The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (2 page)

Changing the timeline was supposed to be impossible,
the paradox itself unbeatable. No one with a scrap of sanity or
credible science had any faith the fantasy plan could succeed. But
apparently there was just enough faith to move a few of us to do
something about it. And apparently I still had enough faith that
the human race was worth saving to try to stop something that could
literally erase all of us from existence.

But that’s where the story ends. Just like that. The
End.

And I’m back here in the dark, unable to move, unable
to feel, with some vague alert nudging my brain that it’s cold
outside.

I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve
seen the two movies of my real and unreal life when I suddenly
realize it isn’t dark anymore.

My eyes are open.

I’m awake.

I’m also
inside
of something, something snug
around me like a pressure suit or Sleep Pod. Through transparent
lenses, I see red rock, and slowly realize I’m looking up. The rock
wall is a ceiling above me. I do vaguely remember being taken to a
cave to die. I guess I’m still here.

I try to move, to find some way to open whatever I’m
inside of, and it moves with me.

Suit. Definitely a suit. Complete with a helmet. But
it doesn’t feel like a pressure suit. It feels like metal. Plates.
Armor. A lot of armor. But it isn’t heavy.

And it doesn’t hurt to move.

But moving is slow. Like I have to think about it. My
body doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like me.

Something is restricting my movement.

I can only move upwards. I’m in some kind of rut, a
snug body-shaped divot in what feels hard enough to be stone, makes
scraping sounds like metal on stone as I try to move.

Then I think about sitting up, and my body does it
for me, smooth and fast. Disorienting, like I’m on a carnival ride.
And now
every
movement I make is smooth and fast, less like
I’m doing it and more like I’m in some kind of brain-wired
servo-frame, but it’s me: my bones, my muscles doing the work. But
nothing feels right, nothing feels like me.

And it
should
hurt to move. I should at least
be stiff. Old man, lying in a cold stone rut for
who-knows-how-long. I should be in agony.

I’m staring at my legs.

My Mars-red camo UNMAC Light Armor uniform is gone.
I’m wearing black, all black. Tall heavy boots and plates of black
metal armor all the way up my legs, all plain and practical and
looking too dense to lift. Over me is a kind of shin-length tunic
or robe, like a medieval knight’s surcoat. Under it are more
plates: chest, gut, pelvis, back—all in bug-like sections to move
with me. My arms… I hold them up in front of my mask (and I
am
wearing a mask). There’s heavy chainmail sleeves with
small rectangular metal splints woven in like tiles, terminating in
backhand plates like a samurai’s
kote
. And thick black
gloves. The only color is some blood-red piping and Japanese-style
lacing on the arm guards.

It should be too heavy to move in. It isn’t heavy at
all.

I reach up and pry the helmet off my head—in unseals
at my touch (or maybe before my touch, anticipating), lifts off.
And I feel: air on my skin. My face. Cold but not unbearable.

I bring the helmet in front of me, get a look at
it.

“Oh… That is not right…”

It’s a big ram’s skull. A bad joke with big horns.
Ugly as hell. Stupid as hell. A prop from a crappy fantasy.

The horns… move… Like a thing alive. The coils shrug
at me, draw in as if offended by my criticism.

I have a flash of a memory then, a comforting
nostalgic familiarity:
I made this.
A badly inspired craft
project, during a phase when I was trying to force meaning on a
bored pointless immortality through artistic expression. But like
all my artistic expressions, I like the results less-and-less as
time goes by, as I see the flaws.

But why am I
wearing
it?

And I suddenly realize I’ve done something
stupid.

How am I breathing?

I look around. I am in a cave, albeit a man-made one,
cut by mining equipment, probably into rim rock. Faded markings in
familiar style on the walls tell me it probably was a Zodangan
outpost, maybe another one they abandoned when they threw in with
Chang. But that means I’m up in the cliffs of the Northeast Rim.
Even at valley floor elevation, the atmospheric pressure is only
0.28. Everest density. And I’m probably at least hundreds if not
thousands of feet above that…

The Zodangans used shelter-fabric shutters to seal
their caves, keep a livable pressure. But they take them when they
move, wasting nothing.

I’m up and turning. Behind me, I can see: the cave
mouth is open to daylight, whistling with the almost-constant thin
winds. Thin.

How am I breathing?

I realize: I’m not. And I haven’t been.

Like I have an interface on, my vision lights up with
another gauge. Somehow I’m reprocessing CO2 into O2 down in my
lungs, and my “carbon level” is still optimal. I’m not sure what
that means. I take a breath anyway.

The air is freezing cold and thin. I see my O2 levels
jump very slightly, but when I try to exhale, something stops me,
and I get a “pressure warning”. I hold my breath again.
Effortlessly.

What the hell am I?

I’m standing in the rut I was laying in. It is
me-shaped, like I’d lain down in deep mud or wet concrete which has
since hardened, but the rock is old. The rut looks dissolved into
it. And I see veins—dark root-like things that radiate out into the
rock, bore through it, like I’d become a kind of plant growing out
of its pot. But there’s nothing there now but the empty cuts and
bore-holes.

What the hell happened to me?

Armored from neck to toes, I can’t see my skin, can’t
see if I still have skin. Which is when I realize I have hair.
Lots
of hair. I’d been shaving my head for decades, and now
the stuff is falling in my eyes, piling around my shoulders, dark
and thick and wavy with no visible gray. Rock star hair. Like I had
when I was in high school.

“Uugg…”

I really never missed having hair, once I chopped it
all off for military service. I thought I would—and dreaded losing
it—but I came to love being buzzed, then bald. Now I’ve got a mop
of it as I run my gloved fingers back through it, pulling it away
from my face. My first instinct is to shave it off.

Which is when I realize I’m armed.

There’s a pistol on my right thigh, a largish knife
in the small of my back, and a sword on my left hip.

Bly broke my sword. Before he killed me.

But it’s back: Japanese katana. Black wrapping over
white ray skin. Black iron fixtures. Black lacquered scabbard. I
need to draw the blade to prove it’s as intact as I know it is. But
it’s better: Finer than even the gift the Shinkyo had given me.
Perfectly balanced, beautifully polished, flawless, gorgeous
temper-line, and…

Moving.

I look close, and my eyes zoom in like mechanical
lenses, enhancing.

The grain of the metal swirls like quicksilver.
Alive.

I snap my vision away, refocus.

I heft the blade—it feels like a normal sword. And I
cut.

It screams in the air. I’m fast, really fast, and
really strong. Then I do something I would never think of doing
with one of my old swords: I try it against the only target handy:
stone. The blade cuts the rock of the cave like soft wood. And the
edge is still perfect, the finish unmarred. It should be chipped to
hell, mangled. But it cut
rock
.

I
knew
it would. Like I somehow know the blade
is an adaptive morphic nanomaterial that can change its
characteristics, self-edge to cut on a molecular level. I know this
from my bad-movie life.

Just like I know about the gun.

I put the sword away, managing to perfectly re-sheath
it without looking—better than I ever could with all my years of
anachronistic training—and draw the pistol.

Big thing. Shimmering stainless. Vent-rib barrel. It
looks something like my antique automag—what Matthew always called
my “Big Stupid Gun”—but it isn’t. And the action works without me
racking it. Opens. Let’s me see the golden rounds inside. Then
locks shut, ready. I wonder where it came from, where the bullets
came from, but my other life knows:

It grew out of me
, just like my armor, just
like the sword. And the magazine cases at my hip will replenish the
ammo, customizing it to my needs. All I need are the raw materials
to process…

The “roots” in the rock: I can draw raw materials
from my environment. I made everything I’m wearing and carrying,
automatically, when I was out of it. (Except the helmet. Star gave
me the helmet. But technically I made that in my other life.)

The big knife is the same swimming metal as the
sword, but it more significantly changes its shape as I consider
uses for a knife: tool, weapon, culinary instrument…

I make the blade flat and wide like a Bowie. Use the
surface as a mirror to get a look at my face.

Oh shit.

Young. I’m
young
.

But not the young soldier, meaty from PT and
enhancers. And not the skinny twig of a kid that came before him.
Both and neither. Almost feminine. Late twenties. Picture of
health. And the scars are all gone. (I miss the scars. I feel sad
looking at this pristine man-boy pretty face.)

My eyes…

No longer hazel. Metalic. Irises like hematite.

I can’t look anymore.

Nor can I sit put.

Others were here. I wasn’t alone when I died (or
whatever it was I did to get replaced with
this
).

Ra brought me here: theatrical fake god that came out
of nowhere and saved my dying ass and threw me on some kind of
flying thing and brought me here. Told me the same story that Chang
did about the future (the same story as my bad-movie life). Tried
to put the ugly helmet on me. Told me I had to become what I was,
the me from that other time, if I still wanted to save this world,
save my friends. Then showed me she was
Star
. I loved Star,
a long time ago. (But there she is in my movie life, still around
as the world goes wrong, wanting to help me fix it.)

And Sakina. She came, wouldn’t let Star take me,
wouldn’t leave my side. I felt her holding my head while the world
went black, went away. She was here.
Right here
.

Now there’s no sign anyone’s been here in a long time
(except me, growing into the rock, turning weird and pretty and
able to breathe without breathing). Just old footprints in the
dirt, dulled by wind. Other patterns I can’t make sense of, maybe
made when Ra—Star—was trying to keep me alive, when she put the
helmet on me.

How long have I been here?

I get tired of lugging the ugly helmet around and it
seems to get that and it folds up into a flat piece of metal like a
magic trick. I can stick it inside my surcoat—there’s a handy
pocket just the right size.

My strange new body walks me out to the cave mouth,
out into daylight. I shouldn’t be so exposed in daylight, but more
handy hallucinatory gauges insist that the UV and cosmic radiation
is well within tolerable limits (I fully expect I could just put
the silly helmet back on if that changes). This semi-intuitive
communication with whatever I’ve got running inside of me also lets
me know that my skin has apparently “hardened” against the low
atmospheric pressure and temperature (possibly accounting for the
reduced sensation).

From the view, I am somewhere up on the Northeast
Melas Rim, in the cliffs just above the talus slopes that drop down
into the shell-shaped valley, hundreds of kilometers of rolling
desert. It’s midday, the sky ruddy pink ochre overhead. The
steam-clouds of the ETE Stations sprout around the rim, billowing
up until they hit the EM Atmosphere Net and flatten out. (Somehow I
can see relatively clearly all the way across the valley, just like
I can see microscope-close.)

The Melas valley looks peaceful enough, a serene
expanse. There is certainly no sign of battle, or even visible
traffic, air or ground. The place could be as uninhabited as it was
before the Land Rush, when Harker’s expedition first set boots
here.

Standing here, in this moment, not knowing what day
it is or how long I’ve been gone, it begins to crush me just what
has been done to my body, my mind,
everything
that I am. I
know the “bad movie” isn’t a fiction. Those were my
memories
, from a me from a time that now doesn’t exist and
never will, erased by what Chang did.

Star brought me here to change me, to put me the way
she knew me in the other time. She said the helmet held the
nanotech that was programmed to recreate that me, the same nanotech
that made me what I was then.

A god. Chang said I was a god. He
knew
the
other me. He was surprised (and idly amused) to meet this me—well,
the
old
this me—here in this world.

And that was part of the bad movie: We actually
started thinking we were gods, or at least the next best thing.
Immortal. Indestructible. Powerful. (And petty and thoughtless and
destructive.) We were even trying to create life…

I know that’s why Chang came, why he would be so
desperate to stop us, all of us. The path we were on… But it
doesn’t give him the right to kill so many people. And to erase so
many many more.

I look down at this new body, feel what’s been done
to it, to my brain—my
brain
—and I realize: I
chose
this. I decided to become this, in that other world. Why would I do
that? Am I that proud, that vain, to think I needed to live
forever? For what?