivered a letter that had been slipped
under their door. Mark had known the neighbor was out for the day and
that Kathy would not receive it until he was far away. She picked up the
wrinkled sheet of paper from her desk and read it once more, for the
hundredth time.
Please forgive me for being a
poor friend. I always planned on explaining everything when I got back
but the singularity is growing so powerful I’m no longer sure I’ll be
able to return as soon as planned. The singularity is more risky than I
told you. It has evolved into something like a black hole, a mental-
emotional gravity well. It’s sucking in all the data from the n-web
around it and growing stronger as if feeding on the data itself. I don’t
know what effect it will have on me when I’m closer to it. Will it
devour my mind in some kind of continuous data-flood? I believe this
singularity is the side effect of a tribe of hybrids increasing in
numbers and reaching a kind of critical mass, but for what purpose? I
don’t know.
Sarah has experienced and believes the same
things I do. We think it could even be a precursor to something new and
wonderful, possibly the next evolutionary step for hybrids. I thought I
had reached an evolutionary plateau, but I am only an embryo.
I
know I told you a week ago that Sarah had disappeared, taking one of
the Humvees, but that was not entirely true. When Sarah left, I knew
where she was heading and what she was doing. She’s gone off to lay the
groundwork to locate the singularity. She’s been in the Outlands,
traveling east on Interstate 40 for days. When she stops each day, she
tries to get a bearing on where she senses the singularity is located.
In her last message, she was certain it was northeast of Pueblo Canyon. I
will be heading in the opposite direction on Route 40 doing the same
thing. We are trying to act like a pair of radio receivers triangulating
in on a target. Once we get a reliable bearing, we’ll both head toward
it from opposite angles. The n-web doesn’t exactly work like radio
signals, but the metaphor is close enough. I know you don’t trust Sarah
and think she’s unreliable and reckless. So just trust my judgment. If I
didn’t need her help, I would not have gotten her involved.
Kathy
stopped reading the letter. She hated the idea of Mark taking so many
risks to find more of his kind. She hated it even more knowing that
Sarah was out there probably traveling with him by now. For some time
Sarah had been acting increasingly unpredictable and even spooky. Who
knew what that twentysomething female hybrid was capable of doing? She
was a wild card in every sense. Kathy could as easily imagine her trying
to kill Mark as seduce him. She balled up the letter and threw it in
the wastebasket. She wanted to scream. She stared at the crumpled letter
inside the basket and wanted to kick the wastebasket across the room.
Why hadn’t Mark called or e-mailed?
The engine sounds returned.
Kathy wrestled one of the windows open. Snowflakes were coming inside as
she listened to the sounds faintly reverberating down the natural echo
chamber of the canyon walls. She could feel tiny vibrations in the
windowpane. The sound was slowly glowing louder. Any doubts that someone
was driving toward the settlement were erased. Vehicles rarely came to
their isolated community. The only way in or out was a dirt road, which
was nearly impassable over the final ten-mile span of broken terrain.
Only if you knew the concealed detours could you arrive by vehicle. As a
result, outsiders came almost exclusively on foot or by horse.
Kathy
was racing down the stairs before she realized it. She grabbed her coat
almost as an afterthought. The frigid air attacked her. The porch was
slippery with thin patches of ice where the sun never reached. She began
shivering while slipping on her parka. Four hundred yards in the
distance, she saw through a curtain of bare trees a black boxy shape
negotiating an incline in the dirt road. A second identical shape
appeared on the road, then went out of sight. They could be Humvees but
something didn’t feel right. Mark and Sarah had each taken one of the
military Humvees that had been part of the exodus from Atlanta. Why
hadn’t the lookouts or the patrols that scouted out as far as the
highway called this in? Kathy pulled out her cell phone and saw
no service on the display. She was out of contact. A skittish feeling was taking root in her stomach.
At
the sounds of boots crunching in snow, she turned to see Carl Green
trudging his way from the cabin where he and his new bride lived. Carl
stepped up onto her porch and tromped the snow from his boots. A mug of
coffee was in his hands and an M16 was slung over his back. Carl had
been her boss at the BVMC lab before the old world had ended.
“Expecting visitors?” asked Carl with a hint of nervousness.
“I don’t know,” said Kathy. “I thought, maybe Mark… My phone’s out. Is yours working?”
Carl
checked his phone, then shook his head. Now Kathy was scared. A third
black shape jounced down the same incline in the road, then a fourth and
a fifth. Her world became surreal. Whatever was coming no longer
sounded like Humvees, but more like powerful truck engines or maybe
construction equipment. Kathy looked back at her door and thought about
going inside and locking it. A vehicle reached the en- trance to the
ranch. Its roofline was the first thing she clearly saw, then a squat
rectangular body with a wedge shaped snout that looked like it belonged
on an amphibious craft. It was a Stryker armored fighting vehicle with
four huge tires on each side and an evil looking Gatling machine gun
mounted in an electric roof turret. The camouflage paint was a dark
mixture of black and smoky grays.
“Shit,” said Carl as he dumped the remainder of his coffee into the snow and unslung his rifle.
“You don’t know,” said Kathy.
“What,
are you crazy?” he snapped. “They’re here because of Mark and Sarah. We
knew this would happen one day. Word they live here had to leak out
sooner or later.”
The lead armored vehicle came to a stop. Its
engine idled like a purring monster. No hatch opened. No greetings were
offered. As the other vehicles arrived, they formed an offensive
formation with a combined firing position over the entire settlement.
This was not a standoff. The settlement was heavily armed, but their
odds were poor against this kind of armored force and the airpower they
could call in for support. Kathy felt like her world had been quietly
slumbering and a bad dream was about to begin. The vehicles had
Peacekeeper insignia. The Peacekeepers were a despised branch of
military law enforcement that patrolled the Outlands. The name
Peacekeeper was
Orwellian. The only peace they kept was that of the grave. If any kind
of resistance was encountered, Peacekeeper rules of engagement were to
respond with overwhelming firepower. Entire towns had been erased with
the after- math broadcast on government run television as victories of
civilization.
Kathy knew she had to quickly take charge of this
situation before it veered fatally out of control. She took in her
surroundings. Almost everyone was standing outside their homes or places
of work. Many of the men and women were armed. They had riot guns,
M16s, and other military hardware. For now their weapons were pointed
down. Kathy thought about her lookouts stationed in the surrounding high
ground of the canyon walls. They had to be aiming their shoulder fired
missiles at the Peacekeepers right now, including a prized Javelin
antitank missile. With luck they could take out one of the Strykers, but
what would happen next? In addition to the remaining wolf pack of
Strykers, Kathy knew Apache helicopters or even worse would be
unleashed. A-10 Warthog ground attack jets might come screaming out of
the sky to murder them all. She was subconsciously praying in a repeated
whisper to her friends and neighbors,
“Hold back, don’t fire….”
“What?” said Carl.
“Nothing,”
she said. “I have to do this!” She started walking toward the lead
vehicle. “Everyone, put down your weapons,” she called out. “We can’t
fight them. It would be suicide.”
She repeated herself louder and
with more authority in her voice. Looking around, she saw some of the
people doing as she ordered, then more. As she kept walking, behind her
she heard the sounds of weapons being laid on the ground. A rear hatch
on the lead vehicle lowered like a drawbridge. Six heavily armed
soldiers came out, followed by a pair of corporate mercenaries who had
officers’ rank. In this new upside down world, the corporate mercenaries
were the officers. All the Peacekeepers wore their standard full body
armor and helmets, which many believed made them impervious to most
weapons. Hatches dropped on some of the other vehicles with more heavily
armored troops emerging. The two officers from the lead vehicle strode
toward her as the storm troopers fanned out, confiscating weapons and
body searching people for anything concealed. The ranking officer, a
major with a badly pockmarked face, took her picture with his tablet. He
stared at the tablet, not acknowledg- ing her presence. She knew he was
checking her against a database.
“Kathy Morrison. What a pleasure
to meet Mark Freedman’s wife,” said the pock faced man. “I am Major
Kohl and this is my second in command, Captain Hillman.”
“A pleasure,” said Kathy. “Just for the record, Mark and I are not married.”
“A legal technicality, I’m sure.” “What do you want?”
“I’d
have thought that was obvious. Are you playing games with me?” Kohl
turned toward Hillman. “It’s time to clarify ourselves. Captain, why
don’t you make it clear what we want.”
Hillman spoke softly into a
boom mic suspended in front of his lips. Distant weapons echoed in
rapid fire. Kathy defensively dropped to her knees while glancing around
in shock. Everyone she could see was doing the same, except the
Peacekeepers. No one appeared injured. She stood and faced off against
Kohl. The man had a smirk on his face. “There are armed surveillance
drones circling far above us right now, watching everything,” said Kohl.
“We have authority to engage with lethal force anyone pointing weapons
at a Peacekeeper. Your perimeter security on the canyon walls have been
neutralized by our drones.” Kohl sounded like a judge reading a verdict
he particularly enjoyed.
“Why the surprised look?” he asked. “Did you
honestly think we don’t have a strategy and just stumble around looking
for trouble?”
“You’re fucking monsters!” shouted Kathy.
“Thank
you. Coming from a terrorist’s wife, that’s a compliment I accept. Now,
I am going to ask only once. Where are the terrorists Mark Freedmen and
Sarah Mayfair?”
From behind her a strong pair of hands clamped
over her wrists and pulled them back brutally. She felt plastic
handcuffs being applied. As they were cinched up, the bands cut into her
skin. She tried to yank free and ended up facedown in the snow with a
sharp pain in the back of her skull. The bastard had hit her with
something hard. With her wrists cuffed, she was unable to get up and
barely able to turn on her side in the snow. Rough hands grabbed her. As
she was hauled away, she saw her own blood smeared into the snow where
she’d fallen.
Kathy felt exhausted. She and a select few of the
others has been strip searched as a group and then separated into
different rooms. Still naked, her arms and legs were secured to a chair
by plastic cuffs. She knew she’d been stripped to humiliate her. She
knew the reasons for everything they did, but knowing provided no
advantage. Their tactics were working. Her head ached from what she
suspected was a mild concussion. The outside windows were open and the
room was freez- ing. She could not stop her teeth from chattering. She
felt humiliated and wretched. So far, in escalating severity, she had
been questioned, threatened, and then beaten. She knew the sadistic
blows had not left any lasting damage—so far. A doctor’s black bag had
been set on a nearby table. She imagined all kinds of surgeon’s tools
and drugs inside that bag. A drawn out animal cry of pain came from one
of the adjoining rooms.
Moments later the door opened, and Kohl
walked in, followed by a woman who was dressed like a medic. A cruel
looking man carrying a towel with bloodstains on it came in behind them.
Once again Kohl’s eyes slowly examined her nakedness. She wanted to
look away but refused to give him that small victory. She was breathing
rapidly. The door was closed and locked. She kept glancing at the bloody
towel and wondering whose blood was on it.
“Why are you making us
hurt you?” asked Kohl. “Just tell me where Mark and Sarah have gone.
Let’s end this before permanent damage is done.”
The cruel looking
man removed a long dissecting knife from the black bag. Something broke
deep inside Kathy. She was terrified in a primitive, uncontrollable
way. Yanking at her restraints and crying, she felt the blood draining
from her head. The room was spinning.
The next thing Kathy knew,
her face and hair were dripping with cold water. Someone had drenched
her. She realized she must have fainted. A large gauge IV line was
tapped into her arm and connected to a bag of saline. The windows were
still open. She did not feel as cold as she should have. Her thinking
was sluggish. The doctor inside her made a diagnosis of hypothermia.
The
cruel looking man was holding the long dissecting knife and staring at
her chest. There was a terrible thirst in his stare. The woman medic had
turned her back. Kohl was gazing at her with pitiless black eyes. He
leaned in close to whisper into her ear.
“We will keep at this, you know.”
His breath was stale, and she felt the warm moisture of his words on her face.
“We
will not stop. We will keep you alive with fluids while we cut deep
into you again and again. At some point you will tell us what we want to
know. Why sufferer permanent damage? You’re a doctor. You know what
losing too much blood can do to the organs. Just tell us where Mark and
Sarah are hiding.”
Kathy felt something cold against her skin and knew it was the knife. Kohl turned away.
“Wait!” sobbed Kathy. “I’ll tell you everything! Everything!”
She
knew she was broken. God help her. She’d imagined she was tougher than
this. Her entire body was on fire. She was terrified of feeling the
sting of that knife and at the brink of fainting again.
“Go on,” said Kohl.
He
sat down in a chair facing her, then motioned to the medic and her day
blanket was draped around her. The smell of the soft wool made her cry.
The IV line was removed. The medic clipped the plastic cuffs from her
body and handed her clothing to cover herself. The windows were closed.
Kathy felt wrenched and defeated. She was babbling ev- erything she
knew. It came out of her in torrents as if she were vomiting out inner
secrets along with her soul. She was afraid to stop talking out of fear
of what might happen after she was of no use.
Kathy Morrison – Pueblo Canyon, Arizona – January 23, 0002 A.P.
It
was morning outside. Kathy was locked in her bedroom. She knew a guard
was stationed just outside her door. From the windows, she’d seen guards
patrolling the grounds. Even though she was exhausted, she’d been
unable to sleep more than an hour or two at a stretch. She knew she was
headed for life in a prison work camp run by some corpo- ration. She was
about to become low cost labor for the machine. Again and again in her
mind she’d gone over the secrets she’d given up last night. None of it
would be much use in hunting Mark down. She heard a helicopter
approaching. The sound grew deafening. The windows were blanketed with a
whiteout of snow as if a blizzard was raging outside. A few minutes
later her door opened and in walked a face she recognized, accompanied
by Kohl and Hillman. The face looked more haggard than she remembered
it. General McKafferty glanced at Kohl and then stared directly at her.
His half-moon shaped face was an ugly visage with a mouth that formed a
kind of crack that was pretending to be a smile.
“You deserved the
treatment you received,” said McKafferty. “We will find the traitors
and that will be the end of it. Your information was helpful and for
that your government thanks you. I honestly think you believe you did
the right thing by helping terrorists. You really don’t understand what
they’ve become or what they’ve done. Do you?”
“I know what you’ve become,” said Kathy.
“Understand this,” growled McKafferty. “I will do anything to keep these terrorists from launching another nanotech plague.”
“Are you’re insane!” shouted Kathy. “You know the truth!”
“Kohl, Hillman, leave us,” ordered McKafferty. The room emptied and the door was closed.
“You
can make all the noise you want about that one state secret you think
you know. No one will believe a prisoner. But I want to be very clear,
Morrison. If you have left anything out of your confession, held even
one detail back, then I will personally see to it that you stand before a
military tribunal with the traitors. I will see you executed. Do you
understand me?”
Kathy nodded while looking away from the man.
“Fine,
get dressed in something warm. There’s no need to pack. You’re leaving.
Oh, by the way, your journal was very interesting reading. I especially
enjoyed the part where you described me as a professional thug and what
was it? Ah… that’s right. The ugliest bastard you’d ever seen.”
McKafferty
was grinning with a hideous display of self-satisfaction. Kathy’s mind
raced to her computer with its encrypted drive. That journal was lost
but not an older backup copy. That one had to be safe. McKaf- ferty and
his jackals couldn’t have found it too. The backup was stored on an
encrypted waterproof thumb drive called an IronKey. The small metal fob
was hidden in a crevice at the base of a red stone formation known as
Indian Foot. Mark knew the spot and what she would want done. She was
about to become one of the disappeared
. Her journal was
now her life’s purpose. Mark would retrieve it and send it out over the
Internet for everyone to read: dangerous truths from a missing and
possibly dead unsung hero.
The late afternoon’s stormy sky cast
its pall over the settlement. Kathy was being frog marched toward a
black unmarked helicopter. On either side of her, a firm, large hand
gripped each arm. She could see faces in windows while others were
outside watching as she passed. The faces were unreadable. She could
tell deep feelings were being masked out of fear. Only their eyes were
saying good-bye.
The helicopter door opened as she approached. She
was bodily lifted up and in by her escorts. More hands seized hold of
her inside the cockpit. She was maneuvered into a seat next to a window.
A safety harness was pulled too tight. She looked at the seats facing
her and was surprised to recognize McKafferty.
As the chopper
lifted into the air, feeling lost, Kathy looked out across Pueblo
Canyon. She knew she would never return again. This was her first step
toward becoming one of the disappeared. As the helo banked, she saw a
smoke trail lance down from a canyon wall toward her. The helo
jinked hard. Her world shook violently. A second missile smashed one of
the Strykers, swallowing it in an orange fireball. That had to be the
work of their only Javelin. Through the window she saw a firefight had
erupted. Her fingers tightened into fists. The Peacemaker machine was
rolling into motion, creating their hideous brand of peace. With
mechanical precision they began grinding Pueblo Canyon under- foot. In a
maelstrom of Gatling machine gun fire and explosions she saw people
running and falling as they were torn apart. She was screaming at the
Peacekeepers to stop while hitting the window with her fists, her eyes
blurred with tears of rage.
She heard McKafferty shouting, “Goddamn it, Kohl, stand down!”
The
carnage went on as the helicopter banked away, gaining speed and
elevation in what felt like evasive maneuvers. Her view of Pueblo Canyon
was replaced with peaceful red stone formations and trees. Kathy banged
her fist against the glass one last time. She turned her burning eyes
on McKafferty.
“You bastard… Why couldn’t you have left us alone? No one had to die. No one!”
“I’ve
been onboard this chopper sitting on the ground for over an hour,” he
growled. “That made me a nice fat target, but no one took a potshot
until you came onboard. That missile was from your friends. I’d say it
had your name on it, not mine. Is there something else you’re holding
back that you want to tell me?”