The Soul Consortium (23 page)

“No time.”

“There is. Kayne was almost done. Tell me!”

“Red fibers … to red … terminals … easy.” He coughs.

From the corner of my eye I see Vieta turn to look at me. Tennison was right; I’m out of time. Instinctively, I raise my hands in surrender just as Vieta lifts a threatening finger. Any moment now my life will be snuffed out. I stand before an eternity of nonexistence, and all I needed was a few more seconds to repair the genoplant’s circuitry.

Perhaps Sunny will buy me the seconds I need. The distraught monk, still trying to master his own wounds and mind, grasps Vieta’s robes, yanks him back, and roars into the man’s ear, “Sunny not want to go to that place! Save Sunny!”

Does he mean the fetal thing in the other room? Yes! He’s afraid of dying and ending up inside that thing’s mind like all the other dead monks.

“You don’t have to, Sunny,” I shout above his screams. “We stopped it. Help me repair it.”

Vieta is already on his feet, pushing Sunny aside. The temporary distraction is probably my last chance, but this time I change my strategy knowing that securing my resurrection is not enough. I dive for the discarded ignition pistol and fire off two shots at Vieta. The first explodes behind his head, but the second is a perfect hit, and Keitus Vieta is a fireball thrust back against the wall.

Sunny, caught in the backwash, flames lapping across his robes, is alight in an angry glow as he leaps aside, screaming.

I run into the next room where Vieta’s abomination is still writhing amongst filth and fibers. The lidless eyes watch me with cold comprehension as I aim the pistol at its head.

It takes less than a second. The indigo pulse becomes a shimmering blur of red heat as the creature’s fluids burst aflame through its skin. I reel from the heat, hoping I still have time to fix the genoplant before it’s too late.

In the other room Tennison gazes upward, his face bereft of pain or emotion, but his shallow breathing tells me he is still alive. Sunny is a blackened husk propped up against the far wall, flames dancing over his charred robes, but also not dead; his cloned replicant has not yet emerged from any of the booths.

Vieta is very much alive. A morbid curiosity makes me watch him, surrounded as he is by bodies, two of them his identical but soulless twins spawned by the booths. Vieta stares at me. His expression is almost unreadable, but I am certain I see grief or perhaps misery at the loss of the fetus. He looks at Sunny, then from corpse to corpse as if trying to understand this new sense of loss he is experiencing.

Snapping myself from the distraction, I turn back to the genoplant circuitry and take a few seconds to connect the fibers. A crackle and thrum of power tell me I’ve been successful. Sunny and Tennison can at least be saved, and I’m secure too.

“Won’t … work … won’t … stop him.” The whispered words come from Sunny’s cracked mouth. “Only … he … can save everything … only Salem Ben. He … must remember … Prometheus … Cataclysm … Wade.” Surely the last incomprehensible thoughts of a dying man.

Hopefully the genoplant will repair him now that it’s fully functional again. Once he’s reborn all this will be behind him. But what about Keitus Vieta? He won’t die, and we don’t even know how powerful he really is or where he came from. But if I have delayed his plans, so can others.

“Whoever you are and whatever you were doing, we’ve stopped it,” I tell Vieta.

He looks at me, his expression shifting from grief to hatred. “I’ll just have to begin again.”

“Then we’ll stop you again.” I raise the pistol.

He glances at the repaired circuitry, then at Sunny, and a cold smile twists his lips. “No. Not you. But I am curious about him and what he knows. Sunny understands the future. You do not.”

And with that, Vieta lifts his finger, and both he and Sunny slump forward, lifeless. At the same time there is the crackle of failing circuits behind me. Either the repair has failed or Vieta did something to it in his final vengeful moment.

For a few seconds I stare, dumbfounded, then two booths surge to life. From one, the body of Abbot Deepseed falls out, looking as vacant as the previous two, but from the other booth Sunny steps out, younger than before, fresh, but still with the stoop. His bulging eyes are far from empty, and in his face there is a malevolence that seems out of place for Sunny. But not for the fake abbot. With sickening revelation dawning, I realize: Keitus Vieta has chosen a new host, a host who has far greater skill with the Codex than anyone else. And now he is looking at me again, lifting that finger.

A distant scream—most likely my own—the involuntary sound of my body’s protest as my mind falls into a waiting chasm. Feeling is gone. Tactile senses are dulled to numb obscurity, and all that’s left is the sensation of falling forward into blackness at nerve-stripping speed. Dimly, I am aware of what will come next. Every civilization has a name for it—Apollo’s chariot, Walkabout, the tunnel of light, the Quantum Uber God Purge.

A blinding explosion of imagined suns floods my synapses at the last second, the magnitude of the experience matched only by an all-consuming silence. It’s the pinprick glimmer that stretches into the cold-white nova, devouring me, promising the afterlife, but delivering only disappointment. I know this moment as the neural flush, the system-controlled transition from dreamed life back to lonely reality.

A
sheen of sweat covers my tingling skin. There is pain and confusion, and I can still feel the thunderclap of my heart in spasm.

Where am I?

I’m resurrected, but Vieta is nowhere to be seen, and this isn’t the genoplant. The smell has gone too. A trick? Or perhaps someone activated a genoplant in a nearby star system. But that isn’t likely, and this doesn’t make any sense.

I died.

Vieta did something to the genoplant circuits, so surely my mind is lost and my body is still floundering around in the basement of the monastery. So where the hell am I now?

It’s a WOOM. Somehow I know that. And it’s opening.

Emerald light invades the darkness, teasing me with vague nostalgia of a different life.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I freeze. I know that voice. “Who are you?”

“Well, last time I was the mother of God, and before that I was a goddess. You tell me.”

Focus. I need to think.
“Qod?”

“Very good! Almost record time, Salem.”

“Salem? Who’s … ? Sunny told me that Salem …”

“Who’s Sunny? Wait. Let me check.”

“Sunny told me that Salem had to remember.”

“Ah yes. Found him. His real name is Amen Brackshard, one of the monks in the Order of the Codex. He’s in the Aberration Sphere too.”

“I’m sure he is. He was one of the first people ever to have met Keitus Vieta … Can you get me out of here?”

“You’re not ready yet.”

“I know who I am. I’m Salem Ben. I still feel like Plantagenet Soome, but I really do know who I am. You have to let me out. Vieta knows about me. We have to—”

“Slow down. You’re perfectly safe.”

“Safe? Sunny mentioned my name in that life I just visited, and now Vieta knows about me too.”

“Relax. I told you you’re safe.”

“How can you—?”

“Don’t you remember how long ago Soome was alive?”

I think for a moment. “He was around not long before the first collapse of the universe.”

“Try to remember where we are now.”

“Yes, yes, we’re at the birth of the fourth cycle of the universe, I know.”

“Even if this Keitus Vieta is real—and I still see no evidence of his existence—he couldn’t possibly have survived the collapse of the universe once, let alone three times.”

“So I’m just suffering from the aftereffects of Soome’s life and panicking for no good reason?”

“That would be a logical assumption. And that’s why the WOOM and I are keeping you restrained for now. For your own good.”

Ahead, beyond the open lips of the exit is the subtle hue of the Aberration Sphere. Millions of souls all afflicted with Keitus Vieta. Perhaps my perception is skewed by Soome’s life, and Vieta is no longer a threat, but I clearly remember Sunny’s insistence that Salem Ben should remember something. Something he showed me when I entered his room for the first time—the time he showed me his paintings. One in particular.

It was a beautiful painting. The silhouette of a man in a bubble, a spear piercing both his heart and the bubble. A moon at the spear’s tip. And where the spear had pierced the bubble, a whirlpool had formed, sucking matter inside.

Why did Sunny want me to remember that? It means nothing to me. Qod must be right. This is all just part of Soome’s life experience, and my waking thoughts have somehow warped the details to include my own name. Or perhaps there is a fault with how the data is overlayed onto my brain, mixing the real me with the people of the past. But that has never happened before.

The slippery sensation of fibers sliding out of my head distracts me, and a few moments later the shackles release me.

“Observation Sphere?”

“Yes. I need to get out of here.”

“You sound disturbed.”

“I am. The more I find out about Keitus Vieta, the more he unsettles me.”

The metallic tendrils lower me to the gangway that leads to the exit of the sphere, and I welcome the pure white light of the corridor ahead of me, as if it is washing me clean of the blood and horror Soome died in.

“You still think Keitus Vieta is a threat?” Qod asks. “I’ve already told you I can find no record of him in the Consortium files, and surely if he wanted to harm you or even pay you a visit, he’s taking a long while to go about it. Three cycles of the universe is quite a span of time, don’t you think?”

“Hmmm.” Her reasoning seems right, but the urgency of Soome’s experience and even the memories of Orson Roth and Dominique Mancini give me cause for concern.

“Anyway, you didn’t answer my question from earlier,” Qod says as I make my way along the corridor toward the Observation Sphere.

“Did I find what I was looking for?”

“Yes,” she says.

“What do you think?”

“Hey! Leave the sarcasm for me, would you?”

“Sorry.” I smile. “But you know the answer is always no. And besides, my priorities have changed. Death doesn’t seem quite so important as finding out who Keitus Vieta is or where he came from.”

S
everal days pass before Qod and I speak again, and I sit the entire time watching the universe busy itself with the work of creation but not seeing. I have overcome my fear of Vieta after living the life of Soome, but I have not satisfied my appetite for answers. Who was Keitus Vieta? Why did Qod know nothing about him? Why was he … wrong?

“You said the aberrations appeared during the third cycle of the universe,” I say eventually. “And you found them when you started to check through the data just before this cycle?”

“Strictly speaking, the aberrations began toward the end of the first cycle after the Soul Consortium broke free from the universe,” Qod replies, as if we had been talking about it only a few moments ago, “but I didn’t detect them until the end of the third cycle.”

“So if Keitus Vieta first appeared in Soome’s life, his appearances in the lives of Orson Roth and Dominique Mancini must have happened in a later cycle. He must have survived the collapse of the universe somehow.”

“Unlikely.”

“Yes, but Keitus Vieta isn’t … right, is he? He’s different. Supernatural, paranormal, alien. He’s using science and technology in ways we’ve never conceived.”

“Mankind reached the limits of scientific understanding millions of years ago. There
is
nothing else to understand. Don’t fall back on paranormal explanations simply because we haven’t identified the cause.”

I sigh deeply and stare out into the inky depths. Perhaps Qod is right. And perhaps I’m entertaining these thoughts because I allowed fear to get the better of me. But I’m past that now. “Maybe I’ve been thinking too hard about this. If Keitus Vieta isn’t supernatural and he doesn’t have a file or an empty slot waiting for him, the aberrations
must
be the result of data corruption in the files. You yourself said you can’t find any evidence he exists other than the anomalies you’ve been finding in the files.”

“I already told you there was no corruption.”

“But there
has
been a change in people’s lives.”

“Yes.”

“The laws of physics haven’t changed. Lives should be the same in every cycle of the universe. There’s an equilibrium, a balance that keeps the configuration of matter and energy the same each and every time. So if it isn’t data corruption, something must have
invaded
the data. A rogue AI perhaps?”

“No. Like you, I am the last of my kind. Nothing has tampered with the data. I’d know about it. It is accurate.”

“Then how can there be aberrations? Where did Vieta come from? What
is
he?”

Silence for a few moments.

“There is no record of Keitus Vieta in the Consortium files.”

“So you keep telling me … but he is
in
there. Every time you find him, you label him as an aberration and move the file … Look, I need to understand how these files actually work. I know the founders of the Soul Consortium created all of this, but the real scientists behind it were kept secret. I need to be one of them, live one of their lives. Maybe then I’ll be able to understand what happened to create these aberrations.”

“I wondered when you’d get around to asking that question. You’ve been living within these walls and using the WOOM for trillions of years, incognizant of its real origins.”

“I’ve never needed to know until now, and you’ve never suggested it.”

She’s silent, as if thinking carefully before she answers. For Qod, a moment is a very long time. “That’s because the founders of the Soul Consortium are in the classified section, specifically the Restricted Sphere.”