Biblical (48 page)

He closed his eyes.

*

It ended as suddenly as it had begun. In an instant it was evening once more, dark beyond the non-reflective windows. The bar and all of its furnishings were restored, as was the marble tiling beneath their feet. The air they breathed was normal. The titanic creaking and roaring of the Earth had ceased and bland Scandinavian jazz tinkled once more in the background.

Mora clung to Macbeth, Gillman was bent over, hands resting on knees like a sprinter after the race. All three were sucking in deep lungfuls of air. Macbeth looked over to see the barman leaning against the bar, also catching his breath. He had experienced it too.

Gillman lurched forward, grabbed the key from the table and seized Macbeth, pushing the key into his chest.

“You’ve got to do this …” The older man was still struggling to gain his breath. “You saw that too. That’s what’s waiting for us.”

“It looked like Hell …” Macbeth said with almost wonder. “But that’s some picture from the Bible … that’s not real, it
is
a delusion. Some kind of folk-memory or fear instilled—”

“Listen to me!” Gillman snapped. “That was Hell all right
… but no fairy-story Hell. Don’t you see? That’s why we feel heavier … what we just saw was a time when the Earth had more mass, was a different planet. What we saw was no biblical vision – it was Protoearth. And it was like Hell, exactly like it – burning and boiling and lifeless – and that’s why geologists call that period the Hadean. You have got to go. You’ve got to go now and stop this.”

“But it’s over …” Macbeth protested weakly.

“No it’s not! Don’t you still feel it? The gravity? This hallucination isn’t over – what we just saw is the first flickerings of it coming to life. If you don’t stop Project One, then you will condemn everyone on this planet to Hell.”

“I can’t believe it …”

“You’ve got to believe it. Don’t you understand? Everyone will experience this hallucination fully, with every sense. They
will
smother and burn. Their minds will tell them that it is reality and they will die in it.”

Macbeth took the key and stared at it.

Mora turned to him, her eyes still streaming from a threebillion-year-old atmosphere, her hands shaking with shock. “I’ll come to the station with you. We have to act now.”

“Do you know what happened in the Hadean?” asked Gillman. “Why the Earth has less mass now?”

Macbeth shook his head.

“The Theia Impact. A planet the size of Mars collided with the Protoearth and blasted trillions of tons of ejecta into space. That ejecta is now the Moon. Without the Theia Impact there would be no deep oceans, no seasons, no complex life on Earth. You have got to destroy Project One, John.” Gillman looked beseechingly into Macbeth’s eyes. “Or our beginning is going to be our end.”

The vision was over, but the world remained mad.

Gillman told Macbeth to take Mora with him.

“What about you?”

“I don’t matter. I’ll be fine. I’ve somewhere to lie low. But you’ve
got
to shut down Project One, don’t you see?”

Macbeth nodded, more to reassure Gillman than out of conviction. They left the American scientist standing alone in the Diamond, surrounded by the lights of a restored Copenhagen.

It was all mad.

Macbeth and Mora made their way out to where her car sat in the parking lot, the unnaturally strong gravity still dragging at them, perhaps even more than before. The city had been mute when he had arrived for his appointment but now, from various points around the city, he could hear emergency vehicle sirens and the unmistakable sounds of hysteria: groups of people screaming, shouting and crying into the night.

“Do you think it was everywhere?” he asked Mora. “I mean not just here in Copenhagen.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was just here because Project One is here. Maybe it’s everywhere. Maybe we really are in the last stages of shutdown and the whole world just went through what we did. Get in, I’ll drive …”

It was a small European compact and Macbeth felt cramped, confined. He allowed himself to be carried along by what had
happened: he’d think it all through later. He’d do nothing until he thought it all through. In the meantime, he was being driven through streets now full of terrified, half-demented people. Vesterbrogade was lined with dark blue police vans and Macbeth could see dozens of police officers trying to calm or restrain the worst affected. When Mora turned off into a side street they saw a full-scale riot had broken out with cars overturned and set alight. With a skill he found surprising, she slammed the car into reverse and drove backward along the street, maintaining a perfectly straight trajectory until she reached the junction, then spinning the car around with assured wheel work.

He heard her mutter under her breath, her eyes locked on the road.

Reventlowsgade was empty of people and cars and Mora pulled up alongside the station basement entrance. This was the unadorned rear end of the brick-built station and had the bleak institutional functionality of a prison.

“I’ll show you the locker,” she said. “We’ve got to hurry. I don’t think the city center is the place to be …”

There was no one behind the service desk in the
Garderobe
and Mora led Macbeth through to the lockers. When they found the right one, Macbeth slipped the key into the lock but, before opening it, rested his forehead against the cool steel of the locker door.

“This is insane, Melissa …” Macbeth said.

“Melissa?”

He turned to her and for a moment thought he saw another face. “I’m sorry …” he said. “I just—”

“We don’t have time, John. Let’s go.”

He opened the locker and took out the small rucksack. It slipped from his grasp and he had to catch it by the strap before it hit the ground. He could see from Mora’s expression that the rucksack contained what he thought it would. He unzipped
it and looked inside. Four blocks of what he guessed was plastic explosive, a box of detonators. A handgun.

“This is insane,” he repeated. “This is totally insane.”

“We have to go, John.”

He zipped up the rucksack and slipped it over one shoulder.

When they got back to the exit, Macbeth saw a tall man in a dark suit standing at Mora’s car, peering in through the driver’s window. Macbeth recognized him immediately and he shrank back into the doorway, pushing Mora back out of sight too.

“Bundy …”

“What?”

“The FBI man looking for Gillman. He must have followed you. They maybe already have Gillman.”

“Come on …” said Mora. “I saw another exit at the back of the locker hall.”

They ran back through. The door was locked but yielded to Macbeth’s kick. Beyond the door was a stairwell that led up to the main platform.

They stood indecisively for a moment, each trying to work out what their next move should be. Macbeth scanned the station. It was completely empty of people other than a young couple standing at the platform edge, embracing each other, kissing, seemingly oblivious to the chaos around them. The man looked at the woman, spoke to her tenderly, stroking her hair. Macbeth felt strangely reassured by the small indication of normality.

“What do we do now?” Mora asked.

“We get back to my place.” He looked along the tracks and saw a freight train approaching at full speed, clearly not stopping at the station. Another small piece of normality.

“I need to think this through,” Macbeth said. “What if we’re wrong? What if Gillman’s made a mistake?”

He stood back, gently pulling Mora with him, as the freight train drew nearer.

It was done almost casually. The young man kissed his girl on the brow and they both stepped off the platform and into the path of the freight train. Macbeth didn’t see or hear any impact: the couple simply disappeared. He heard Mora gasp and he wrapped his arms around her, pushing her face into his chest.

The train didn’t stop or slow but thundered past.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They ran to the station steps from where they could see Mora’s car. Bundy was no longer there, probably searching the station for them. But then Macbeth saw him appear briefly from under the basement entry arch, checking Reventlowsgade in both directions before sinking back into the shadows.

“He’s waiting for us to go back to the car,” said Macbeth. He reached into the rucksack and took out the handgun. It was a heavy, dark block that looked ugly and out of place in his hand.

“I’ve never handled one of these before,” he said disconso-lately. “I haven’t a clue how to use it.”

“We need to get back to the car,” said Mora.

Macbeth nodded and they headed down the steps and along the flank of the station, hugging the wall to stay out of sight. When they drew close to the exit, Mora signaled her intention to Macbeth and stepped out, walking towards the car. The FBI man emerged from the doorway and challenged Mora, allowing Macbeth to slip behind him. For a second he thought about bringing the butt of the gun down onto the nape of the other man’s neck to knock him out, as he had seen done so many times in the other reality of movies. But as a doctor and neuroscientist, Macbeth knew how difficult it would be in real life to knock someone out with a blow to the back of the head or neck without doing some serious neurological damage. He pointed the gun at the back of Bundy’s head.

“Turn around, slowly,” he said. “Keep your hands where I can see them or I’ll shoot.”

Bundy did as he was told, but his expression when he turned to face Macbeth was one of pent-up violence. Again Macbeth noticed the strange intensity in the dual-colored eyes.

“Out of my way,” Macbeth ordered. “I mean it, Bundy.” The agent stepped sideways.

Mora was now in the car and had the engine running.

“Didn’t you see it?” said Bundy. “Didn’t you see the Lord’s wrath for yourself? You and your kind have brought this upon us. This is the Rapture … this is the Measuring.”

“Whatever …” said Macbeth and made towards the car. Bundy suddenly lunged forward, reaching out for the gun in Macbeth’s hand.

It was merely a reflex. Macbeth’s grip tightened on the gun and there was a loud crack and a muzzle flash. He had not known if the safety was off, or even where the safety was. He looked at Bundy’s chest, where something bloomed dark on his shirt, then into the FBI man’s eyes.

“You have killed us,” said Bundy, as he sank to his knees and the light went out from his strange, heterochromatic eyes.

*

When they got back to his apartment, Mora poured Macbeth a tumbler of Scotch, which he drank quickly, pushing the glass towards her for a refill. It wasn’t the right thing to do, he knew: he was in shock and shouldn’t be drinking alcohol. But he had just killed a man; doing the right thing no longer had meaning for him.

They sat for an hour watching the news on the television. The
event
, as it was being described, had been experienced around the globe, by every man, woman and child on the planet. The real-time duration of the event had been less than a second, yet, universally, the experience had been felt to last for several minutes. The aftermath of the event was causing even more concern and had already cost thousands of lives. There had been riots in every major city around the world. The
Middle East burned as fundamentalists armed themselves, fuelled by religious frenzy. In the US, President Yates had declared a state of emergency.

“How has it come to this?” he asked Mora pleadingly. “Why has everything gone mad? I’ve got to go to the police … give myself up.”

“Maybe in the normal world,” said Mora. “But there is no normal world any more. You know what you have to do.”

“Do I?”

She walked over to the small table by the window looking out over Larsens Plads, picked up Macbeth’s laptop computer and handed it to him. As he had done countless times over the last eighteen months, Macbeth clicked on the phantom folder that sat, taunting him, on his desktop.

It opened.

Macbeth read.

PHANTOMS OF OUR OWN MAKING
by John Astor

WHETHER it was in the name of God or Science that you devoted yourself to seeking out the Truth, the danger always was that you would find it.

I am so very, very sorry. You have just found it. That which waited to be known.

And that which waited to be known is your Future has already happened.

FIRST, a word about reality.

Everything you can think about, everyone you can recall, exists as a dedicated cluster of neurons in your brain. You connect to these clusters every day and call that memory. Occasional disconnection is forgetfulness, permanent disconnection is jamais vu, when everything is seen as if for the first time. Misconnection leads you to confuse what you see with what you remember: déjà vu.

Even your body exists in your mind. Amputees suffer from Phantom Limb Syndrome, where the amputated limb itches or aches. The opposite – Alien Limb Syndrome – leads patients to believe their own arm or leg does not belong to them as part of their bodies, often asking for amputation.

As you read this book, you can still call to mind the last person
you spoke to, the last room you occupied before the space you are now in. These people, environments, your body itself, exist as neural clusters in your mind, as concepts. But the question you must ask yourself is: do they only exist in your mind? Are you the sole occupier of this universe and is the sole function of this book you now read to remind you of that fact?

SECOND, a coincidental existence.

Haven’t you ever wondered why you are alive right now? Anatomically modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, most of that time scrabbling in the dirt, yet you just happen to be here when Man has reached for the stars, delved into the depths of the atom, and the depths of his own physical being; has developed other, virtual realities to explore. Everyone is waiting for the Technological Singularity to happen, something that will take place during or immediately after your lifetime. In fact, some believe that if you live to see the Singularity, you may live for ever.