The Broken God Machine (22 page)

With this done, Mombutabwe, Montgomery, and all those who inhabited the city
proper boarded a great number of ships that had been built underneath the
mountains, and they launched themselves into space. There, the ships would link
together into one gigantic, self-sustaining city and begin their journey out
into the universe. The citizens of this floating city hoped to find a new,
unspoiled planet upon which to settle, and there continue their work to unravel
the mysteries of God.

Whether or not they had accomplished this goal no one on Earth could say,
not even this shadow version of Allen that they had left behind. After their
departure, communication bursts came for a time. Two hundred and sixty-eight
years in, just as the floating city was reaching Alpha Centauri and – having
found no suitable planets there to colonize – preparing to move on to the next
destination in their course, communication ended. Messages were taking more
than four years to return to Earth, and the crew of the ship said in their
final dispatch that the parliament felt the ever-growing expanse of time
between sending and receiving made the messages a worthless waste of
energy.

Those who had departed were now truly separated from those who remained
behind, and all that was left was ten thousand years of darkness.

Pehr was sitting on the cold steel floor of the mainframe room, holding his
head in his hands. More than six hundred years of history had been force-fed
into his brain in what seemed only a few moments, though in truth it had been
nearly six hours of non-stop inundation. If someone had asked him his own name
at that very instant, he might not have been able to summon the answer from his
addled mind.

Tasha was sitting next to him, staring straight forward, her body slightly
hunched over and her face devoid of all expression. Pehr spoke her name but she
did not immediately respond. He couldn’t seem to think of anything else to do,
and so they sat like that, in silence, for some time. At last Tasha spoke, the
words coming listless and leaden from her lips.

“They left us.”

Pehr felt himself nodding. Yes. Here they were, sitting in the middle of
this dead city, the last descendants not of the great men who had built this
place but of those pilgrims who had come too late to gain entry onto the
shuttles. These abandoned souls, the parasites of whom Tasha had spoken, had
lived at the edge of the city until the malfunctioning gardeners had driven
them out entirely, whereupon they had split between the Plains of Tassanna and
Pehr’s land. At some lost point in history, the Lagos had come between the two
and contact had ended.

“I’m not proud of what we did,” Allen said. “We left you, or at least the
ones who became you. Nes cried … that’s the last image I have of him, before
the Allen that I am and the Allen that went off into space split. Just Nes
sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, crying like a baby.”

“They wouldn’t give him any more time,” Pehr said. “That’s it, right? So you
left us here with codes built into our bodies that would produce someone like
Tasha who would be inherently drawn to someone like me, who held the Mombutabwe
DNA and could get her past the RDIS units.”

“Yes.”

“Why bother? What was the damned point?” Pehr asked. He was still too shaken
by all that he had seen to be furious, but he was filled with an almost
overwhelming disgust.

“We wanted you to follow,” Allen said. “The rest of you weren’t ready, and
we thought … Nes and I, we thought maybe if we gave a bit of ourselves to you,
then it might produce some scientists. Some mathematicians. Maybe we were
crazy, but there wasn’t any time. They were locking off the inner city. All of
this knowledge was just going to lie here dormant, and we had to give it to
someone.

“I know you must hate me, and Nes, and all of the rest of us for what we
did. I guess probably you even hate us for screwing with your DNA and bringing
you back here … but we had the best of intentions.”

“They say the road to hell is paved with such,” Tasha said, and still her
voice sounded distant and dead.

“So I hear,” Allen said. “We did what we did, and it’s too late by thousands
of years to make up for it anyway. Even if I had any way of communicating with
that ship, which I don’t, they wouldn’t come back.”

Pehr gave a short, grim laugh. “Why return to rescue a bunch of
savages?”

“You’re not savages anymore,” Allen told him.

“What did you do to us?”

“Basic set of augmentations. Your brains are now host to a whole colony of
microcomputers built to communicate with your neurons.”

“So you’ve made us smarter.”

The gigantic, projected head shook back and forth. “Nope. Your brains can
now store and retrieve data in much greater amounts, and in much better ways,
but you’re no smarter than you were when you walked in here. We never did crack
that one. I can feed you calculus algorithms and you could do some pretty
complex stuff, but you’ll never wield it like … well, like I did. Your storage
capacity’s been increased, not your processing ability. And by the way, Pehr …
how would you say ‘the man dreamed a golden vision of God’ in French?”

“
L’homme rêvait d’une vision d’or du dieu
,” Pehr said, and after a
moment his eyes went wide in surprise. “I … that’s …”

“That’s data collection and presentation, is what it is,” Allen said. “You
came in here only knowing the Spanish-English hybrid that you and Tasha both
speak natively – though I must say, Tasha, your side has really butchered the
hell out of the pronunciation. Now you both speak several languages, including
French. You can speak it … but whether or not you can write poetry in it is
still up to you. Do you understand?”

“We understand,” Tasha said. At last she looked up at Allen, her eyes
bloodshot and ringed with deep, dark circles of exhaustion. “So … you’ve given
us all of this data. Now what?”

“Well, sweetheart, that’s where this all gets interesting. In the time
before the gardeners went berserk and chased you off, I had plenty of kids come
in here and get augmented, but none of them ever did anything with it. A couple
tried, but it’s harder than you might think to get people to listen. The RDIS
units wouldn’t let anyone into the inner city, but even living on the outskirts
was pretty great, back then. There were cars and TV, diet soda, a pretty
unending supply of food from the hydroponic farms and the meat-sheet
warehouses. Who wanted to build spaceships?”

“Lazy …” Tasha muttered.

“Humans are pretty lazy,” Allen said. “We expected that. We didn’t think it
would take
this
long, though. Actually, it probably wouldn’t have,
but—”

“But we were cut off from this place by the gardeners, and then from each
other by the Lagos,” Pehr said.

“Right. You two are the first to make it through since the gardeners
malfunctioned. Maybe others tried, I don’t know … they never made it far enough
for an RDIS to broadcast their presence on the network.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Tasha said. She stood up, wincing
at the pain in her leg, and stretched. “What happens now, Allen?”

“The city belongs to you and Pehr. Whatever’s left of the old girl. You can
go anywhere, enter any building … if you wanted, you could wander into the
reactor cores that power the joint, but I don’t recommend it. I can help you
reset the gardeners and make them friendly again. I can help you get the
food-production services back online. I can help you do whatever you want, but
the point is: it’s all yours and you can bring anyone you want in for
augmentation, too. Bring enough of them and you could restore the whole
city.”

“To what end?” Pehr asked, but he could see that the greedy look had
returned to Tasha’s face. She had thought further ahead than he had, again.

“We could follow them,” she said.

The disembodied head before them nodded. “Listen, sister … over the years,
either a lot of my uplinks died or the machinery floating around up there broke
down. Point is, I don’t have the vision I used to, but I can still see plenty,
and I can tell you this: there’s nothing else out there. There aren’t any other
cities and there aren’t any functioning bunkers left. Most of the planet is
still so irradiated it would kill you in minutes. The Everstorm is starting to
fail. It’s been failing since we built it, really – it was never meant to last
– but the failure is speeding up, and the amount of land it can keep clean is
shrinking.

“This planet will survive, OK? There’s hundreds of millions of years still
before the sun gets too hot for life as we know it to exist here, and the
radiation will clear itself out in time, but humanity … we’re pretty much done
here. The numbers have been dropping since the Great Destruction.”

“Even if we could fix the Everstorm and wait out the cleansing, it doesn’t
matter,” Tasha said. “There’s nothing left on this planet for us. There is no
God here.”

“Whatever’s next for the human race, it’s out there,” Allen agreed.

“So, then, what – we must bring the plainsmen and my people here?” Pehr
asked.

“Yes, that must be our path,” Tasha said. “We will go back now to my family
and begin our work. We will raise an army, enter the jungle, and destroy the
Lagos. We will unite all Uru and bring them to this place!”

Pehr took a moment to think, head down. There was a great need tugging at
him, but for some time he struggled against it. He did not want to relive that
horror, that pain, no … so why did it seem so very important? Why did his very
soul cry out against leaving the mountains without first making the trip that
he so dreaded?

“I know you wish to return to your family …” Tasha ventured.

Pehr could fight no longer. Shaking his head, he looked up at Tasha, looked
her directly in her big, purple eyes, and he told her the truth. “Before we
begin, I must go see Jace.”

These words were greeted with a rare sight: abject confusion on Tasha’s
part. At first it seemed she did not even understand what he meant, and yet
when comprehension dawned on her, she looked no less confused.

“Pehr … why? Why would you do that to yourself?”

Pehr struggled for a time to put his feelings into words, and at last found
that the simplest explanation was also the best. “I left him there. I could
have braved the arrows of the Lagos and taken him from that place, given him a
proper funeral, but instead I fled.”

“You would have been killed.”

“Perhaps you’re right, but I must go back. I must make reparation for what I
did. I must look upon my dead cousin and beg his apology for abandoning him
there in a dishonorable grave.”

“Could you not do so when we come back?”

“It will take months to rally the plainsmen, Tasha. Years, maybe. I will not
let him lie there that much longer.”

“What if there are Lagos?”

“There won’t be. I saw the circle … there were no dwellings near it. They
come there to make sacrifice to the broken RDIS unit, but they don’t live
there.”

Tasha stared at him for some period of time, and Pehr met her eye, unashamed
and willing to accept the test of conviction he saw in her gaze. At last,
seeing he would not back down, Tasha sighed.

“Very well. We will leave Allen to his video games and his simulations, and
we will go see your cousin and this killing machine.”

“That unit’s been off-network for thousands of years now,” Allen told them.
“I’m impressed he’s still functioning. The boys over at Amfeld built those guys
to last.”

“They built them to shoot lasers visible to the naked eye, too,” Pehr mused.
“Why?”

Allen laughed. “Honestly, man? It looks cool.”

Pehr wondered how cool Allen would have thought it looked if he’d had to
watch those beams of fire bore through a cousin’s torso. After a moment more,
he let it go and moved on. “We can’t leave while the gardeners are out.”

Tasha shook her head and reached over to scratch her shoulder. She smiled.
“Of course not. Allen, could you tell me when sunrise will come?”

“About an hour from now,” Allen said. “You guys took a crazy route in,
though. Some of the surveillance systems are still functional so I was catching
glimpses of you. I can get you back out of the city in about forty-five
minutes. I’d offer you a ride, but the batteries on the last working vehicle
crapped the bed about six hundred years ago.”

“We can handle the walk,” Tasha said, and Pehr made a noise of affirmation.
Then her words sunk in, and he glanced over at Tasha in surprise.

“Your leg …”

“Allen has done something to us,” Tasha said.

“While you were out, I had one of the RDIS units bring in couple of
nanopatch kits. They’re good for light wounds. You can’t put a severed limb
back on or anything, not without more direct intervention, and the cut will
still ache for a couple days, but you should be able to use your arms and legs
without much trouble.”

“This city is full of miracles,” Pehr murmured, and Allen laughed.

“It’s getting low, actually. If you want more of this stuff, you’re going to
need to learn how to use the synthesizers, and you’re going to need to provide
some raw materials.”

“We’ll worry about that when we return,” Tasha told him, and Allen
nodded.

“All right,” he said. “I guess that’s it for now.”

“You’ve been a tremendous help, Allen,” Tasha said. “I … it may be a while
before I can forgive you, but I thank you.”

“If we had known …” Allen let the sentence trail, and Tasha nodded.

“I understand.”

“Let me ask you something before you go,” Allen said, and Tasha glanced at
him in surprise.

“Certainly.”

“Do you have any idea how lucky you are that this kid made it through? Do
you know how completely improbable it is that, once you guys were separated,
you would come back together and make it through to this place without being
killed?”

Tasha bit her lip, pondered, and finally shrugged.

“Perhaps it was the will of God,” she said, and then she smiled.