Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD FARR

  The Babel Trilogy

  The Fire Seekers

  Ghosts in the Machine

  Infinity’s Illusion (forthcoming)

  The Truth About Constance Weaver: A Novel

  Emperors of the Ice: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in the Antarctic, 1910–13

  You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Richard Farr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York.

  The publisher wishes to dedicate this book to Nick Harris. We hope he enjoys it, wherever he’s reading from.

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477817896 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1477817891 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781477827918 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1477827919 (paperback)

  Cover design by Will Staehle

  Book design by Jason Blackburn

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  Map

  A MESSAGE TO THE PLANET

  PROLOGUE A THOUSAND GODS

  PART I: AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER 1 THE UNIVERSE VANISHES

  CHAPTER 2 THE FLAME OF KNOWLEDGE

  CHAPTER 3 ALIENS AND EXTENDERS

  CHAPTER 4 NARAKAIN

  CHAPTER 5 WORTSPIEL?

  CHAPTER 6 FOOL FOR LOVE

  CHAPTER 7 HISTORY AND HOPE

  PART II: ZONE OF MIRACLES

  CHAPTER 8 GOD’S MONSTERS

  CHAPTER 9 FOXQ3

  CHAPTER 10 √2

  PART III: AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD

  CHAPTER 11 ROAMING

  CHAPTER 12 WHAT RAVEN DID

  CHAPTER 13 ILDAVAN

  CHAPTER 14 IMMORTALITY MAN

  CHAPTER 15 IONA’S THESIS

  CHAPTER 16 TELEFOMIN PLES BALUS

  PART IV: GHOSTS

  CHAPTER 17 FISCHER’S KINGDOM

  CHAPTER 18 OMA’S DREAM

  CHAPTER 19 A DEAD MAN WITH A RUINED FACE

  CHAPTER 20 OFF THE MAP

  CHAPTER 21 TERROR IS THE COLOR OF TEA

  EPILOGUE IN THE MACHINE

  FROM THE AUTHOR: SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION

  SOME DATES

  THANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “A butcher’s sharp blade liberates the flesh from the bone. But the words of the Architects are sharper still: they liberate the mind from the body.”

  —From the Akkadian Version, translated by Morag Chen (compare Hebrews 4:12)

  “History is repeating itself. I know a lot of history, and I’d rather it didn’t.”

  —Professor Derek Partridge

  “Science begins with doubt.”

  —Fang Lizhi

  A MESSAGE TO THE PLANET

  According to the Seraphim the message that follows was written by their founder and leader, Julius Quinn, shortly before his death—or “ascent,” as they claim—on Mount Ararat. It is being reprinted as a new introduction to Anabasis, his account of his interaction with the so-called Architects.

  Anabasis has been described as “the founding scripture of the world’s newest religion” and “a conversation with the gods.” Quinn himself vigorously opposed the use of such language. He denied that his movement was a religion or faith and described the Architects only as “free intelligences.”

  Anabasis (the word means “ascent”) is now available in 147 languages, and has been read by an estimated 300–500 million people worldwide. Ironically, one of Quinn’s key messages has been that the proliferation of human languages and cultures began only because—in the period of “doubt and rebellion” that led up to the catastrophic eruption at Thera in 1628 BCE—humanity drifted away from the “true voice” of the Architects.

  Our immediate task, Quinn has said, is to “reject these inauthentic cultural influences and return our minds to their origin.”

  Do you experience tastes and sounds, pleasures and pains—but also an inner self that is conscious of itself? Are you, in short, a human being? Then we, the Seraphim, salute you, for soon you will join us on the stairway. After five thousand years, humanity’s ignorance of its own true nature is drawing to a close. We are poised now to rise together and join the dimension of the infinite.

  Deep in our past, we were animals. By slow degrees, over hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved into the cleverest of all animals. But our full humanity was given to us only when the Architects first enabled in us the capacity for language. Since then we have had understanding, and have found, in our myriad ways, how to cope with the great gift that comes through language—the full inner light of consciousness.

  And yet how painful our humanity has been, this temporary way station between the animal body and the infinite mind! Animals experience, but they do not plan and build, hope and fear, because they have no sense of a self that continues into the future: it is their great good fortune not to live, as we do, under the savage lash of time. Time is the medium through which we experience the frustration of our hopes, the sense of our limitation, and the well-founded terror that the self, which we carry within us like a guttering candle in a jar, will be extinguished in death. No wonder we have invented so many new languages, ideologies, and religions in our desperate attempt to understand the paradox that we are minds trapped in the decaying prison of the body. No wonder that so many of our ideas contain, like flashes of lightning, hints of the astonishing truth!

  Hear the news, then. Hear the truth.

  The period during which we humans have been conscious of ourselves as unique individuals is a mere eyeblink in the larger story of our development. A mere stage, like childhood. And now, at last, our waiting—our very history—is coming to an end. Just as we left our animal nature behind on the way to becoming human, now we are ready to leave our humanity behind and become what people throughout history have mistakenly called “gods.”

  No longer will we be mere animal bodies.

  No longer will we be self-conscious minds imprisoned within bodies.

  In the next inevitable stage of our development, we will become free intelligences. Eternal thoughts. Untethered from the physical world. Immortal.

  Prepare your mind for this transformation; prepare your inner self. Listen to the original language that we corrupted, the language of the Architects—for they want us to come back; they want us to be with them; they have announced that we are ready at last!

  Em-DA-chol

  Ul-KO-vok

  Ret-YEM-an

  Ar-QA-het

  When you are ready, when your mind is ripe, they will come for you. Do not be afraid. For it will be time then to leave your body behind.

  To leave time itself behind.

  To rise up at last and become what you are.

  New calculations indicate that, although much smaller than the eruption at Thera, the “Ararat event” unleashed energy equivalent to over eight hundred kilotons, concentrated at first in a narrow column that seems to have triggered the main eruption. Due to the scale of the ensuing devastation, neither Quinn’s body nor those of approximately a thousand followers have been recovered. Eyewitness accounts are almost excl
usively from Seraphim converts who survived unscathed on the lower slopes to the north of the mountain, and even their accounts vary widely. A much larger number of survivors became Mysteries—or Partials, as the Seraphim prefer—their bodies still functioning, at least for a time, but their minds and personalities gone.

  What really happened there continues to be disputed across the globe by scientists, religious leaders, and others. Not in dispute is the fact that global rates of conversion to the Seraphim, far from faltering, increased exponentially in the wake of the “event.” This is, they say, both an effect and a cause of “the growing power of the Architects to aid us in our coming transformation.”

  PROLOGUE

  A THOUSAND GODS

  You were standing motionless on the snow, like all the others, with your face tilted up toward the sky and your hands raised in greeting.

  “There!” I shouted.

  Mack didn’t hear me, which wasn’t surprising—I was competing with 130 decibels. I leaned across the instrument panel, pointed, and shouted again. “There! Daniel and Rosko. Do you see?”

  Wrestling with the controls, struggling to make the big machine do his bidding, he glanced to his left and nodded. Even in that moment of life-threatening crisis there was an aura of relaxed control about him.

  “Go,” he mouthed, even before the helicopter’s wheels had made contact with the pad. “Help them. You’ll have to be quick.”

  Snow and ice, stained pink by the evening light, were cascading onto the pad. Smoke and steam were so totally everywhere that you couldn’t tell which was which. As if by magic, Rosko had emerged from the crevasse, covered in blood, and was struggling up the slope toward you from fifty paces away. The Seraphim were standing silently, or chanting, or on the steeper sections they were beginning to stumble and fall as the ground shook. It was still a couple of hours to sunset, but the full moon had risen into view over the shoulder of the mountain, indecently big and close, like an airbrushed fantasy planet from the cover of an old comic book. Not far to our right, Mount Ararat’s first lava flow in centuries was hissing and sliding—a lazy, venomous, red-eyed snake, mooching for new victims.

  And—

  And—

  It was hard not to stand there in the doorway and just stare. The sky, which should have been blue, was turning before our eyes into an upside-down oil-black lake. And a thousand gods—spirits, disembodied souls, angels, demons, Architects, what the hell did I know?—were swirling and foaming and materializing out of it, taking on human and yet not-human shapes as they dripped down toward the shiny, bright faces of the entranced, eager-for-immortality Believers. That counts as a Don’t-Miss, Five Stars, Bucket-List roadside attraction, don’t you think? But it grabs your attention even more, when it contradicts everything you’ve ever believed, because your whole life you’ve been a science-minded, unapologetically rationalist, don’t-give-me-that-crap atheist.

  This is not happening. That’s what I said to myself. Morag, this is so so so not bloody happening. It’s just an illusion. A hallucination. An extra-deluxe, high-octane, ultra-high-pixel-density nightmare.

  I hate it, D; I totally hate it when I don’t believe a single word I’m telling myself.

  Your dad’s voice came floating back to me. He may have been an arrogant pain in the neck, but he was also my mentor, my hero. William Hayden Calder, famous linguist: hunched over our Akkadian translations at the big table in his Seattle office, unearthing buried civilizations for a living. “Don’t misunderstand me, Morag,” he’d said to me once. “My position isn’t simply that ghosts don’t exist and souls don’t exist and gods don’t exist. I’m not saying that we have bad-to-zero evidence for those particular things—though, sure, bad-to-zero evidence is what we have. What I’m saying is the whole category of what people call ‘the supernatural’ is a crock, a confusion.”

  “Why?”

  “Simple. If you can’t make sense of something—if it seems to lie beyond your understanding—then you’ve nothing but bad reasons for claiming that you ‘know’ it’s supernatural. On the other hand, if eventually you do make sense of it, bingo: the temptation to call it supernatural evaporates. History of science in a nutshell.”

  Thunder and lightning explained as Zeus having a snit: that was his favorite example. I’d always agreed with him, and I’d always thought that Julius Quinn, his former student turned Alternative Messiah, was merely a super-charismatic BS artist, like all the other people in history who’ve claimed they’re just back from a personal interview in the Big Office Upstairs. Even when Iona became obsessed with the disappearances in Bolivia, even when the “disappeared” turned out to be Mysteries—and even when she died, and we saw a hint of this same craziness in those blurred frames of video, I wasn’t ready to believe so much as a syllable from our Mr. Quinn. But Ararat forced me to give him and his Seraphim this much: I might not have, and they might not have, the slightest effing clue what the Architects were, but they were real.

  They came down like fast-acting stalactites from the roof of a cave. At first each one was just a viscous column, and they hesitated, as if picking out one of the individuals below: only then did they begin to take on the outline of a human form. The supplicants (Applicants? Angels? Victims? You tell me!) stood rigid, with their arms held out in greeting, poised on the cliff edge of infinity with joy on their luminous upturned faces.

  Amazing—and when you’ve been raised by a couple of archaeologists, so you know the world’s mythologies like the back of your hand—well, all things considered, it would have been nice to get a spare five minutes, sit down with a notepad, and concentrate on the details.

  “You’ll have to be quick.”

  Oh. Right. Sorry, Mack, yes, have to be quick. Because—

  Because shit shit shit one of them is above you.

  You, Daniel Calder.

  Right now.

  Don’t look at it, D! Please! Don’t look at it!

  But it was there especially for you, so you looked at it.

  Daniel, run!

  But you didn’t run. You were already beyond running. You just stood there looking up, like all the others, mesmerized. In that pose, you might have been one of those Greek statues of an athlete that they found standing, javelin arm forever raised, on the seabed at Antikythera. A track-and-field snapshot in solid bronze. The hero of the games, anticipating forever the laurel wreath of victory.

  I hauled the door open and jumped down onto a pile of snow and ice. My foot hit a jagged block at an angle and I spun sideways, turning my ankle and cutting both hands. Rosko had started running up the slope toward you; when I picked myself up and looked again, he was already halfway there. Yelling was pointless—neither of you could have heard a thing from that distance, not over the deafening triple protest of the blades, the engine, and the mountain itself—but I yelled into the thin air until my throat hurt.

  “Daniel! Daniel, it’s me. Morag. We’re over here; can you see us? This way! Rosko, you have to move faster. Now, Rosko. Now!”

  Cheerleading the impossible. You must both weigh eighty kilos—sorry: 180 pounds—so how he even picked you up, I’ll never know. Somehow he got you over his shoulder and started half-carrying, half-dragging you toward me. I ran, or stumbled, to meet him halfway. It was only then that I saw how bad his injuries looked. No words between us. We made it to the open door, where I pulled more muscles than I can name getting you both on board. Before I’d even had time to get your bums into seats, the helicopter lurched sideways, smashed in the tail by a block of ice. Our bearded, grinning, rifle-toting Armenian friend shouted, “Hang on to something!” before managing to give us a foot or two of lift and steer us crabwise off the steel deck.

  I buckled you both into the second row and half-jumped, half-fell into the copilot’s seat on Mack’s right as he veered away and down. We passed right over a tongue of the lava flow. The heat radiating off it was so intense, I wondered if we’d light up. A shred of lint, sucked in too close to a bon
fire.

  Once it was behind us we dropped like a stone. It took only a few sickening, theme-park minutes to leave that horrible scene and most of Mount Ararat’s five thousand meters behind. The pale-brown moonscape beneath us—rock, dust, gullies—looked like a beach raked by a bear’s claw. The whole machine was canted over to one side, the nose was tilted too far down, and we were seconds away from violent death.

  “So far, so good!” Mack said, as if everything was going way better than expected. As if he was Dad, we were the kids, and this was a Sunday drive to the beach. When he looked at me with a mad gleam in his eye, as if to check that I was having fun too, I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.

  Funny how many regrets a mind can dwell on, in the almost infinitely expandable space of a single moment. We were about to say our last good-byes to the world from inside a fireball of shredding metal, and I had all the emotions you’d expect, including the purest and most cowardly physical terror, anger that this was a situation over which I had no control, and “a kind of philosophical panic” (I here quote the great German thinker sitting beside you, Rosko G. Eisler) at the thought of my own extinction. But that was just the start. I managed also to regret that I’d never see my parents again. Regret that I’d never become the world-famous anthropologist, linguist, and discoverer of lost civilizations I’d planned to be. Regret that I’d never know how to adjust my personal belief-space to fit the fact of oily, strangely attractive beings materializing into semihuman form out of a clear sky, precisely as Julius Quinn had predicted they would.

  It even entered my mind, like the scent of honeysuckle captured in passing, that I’d never see a Certain Other Person again. Or find out what feelings that person might have about me. Or—let’s face it, Morag, shall we?—almost certainly not have about me.

  The mountain was behind and above us. I couldn’t see most of it, but the eruption seemed to have stopped. A small fist of smoke was rising from the summit. It blurred into the rolling bank of unnatural darkness that kept parting, re-forming, and concentrating in the sky above. Several darker points within that darkness dripped down, a viscous goo extending down like molasses toward the crowds of people still grouped in rings around the summit.