Cronix (42 page)

“What the hell happened down there, Tilloch? Do you know?”

His host spread his hands, reflecting. From outside, there came an indefinable howl, some dread creature from the island across the waters.

“I can't say with absolute certainty, I'm afraid. This is still an evolving situation. But I am sure it was my and my brother’s doing, at least in part.” He sounded almost proud, Oriente thought.

“
You
did this?”

“You’ve heard of the mood pools, Mr Oriente?” Oriente nodded. “Well, my brother and I worked for a great many years, perfecting the technique. Another pastime,” he smiled. “You see, our father was the one who came up with consciousness blocking, and it made his fortune. That’s how we could afford all this, and much, much more.” He gesturing around him, at his domain.

“Father's real genius was to foresee the boredom of eternity, the worn delights of paradise. Men were not, in all honesty, meant to live forever, Mr Oriente. It’s just too much of a burden. That’s why some went back, like the ancestors of your neighbors in Dorking. ‘Prisoners of consciousness,’ my father used to call them. He made his breakthrough just as he was despairing himself and thinking of going back, as several of his close friends had done before him. It was a time of great sadness, though few choose to remember it now. After all, if paradise wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, what possible hope was there for these poor super-evolved humans? Their very last illusion was being stripped away from them.”

Tilloch paused, his finger resting on his lips. “Consciousness blocking was a major breakthrough, perhaps as important as immortality itself. It allowed people to effectively
be
other people, to swim the vivid currents of history and make them feel they belonged to some greater project, the recreation of all human existence. But there was one problem.”

Oriente raised his eyebrows. He could imagine there was more than one problem with eternity inside this man-made paradise.

“Adopting someone else’s consciousness is merely sidestepping the issue. Ultimately, you have to come back to yourself again. And once you are back to where you started, the same old neuroses start to re-appear. People become jaded, bored with themselves, and with each other. Some even choose go to sleep for centuries. That is what our father eventually opted for: we have yet to wake him up. I’ve contemplated it, since we got the mood pools working. But he said he wanted to wake up in 500 years, when there would be enough new phenomena in the afterworlds to engage his curiosity afresh. Some, like your friend from the Zone – 1167, was it? – are condemned to the permanent sleep, to Dormition. Some choose it. You see, heaven turned out to be just another cage of the mind.”

Tilloch refilled their glasses. Carefully replacing the carafe on a cherry wood cabinet, he went on. “Pegomas and I decided we could complete our father’s work. We created the drugs worlds, though the authorities objected. They were beautiful places, and never hurt anyone. It was the cheap imitations that did the damage. We had to be careful, but we persevered. And then, out of that work, we eventually came up with the mood pools. We lifted the burden of individual consciousness and allowed people’s minds to drift into one another, to merge. Now, people are no longer alone, if they choose this path. And more and more do. The afterworlds are becoming quite empty these days.”

“So where did things go wrong?” asked Oriente. “With your mood pools, I mean.”

“Wrong?” Tilloch smiled, as though the thought had only just occurred to him. “Actually, I’m not at all sure anything has gone wrong. You see, when you and Fitch created a whole new species of Eternals, everyone assumed that that was the ultimate breakthrough in human history, the be-all and end-all of evolution. But perhaps
they
were wrong. Maybe what is happening now is actually the real evolutionary event, the rebirth of our species in a higher form.”

“As what?” Despite the wine and the fire, despite even the fact that he was in heaven, the old angst was creeping back.

“Have you ever heard of Pangaea, Mr Oriente?”

“Pangaea? The lost super continent? Yes, of course I know of it.”

“Actually, not lost,” said Tilloch. “Merely broken up into its constituent parts – Africa, India, Antarctica, the Americas, Australia, Europe – by plate tectonics. They were once part of a huge single landmass, until around two hundred million years ago. They are still moving apart down there, about millimeter every thousand years.

“You see, Pangaea was a huge merger of all the landmasses in the world, which gave rise to all sorts of new species. And that is in essence what is happening here inside the Orbiter. In the mood pools, the minds of humanity are merging. Perhaps one day, they will break off again and the individuals will once again emerge, my brother among them. It is physically quite possible, a fact that I proved in court. But spiritually, it is unlikely. Who, after all, would want to quit Nirvana?”

“Humanity is merging? Into what exactly?”

Tilloch smiled and cocked his head. “Into one super being. Or a supreme being, if you prefer.”

“A supreme being? Like a god?”

Tilloch shrugged. “Antiquated labels really don't apply at this stage, Mr Oriente. Whatever it is, it is extremely young and barely conscious of its own potential. Though it does seem to be displaying remarkable survival instincts.

“By my count, more than a billion humans have entered the mood pools so far. A staggering number, no? Perhaps a testimony to what humanity has always been looking for, if I may be so immodest. And each of those humans brought the cranial capacity of roughly a hundred billion brain cells. So we are talking about an unbelievably powerful phenomenon that has come into existence.

“When you were in London, it had already divided the Eternals from the mortals. I believe it blocked the downloads to prevent the Eternals from fighting back, if ever they became aware what was going on. It then used the reanimation centers to create its own army of Cronix to scatter the human population for good. And yet it gave all the Eternals a brief chance to return to paradise. Sympathy, perhaps, or because it knew that each returnee was a potential new cell in its own brain? Every person who enters the mood pools makes it incrementally smarter, more powerful.”

Oriente needed another drink. He walked to the cherry wood cabinet and sloshed more wine into his glass.

“So what do you think this new entity, this god of yours, wants?”

Tilloch considered the question for a moment, then shook his head. “To be frank, I have no idea. Maybe even the entity itself does not know. The chances are, it doesn’t even know what it is yet. It is trying to figure that out. But it seems to be learning rather fast.”

Oriente took a swig, then another. He barely noticed the wine's divine flavor now. “The visions I had in the forest, down on earth. Strange apparitions, armies on the march…Was that some projection from here?”

“I believe, Mr Oriente, that what you saw were the dreams of a slumbering deity, shortly before it woke up. The equivalent of a god talking in its sleep.”

The Tamagochiite stood up and walked to the door, beckoning Oriente to join him. They walked back to the rooftop parapet. It was getting late now, and a slither of moon hung in the pale blue heavens. The howl of a monkey drifted across the black channel below.

Tilloch leaned against the stone wall and was about to speak when Oriente butted in.

“But if you know all of this … have you told anyone? Have you shared your theories? Maybe they could do something about it, close down the mood pools...”

Tilloch held up a hand. “I very much doubt it would allow us to take any action now, least of all shutting down the mood pools. That would be the equivalent of an aneurism to this super-being. It is too advanced already for us to do anything. All we can do now is observe this fascinating new stage of post-human evolution.”

“Maybe you should wake up your father from his frozen sleep, Tilloch,” said Oriente. “This 'fascinating development' might be what he needs to whet his jaded palette.”

Tilloch could not have missed the sneer, but went on as though he had not. He was a Tamagochiite after all – what did he care about the travails of these humans? A god though ...

“What is happening down there on Earth is the end of this cycle of human memory, Mr Oriente” he said. “The Cronix are still multiplying, and fast. Almost every last reanimation station has been put into action, full time, for the past 15 years. The Eternals are gone, swept under the carpet of history. Without their support, the mortals have fled to the forests.

“The time of the Cronix has come, but it will brief. A generation at most, and for them, generations are short. They are violent creatures who usually meet untimely ends. But their offspring will not be Cronix. They will be human. Those that survive, and a very small number will, will have the blank slate minds of normal children, but without education, civilization, heritage. Just the woods, the rivers and their innate survival skills. It will be a brutal world, but humans will survive. Bands of hunter gatherers will roam the land, just like they did 50,000 years ago. They will have the same ability to learn from experience, but it will take a long time for humanity to achieve anything like a stable population.”

“Sounds like every backwoodsman’s wet dream,” said Oriente. It sounded horrific to him.

“I was hoping you might take such a romantic view of the situation, Mr Oriente. You of all people know how tough life can be out there in the woods. And there are no cozy little Dorkings to take refuge in on cold winter nights.”

“There’ll be a terrible attrition rate for these 'normal children' of the Cronix,” said Oriente. “No inherited skills, no received knowledge even of which berries are edible and which poisonous...”

“It's happened before. That was precisely how the humans migrated across the planet.”

God, he was a cold one, thought Oriente, noting the reference to ‘the humans,’ a group to which Tilloch clearly believed neither of them belonged.

Oriente took stepped away from his urbane, unfeeling host. The night air was cool and fresh and a wicked scream came from the dark jungle across the waves. Some war criminal was having a bad night.

“So you won't help fix this mess because you want to see what happens? As a scientist, of course,” he said. The Tamagochiite was about to speak but Oriente cut him off. “So why did you bring me here? Why drag me to London with your wolf, pretending to be Fitch, then have me turned into geese, most of whom were butchered without mercy?”

Tilloch looked mildly surprised. “Me, Mr Oriente. It wasn't me who engineered your return.”

Oriente stared at him a moment. “You mean, this thing brought me here?”

Tilloch nodded, raised his glass and took a thoughtful sip.

“It would appear so.”

“Why, though?”

Tilloch peered down into the churning black surf at the foot of the cliff.

“For most of human history, people have invented deities to help them make sense of an environment they never fully understood. Gods of the forest, gods of thunder, of corn and volcanoes. This time, by contrast, there actually is a god, if that’s what we finally agree to call it. One fully capable of shaping this new humanity in whichever way it chooses.”

“Sounds like a nightmare to me,” said Oriente. “An adolescent deity with life or death power over a bunch of savages.”

Tilloch smiled. “It gets worse. This god is likely to have strong psychotic tendencies. Not only is it, as you noted, a confused adolescent, but it is made up of human minds, and therefore subject to the same irrational bursts as human beings. Made in the image of billions of refugees, traumatized by their own brutal evolution on Earth.”

Oriente rubbed his face. He was tempted just walk away. He thought of Lola: would he really go back for a woman he had known so briefly, so long ago? But then he imagined her desperately fending for her daughter, and thought of an entire generation of helpless children that the Cronix would leave to die in the woods.

“You think it wants me to go back there now, don't you?”

Tilloch nodded.

“Every god needs a prophet, Mr Oriente” he said. “And what better messenger for a god born of the minds of others than one whose mind was also made of people who once lived? You are a creature created by scientific accident, more intelligent and more powerful than any other that had gone before it. Not sure of what it was, and the only one of its kind. A god needs a prophet it can relate to. Perhaps even a friend. I believe it has even talked to you, has it not?”

The voices. How the hell did Tilloch know about the voices in his head? Did it talk to him too?

“And what if this god really does turn out to be psychotic, driven insane by power and loneliness, and starts ripping the arms and legs off its people like they were flies?”

“Like you volunteering to throw living people off the Empire State, perhaps?” Tilloch smiled, as if this just proved his point. “Well, we will certainly keep a back-up of you here. That might make the prospect of such an unpleasant fate a little less appalling.

“But how would I even get back to Earth? The reanimation stations must surely be almost empty by now? Fifteen years of churning out Cronix. How many could there be left?”

“The main stations are almost exhausted. Which is why we must get you back down there quickly. But there are also emergency back-up centers. They are much smaller, designed to allow emergency crash teams to emerge in a disaster scenario and rebuild the infrastructure the Eternals would need for their return to Earth. They are generally underground bunkers, sealed in places far from the main settlement areas. One of them is buried under a hill in Glastonbury, only a few days march from the siege of Arundel. It was once a sacred site for druids, fittingly. I imagine our new friend might want you to guard it, should he ever allow anyone else to return to Earth to do his bidding.”