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

  Rosko was dismissive of the fire stories, as if arguing with you—or arguing with me. “It’s like terrorism,” he said. “The proof that it works is that it terrorizes people right out of their common sense. My mother texts while driving. That makes her way, way more dangerous than any terrorist—but terrorism is always going to be a better story than a suburban mother with thumbs for brains. Burning libraries make a cool story too, but what’s the big deal? It’s cheap symbolism. Knowledge isn’t under threat. It’s not like they can burn down the Internet!”

  You looked at him and tried to say something. “Manipulating—manipulating symbols. Numbers. They—if they—they can—” You stopped, frustrated, and stared into the distance, gripping the atlas so fiercely I thought the spine would rip.

  “The Seraphim haven’t even claimed responsibility,” I pointed out. But they didn’t need to. They left the question of their own involvement infuriatingly unspoken but plainly implied. One of their new leaders, an American named Zachary Ash, chose instead to release oracular statements about what must be done:

  Revealing our true nature and our true destiny to ourselves requires that we focus on one sort of knowledge only: the language of Architects, which is the stairway to the liberation of the mind. Everything else is a distraction. Speak little. Forget your own history and culture and languages: they can be of no use to you now. They are trash now. Leave them, and prepare.

  It was odd—or, OK, so maybe it wasn’t odd, and I’m prejudiced, but it was interesting—that the established “faith leaders” were the ones who came out swinging over this stuff. Not presidents and prime ministers. Not even scientists and scholars, for the most part. They seemed stunned, frightened of the Seraphim’s popularity and unable to lead. It was the bishops and imams, the sadhus and the Panchen Lama, who were prepared to call a spade a spade. They were the ones saying that the Seraphim were dangerous, that they were misleading the vulnerable; it was they who were mobilizing people to protect both their loved ones and their heritages. Now, sure, if you want to be cynical—and you know me: cynical is my default setting and no apologies—you could say it was simply in the interests of the traditional faiths to point the finger at their big new rival in the Hearts-and-Souls game. There’s something to that. But most of them truly were appalled, I mean totally gob-smacked, by the idea that knowledge itself could be seen as the enemy. God does not value the deliberate cultivation of ignorance—that was your dad’s old nemesis, Cardinal Gerhard Kirkmünde.

  As the Catholic Church’s head scholar, announcing new security measures at the Vatican Library, he sounded totally plausible. But the fires continued, horrifying one group of people as they energized and enthused another. Kirkmünde again: This terrible urge to purify has been with us since Plato. In the past it has found shelter within many religions, including both Islam and Christianity; it also reemerged in new and terrible forms among the Nazis, who claimed to be Catholics, and among the Communists, who were atheists. Human beings and their cultures and languages are diverse and complex—and an abhorrence for that fact has been common in the scientific community too, for centuries. The desire of the purifiers is to wipe everything clean, to get rid of all humanity’s inadequacies and problems at once, and to begin from the imagined simplicity of a fresh beginning.

  Yes, Zachary Ash and the Seraphim said. Precisely. But this time we are right. And the cost of not believing in purification will be that your mind is not adequately prepared. And the cost of that will be infinite.

  Inevitably, as the fire phenomenon spread, it got local. The main library in downtown Seattle was heavily damaged after a truck full of gasoline was left in its underground parking lot. Several city branches had minor fires, as did two of the smaller libraries on the university campus. You drew your own versions of each incident, over and over.

  “What’s so important about them, Daniel?” Kit said, leaning over me to get a better look.

  Your response had a hint of Iona’s voice again, and its precision and coherence made it sound as if you were quoting her. “People only lie if they need something,” you said. “Gods also.”

  Kit leaned in closer. “What is he trying to tell us?”

  She was wearing running shorts, and her feet were bare, and I noticed that the little toe on her left foot was slightly crooked. I checked the other one to be sure; no doubt about it—a tiny, insignificant asymmetry. Tell me something, D: How is it that you can be powerfully, powerfully attracted to someone, and when you notice something like that it makes them even more unbearably desirable than ever? Doesn’t make sense, does it?

  “Morag. Hello, Morag?”

  I shrugged. Even if I’d known the answer to her question, right then I couldn’t have formed the words.

  CHAPTER 3

  ALIENS AND EXTENDERS

  The fires were unnerving, sure. But if you weren’t Seraphim—if you hadn’t already Accepted the Truth—what to make of Ararat was the really big question still on everyone’s mind. The problem was that few people on the mountain had survived—they’d either died or become Mysteries, the fate you’d only partially escaped—so for the unbelievers, the undecided, and the global bazaar of talking heads, there wasn’t much in the way of evidence. A scattering of contradictory eyewitness accounts, satellite imagery that proved nothing, some head-scratching seismographic data. Maybe that’s why civilization didn’t immediately fall apart: there were still sane and half-sane things for so-called experts to sit in front of the cameras and say. In place of immediate global panic, what we got in those first weeks was endless interviews with geologists, “international security consultants,” priests, sociologists, and fortune-tellers. Also “futurists”—who turned out to be fortune-tellers too, except that they’d ditched the gypsy costumes and had better jargon. The televised chatter established one thing beyond doubt: being introduced as an “expert” didn’t guarantee that you knew anything about anything—not even the extent of your own ignorance.

  I watched it all—unable to tear myself away, like a witness to a road accident—and felt sorriest for the professional scientists, the sort of people who actually knew Schrödinger’s equation from a hole in the ground. Most of them had a hard time being patient with Traditionals, because who needed God in a universe that the equations had already described down to the last quark and gluon? They were even more let’s-be-frank about the Seraphim, who were surely just the latest and most successful in a long line of whacky cults with a death wish. Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Order of the Solar Temple: you get the picture. But the laughter, or the smirking, had a hollowness to it this time.

  The equation guys needed to explain Ararat—and, in the face of not being able to, they seemed torn between three instincts. Make up a story about the eruption that’ll at least sound kinda sciency? Say nothing, for fear of being exposed later as an idiot? Or admit openly that you’re stumped, speechless, up a creek without a hypothesis? Hard to choose: their polite, catty, ruthlessly competitive world was supposed to be full of disagreements about how best to make sense of existing stuff. Bird navigation—how the hell does it work? (Nobody knows!) Earth’s billion gigatons of water—where did it come from? (Nobody knows!) Those swirly patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background, like foam on the Mother of all Lattes—what do they mean? (Five different theories!) Those were the things serious scientists argued over. It was what you signed up for. New stuff wasn’t supposed to show up this late in the game. New things certainly weren’t supposed to sound like a bad tabloid headline. Any mention of Anabasis, and the Mysteries, and the unprecedented signature of the explosions, and you got the feeling that what the scientists wanted to say was Put that away. It’s not polite.

  A meteorite was ruled out almost immediately. Terrorists-gone-nuclear was clearly rubbish. One evening we sat on the couch—Kit and Rosko too; at least one part of my brain was grateful that Kit and I were six feet apart, with you and Rosko in the middle—and watched a program in which they paraded some of the
best muscle in physics. Professor A (Berkeley) said that the “Ararat event” was consistent with the earth undergoing a freak collision with a submicron black hole. Professor B (Caltech) and Professor C (Large Hadron Collider, Geneva) said that Professor A had his head up his singularity.

  The Japanese astrophysicist Hideo Murakami was a Nobel contender. I’d heard of him before. Not yet canonized, not yet transformed into a Holy Man by a telephone call from Stockholm, but definitely a big name in the field of mathematically hairy exotica that might explain, you know, Everything. He had a pop-sci book, The Memory of Time—an obvious attempt to fund his retirement by pulling a Hawking—but his latest thing was a breezy Scientific American piece in which he claimed that Ararat might have been caused by (take a deep breath) “density anisotropies in the scalar field I call the Substrate.” As if that wasn’t enough, he went on to say that this Substrate could explain the whole universe, and even our capacity to experience the universe.

  Should have paid attention to that. Didn’t. I thought Substrate was kind of ridiculous, actually. It was like, hey, it turns out the universe is a parking lot; all we have to do is pickax our way through the tarmac and keep digging. Once we’re down through the neutrino sand, the quantum clay, and the seven extra-peaty dimensions of string theory, we come at last to the Deep Underlying Reality at the Bottom of It All. Which is like, gravel or something.

  Sorry. See how impatient I was becoming? I used to love all this haute speculation—the bright gas flares of exotic What-If, guttering brightly above the shale beds of everyday science. But it was too late for speculation. I wanted to know, preferably yesterday, WTF Was Actually Going On. And unfortunately there wasn’t much to be said, or not much that didn’t stink of the supernatural.

  I think that’s why some scientists went from muttering about quantum tunneling and energy gradients to saying that their money was on alien abduction. It was meant to be a joke. But the idea was given form, and a thin gloss of cred, by the announcement from the JPL in Pasadena that the Slipher Space Telescope had eyeballed an exceptionally Earth-like rock a mere handful of light years away.

  Zeta Langley S-8A, they called it, and it seemed like good news at first because it fitted so neatly everyone’s desperation for a second, untrashed home. It was the right size, the right mass, and slap in the middle of Goldilocks country. It had, if you believed everything you heard, a 310-day year, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and average surface temperatures like San Diego in spring. Judging from the hysterical joy of the initial online commentary, there was even a faint scent of mown grass hiding in the ninth decimal place of the spectroscopic data. Then someone said the obvious and ruined the moment:

  Oxygen-rich atmospheres don’t come from nowhere. So maybe S-8A isn’t a potential new home for us, because the oxygen means it’s already home for someone else? What if the poor, abused Earth is about to become a second home? For, say, the Architects?

  The idea was like static in the air when a storm’s coming. OK, people argued: those reports we’ve been hearing about creatures dripping out of the sky above Ararat might be the mere raving of post-trauma religious hysterics (subtext: ha ha ha, what credulous rubes!), but the explosion was certainly real. And if it wasn’t caused by “gods,” what but an alien invasion could possibly be going on?

  Cue the full 1950s panic-fi scenario, in grainy black and white. Beings with corny silver flight suits and eyes like moist American footballs are about to emerge from their aluminum pie plates directly onto the White House lawn! An inexperienced cop will wet his undies and pull the trigger! And one of the “visitors” will brush off the bullet like a fat dead fly and say, Greetings, primitive monkey-creatures. You look so tender and juicy.

  I liked the discovery of S-8A. It cemented in my mind an essential division. One set of people thought the truth about the Architects was “up” there, in the Realm of the Eternal, while another thought it must be out there, among the stars. Kit expressed the idea just right, in her ungrammatical way. “Is always same, yah? When scary somethings happen, only we have the two ideas. Gods? Or aliens? So we have to decide which one. What you think, Morag?”

  But the almost-unique privilege of having seen them left me with no idea what to think, and my only real clue—or hint at where I might find a clue—was the fact that Mayo had shown up on Ararat. Here was a man as belligerently, dismissively atheist as Bill Calder, a man professionally fascinated by the brain precisely on account of the fact that, quote, “We are our brains. And nothing else.” So why’d he show up on Ararat, in his expensive street clothes, with millions of dollars’ worth of scientific equipment, apparently trying to “measure” a religious ceremony?

  Minutes before he died, he told me that he’d dismissed the whole Seraphim/Mysteries phenomenon—until Patagonia. Had he converted? I didn’t believe that for a moment. Had he merely gone off his rocker with the sheer lust to harness an apparently limitless source of power? That would have been more in character, but I didn’t believe that either. He’d known something. Been onto something. Seen farther into this than I’d seen.

  That thought pissed me off in a major way, naturellement, but at least it pissed me off in a way that was motivating. If he knew something about the Architects, or had guessed something and was trying to figure it out, surely I could figure it out too? Natazscha had been one of his most senior colleagues at Charlie Balakrishnan’s Institute for the Study of the Origin of Consciousness. So, despite her claiming to be too busy to eat, sleep, or talk, I got Kit to engineer a couple of brief conversations with her. Not helpful. “David’s office is on the top floor of the Institute,” she said, rubbing at the bags under her eyes. “I went up there as soon as I heard what happened in Turkey. I thought I ought to look around, because, well, you’re right—the whole thing seems so odd. He had pretty much the whole floor to himself, and he was rather secretive. But there’s nothing there. No notes, no telltale files or off-network laptops lying around with the truth inside. Sorry. Just lab equipment and a couple of empty spare offices. I can’t imagine what he was up to.”

  There wasn’t much on the Net, either, which was odd in itself. I assumed there’d be information on him all over the place, like blood on a slaughterhouse wall, given that he’d been a well-known researcher, churning out intellectually hip ideas while holding prestigious appointments at big universities. But it was like someone with time and tech at their disposal had performed a deep trawl and cleaned up.

  Not much there, except the basic vertical career trajectory. Finishing high school at fifteen. An online degree at seventeen and two more by twenty-one. Right around the time he’d have met Iona, that famous first paper on brain emulation. (“Wetware to Software: Does Consciousness Count?”—not just clever, but a sucker for the cute pun.) Australian National University making him director of their brain science program about five minutes after that.

  Rosko dug up an old interview full of superficial, let’s-wow-the-masses answers to questions about brain science. (Modern scanning technology can watch you in the act of thinking!). And there was a politically incorrect bit, vintage Mayo, in which he seemed to be amusing himself by deliberately echoing Julius Quinn’s theme—the purity and unity that would prepare us to become gods:

  Interviewer: [Blah blah, preservation of minority cultures and languages.]

  DMJ: “My friend Bill Calder, the linguist, is always going on about this issue of preserving cultural diversity. But why do we care about it so much? It’s just sentiment! Wouldn’t it be a good thing, actually, if all these minor languages and cultures died out?”

  Interviewer: “I—I don’t think I—”

  DMJ: “Why not care about unity instead? War is caused by misunderstanding. Misunderstanding is caused by cultural differences. And what are culture differences but an infection caused by the virus of language? Sentimental people complain that the world is becoming more homogenous, but surely that’s a good thing? If we all spoke the same language, and we all have the same cu
ltural assumptions, perhaps we’d stop killing each other quite so much.”

  It reminded me of a line I’d seen in one of Derek Partridge’s books: The dream of total purity has proved seductive in every age. It is one of the engines of history. And it turned out that Mayo was in the purity business in even deeper ways. At ANU, he got involved with a global network of people interested in prolonging life through technology. Extenders, they called themselves—or, more grandly, transhumanists, because they believed they were (to quote the man himself) on the verge of a revolution in biotechnology that will accelerate our “evolution” a thousandfold, redefining us so quickly and so profoundly that within as little as one or two generations we can expect to become, in effect, a new species—as far advanced beyond Homo sapiens as we are now beyond our cousins the apes.

  The Extenders were a mix of high-caliber people in fundamental science, Silicon Valley übernerds, and bioengineers. Plus, on the fringe, a lot of people whose science training probably consisted of bingeing Star Trek. Their ambition wasn’t to live forever, just to avoid dying for as long as possible. So they were all about radical diet retuning, advanced medical augmentation, megavitamins, micronutrients. Daily cocktails of modafinil and testosterone, served shaken over ice with a twist of serotonin. Discussion groups on cloned organs, whole-spine regeneration, and injectable nanobots—which, apparently, D, are going to live permanently in our bloodstreams, grazing on our middle-aged arterial plaque like trout controlling milfoil in a lake. There was a whole separate subculture of cryonics, too: they already had an old Nevada mine shaft, complete with geothermal juice, where for the right money they’d stuff you into a stainless-steel keg so you could spend as many decades as necessary hovering patiently at a few degrees above the floor of Kelvin’s basement. A colleague of Mayo’s had even organized a whole conference on advanced enzyme synthesis: apparently one of the big worries about returning from an icy vacation under Nevada was that getting you back to room temp might reduce your lovely, buff, alpha-specimen self to fifty kilos of ricotta.