Messiah Read online

  Before her arrival at Earth, the belief in the rightness of her self-preservation was unshaken. Even when she was shown Adam’s less-than-divine origins, as a half-AI, half-human cyborg, psychotically digging in the ruins of the dead world of his creators—that did not shake her faith in her own continued existence. Even when she watched the jealous God Adam rain his host upon the unbelievers, bringing those willing to shed their flesh into his fold, and destroying those who did not. Even when she watched him consume the lives on Salmagundi and Khamsin—watching with awareness inconceivable to her once-human self—she watched, and understood, without questioning her choice to live.

  She clung to her own existence even after Adam tached the Prophet’s Voice into Earth’s solar system, as he had Khamsin’s, and broadcast his ultimatum to the inhabitants —“I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the God of the next epoch of your evolution. I will hand you my universe. Worship me or become as dust.”

  She buried herself within the womb of the Prophet’s Voice, the ship that had carried this embodiment of Adam. She observed with a consciousness that could range across the breadth of Adam’s existence, processing information from the breadth and depth of the thinking matter that consumed spacecraft, asteroids, cities, and people with an omnivorous and insatiable hunger. Like her role on Jokul, monitoring data streams for the totalitarian government, she observed everything with a terrifying omniscience. Like Jokul, she saw all the evils, great and small. She saw with great clarity the horrifying machine she was a part of.

  And like Jokul, she dared not judge. She dared not act. The evil she watched could consume her without a thought. She saw what even the slightest dissent brought, and she intended to survive.

  So she did nothing that might possibly draw Adam’s attention.

  She intended to survive.

  Even if that meant being party to the death of billions.

  She intended to survive.

  Even if it meant being Adam’s hand, reaping souls for a god she did not truly believe in.

  Earth would be no different.

  As at Salmagundi and Khamsin before, the mass of Adam’s host formed itself around the Earth. She became part of that host, distributed across the sky, but individualized in her own awareness. Through a million eyes descending through the atmosphere, she saw Adam’s army fall from the sky. White-hot teardrops of matter slammed into cities, pouring their substance into the craters they made, extruding tentacles to probe the structures around them, disassembling buildings and pulling them into themselves.

  It was no different.

  But it was different.

  She saw, in the southern hemisphere, a dozen glowing masses fall in the old diplomatic compound around the Confederacy Spire. Threads of glowing, thinking, mass twisted up the sides of the kilometer-tall symbol of man’s last attempt at a unified government. For a moment, the spire glowed, encased in a net of alien will, then it folded in on itself, the walls of the structure pushing down, falling inside itself as the structure imploded without so much as a wisp of dust to mark its passing.

  In the middle of Asia, the buildings of the Forbidden City briefly folded inside out before disintegrating in a mass of glowing tendrils. In the Arabian Peninsula, the Kaaba itself was struck as two million terrified pilgrims watched the holy site implode to reveal glowing humanoid simulacra proclaiming Adam’s divinity in a host of languages.

  She watched Adam claim Paris and San Francisco, Tokyo and St. Petersburg, Mexico City and Cairo, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, New Delhi and London.

  She watched, and even though she had never been to Earth before, even though all she ever knew of these places were just the stories of a common human history . . .

  Even though she told herself survival was enough . . .

  I cannot abide this.

  It was not the first thought she had directly opposing this being that was not a god, but might as well have been. The thought was shocking in its suddenness and its intensity.

  It was devastating in its impotence.

  More than most other consciousnesses absorbed into Adam’s growing demesne, she knew the limits of their god, the edges of his omnipresence. And she knew that she was trapped firmly within them, her mind occupying the same matter as his now, and while her thoughts might remain inviolate, should she act, so much as communicate a question of Adam’s place in their universe, her existence would end.

  She watched from orbit, knowing that failure to participate in the great reaping might be enough to bring Adam’s wrath. Below her, billions died, and billions chose to commune with Adam, choosing to continue their existence as Rebecca had.

  “You want to go to Rome.”

  Mosasa’s voice spoke in her head. Not the AI that Adam had destroyed above Salmagundi, and not quite the human Mosasa that had given that AI his identity. The Mosasa in her head was some ghostly remnant, a virus of a personality that had inhabited Adam ever since his common origin with Mosasa the AI, a virus that Adam unknowingly bequeathed to all his chosen. As far as she knew, Rebecca was the only one aware of Mosasa’s presence.

  “Rome, Vatican City, you need to be there before it’s completely transformed.”

  Mosasa’s voice was almost that of her own thoughts. Before asking herself—or Mosasa—why, she moved to coalesce her identity into one of the meteors hurtling down toward Europe, Rome, Vatican City. She needed to become one with the invasion to avoid Adam’s attention in any event.

  She was one of several dozen minds wrapped in the descending teardrop-shaped craft. Along with them was the overwhelming, suffocating presence of the embodied Adam. Of course, the Vatican was one of a few places that their God would wish His presence. Like Jerusalem, or Mecca, Adam would revel in consuming the holiest of sites while proclaiming his primacy over any gods that had come before him.

  And realizing that, and realizing that Adam had duplicated himself within the body of this craft, Rebecca had a small epiphany about Adam’s power.

  He had to be present on the craft, at least one copy of himself, in order to present himself upon landing. That meant that those other craft descending to the surface without his presence were briefly free from his influence. For the time being, the universe of Adam’s acolytes, their control over the matter of their existence, was constrained within this envelope hurtling through the atmosphere.

  She tested the idea by trying to push her awareness back outside the surface of the descending craft, and she couldn’t.

  Then they crashed through the dome of St. Peter’s.

  The craft penetrated the dome of the thousand-year- old basilica and exploded across the marble floors as if it were a living, glowing, liquid. Tendrils shot out from the glowing mass, whipping around the twisting bronze pillars of the towering baldacchino above the altar, absorbing tons of mass into itself. Adam’s burning fingers crawled up the walls and traced the epic statues of Saint Helena, Saint Longinus, Saint Andrew, Saint Veronica, the stone itself softening and collapsing under the touch.

  In moments, the center of the church under the dome had become solely Adam; the walls a weave of matter in constant motion and no fixed form. One self-directed tendril shot from the mass, toward a side chapel that had not yet been absorbed into Adam’s glory. It pooled at the base of Michelangelo’s Pietà, and out of the glowing mass stepped the short, flame-haired embodiment of Rebecca Tsoravitch.

  She turned away from Adam’s glowing consumption of the building behind her, and stared into Mary’s incongruously serene face as she cradled the dead body of her son. Rebecca bit her lip, and now that it was of flesh, it bled.

  Why am I here? she asked herself, in the safety of her own thoughts.

  “There is someone here that we need to reach first,” Mosasa’s voice came to her. She glanced away from the statue as Adam’s glowing host reached the chapel and consumed it around her. She saw the hairless, tattooed Mosasa standing next to her as clearly as she had seen the last moments of the Pietà, but she knew that no one actually st
ood there. The centuries-dead pirate existed only as a persona embedded within the artificially expanded confines of her mind, bequeathed by Adam’s call to transcend the flesh.

  Mosasa himself might epitomize Adam’s call to shed the flesh, but given their history, Rebecca doubted that Adam would see it that way.

  “Who?” she asked the apparition without speaking.

  “One I knew. Someone Adam knows.”

  As Mosasa’s apparition directed her into the depths of the disintegrating Vatican complex, Rebecca realized that the reticent nature of Mosasa’s AI, the golem that had led her to its megalomaniacal sibling Adam, had been more the human than the machine. The Mosasa within her had shown her much of Adam’s history and his own, but while he had been forthcoming about everything he had been, she knew very little about what he was now.

  He certainly was no more human than the AI that had worn his face on Bakunin for three centuries. For that matter, he was less human than she was—her fleshy humanity was barely a week behind her in her own mind. For centuries, this Mosasa hadn’t existed as more than a subtle bit of stealth programming in an AI device. She suspected that made the being now leading her down the labyrinthine corridors deep under St. Peter’s Square a more alien creature than the robot that had once worn his face.

  During their descent, she began to understand that while Mosasa might have copied himself like a virus among all of Adam’s chosen, the copies couldn’t be completely independent. There had to be some communication, however limited; nothing to attract Adam’s attention, but enough so that information filtered through the subconscious Mosasas, until it reached the one that had contact with a conscious agent—her.

  Some of Adam’s chosen, somewhere in Rome, or around the Vatican, had stumbled upon something significant—at least something significant to the common Mosasa personality, and that information was what led her Mosasa to bring her here.

  She followed Mosasa, all the time wondering if it would, in the end, be as reprehensible as following Adam.

  And the universe did not allow her a moment to forget what following Adam meant. She still walked abroad as Adam’s will, and when she came across unfortunate human beings in her path, she was obliged to render Adam’s ultimatum—go the way of all flesh, as follower of the God Adam, or as dust.

  She would pronounce this before them, her shadow extending over them, cast by the glow of the amorphous glowing chaos that followed her embodied form along the corridor. Every one of them down here chose dust—and from behind her, tendrils struck their bodies, melting them and consuming their mass as they had the Pietà.

  Deep in the bowels of the Archives, when there was nowhere further to go, Mosasa’s form stood in front of an armored door and told her, “He is here.”

  “Who?”

  “You remember him as well. His name is Jonah Dacham.”

  It was a memory Mosasa had granted her, from the waning days of the Confederacy, a battle, a wrecked aircar, and one of Mosasa’s AIs saving the man from the kinetic blast that had destroyed the Protean commune on Bakunin.

  How could that man be here?

  But, if he was, Mosasa was right, and the man would be known to Adam as well . . .

  She tried to sense Adam’s presence. Behind her, the part of Adam’s being that, as his agent, she held sovereignty over, boiled in its desire to consume the artifacts around her. It pulsed impatiently, casting flickering shadows in the corridor around her. She realized, like the isolation in the landing craft, she was far enough away from Adam’s consciousness to be temporarily free of his observation and influence.

  The mass behind her would remember things in its primitive fashion, but at the moment it was as much a part of her as her arm, her lip, or the small trickle of blood drawn by her teeth.

  She could tell it what it would and would not remember, and from everything she had seen, her own thoughts and memories would be safe from Adam’s probing.

  The mass was part of her now, and as part of her, it crawled tendrils across the ceiling toward the armored wall she faced. She could feel the matter it crawled against, taste it, smell it, and perceive its structure in ways that she had no words for. At her direction, it spread across the wall in front of her, integrating with the layers of steel and carbon and diamond monofilament, slipping its own mass through the matrix of each material as if it swam through water, twisting atoms and molecules around to incorporate its mass into itself.

  Now a part of her, the wall irised open a doorway.

  She stood a moment, tentative. She was thinking of betraying Adam, but so far those were only thoughts. Acting against his will, that decision would be irrevocable.

  She stepped through the opening in the wall and faced the occupants in the small room beyond. One man wore the face from her memory, Mosasa’s memory.

  Should I risk my existence for this?

  She reached out her hands and told them, “I am Rebecca. I am here to offer you a new life as a servant of Adam. You will have power beyond imagining.”

  Dacham surprised her by stepping forward and taking her hand. He stared disconcertingly into her face. He showed none of the tentativeness she had seen in all Adam’s converts she had witnessed.

  He expects this.

  She faced Dacham’s companion. The man gave a resigned shake of his head and told her, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”

  She stared at him and felt the bottom fall out of whatever soul she had. She whispered, “I’m sorry,” as her mass consumed the man along with the room they inhabited.

  In moments she and Dacham were englobed within the undulating matter that extended her embodied form.

  Rebecca was an atheist, but she did pray:

  Let me know what it is that I am doing.

  The globe of matter collapsed around them, absorbing the human form of herself and of Dacham. Then the glowing mass began the long crawl up to rejoin Adam’s host, carrying more consciousnesses than it should have.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Apostles

  “Great evils are never met by small acts.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.”

  —WENDELL PHILLIPS

  (1811—1884)

  Date: 2526.8.2 (Standard) 1,000,000 km from Bakunin-BD+50°1725

  Toni II sat by the bulkhead, out of the way, as she watched her sister control the jury-rigged command center that was once the Daedalus bridge. Her twin, through an accident of logistics, occupied the captain’s chair, communicating with Mallory as he organized the attack.

  Attack . . .

  She still was amazed at how improbable that sounded. They faced an entity that had consumed an entire star system and had blown apart the entire wormhole network across all of human space, an entity that posed as God, and seemed to have the power to back up that claim.

  But Adam was not God—which is probably the one spiritual point that Father Mallory’s alliance could agree upon; from Catholic, to Hindu, to Muslim, to Nickolai and the strange Gnostic Puritanism he held to, to the technological ancestor worshipers that had survived the fall of Salmagundi. Adam was fallible, and his apparent vast power fell short of omnipotence.

  On the bridge were representatives of that improbable alliance. There was the leader of the surviving Caliphate techs, the man who represented the small contingent of the Salmagundi militia, and Karl Stavros, the one-time captain of the Daedalus. All watching the same displays that her sister watched.

  Toni II studied Karl, and thought he looked older . . .

  I wonder what his son’s doing right now.

  The comm channel from the Savannah lit up. “This is Mallory. Has there been any word from Bakunin?”

  What he was really asking, for the dozenth time, was, “any word from the expedition to the surface?” Since the crisis began, and refugees had started filling Bakunin’s star system, the access to the planet had been cut off by the Proudhon Spacepor
t Development Corporation. For a long time, the only communication from the surface was the PSDC warning ships not to land. None of the craft running that blockade descended past high orbit intact.

  Her sister, the de facto captain of the Daedalus, transmitted back, “Still no word from the Khalid.”

  For what seemed to both Tonis very questionable reasons, Mallory and his command staff had agreed to use the Khalid to attempt a blockade run. Her twin had only agreed because Mallory’s group had been able to trade seats on the trip groundside for additional ships for their fleet. “Captain” Tony Valentine had told her sister that she had thought no one would accept the offer.

  Toni II, for the first time since diving into a wormhole and finding her ten-day-younger self on the other side, disagreed with her other self. She never would have agreed to such a fool plan, even if it doubled their fleet at the time. They had only been granted a trio of ships at the expense of the Khalid, which had been probably the most technically advanced ship in all of Bakunin space. An exchange that, after the pope’s broadcast, seemed hardly worth it.

  Toni II could remember the whole thing, nearly word for word. The pope warning of Adam, showing first the tachcomm transmission Mallory had made from Salmagundi before that planet fell, then another showing Adam taking the capital of the Caliphate, Khamsin. And the pope’s closing statement had been chilling:

  “For centuries, all human society has recognized three basic evils. Religious or secular, we have not tolerated any experiments in these Heretical Technologies: Self-replicating Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, and the genetic engineering of sapient beings. Each brings its own unique dangers, and each has been responsible for the loss of countless lives over the past five hundred years. For five hundred years we have seen these things, in and of themselves, as anathema. But evil does not reside in matter, in knowledge, in science. Evil lives in the heart. It lives in the soul. It is our choice, to follow a moral framework we acknowledge as outside ourselves, or descend to one written to accommodate our own petty desires, our hubris, our narcissism, our solipsism, our nihilism.