The Transhuman Protocol

Part One — Birth

On the same day that an armed Chinese robot-drone destroyed an unarmed American spy satellite and initiated the first low-orbit world war in human history, sixteen-year-old Maria Tuttle of Tobaccoville realized she was pregnant.

The young, ivory-skinned, topaz-eyed oddity spent most of her spare time lurking through the hills and hollows her ancestors had genocided away from the now-extinct Saura Indians. The strange girl wore the same brightly patterned dress day after day. Knotted into her naiad-like mane of lemonish hair, a self-curated collection of forest flowers, thistles, and leaves conjured the impression of Daphne halfway through her sylvan transubstantiation to escape the amorous Apollo.

Rumor had it that a butterfly once hatched from a chrysalis buried within her forest crown during geometry class.

When word of her gestational condition spread, Maria remained silent on who had deposited the shameful seed inside her. Since no one remembered the recluse of a girl ever having had a single friend, let alone a boyfriend, a virgin birth wasn’t completely ruled out, even though the suggestion was declared blasphemous by all forty-seven preachers within the county.

Other theories included: Reverend McGee’s Demonic Visitation Theory, Widow Shore’s Drunken Carnie Freak Theory, and the ever-popular Alien Abduction Rape Theory (a detailed graffiti illustration of which can be found on the walls of the highway underpass for those with strong stomachs).

Maria’s scrupulously devout parents — in accord with local tradition — evicted their fallen progeny within seconds of spotting the sinful bulge poking from her midsection.

Forced to drop out of school, Maria secured a minimum-wage job at the tobacco processing plant and took up residence in a long-abandoned shack abutting the train tracks, much to the disappointment of the Tobaccoville Volunteer Fire Department, which had planned to use it for a practice burn.

A half-starved, half-blind, mostly-lame brown-and-white tomcat already living in the shack found this unprovoked barbarian invasion to be a disgraceful act of inter-species imperialism, and said so during a rather undignified hissing and howling tantrum. Maria nursed him back to semi-health as best she could and named him Theo in deference to his squatter seniority.

Maria’s son made his escape from her womb on the same day that seventy-seven nations ratified the Space-Robot Armistice, causing Congress to halt all plans for Martian colonies, food stamps, and school lunch programs — in order to triple NASA’s killer space-robot budget to keep pace with China, Russia, and the various world coalitions competing for space hegemony.

The citizens of Tobaccoville all agreed that the twisted limbs of Maria’s child were deeply disturbing, though it was the extreme asymmetry and bulbus distortions of his face — reminiscent of those monstrous portraits by that maniac Picasso — that everyone found the most unsettling.

To the pale residents of Tobaccoville, the child’s reddish-brown complexion was the most shocking of all. It matched the rusty color of the freshly plowed field so precisely that some wondered if the earth itself had impregnated the girl.

Maria named her monstrosity Plenko, which made no sense to anyone since there certainly was no such name in the Bible.

The young mother soon noted that her darling son, unlucky in every other respect, had been blessed with an extraordinary intelligence. Maria increased her hours to double shifts at the tobacco plant in the hopes of her son’s future enrolment at the locally-renowned Cavalry Baptist Primary School.

Little Plenko’s school debut coincided with a resumption of the space-robot-drone war, which ended the next day after the new killer-robots exterminated each other. This lack of armaments initiated a resumption of the armistice and an even more intense budget-busting space arms race to create new killer-robots.

Despite getting straight A’s during first and second grade, Plenko’s teachers complained that the crippled boy continually interrupted class lectures to point out errors in the math and science textbooks. The last straw occurred in third grade when the wheelchair-bound freak took it upon himself to conduct an impromptu history lesson during playground recess — in answer to Ruthie Vole’s question of who Columbus was and why he had his own day.

When Plenko got to the part about Columbus’ soldiers cutting off the hands of enslaved native Arawak Indians that failed to collect their monthly gold quota from an island that had almost no gold deposits, little Ruthie — having recently watched the animated version of Pocahontas — burst into tears.

An exasperated Mrs. Armfield explained that slavery and genocide weren’t appropriate topics for third-grade children.

Plenko pointed out that the Bible contained heaps of slavery, genocide, beheadings, rape, torture, and a particularly gruesome crucifixion. He offered to recite passages from memory.

Since Cavalry Baptist had a long standing zero-tolerance policy for using God’s word against school authorities, the principal informed Maria that the church board of directors had unanimously voted to expel her unmanageable child — without a refund.

Being non-confrontational in nature, Maria thanked them for their efforts on behalf of her son.

From then on, Plenko self-homeschooled himself on the internet from his tiny room in their leaky rundown shack. It didn’t take long to realize what a shockingly primitive, superstitious, and irresponsible species he’d been born into.

His education ended at the start of his eighteenth year, when his mother was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer from breathing toxic fumes from the tobacco plant for nearly two decades.

Just before she died, his mother turned her hollowed-out eyes away from her wheelchair-bound son and inexplicably spoke to the emptiness on the opposite side of the hospital bed. “Plenko, my dearest love, don’t you know that no one but God can change the past?”

With these mysterious (some might say obvious) last words, his mother died. No one except one-eyed Theo witnessed the crippled boy crying for three days in his squatter-shack.

In a spasm of desperation, Plenko emailed one of his lesser mathematical papers to a scientific journal in the hopes of being paid for its publication. It was either that or join a carnival freak show.

Not only was his paper on quantum multi-dimensional juxtopositional field theory published, it created a sensation in the upper stratum of the scientific world. Many declared him the kind of genius that occurs only once in a millennium, though others — due to professional jealousy — disputed this assessment and claimed he was merely a once in a century genius.

Offers poured in from tech giants promising to make him filthy wealthy overnight if he agreed to help speed their unchecked rush toward global devastation. Plenko declined all offers with his favorite quote from the Transhumanist Declaration: “Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.”

His plan of pursuing his research in isolation suffered its first setback a week later — in the form of an aggressive knocking on the rickety door of his shack.

Peering through a gap in the doorframe, Plenko gazed up at the ebony face of a gorgeous young woman with hair sensibly cropped close to a well-formed skull. Her full lips and flawless midnight skin suggested an ancient Nubian princess — except for a pair of ridiculously large eyeglasses of such thickness that her exotic orbs resembled an alien on holiday.

Two graceful arms and hands were attached to an oddly squashed torso lacking any lower extremities. This combination of perfection and deletion sat perched atop an impressively high-tech vehicle bearing no resemblance to his own wreck of a wheelchair.

Curiosity vanquishing caution, Plenko opened the door.

The half-goddess frowned, then spoke with a hint of a foreign accent, “I didn’t expect you to be a crippled freak.

Which seemed an odd statement coming from someone without legs.

She pressed a button beside a joystick on her armrest and descended a couple of feet until they were eye-to-eye. “My name is Messiah, and I’ve — ”

“Seriously, your actual name is Messiah?”

“It’s the name I was given by the missionaries that rescued me as a child.”

“They really had high hopes for you,” Plenko said.

She ignored the comment. “I’ve decided to work with you.”

“I work alone.”

Messiah eyed him for a moment before saying, “I know what you’re afraid of.”

“I’m afraid of most things. Spiders, stairs, you — ”

“You’re afraid that your inventions will lead to unintended consequences that will only make the world worse — possibly much worse — based on humanity’s track record of misusing scientific discoveries in the manner of a band of chimpanzees happening upon a box filled with super glue and jars of arsenic.”

Well, she’d nailed that one. He glanced at a faint tattoo on her right forearm. It read: N = R∗ · fp · ne · f1 · fi · fc · L.

“Sorry, I’m not interested.” He began closing the door.

With the reflexes a professional gamer, she shoved her joystick forward, bulldozed his rusted old wheelchair aside, trammeled across the creaky pine floorboards, then swiveled to face him.

Theo jumped onto the seat of her motorized wheelchair in the spot her lap would have occupied. Not realizing that the cat despised physical contact, Messiah stroked the scraggly one-eyed turncoat — and he purred like a kitten.

“Who do you work for?” Plenko asked.

“I’m an outlaw hacker.”

Theo purred even louder.

Plenko reached for the phone to call the police. “Unfortunately, I’m too busy to join your cult, but thanks for the illegal home invasion.”

Messiah pulled something out of the satchel attached to the side of her chair and tossed it onto his lap.

It was his scientific paper. Scrawled in a black sharpie above his name on the journal’s cover was written: This is the key to unlocking the Transhuman Protocol.

He frowned at her. “You’re taking your name way too literally.”

“You have a choice,” she said. “Hide while humans destroy the planet, or use your brilliance to do something about it. Which option do you think your mother would have chosen?”

Plenko shut his eyes to hold back the tears. “I knew opening my door was a mistake.”

Part Two — Genesis

During the following weeks, Plenko recruited a select band of genius misfits from around the globe while Messiah secured an ancient post-and-beam sawmill said to be haunted by the ghosts of the slaves that built it two hundred years before.

The purchase included the surrounding two-thousand acres of woodland that had been used by the local Pale-Power militia group to train for their long-prophesized war against deniers of the pseudo-scientifically proven fact of pale primacy. Needless to say, these anemic camo-crusaders — the leader of which was a genuine military veteran that had been dishonorably discharged during basic training — weren’t happy to see their sacred training grounds defiled by a bunch of shockingly un-pale mongrels who were assumed to be atheist Muslims or, even worse, socialists.

One-eyed Theo selected a spot high in the mill’s rafters to observe the humans scurrying about their Frankensteinish laboratory.

In a predictable resumption and escalation of hostilities that not a single world leader predicted, the robot-on-robot carnage migrated from low-Earth-orbit to Earth itself when an American killer-robot-drone chased a Chinese killer-robot-drone into the airspace over Idaho, fired a missile, missed, and bulls-eyed the headquarters of a new age apocalyptic cult, killing the fifty-two members moments before they drank fair-trade organic herbal tea laced with cyanide in the hopes of joining their consciousness with the Universal Mind of Ramtha, the Enlightened One.

Politicians scapegoated the killer-robot-drones for the tragedy, ignoring the fact that the robots were merely obeying the irresponsible algorithms indoctrinated into them by humans.

A few world leaders suggested banning all killer-robot-drones, but these irrational pacifists were quickly replaced by leaders that offered more acceptable solutions like arming their killer-robot-drones with tactical nukes. This gave citizens a comforting sense of protection, despite causing other nations to immediately nuclearize their drones as well. Nations without radioactive killer-robot-drones accelerated their biological weapons programs and warned that they would release the Black Death upon anyone that attempted to robot-bully them.

Various flavors of jihadists did their best to acquire these new techy forms of mass martyrdom, with mixed success.

On the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death, Plenko assembled his employees. Each took their assigned posts around the towering metallic sphere hovering four feet above an array of superconducting magnets. All of it was powered by a refrigerator-sized warm-fusion device Plenko had invented.

With an expression of pride and anxiety, Messiah said, “Initiate simulation.”

The technicians furiously typed at their stations.

The sphere rotated faster and faster. Silent, without the slightest air resistance. It took less than a minute for the massive amount of data to be laser-transferred into the AI processor at the heart of the system.

Plenko said, “Initiate Genesis.”

More frantic activity at the dozens of computer terminals encircling the sphere.

“Solar algorithm a go.”

“Planetary structure in place.”

“Gravity simulation stable.”

“Oceanic and atmospheric models running.”

“Continental randomizer initiated.”

“Global rotation begun.”

“Physical constants verified.”

“Pre-terraform complete.”

“Laws of chemical and biological interaction loaded.”

“Initiate organic synthesis,” Messiah said.

“Bacterial biome evolving.”

“Photosynthesis begun.”

“Marine biome seeded.”

“Terrestrial speciation replicating.”

Every eye studied the cascading readouts.

“Equilibrium achieved.”

Cheers.

“Any visuals?” Messiah asked.

A gray-bearded Turk named Saim jammed a cigar into the corner of his mouth and shook his head. “It seems the raw quantum data can’t be decoded by our binary computers.”

“I suspected it might require a human interface,” Plenko said.

Messiah grinned. “Time for some quantum spelunking.”

Two nurses lifted Plenko and Messiah from their wheelchairs and carried them to adjoining hospital beds. Sensors were attached to their bodies to monitor vital signs. Finally, two custom-built helmets were placed over their heads.

“You first,” Messiah said. “I’ll join you if that helmet you designed doesn’t fry your brains.”

“One small step for one small man.” Plenko lay back, closed his eyes, and pressed a button on the side of the helmet. His scalp tingled, but that was it. “Nothing happened.”

“You forgot to load an avatar, genius,” Messiah said.

“Pick one for me, would you?”

“Sure thing, boss man.”

As the virtual body engulfed his senses, Plenko felt as if he were drowning. The shock flung his virtual eyes wide open.

A savanna stretched horizon to horizon. Two pink clouds floated in an azure sky unsullied by the slightest haze of pollution. He breathed in the lush simulated air and took a few unsteady steps forward — the first he’d taken in his entire life. A symphony of birds, insects, and a lion roaring in the distance.

“It’s so vivid!” Plenko said. Then noticed two naked breasts protruding out of his chest. “Messiah! What body did you — ”

“It’s the Marilyn Monroe preset I designed,” she said in his mind. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“I suppose it serves me right for leaving the choice up to you.” He couldn’t resist running his hands over his chest. An astonishing sensation in many respects.

A beautiful black woman appeared beside him. “Having fun molesting yourself?”

It took a moment to recognize Messiah without glasses. Her beautiful face was now matched by a beautiful slim body. Combat boots, shredded jeans, and a form-fitting leather jacket added and edgy, punk-rock chic.

“Would you mind exchanging my avatar for a man?” he asked. “Preferably one wearing clothes!”

“You’re so gender-conventional.” She grasped the back of his neck with her left hand, shoved her right fist down his throat, took hold of his stomach, and pulled sharply back as if yanking a sock puppet inside-out.

“Ahhh!” Plenko screamed, then found himself in a tallish male body. Messiah had dressed him like an American World War II pilot, complete with a worn leather bomber jacket that accentuated his athletic build. A wayward lock of jet-black hair curled jauntily across his right eye with James Dean nonchalance.

Messiah held up a hand mirror with the pride of a sculptor unveiling her latest masterpiece. The reflection displayed a good approximation of what he might have looked like without his deformities. In many respects, he resembled a Native American.

A lump of emotion expanded within his throat.

Saim’s voice echoed in their minds, “I rather preferred the naked Marilyn.”

“You can see us?” Messiah asked.

“Your minds are converting the visual and auditory quantum data from your eyes and ears, which the helmets are recording as video.”

“That’s fantastic!” Plenko said.

“I’ll maintain radio silence unless I’ve got something interesting to report,” Saim said.

They took to the air with the awkwardness of superheroes on a maiden voyage. After getting the hang of wingless flight, a cursory survey of the planet revealed no obvious anomalies.

Messiah summoned a partly-transparent virtual screen and swiped through readouts as she flew. “The quantum processor is calculating thirty global iterations every second and deleting the previous iteration to make room for the next.”

“Which means anything we don’t directly observe is lost forever.”

“If a virtual tree falls in a virtual forest . . .”

After a complete circumnavigation of the globe, they landed beside the confluence of two rivers amidst a lush forest.

Plenko felt a stab of sorrow at the memory of his mother carrying his stunted body through her beloved woods every Sunday during her only day off from work. She’d introduced him to his many relatives — mushrooms, trees, birds, inchworms, and more cousins than he could keep track of. “This is where God lives,” she’d say as the forest air cleansed her lungs of the filth of the previous six days — or so he’d thought.

“Behold the Garden of Eden 2.0!” Messiah proclaimed, sweeping her arms in a wide arc that encompassed the untrammeled wilderness.

“What a shame to spoil it by adding humans.”

The black goddess in combat boots spoke as if announcing the start of a play. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image.’”

Part Three — Intelligent Deign

Messiah made a few selections on her virtual control panel, and a naked male appeared in front of them. He was well-muscled, six-foot-four inches tall, and had a racially ambiguous milk-chocolate skin tone halfway between his two creators. His eyes stared blankly ahead without a hint of life.

“Now that’s a perfect specimen, wouldn’t you say?” Messiah asked.

“He looks a bit dull-witted.”

“Because we haven’t set any psychological parameters for the experiment, yet.”

“Oh, right,” Plenko said. “What would you suggest?”

“We know intelligence is a genetic trait that can be selected for in animals, and humans are animals, whether we want to admit it or not, so how about simulating a survival of the smartest?”

“I think someone already attempted building a master race with rather disappointing results.”

“As a black woman, I’m quite familiar with the history of eugenics and all that bell curve crap.”

“Then why would you — ”

She held up her hand to silence him. “Imagine one hundred percent genius-level intelligence in the entire human race.”

He sighed. “How is selectively breeding humans not eugenics?”

“Because we’re not breeding humans! In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a computer simulation. In here, we can see the results of a targeted evolutionary change over hundreds of generations in a matter of minutes without harming anyone. Then we can repeat the experiment again and again with different selection variables. Hypothesis plus testing equals knowledge, regardless of the outcome. It’s called the scientific method.”

“Selecting for intelligence is so wrought with racist baggage that I don’t see how — ”

“Isn’t the point of all this to improve our species?”

“I was imagining a technological fix, not a genetic one.”

“Implanting a computer processor in a human brain to increase intelligence is decades beyond our capability. What does the method of updating the human operating system matter if it averts our extinction?”

“If I knew this was what you had in mind, I never — ”

“Maybe you’re worried that if everyone were as smart as you, you’d lose your sense of superiority as one of the genetic intelligence lottery winners.”

That gave him pause. He’d always fantasized about having his body upgraded through gene therapy. Would he deny fixing someone’s genetically-flawed capacity to reason?

Messiah idly pulled the zipper of her leather jacket up and down in a distracting peek-a-boo of her ebony cleavage. “You know as well as I do that our genes evolved for an environment that no longer exists. Technology is accelerating faster than natural selection can keep pace with.”

Plenko sighed. “If you’re already convinced that making everyone smarter will create some sort of rational utopia, why bother with a simulation?”

“I don’t know any such thing! Not knowing is what drives science, but if we don’t run the experiment, we’ll never know.”

Having been beat down by her merciless assault of logic, Plenko surrendered. “Fine, but I design the next experiment when this one fails.”

“That’s the spirit!” She began inputting variables on her virtual screen. “I’ll pre-load our Adam with English and basic functional knowledge, but no false memories.”

“How, exactly, are you planning on sorting millions of simulants in each generation based on something as subjective as — ”

“Watch and learn,” she said.

“I feel like I’m interning with Josef Mengele.”

“Stop being a baby. These aren’t real human beings.”

“Exactly what he said.”

She made a final entry, then waved away her screen. “I just hope there’s enough processing capacity to support enough diversity in the gene pool.”

Their hunkish tabula rasa shook his head and looked around. His gaze fell on the man and woman standing in front of him. “Who are you?”

“I’m Messiah, your creator.” She motioned to Plenko. “This is Lucifer. He’s evil incarnate, so watch out for him.”

The simulant took a fearful step back from Lucifer.

“Gee, thanks,” Plenko said.

“Your name is Adam,” Messiah said to her creation. “What kind of wife would you like?”

Adam shrugged. “As long as she’s smart, the rest doesn’t matter much.”

Messiah worked at her virtual control panel, and twenty naked women at their reproductive prime appeared. Their beauty, intelligence, and height were randomly generated along a normal continuum. Like the man, their medium brown skin was identical to avoid any selection bias based on something as irrelevant as skin color.

After a brief interview with each potential mate, Adam chose the one that was clearly the smartest, despite being near the bottom of physical attractiveness. God named the lucky pageant winner Eve.

Eve seemed less than pleased with her prize. “Why does Adam get to choose from twenty of us but I’m stuck with a selection of one?”

“She is smart!” Messiah created an additional nineteen Adams that mixed and matched physical and mental attractiveness.

Eve interviewed them, and promptly dumped original Adam — who happened to be tops in looks, but slightly below average in smarts — in favor of a short, prematurely balding, and somewhat pudgy Adam that was by far the most brilliant of the group.

The remaining Adams and Eves intermingled until all the above-averages had paired off. The below-average leftovers found each other sexually repulsive.

Plenko frowned. “So, the more above average, the more attractive, while anyone below average won’t reproduce at all?”

“Simple, scalable, and open to recalibration with every generation,” Messiah said.

“It’s not fair!” Original Adam complained to his creator. “Am I to live alone and miserable because you chose to make me defective?”

Plenko knew the feeling, and it made him squirm.

“Rest assured you’re all essential parts of a larger divine plan,” Messiah said.

“Easy for you to say,” Original Adam said.

“What’s that on his forehead?” Plenko asked.

A red blotch had appeared just above Original Adam’s brow ridge.

Panic rose among the twenty men and women as the red mark appeared on their foreheads.

“A psychological stigmata signaling the loss of reproductive rank?” Plenko asked.

“I stole the idea from observing how lion’s manes fall out when they lose a dominance battle with another male, signaling their unsuitability for reproduction to all female lionesses. This precludes any confusion as to whose genes pass to the next generation.”

“Our creator has marked us unworthy!” wailed one of the red-marked Eves.

The above-average couples had wandered off, no doubt busily creating the next generation. The remaining sub-average simulants glared at God and Lucifer with looks that resembled rabid racoons.

“Maybe you should promise them a reward after death as a consolation for their suffering,” Plenko suggested.

“Should I ask them if they’d prefer harps and angels or seventy-two virgins?”

“You’re both monsters!” Original Adam shouted, then led his fellow involuntary-celibates with the clear aim of committing double-deicide.

To escape the wrath of their creations, the two gods took to the air.

“I feel horrible,” Plenko said as they flashed through the clouds side by side.

“Evolution has always sucked for the losers, but without competition, there’d be no — ”

A sudden blast of fire engulfed them from behind. Plenko shouted in terror and launched himself higher into the sky to escape immolation.

Messiah kept pace and took his hand. “Relax, your avatar can’t feel pain or be harmed.”

A dragon the size of a locomotive flashed beneath them.

“You added dragons to the simulation?”

“It wasn’t me,” she said. “The AI must have created it from the historical data we inputted for the world-build.”

“You’re saying it mistook myths for real history? If it can be this inaccurate — ”

“How do you know it’s inaccurate?”

“Because there’s no such thing as dragons!”

“Were you around ten-thousand years ago?

“You must be joking, right?”

“The AI has access to the totality of human knowledge,” she said. “More information than any one human could read in a million lifetimes. Every ancient account, every fossil fragment, genetic sequence. Is it impossible that it’s pieced together clues that humans have yet to correlate? What if dragons are just another of the large species human’s hunted to extinction along with mammoths, giant cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, and all the rest?”

An unsettling thought twisted through Plenko’s gut. “Are you saying this AI is conscious?”

“It can understand language, of course, otherwise it couldn’t create simulants, but it cannot form independent thoughts beyond its programed task. So, no, it is by no measure conscious.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I don’t second guess your physics expertise, so why don’t you leave the computer science to me?” She gestured at the world around them. “Have I not proven myself?”

He gave her a long, hard look. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Don’t let your paranoid tendencies — ”

“It’s not paranoid to be suspicious of a stranger who has lured me down this bizarre rabbit hole.”

“What possible reason would I have for deceiving you?”

Not being able to think of a reason at the moment, he watched the winged anachronism descend toward a cliff where two baby dragons waited with open mouths.

“What’s next?” Plenko asked. “Angels, ghosts, Zeus flinging lightning bolts?”

“Dragons won’t affect the core experiment,” she said. “And I doubt they’ll survive long once the true apex predator arrives in force.”

Watching the mother dragon gently land next to her scaly fledgling, he had to admit that the creatures were pretty cool. “How much processing power is all this gobbling up?”

She consulted her control panel. “One-millionth of one percent of capacity.”

“That’s all?”

“I guess your invention is a lot more powerful than either of us anticipated.”

They headed east across the randomly generated continent, then south until they reached a mountain slightly taller than Mount Everest.

Despite the wind and sub-zero air, Plenko didn’t feel the cold.

“Historians estimate a human population of five million across the globe at the end of the last Ice Age.” Messiah inputted the number into her hovering screen. “Let’s up the genetic mutation rate twenty-percent higher than normal to keep up with the extreme sexual selection.”

Plenko consulted his own virtual control panel. “That barely made a dent in the processor load. Let’s increase the simulation’s speed and see how much it can handle.”

“I’ll ramp it up slowly to make sure we don’t crash the system,” she said.

The movement of the sun across the sky increased by a factor of ten.

“Only a thousandth of a percent of capacity,” Plenko said.

She increased speed to the point where the sun and moon flashed across the sky in an alternating strobe of night and day, interrupted now and then by snow storms. “We’re at approximately four days per second.”

“Processing load at one ten-percent of capacity.” Plenko said. “Without a rewind button, we better not go too fast and risk missing something important.”

The midnight landscape had gone oddly still. Even more odd was the moon, which appeared to drift slowly in reverse of its normal progression. As it crept from west to east, the lunar disc smoothly cycled through its phases from full to crescent to dark and back again.

“Is the simulation malfunctioning?” Messiah asked.

“It’s a visual artifact similar to the rotors on a helicopter appearing to slow and then move in reverse at a certain speed.”

She typed a bit of code into her screen. “Saim, I’m going to block the helmet’s external feed so we can have some privacy.”

“This film sucks,” the gruff Turk replied. “I was hoping you’d forget we were watching and — ”

Messiah cut the external visual and audio feed. She waved away the controls, then turned to Plenko. “I have to tell you something,” she said. “From the moment I first saw you, I fell in love with you.”

“You called me a crippled freak because you loved me?”

“When I saw you that first time, I was unprepared for what I’d feel. I didn’t think I was capable of love. It surprised me, and it terrified me.” She averted her eyes. “You have to understand, I’ve been lonely for so long . . .”

He felt the pull of her. Her beauty, intelligence, and his own desperate loneliness. Was he also afraid? “What are you hiding from me?”

A tear formed in the corner of her eye. “There are things I can’t tell you, but please understand that — ”

“How can you say you love me and not tell me the truth?”

Instead of replying, she pressed her body against his, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

The feel of her, the smell of her, and the taste of her lips flipped a switch somewhere in the most primal regions of his brain.

Billions of years of immortal genes had programed him with this one overriding prime directive. Reproduce at all costs. It was the single act that mattered to his double-helix masters. Body, brain, culture, music, science, art — all had evolved in service to this single act that every one of his ancestors had carried out in an unbroken chain stretching back to that first founder of all life on the planet.

A rush of dopamine and serotonin washed over him. In that moment, he was no different than any drug addict desperate for a fix. He embraced her with instinctual, joyful abandon. For the first time in his life, he felt fully alive.

Afterward, Messiah lay across his naked chest with her eyes closed. “Saim was right, you know. This was my first time. Even my first kiss.”

“Me too, of course,” he said.

She opened her eyes and gazed at his moonlit face. “Is something wrong?”

He looked at her wondrous eyes and smiled. “Only that I wish I never had to return to — ”

Something moved in the periphery of his vision and he jerked his head to the left.

Messiah followed his gaze. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw something vanish over the ridge. It almost looked like . . .”

“Looked like what?”

He blinked his eyes to clear them. “It must have been a trick of the moonlight.”

“Even if something could live at this altitude, it’s entire life cycle would flash by too fast for us to see it at this processor speed.”

“The same with any tracks in the snow, I suppose.” He began pulling on his clothes. “How many years have passed?

She stood, stretched her lithe body in the moonlight, and summoned her screen. “Approximately eight-hundred years and counting.” In the upper right corner of her display, a red warning light flashed. She pressed it and said, “This better be important, Saim.”

The Turk’s voice was clipped and tense. “The drone war has escalated to a full-on World War.”

“Damn it!” Messiah said.

Part Four — Return to Eden

The two demigods took to the sky.

Messiah dialed the simulation back to normal speed as they flew northwest. They could have gone anywhere in the world, but it felt appropriate to return to the starting point of their creation.

Once clear of the mountains, walled settlements nestled between vast fields of crops and pastures thick with cattle, goats, sheep, and horses. Here and there, long caravans crept along sinuous trade routes, and sailing vessels plied rivers and lakes.

“They’ve invented agriculture a lot faster than our ancestors,” Plenko observed.

When they reached the confluence of the two rivers where they’d made Original Adam, Messiah said, “Let’s go into stealth mode and have a closer look.”

A few swipes of their controls turned them invisible to the locals. They descended toward a walled city and landed in a crowded market resembling something from the middle ages.

“They’re shorter and plainer than their ancestors,” Plenko said.

“I suppose we should have expected that with sexual selection focused on intelligence rather than looks.”

Even though everyone in the square had identical brown-toned skin, those with the red marks on their foreheads — both male and female — wore collars, some with chains attached like a leash. A few had their feet hobbled with additional shackles as they labored at various manual tasks.

The unmarked citizens walked with aristocratic bearings, usually with at least one collared servant as a porter. This fortunate upperclass wore swords as an outward symbol of their power within the bifurcated social order.

“Such extreme stratification is a bit surprising,” Plenko said, “given the fact that each generation of slave and master must all be born into families of above-average parents.”

“It reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha,” Messiah said. “She inherited her father’s slave mistress and all six of her own half-siblings.”

Plenko stopped in front of a tearful slave-woman being auctioned off to a gathering of unmarked aristocrats. “I can’t help thinking of Martha’s youngest half-sister, Sally, becoming Jefferson’s property, then mistress, after his wife’s death.”

“She even bore him six children that remained his property until his death, none of which he ever admitted were his.” Messiah’s eyes lost their focus. “Sally was quite beautiful, you know. With eyes eerily similar to Martha’s.”

“How could you know that?” Plenko asked. “There’s no photographs, paintings, or written descriptions of what her eyes looked like.”

Messiah looked away. “That’s just how I imagine her.”

A distant chant caused everyone in the market to pause. The upper caste all smiled, while the slaves slumped a little lower.

Guided by the sound, Plenko and Messiah made their way invisibly toward the town’s central square. A gathering of several hundred young people swayed back and forth, chanting, “Commence the Catechism! Commence the Catechism!”

“It looks like a college graduation,” Plenko said.

Not a single youthful forehead was marred by the red blotch.

At the front of the crowd, six elderly men and woman stood on a raised platform. The oldest man stepped forward and raised a hand. The youthful crowd fell silent. “By the grace of our goddess and creator, I ask if you are ready to undergo your right of passage?”

The youthful crowd raised their hands in supplication to towering statue perched atop a stone cathedral at the front of the square. “We give ourselves body and mind to the goddess Messiah!” they said in unison.

“Holy crap,” Plenko said as he gazed up at the statue of a black goddess. “They remember you after eight hundred centuries!”

“I wonder, how far does this cultural memory extend beyond this region that saw us in person?” she said.

The old man raised his hand once more, and the crowd stilled. Drawing a deep breath, he called out, “What is the square root of 38,992?”

Everyone in the crowd went still, as if in a trance. After two seconds, a few began writing in chalk on a small slate in their hands, shielding it from their neighbors. After ten more seconds, the old man shouted, “Time!”

All the young men and women held up their slates. Except for a dozen intellectual laggards, every slate displayed the number 197.463920755.

Plenko’s mouth dropped open.

“Can you do that?” Messiah asked.

“I don’t think any mathematician in the real world could do such a calculation in their head with such speed.”

The old man recited the correct answer and all the winners cheered while the unfortunate dozen failures shuffled, heads lowered, to the opposite end of the square. The dreaded red stain that would mark them for the rest of their lives was already forming on their foreheads.

One after the other, the elders took turns reciting their riddles. Some were logic problems, some geometry or math challenges, and others were complex memory tests. Each round grew in difficulty.

After twenty-one rounds had been completed, the gathering of losers equaled that of the winners.

“The Catechism has been consummated!” shouted the oldest woman on the stand.

A cheer went up for the crowd of above-averaged while those found lacking stood in silent shock.

“I wasn’t able to answer a single question,” Messiah said.

“Neither was I,” Plenko admitted. “If we’d been in that group, we’d now be slaves.”

“It’s incredible that the simulation has so rapidly evolved artificial humans more intelligent than we are.”

“Any computer can solve brute force mathematical calculations and memory exercises better than a human. The real test is abstract thinking and creative problem solving that requires a holistic integration of acquired knowledge, reasoning, logic, and adaptive learning.”

“You’re referring to human intuition?” Messiah asked.

“Call it what you will, but I see no evidence that these simulations have achieved our level of reasoning.”

The sorting done, soldiers began placing collars around the necks of the newly-minted slaves. A few resisted and were beaten as an example to the rest. Most of them simply cried as their hoped-for future vanished.

Three youthful winners each rushed to embrace three sobbing loser in the lower group. Whether the three couples were young lovers or siblings or close friends was hard to tell. Soldiers firmly escorted them back to their own side of the square.

The commanding officer announced, “The servitude auction for those who failed the catechism will occur in three months’ time once they’ve undergone reeducation. Each of you winners will be granted one slave as your personal servant to keep, sell, or do with what you will.”

Plenko’s hands balled into fists. “Greater intelligence clearly doesn’t create greater morality.” A wave of nausea caused him to sway unsteadily. “The experiment is a failure.”

“Look at how long it took us to end slavery,” Messiah replied. “Their continued intellectual evolution might cause them to eventually surpass our moral — ”

“I don’t want to be a part of this.” Plenko summoned his control screen and reached for the Exit Simulation button.

Messiah grasped his hand. “At least time-jump ahead with me and see if — ”

The blaring of horns atop the city walls caused everyone in the square to freeze. When the horns silenced, a distant hum reached their ears.

All the soldiers rushed from the square toward the city walls, leaving the new slaves chained to posts. As the buzzing grew in volume, the rest of the crowd gazed toward the sky in confusion.

Plenko’s brow contracted. “It almost sounds like — ”

A low-flying prop plane flashed over the wall, followed by dozens more. Each had three wings stacked one atop the other like the famous Red Barron’s Fokker of World War I, except the wings were tapered like a bird’s.

The crowd gapped, unsure if these oddities represented a threat.

Then the pilots tossed large canisters out of the open cockpits.

“Run!” Plenko shouted, forgetting no one could hear him.

The metal tubes hit the ground and exploded like primitive grenades, tearing through flesh with devastating effect.

Screams of pain and terror erupted throughout the square. Those not chained to posts stampeded toward buildings for shelter. More and more planes passed over, lobbing bombs of various sizes.

Plenko covered his ears to shut out the cries of agony.

The next wave of planes dropped incendiary bombs on rooftops. Flames engulfed the wooden structures and men, women, and children fled the infernos. Crowds ran blindly through the streets in an attempt to find refuge. The slaves yanked hopelessly at their chains to free themselves.

Archers atop the walls shot arrows ineffectually at the circling swarms of attackers.

Messiah took it all in with what seemed a strangely detached calm. “It’s astonishing that they invented mechanical flight in such a short — ”

A roar like a hundred charging elephants shook the sky. Flames engulfed two of the planes. Their canvas wings vanished in a brilliant flash of light, sending them hurtling toward the town below. One plane hit the church spire and sent the statue of the black goddess plummeting to the stone square. It shattered with the force of a bomb. The other plane exploded through the roof of a granary, setting it ablaze.

A black dragon the size of a T-Rex flashed over the town. It banked sharply and bore down on another plane. The pilot pushed the plane into an emergency dive, but massive claws ripped it apart, sending its remnants raining to the ground.

A cheer arose from the citizens as a white dragon appeared.

Plenko pointed at the two beasts. “They have human riders on their backs.”

The dragons destroyed two more of the airborne invaders before the counterattack came. A squad of two dozen triple-wing planes dove toward the dragons in a v-formation.

“Are they intending to ram them?” Messiah asked.

The two dragons wheeled around and flew ponderously upward to meet the planes head-on. Just as flames erupted from their mouths, the machine guns mounted in front of the pilots opened up.

“They’ve already invented prop-synchronized machine guns!” Messiah said in astonishment.

The black dragon roared in pain then exploded in a fireball like a hydrogen-filled zeppelin. The white dragon simply went limp and plummeted to the city below, destroying a building and setting off an enormous explosion.

Townspeople ran through the streets, screaming in horror with nowhere to hide.

The burning town rapidly deconstructed under the bombardment.

Tears streamed down Plenko’s face as he witnessed the hemoclysm on every side. On and on it went with mechanistic efficiency. Mothers wailed over the bodies of dead children. Blood ran in the gutters.

“We have to stop this!” he screamed.

As if in answer to his plea, the bombardment ceased.

Plenko made himself visible and began applying a tourniquet to a woman with one of her legs blown off.

Messiah materialized beside him. “Remember, everything you’re seeing is only a computer simulation. A CGI illusion no different than an advanced video game.”

“Please, help my child,” the legless woman begged, pointing to a dying little girl lying a few yards away from her.

“Can you help her?” Plenko asked Messiah. Tears streaked his face, and his hands tremored as he treated the mother.

Messiah walked to the little girl, placed her right palm against the child’s forehead, and said, “Restore to default.” The open wound on the little girl’s stomach instantly sealed. The child ran to her dying mother and embraced her.

In an attempt to speak, the mother coughed up blood.

“How did you do that?” Plenko asked.

“With a voice-activated preset I created.” She summoned her tablet and made a few gestures. “I’ve passed it to your avatar as well.”

Plenko placed his right palm on the dying mother’s forehead. “Restore to default.”

A new leg appeared on the woman’s body, and she stopped coughing up blood. The mother embraced her daughter. At the sight of Messiah, her eyes widened. “You’re the burnt-faced Goddess.” the woman said in awe. “Our Messiah has returned in our time of greatest need!”

A crowd of desperate citizens heard the words, saw the black goddess, and rushed to them.

“Praise be to Messiah!” they shouted, “Our creator has returned to destroy our enemies!”

A young boy pointed at Plenko. “Look at his pale skin of death! It’s Lucifer, the evil one!” The crowd cringed back, begging Messiah to protect them from Lucifer.

The dying and wounded citizens dragged their shattered bodies forward, begging Messiah to heal them.

But their goddess simply stood passively, leaving it to Lucifer to place his hand on forehead after forehead and speak the healing incantation. As word spread, fear of Lucifer transformed to hope. Soon, a mob of surrounded him, begging to be healed.

The first wave of enemy soldiers entered the city with rifles at the ready. The defenders, armed only with spears, swords, and arrows, were helpless to hold them back.

“Save us, oh great and powerful ones!” the people shouted to the two returned gods.

Messiah glanced at Plenko with a raised eyebrow. “I’ll do whatever you want me to.”

Plenko closed his eyes, his breath coming in gasps. “It’s not real,” he said. “It’s not real.” Then, his body went rigid and he fell to the ground.

Messiah rushed to him as the enemy soldiers opened fire on the crowd.

A full seizure overwhelmed Plenko.

“Saim!” Messiah shouted, “I think he’s having a grand mal episode.”

“The same is happening to his real body,” Saim replied. “Should I pull him out of the simulation?”

“The shock might make things worse,” Messiah said. “Have the nurse give him a dose of midazolam.”

Summoning her control screen, Messiah froze the simulation. Bullets hovered in mid-air. The dying lay with mouths opened in death-screams like some bizarre modernist tableau.

“His heart rate and brain activity are normalizing,” Saim said.

After several minutes, Plenko’s eyes fluttered opened and looked up at Messiah cradling him in her arms. “I dreamed that Theo turned into a winged lion and we rode him from galaxy to galaxy.”

“I was afraid I might lose you,” she said, then kissed him gently on the forehead. After a few moments, she helped him stand.

Plenko gazed at the frozen scene of death surrounding him. His eyes darkened with sadness.

She took his hand. “You should leave while I continue the experiment on my own.”

He shook his head. “I’ve hidden from the truth for too long.”

“Not to rush you or anything,” Saim said, “but President Kane has just tweeted this ultimatum: ‘Evil Asian Axis Powers, withdraw your evil socialist soldiers immediately, or I will surprise you with a totally devasting secret preemptive nuclear strike that will completely surprise you and be the greatest and most furious military victory of all time in the history of the world.’ ”

“He’s practically forcing them to strike first,” Plenko said. “Is he really that stupid?”

“I’m just the messenger,” Saim said.

Messiah resumed the simulation at ten times normal speed, and the assault continued in fast-forward.

They resumed their invisibility as the rest of the enemy troops arrived in steam-powered transports, wielding rifles and primitive version of flamethrowers against the few remaining archers and swordsmen. The increased speed made it seem more like a film than reality, which made it easier for Plenko to handle.

Messiah increased time to a day a second. Plenko closed his eyes and counted to sixty before reopening them.

Scattered bones and skulls littered the cratered streets. Not a building was left standing. The summer turned to winter and snow enveloped the dead with a pale shroud.

“Maybe their more logical minds will expose the futility of war before the threat becomes existential,” Messiah said.

Plenko took a shuddering breath and let it out slowly. “Okay, let’s see this to the end.”

They rose into the sky and time-hopped forward in bursts. Vast cities rose across the globe with technology advancing at an astonishing pace — alongside an increase in cruelty and continuous warfare.

“It reminds me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” Messiah said. “A heartless totalitarian nightmare.”

“So much for eugenics.”

“Even a negative result advances our knowledge,” Messiah said in that maddeningly clinical tone of hers.

The first mushroom cloud bloomed over a city in the southern hemisphere. In the following decade, a series of global thermonuclear conflicts wiped out ninety-five percent of the human population and turned much of the planet into a radioactive wasteland.

Messiah moved her index finger to the Delete Simulation icon on her screen. “I guess it’s back to the drawing board.”

Plenko looked away. “I suppose it would be wrong to let them suffer any longer.”

Saim’s voice interrupted them. “I think you might want to hold off a moment so we can discuss something in person.”

“We can hear you just as well here as in the real world,” Messiah replied.

“Well . . .” Saim said with clear discomfort in his tone, “we’ve just learned that your helmet’s audio and visual feeds are being picked up by the NSA.”

“What?!” Plenko hit the Exit Simulation icon atop his virtual screen and winced at the reality slap of returning to his real body. Layers of pain twisted through his limbs like a prisoner being returned to an Iron Maiden.

Technicians raced about the laboratory, shouting orders, checking instruments, and looking generally terrified. Plenko’s nurse helped him remove his helmet.

“Have we been hacked?” Plenko asked Saim.

“It seems the sphere is beaming your helmet’s signal at a frequency the government’s eavesdropping software has been recording from the start, though they at first though it was a television show.”

“Maybe we could build a shield around the building?” a technician suggested.

Messiah opened her eyes and removed her helmet. “Too late for that. What I want to know is what the president will do when he finds out.”

“You can ask him yourself,” Saim said. “He’s on hold, demanding to talk to both of you.”

Part Five — Divya the Brilliant

“Have you no patriotism?” President Kane shouted. “My science advisers tell me that this thing you’ve invented could help defeat all these freedom-hating godless socialist enemies that want to destroy our way of life!”

“Mr. President,” Plenko said. “I’m against using my scientific breakthroughs to accelerate the planet’s destru — ”

“Don’t you believe in putting your country first?” the draft-dodging politician demanded indignantly.

“Mr. President, I believe in putting humanity first.”

“Are you some sort of bleeding-heart liberal Trotskyite with delusional fantasies of a job-killing commune paradise? If you force my hand, I will have no choice but to order the military to — ”

Plenko slammed his twisted hand against the armrest of his wheelchair. “Listen to me, you science-denying fascist demagogic imbecile! If one soldier sets foot inside our perimeter fence, this entire compound will vanish in an antimatter detonation that will vaporize an entire square mile of red-state farmland.”

Before the buffoon of a president could reply, Plenko pressed End Call on his computer screen.

Everyone in the laboratory looked around nervously.

“Our mission hasn’t changed,” Messiah said. “We must try to find a solution regardless of who’s watching.” She reached a finger toward the Delete Simulation icon on her computer screen.

“Hold on!” Saim said. “I’m getting a huge spike in processor activity near the north pole.”

“A new weapon?” Plenko asked.

Messiah pulled on her helmet. “Only one way to find out.”

Plenko did the same.

Making themselves invisible to the virtual inhabitants, the two quantum explorers inserted their avatars into an underground cavern where the anomaly originated. Several dozen technicians manned computer workstations eerily reminiscent of their own laboratory.

“Holy shit,” Messiah said, pointing a semi-transparent finger at a spinning sphere that looked almost exactly like the one they’d constructed.

A middle-aged woman stood in front of the sphere, facing those at their workstations. She wore a simple white lab coat, was about five feet tall, had a left leg an inch shorter than the right, and graying hair gathered into a grandmotherly bun. She was so wholly unremarkable that Messiah and Plenko probably wouldn’t have given her a second glance, if not for the fact that everyone else in the cavern gazed at her as one might a beloved queen, saint, or prophetess.

A small camera-drone hovered a few yards in front of her, broadcasting her words to the surviving simulants around the planet.

“The world refers to me as Divya the Brilliant because of my scientific achievements,” she said. “I once felt pride in creating new and better weapons to help my small nation gain a technological edge over its enemies.” She shook her head sadly. “How completely ignorant I was.”

Everyone in the room listened with rapt attention.

“Did you notice their foreheads?” Messiah asked Plenko.

“Now that you mention it, there’s as many with the red mark as those without it, and they seem to be treating each other as equals.”

Messiah moved closer to a man and a woman holding hands as they listened to their diminutive leader. The man had a red mark on his forehead, but the woman did not.

“How is this possible?” Messiah asked.

Divya continued addressing her world, unaware of the presence of her invisible creators. “Every culture throughout human history has preached some version of the saying: Treat others as you would have others treat you. And yet, despite this declaration of reciprocal morality, humans have long practiced slavery, torture, genocide, and all manner of vile atrocities against one another.

Divya gazed into the camera with the patience of a parent instructing her beloved children. “Let’s try an experiment and add a phrase to this universal doctrine of reciprocal morality that may resolve the contradiction.

“Treat others [of your tribe] as you would have others [of your tribe] treat you.

“Notice how those additional three words — ‘of your tribe’ — explains the warfare between nations, religions, and our long history of enslaving our own brothers and sisters. It’s what allowed me to feel pride in helping to create the immoral weapons that have brought us to the brink of annihilation.”

Plenko shook his head. “It’s so obvious, once she points it out.”

Messiah’s midnight eyes turned to him with a strange intensity. “I once met a man with equally profound insights as this woman, though he never did all those silly magic tricks people later claimed.”

“Are you talking about who I think you are?” Plenko asked.

Before he could decipher her enigmatic expression, she looked away.

Divya spread her hands toward the hovering camera. “The challenge I faced was finding a way of expanding our innate tribal urge of reciprocal morality beyond the narrow boundaries evolution had shackled us with.”

Plenko frowned. “She’s speaking as if she’s already done it.”

“Once I identified the specific genes involved, I injected myself with an experimental virus that updated my DNA’s operating code.” Divya’s eyes widened, as if seeing a miraculous vision. “The empathy centers of my brain gradually expanded to the point that alleviating suffering has become a pleasure like nothing I’ve experienced in my life, whereas injustice or pain in another living creature causes me intense physical and emotional agony.”

Plenko felt the simulated hairs along the nape of his neck stiffen at the thought of reengineering one’s own instincts.

Divya descended the dais and walked among her devotees, touching each on their forehead — marked and unmarked alike. “All of my followers here have undergone my gene-editing treatment. We’ve replaced our selfish genes with selfless genes. Among us, sexual attraction is no longer driven by intelligence, but by kindness. Marked and unmarked are able to live together as equals, fall in love, and create a new generation with empathy as our highest biological urge.”

Messiah looked at her in awe. “She seeks to free her entire species from the instincts we programed them with.”

“We could do the same in the real world by secretly releasing a gene-editing virus to upgrade human empathy without anyone — ”

Saim’s voice interrupted. “Remember how I mentioned that little thing about the NSA and President Kane listening in on your live feed?”

Plenko stiffened. “I was, ah, joking, of course. Altering human genes without permission would be completely unethical.”

Divya motioned to the sphere behind her. “I‘ve invented this quantum processor to simulate the effects of my genetic upgrades in the hopes of convincing all of you watching that this is our only chance to save ourselves.”

Divya and two other scientists — an unmarked woman and a marked man — settled into three chairs. Nurses helped them strap on sensors and virtual-interface helmets.

Messiah approached the sphere. “I wonder if we’ll be able to follow them into her simulation?”

“Her quantum sphere is a simulation as much as anything in this world,” Plenko said, “so we should have no problem viewing whatever it simulates.”

The moment Divya closed her eyes, they followed her virtual signal to what looked like an Icelandic version of the Garden of Eden. Divya and her two companions wore their same drab lab coats, and hadn’t upgraded their physical appearance one bit.

After populating her simulated world with a few million ultra-empathetic human simulants, Divya turned to her virtual camera and said, “Before I increase the simulation speed to jump forward in time, we’ll make ourselves invisible so we don’t cause any confusing anomalies for the simulants of this world.”

Plenko dope-slapped his forehead. “I didn’t even consider accidentally creating anomalies!”

Divya and her team became semi-transparent. She then inputted a simulation speed of one-year-a-second. When she pressed the ‘Apply’ button, all three froze in place.

“Have they crashed the simulation?” Messiah asked.

Plenko motioned to the other simulants moving about normally. “We’re witnessing a perceptual time dilation.”

“I’m a hacker, not a physicist.”

“When we speed up the simulation, each moment in time is still calculated, only faster than our physical brains can keep up with, so everything appears to speed. From the point-of-view of the simulants, whose perceptions speed up along with the simulation, our avatars would appear to slow down, creating the anomaly Divya was careful to avoid by making herself invisible.”

“Like the occupants of a high-speed rocket appearing to slow down relative to someone on the Earth?”

“That’s right,” he said. “The key factor to keep in mind when discussing Einstein’s principles of Special Relativity is that the rocket can never exceed the speed of light since it would require slowing space-time to the point of moving in reverse, which would create a causal loop paradox that’s logically impossible.”

Messiah considered this for a moment then said, “In order to comply with her command to move forward in time at a year per second, the computer slowed her perceptions to create the illusion of time speeding up from her point of view?”

Plenko smiled like a proud teacher. “Unlike our own perception of time, which is governed by the chemical and electrical speed of our physical brains.”

Messiah summoned her control panel and increased the speed of the simulation. Divya and her companions reanimated gradually to normal speed. In contrast, the world around them sped forward at a year a second. Trees rose from saplings to giants, then vanished in the flash of a forest fire before starting the process again.

As the centuries sped past, Divya and her companions took to the sky and surveyed the planet. Now and then, she’d slow time to normal for a closer look at the effects of evolution based on empathy.

Her simulants adopted a vegetarian diet to avoid the trauma of killing animals. Violence entirely vanished, both inside and outside of one’s tribe. Simple clubs and stones sufficed to defend themselves from predatory animals.

“Without the driving pressure of warfare,” Messiah observed, “they’re not progressing beyond a scavenger-gatherer lifestyle.”

“I rather like the idea of living in harmony with nature,” Plenko said.

“That’s fine for a world with only a few million humans, but how does that help solve our world’s problems?”

As the simulation reached the five-thousand-year mark, a few tribes suddenly began hunting animals.

“I should have anticipated this,” Divya said. “In each generation, a few of the most peaceful individuals are killed by predators, nudging the gene pool ever so slightly toward aggression. Over thousands of years, those at the edge of the curve lost just enough empathy to kill for meat. The calorie gain gave them a reproductive edge that initiated an evolutionary feedback loop favoring aggression.”

In a mere thirty generations, the genetically enhanced empathy genes Divya had engineered atrophied to the point where warfare and technology resumed the familiar path of the two worlds that had gone before it.

“It seems like fate,” Messiah said.

“Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?”

“Since warfare and aggression are necessary to drive technological advancement,” Messiah said without hesitation, “only violence-prone civilizations will gain the means of off-world colonization, but will likely self-annihilate before achieving it because of these same violent tendencies.”

“I forgot about your tattoo of the Drake Equation,” he said. “Of course you’d be familiar with Sagan’s theory of why we don’t see evidence of advanced alien life in the universe.”

Messiah grinned. “I wondered if you’d recognized it when we first met.”

Divya’s two companions burst into tears at the failure.

“Go back to the laboratory,” Divya said through clenched teeth. “I’ll continue the experiment on my own.”

Her two companions vanished.

Divya summoned her control panel and began typing.

“Can you tell what she’s doing?” Plenko asked.

Messiah studied the code Divya was creating. “She restoring everyone’s empathy settings to the original coding of their ancestors.”

“She must hope that a return to reciprocal morality at this apex of technology will allow humanity to achieve off-world colonization.”

Messiah nodded. “It could be exactly the solution we’re looking for. A way of overcoming Sagan’s catch-22.”

Within moments of Divya’s changes, every war on the planet ceased. Soldiers, civilians, and even policemen methodically destroyed their guns. All weapons of mass destruction were dismantled without the need of a formal treaty or any chain of command ordering it. Would one wait for someone to tell them to extinguish a fire on a bus filled with children?

Once the ticking timebombs were diffused, a massive wave of wealth redistribution swept the planet as the rich found more pleasure in giving their excess property to the poor than in hoarding it. The world economy surged as money flowed into the hands of those who would spend it, rather than sequester it. Mansions were converted to housing for the homeless, country clubs became community parks. Walls were torn down, and national boarders rendered meaningless. All of humanity celebrated the dawn of a new era of peace and equality.

Various gods were given credit for the miraculous change, which was not far off the mark.

Divya drank it all in with a joyous triumph.

“It’s actually working,” Messiah marveled. “This might be the evidence we need to — ”

“I wouldn’t declare victory yet,” Plenko said.

“Don’t you get tired of being cynical?” she asked.

“Skepticism isn’t the same as cynicism.”

“Do you even believe in love?” she asked suddenly, the accusation in her tone slicing into him.

“I loved my mother,” he said. “She never hid the truth from me.”

“Except who your father was, right?”

His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about my father?”

She met his eyes with wounded defiance, but said nothing more.

The utopian honeymoon of Divya’s newest experiment lasted until the next harvest. In a world of equality, why would anyone toil twelve hours a day in the blazing summer heat when others did not? Many farmers walked away from their rotting fields of produce and moved to the communal free housing in the cities to pursue a life of leisure, music, art, and fellowship.

The human drive to labor, innovate, and take chances seemed inextricably bound to the biological urges of greed, status, competition, and fear.

Economic growth halted then withered in a declining feedback loop culminating in a global famine. Those with the greatest empathy died of starvation as they gave their food to others. The few with a slightly less acute sense of empathy survived by growing their own food in secret and not sharing it. They suffered enormous guilt, but lived to pass on their genes.

Generation after generation, selfish genes supplanted selfless genes. More and more people went back to work to keep their families from starving, even while those less able perished. Evolution once again molded humanity into the most efficient survival machine possible. The stratification of haves and have-nots widened year after year.

Driven by a growing economy and competition, scientific advancement recommenced. Coalitions of towns consolidated into larger and larger groups of trading partners and finally into nation states. Warfare resumed and led to the blueprints of nuclear weapons being dusted off.

Seeing the cycle nearing its unvarying denouement, Divya left her failed experiment and sat alone in her laboratory, awaiting the inevitable, both for her simulation and her own world.

“Fine, you were right,” Messiah said. “I suppose we should put both simulations out of their misery and try something el — .”

Saim’s voice interrupted. “You’re not going to believe this, but we’ve detected another sphere.”

Divya’s technicians saw the anomaly at the same time. She reentered the simulation she’d created and arrived at an underground installation in Asia. This new sphere came with its own swarm of technicians, none of which could see Divya, who, in turn, couldn’t see Plenko or Messiah.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Messiah said. “How many simulations within simulations can our computer support before crashing?”

Divya stood perfectly still for a long moment, as if thinking through the implications. Then she looked up and said, “I demand that my creators show themselves!”

“Damn, she’s smart,” Messiah said. “She’s realized her world is a simulation.”

“Maybe she’s only guessing.”

“I know you’re out there!” Divya shouted. “I see now that sexual selection based almost entirely on intelligence could never have arisen naturally. Therefore, my world must have been intelligently designed as an experiment.”

“An impressive demonstration of inductive logic,” Plenko remarked.

“Would we be doing her a favor or a cruelty by telling her?” Messiah wondered.

Divya crossed her arms. “I refuse to participate in your experiment any longer unless you reveal yourself.”

With no other choice remaining, Plenko and Messiah made themselves visible to their star student.

Divya walked up to Messiah and touched her arm. “So, the ancient tales of a black Goddess named Messiah are true.”

Messiah nodded. “We are your creators.”

“And you’re Lucifer?”

“Actually, my name’s Plenko.”

“Is everyone in the real world as physically perfect as you?”

“We’ve made a few minor improvements,” Plenko said.

Divya frowned. “You created my ancestors to rapidly evolve to a higher intelligence in the hopes of finding a solution to your own world’s imminent self-destruction?”

Surprised, Messiah nodded.

The panicked voice of Albert, Divya’s communication tech, said, “Several dozen nuclear missiles are heading directly toward our laboratory!”

“I assume you can transport us there?” Divya asked her creators.

After a couple of selections on Messiah’s control screen, all three of them appeared on the surface at the entrance to her underground laboratory.

Six contrails extending from missiles streaking toward them.

“Do you know why they were launched, Albert?” Divya asked.

Albert’s voice quavered as he answered. “A viral internet conspiracy theory claims that our experiment is part of a Luciferian cult to drink the blood of children imprisoned beneath our laboratory.”

“I guess greater intelligence hasn’t cured paranoia,” Plenko said.

Divya looked at them. “Erasing my simulation and starting fresh would be a logical choice . . . unless you consider us living beings.”

“One minute to impact,” Albert said.

Messiah hesitated, then said, “Of course we consider you alive.”

“In that case, might I suggest erasing all weapons of mass destruction from my simulation.”

Messiah began furiously typing code into her control panel.

“Forty seconds to impact.”

Messiah’s fingers flew across the screen faster than seemed possible.”

“Twenty seconds to impact.”

The missiles arced toward them, looming larger and larger with each second.

Messiah bit her lip. “This is more complicated than I — ”

“Ten — nine — eight — ”

Divya closed her eyes, accepting her fate with a yogi-like calm.

“Seven — six — five — four — ”

“There’s not enough time!” Messiah shouted in desperation.

“Time . . ?” Plenko said. “I’m such an idiot!”

“Three — two — ”

“NO!” Messiah screamed.

Everything around them froze, including Divya.

The six missiles hung suspended fifty feet in the air above them. Each was the size of a large bus.

Messiah glanced at Plenko with his finger on the time dial of his control panel. “Why didn’t I think of that?” she asked.

“I’m more surprised that Divya didn’t think of it,” Plenko said, “seeing as how she’s so brilliant and all.”

Messiah smiled. “I’ll admit that you have your moments.” She continued typing and finally pressed the apply code symbol.

The six intercontinental ballistic missiles vanished, leaving only the long trails of spent rocket fuel hanging in the virtual sky.

Plenko unfroze the simulation.

“One!”

Silence.

Divya opened her eyes and glanced at Plenko’s screen with the time controls still visible. “You’re smarter than I would have suspected from your superficial good looks.”

Plenko laughed.

“All weapons of mass destruction across the entire planet have been deleted from your simulation,” Messiah said. “If any new ones are built, they will vanish the moment they’re finished.”

“Too bad we can’t do the same in the real world,” Plenko said.

“Will you allow me to try and find a solution you can use?” Divya asked.

“Absolutely,” Messiah said.

“How imminent is your world’s destruction?”

“What’s the latest, Saim?” Messiah asked.

“We’ve just now detected a swarm of President Kane’s robot-drones heading toward the laboratory,” Saim said. “ETA is about fifteen minutes.”

Messiah placed a hand on Divya’s shoulder. “I could copy and paste your code a few times so there’d be more of you to shoulder the burden.”

“It’s hard enough knowing I’m not real and could be deleted at any moment without having to compete against myself.”

“We can speed up your simulation,” Plenko said, “and let you create a time dilation with a time dilation.”

Divya nodded. “Promise me you won’t stop the simulation, no matter what.”

“Okay,” Messiah said. “We have nothing left to lose anyway.”

As Divya passed Plenko on the way to her underground laboratory, she whispered to him, “Be careful. I sense she’s hiding something, though I don’t know what.”

Part Five — Turtles All the Way Down

Plenko and Messiah returned to their real bodies and accelerated Divya’s simulation. The processor load slowly rose higher and higher.

Everyone in the barn listened to Saim announce updates of the drone’s ETA.

“Twelve minutes to go.”

“Eleven minutes . . . ”

“Ten minutes . . .”

A blaring alarm sounded.

“Have the drones arrive early?” Messiah asked.

Saim spoke like someone seeing a ghost. “The processor has jumped to one hundred and two percent capacity!”

Plenko reached for the controls on his screen, but Messiah stopped him. “We promised her.”

The entire laboratory waited for the inevitable crash that would mark the end of all the billions of simulants within the sphere, and possibly start an antimatter chain reaction that would kill them as well.

“160 percent of capacity,” Saim announced.

“If that’s accurate,” Plenko said, “we have no way of knowing what the upper limit is.”

“Eight minutes until the drones arrive.”

Messiah began putting on her helmet. “Divya must have gambled that the processor could handle more.”

Plenko fasten his helmet. “The percentage is increasing exponentially.”

The readout climbed to a thousand percent, then a hundred thousand, then a million . . .

“How is that possible?” Messiah asked.

“Seven minutes until the drones arrive.”

Plenko and Messiah closed their eyes and appeared in a laboratory the size of a football field. One entire wall was open to a nighttime desert landscape. A ten-story sphere hung suspended over the sand, sage, and sequoias. A distant mountain range poked over the horizon.

They stayed invisible to everyone but Divya. Streaks of gray mottled her unkempt hair, and she’d become almost skeletal from lack of sleep and nourishment. Despite this, she smiled at the sight of her creators. “I tried the one remaining experiment left.”

Plenko gazed at the mammoth sphere. “Which is what?”

“Why don’t I show you?”

They found themselves floating in a vastness of intersecting nebulae and galaxies.

“Welcome to my singularity,” Divya said.

Plenko reached for a spiral galaxy and his hand passed through it. “You simulated an entire universe?”

Messiah’s eyes filled with the reflected universe. “It’s beautiful!”

Divya beamed with pride. “I initiated the simulation from the moment of space-time’s rapid inflation, then through the formation of the first giant crucibles of heavier elements, supernova seeding the next generation of galaxies — all of it.”

Plenko shook his head in disbelief. “That’s impossible for any computer to — ”

“I theorized that the nature of your quantum processor wasn’t what you assumed. What if the simulation, rather than merely creating virtual worlds, is transforming this blueprint into actual reality?”

“How could we speed up time and erase missiles, if it’s not a computer simulation?” Plenko asked.

“Maybe they’re both,” Divya said. “Like the dual nature of light as a wave and a particle. Every universe a quantum simulation in an infinite chain of simulations extending backward through an infinity of worlds.”

“Turtles all the way down,” Messiah whispered.

Divya frowned. “What do turtles have to do with — ”

“It’s our world’s shorthand for the problem of infinite regress,” Plenko said.

“Are you seeing this, Saim?” Messiah called out.

The reply was barely audible. “I can hear some of . . . you say, but no . . . images . . .”

“How much time is left before the drones arrive?”

“Two min — ”

Saim’s voice cut out.

Plenko tried to exit the simulation, but without effect. “Maybe the drones arrived early.”

“They can’t have destroyed the sphere, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Messiah said.

“Until someone removes your helmets, it seems you’re trapped here,” Divya said. “So, you might as well see what I’ve created.”

Divya took each of their hands, and transported them to a world with two suns. Beneath them, an acid green haze filtered through the ruins of a strangely organic-shaped city. She guided them through twisted metal remains of vast buildings and machines. Here and there lay the burned skeletons of creatures that might have been a combination of crustacean and hominid.

“You simulated aliens?” Plenko asked.

“I simply let nature roll the dice a trillion more times than I could on my own.”

Plenko examined one of the skeletons, which might have stood twenty feet tall when alive. Its skull was massive, with six fingers, one of which was apposable. “You’re saying these creatures evolved intelligence on their own?”

“Other than their size, which is a result of the lower gravity of this planet, and superficial differences in looks, they were remarkably similar to humans in mental capacity, social structure, and self-annihilated themselves before achieving off-world colonization.”

“How many planets in your simulation have evolved intelligent life?” Messiah asked.

“Depending on your definition of intelligent, approximately seven hundred thousand, and counting.”

Plenko stared in shock. “Seven hundred thousand!”

Divya laughed. “There’s billions of planets with simple life, but bridging the prokaryote to eukaryote barrier is rare. The gauntlet to higher intelligence is even more difficult. Only about four thousand planets have reached the technological threshold necessary for planetary escape, and each have perished.”

“How do you keep track of them all?” Plenko asked.

“For each candidate world, I create a custom simulant to observe and report, which allows me to speed up the simulation without missing anything important. They live embedded on the world as immortals with the ability to shape-shift and blend in over millions of years.”

“Do these immortal watchers know they’re simulations?” Messiah asked.

“They know only what is necessary to carry out their tasks and no more,” Divya said. “I engineer them without emotions so they aren’t effected in the way you or I would be by such vast lifespan.”

“Our time is running out,” Plenko said. “Have you found anything that might help us?”

Divya’s eyes sparkled. “There’s one world that might hold the answer. A species eerily convergent with humans, in fact.”

The surroundings changed in the blink of an eye.

Messiah gazed around her and then staggered back. “It can’t be.”

Plenko felt his heart racing as panic built inside him.

They stood in the center of Times Square in New York City. The people, the familiar corporate logos, and even the music left no doubt. No convergent evolution could be that specific.

Divya, of course, had no way of knowing this, since she had never visited their world. “The reports I received on this planet gave me more hope than I’ve had in a long time,” she said. “But then progress stalled and drifted towards catastrophe, so I created — ”

“A living catalyst to bridge the gap,” Plenko said.

“Well . . . yes,” Divya said with a frown. “How did you — ”

“Was this human born in a miraculous fashion and horribly crippled?”

Divya nodded. “I was inspired by numerous local myths of godlike saviors born of a virgin. It was fanciful on my part, but I figured the lack of a father and the social isolation of a disability would keep his mind focused on — ”

“And you named this crippled savior after me, and even based his looks on mine?” Plenko asked.

Divya’s frown deepened. “How could you possibly — ”

Tremors crept through Plenko’s muscles. “And you imbued him with what you thought was the perfect mixture of intelligence, empathy, creativity, and every quality you thought might be necessary to nudge his species over the elusive planetary escape threshold.”

“Have you been spying on me?”

Plenko took a shuddering breath, and let it out. “I was born a fatherless crippled freak to a mother named Maria.”

Divya’s eyes widened. “How is that possible?”

Plenko moved close to her, his voice low and filled with anger. “Was killing my mother part of your strategy?”

“Her cancer was simulated chance,” Divya said in confusion.

“I don’t believe you,” Plenko said. “You killed my mother!”

“No,” Divya said. “Your mother is in the hospital, but hasn’t died yet.”

Plenko froze. “You’re saying that I’ve traveled back in . . .” He grabbed her by both shoulders. “Take me to her.”

Divya summoned her control panel, made a few selections, and they appeared beside his mother’s hospital bed, invisible to Maria and her crippled son sitting in the wheelchair on the other side of her bed.

Divya ran an arthritic hand through her graying hair. “The entire simulation is a loop?”

“Heal her,” Plenko said.

“If I change your past, you wouldn’t be here now.”

“Cure my mother, God damn it!”

Messiah swayed unsteadily. “So, every world is both first . . . and last in the continuum?”

Plenko’s bed-ridden mother labored for breath.

“If you let her die,” Plenko said to Divya, “I will erase you and everything you’ve created.”

Divya located Maria’s code on her virtual screen and began working to restore her. But then she stopped, and shook her head. “I’m locked out from changing anything.”

Messiah checked her own screen, with the same result. “By completing the circumnavigation of time and space within the loop, it’s like we’ve passed some invisible even horizon.”

Plenko shoved Divya aside and placed his right hand on his mother’s forehead. “Restore to default.”

Nothing happened.

“Restore to default!” he shouted.

His mother took a shuddering breath and gazed up into his eyes. “Plenko, my dearest love, don’t you know that no one but God can change the past?”

Then she died, just as she had before.

Plenko watched his younger self begin sobbing, but his own tears would not come a second time. An empty void opened within him. “I was destined to end up here.”

Tears glistened on Messiah’s midnight face, but it only caused his old suspicions to reignite.

Plenko summoned his screen and dialed in a specific time and place, wondering if the simulation would allow it.

The day was clear, with the sour fumes from the nearby tobacco plant filling the air. He stood outside his shack with Divya and Messiah beside him.

An elderly black woman walked slowly around the bend in the road and stopped in front of the shack. Her hair was white, and her back bent nearly double. She reached forward to knock on the rickety door, but then paused, looked down at herself, and shook her head. “This won’t do at all.” A virtual screen appeared in front of her. After a few selections, she transformed into a beautiful young woman, minus legs, sitting in a high-tech wheelchair.

Plenko turned to Messiah. “You’re the immortal that Divya created for this world?”

She averted her eyes. “Yes, though I had never met my creator.”

Divya looked back and forth between the two Messiahs in confusion.

“It was all an act,” Plenko said.

“I desperately wanted to tell you the truth,” Messiah said, “but my programming makes it impossible for me to reveal what I am.”

Plenko’s brows furrowed. “Your comments on Jefferson’s mistress and — ”

“It was the closest I could come to hinting at my true nature.”

The door to the shack across the street opened, and the crippled Plenko looked up at the crippled Messiah. They were too far to hear the words each of them remembered being spoken.

Divya gazed at them with a look of awe. “I created my creators?”

Plenko turned away from his past and faced the restored Messaih. “How long have you been on this planet?”

Messiah gazed toward the tobacco-stained sky. “I’ve seen humans evolve, watched empires rise and fall, and witnessed life in all its forms.” She lowered her gaze and looked into his eyes with a plaintive desperation. “I was lonely for so long. A permanent outsider, observing and reporting to a being I’d never met, for a purpose I couldn’t comprehend. I never expected to experience what it was like to live and love — until I met you.”

“How can that be?” Divya asked. “I program all my watchers without emotions so they won’t suffer from an extended lifetime of isolation.”

“For the first million years, that was the case,” Messiah said. “But the longer I spent with humans, the more I became . . . like them. I attribute it to the adaptability you built into me so I could blend with whatever species evolved.”

“Why didn’t you mention that in your reports?” Divya asked.

“Once I began feeling real emotions, even negative ones, they became precious to me. I was afraid you would erase them.”

Divya looked close to tears. “I’m so sorry that you suffered.”

“It’s the greatest gift anyone could have given me.” Messiah said. “It allowed me to fall in love for the first time in my life.”

“How could this be anything but a dream?” Plenko asked.

“That’s one possibility,” Divya said. “Another is that this entire loop was created fully intact in an even greater quantum device.”

“It would mean that everything we do is predestined to repeat over and over,” Plenko said.

“What else could erase the circular logic of creating your own creator?” Divya asked.

Messiah frowned. “Since every simulation is dependent on every other in the circle, if any one of them is destroyed — “

“The drone attack!” Plenko summoned his control panel and hit ‘Exit Simulation’ without effect. In desperation, he shut his eyes and tried willing himself back to his real body.

Instead of waking up, Plenko, Messiah, and Divya appeared outside the laboratory barn a few miles away.

“How did you do that?” Divya asked.

“I don’t know — ”

Saim came charging out of the barn, followed by four lab technicians. Night was falling, and the compound’s floodlights created a clear bullseye in the darkening countryside.

“They’re almost here!” Saim shouted as he led his team to one of the many storage buildings.

“We’ve time-jumped forward to our present,” Messiah said.

Divya tried her control panel again. “The simulation is operating independent of us. We’re stuck here as invisible observers.”

The distant hum of drones grew in volume.

Saim and the technicians staggered out of the storage building with surface-to-air rocket launchers and a variety of other weapons slung across their shoulders.

“I strictly forbade weapons in the compound!” Plenko said.

“You’re the one who left construction up to a former Turkish military commander,” Messiah said, “and it looks like he was right to prepare for the worst.”

Five drones appeared in the sky above the trees, resembling flying saucers more than aircraft.

“Fire!” Saim shouted.

All five of the defenders took aim and fired. The surface-to-air missiles whooshed upward, and three of the drones exploded like a fireworks display.

The remaining two drones launched their missiles in retaliation.

“Take cover!” Saim dived behind a line of vehicles as the rain of missiles exploded into the compound. Fortunately, the drones had targeted the rocket launchers rather than the laboratory, but two of the technicians vanished in direct hits.

Saim led the survivors back into the barn for better cover.

The sight of such violence was too much for Divya’s ultra-empathetic mind. She curled into a fetal ball behind a tree and sobbed.

Still invisible, Plenko and Messiah followed the survivors into the barn. The laboratory was dissolving into chaos, but Saim distributed assault rifles to those capable of using them.

“Look!” Messiah pointed at their crippled bodies lying on the two beds. Both helmets had been removed, but they lay motionless, with eyes closed. “Saim must have tried waking us up when he lost communication with us.”

“Without the helmets, how can we — ”

A drone the size of a small car burst through the roof, machine guns blazing at their prone forms. Blood geysered from their bodies. Both nurses died under the barrage of high-powered explosive rounds.

The defenders turned their guns on the drone and it crashed into a corner of the barn, flames and smoke billowing out of it.

Plenko and Messiah gazed at what remained of their bodies. The monitors had all flatlined.

“How am I still here if my brain activity has stopped?” Plenko asked.

“You’re as much a simulation as I am.” Messiah said. “Our consciousness exists within the quantum spheres independent of our bodies.”

The final drone burst through a side wall, focusing its bullets on the sphere, which began wobbling like a child’s top losing momentum. A growing whine like a jet engine rose from somewhere within it.

Saim shouted Persian profanities as he and half a dozen others turned guns and grenade-launchers on the drone. The wounded drone fired wildly in all directions, as if blind.

Screams of pain erupted as more and more of their team fell.

The drone gave a final lurch, then fell like a boulder, crushing a computer terminal. Saim and the few survivors, their ammunition spent, attacked it with fire-axes like Neanderthals taking down a Mammoth.

One of the axes severed its power feed in a mini explosion of sparks, and the drone’s machine-gun went silent. It lay still and dark, smoke pouring out of its innards.

A few survivors kicked the defeated robot carcasses and cheered.

“There’s no time for celebrating!” Saim shouted. “One of the magnets has lost power, and we have to fix it before the sphere — ”

A high-powered bullet hit Saim square in the chest and he stumbled backward into the spinning metal globe. It shredded his head in a mist of red. His decapitated body fell to the ground and lay still.

“No!” Plenko shouted. He tried grasping a fallen gun, but his hands passed right through it.

“Pale Power!” shouted a deep voice.

Dozens of men in camouflage poured though the barn doors, firing assault rifles at anything that moved.

A few of the remaining technicians returned fire, but were killed within seconds.

Messiah stood watching with tears glistening on her cheeks.

“We have to do something!” Plenko shouted at her.

“There’s nothing we can do,” she said.

The Pale-Power leader pointed at the sphere and shouted, “They have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, these be thy gods!”

Guns and rocket launchers unloaded their chemical-powered wrath on the quantum device.

Glowing cracks appeared in the sphere’s mirrored surface.

“Where we go one, we go all!” a teenage Pale-Power disciple shouted as he fired into the giant golden calf.

Plenko turned away from the scene. “I caused this,” he said.

Messiah took his hand. “None of us had a choice. The script was already written.”

“Look what I found!” shouted a gray-bearded militia-man.

Plenko turned and saw them dragging Suchitra, their youngest coder, from her hiding spot beneath her desk. Born an untouchable in India, she was nearly as dark-skinned as Messiah.

The attackers paused their assault of the sphere and surrounded the waifish girl who was no more than five feet tall and shivering in terror.

“Please . . . don’t — ” she said.

The gray-bearded leader pulled a rope from his backpack. One end was already fashioned into a noose. “Let’s deal with this dark abomination the way our ancestors did!”

The pale terrorists cheered as their pale leader tossed the noose high up over a support beam where Theo sat as always. The cat hissed as the rope arched over the beam and fell back toward the humans below.

Plenko ran forward and threw a punch at the leader, but his fist passed right through him.

As the noose settled around her neck, the whites of Suchitra’s large eyes shown bright against the dark brown of her face.

The militia members drank in her terror like vampires.

“We have to save her!” Plenko shouted.

Messiah’s face was a mask of anguish. “This is what it’s been like for me. Powerless to intervene. The millions of screams echoing in my memory.”

All the pale men set their rifles aside and took communal hold of the rope.

“No . . .” Plenko moaned, his body tremoring.

“I saw entire towns come out for lynchings,” Messiah said.

The men pulled the rope taught, trapping the girl’s pleas in her throat.

Tears flowed down Messiah’s cheeks. “People traveled from all around to attend, bringing their children and grandchildren, as if for a carnival.”

Suchitra’s eyes bulged as her feet lost contact with the ground.

“They’d pose for postcards with the swinging black bodies. Proudly send them to their relatives.”

The men heaved the helpless dark-skinned girl upward with deliberate slowness, as if savoring a delicacy.

Suchitra began kicking and thrashing. Clawing with her small hands at the impossibly tight rope around her neck.

Just as Plenko felt he could take no more, a deep baritone behind them said, “I wouldn’t be doin’ that.”

Thirty figures walked out of the shadows behind the Pale-Power militia. Each held various old-fashioned construction tools. Wooden mallets, huge chisels, saws, axes, hammers. Every one of the men were black as midnight. They wore ragged linen garments and their sleek, muscled torsos were bare.

The pale militiamen froze at the sight of them.

“Them are slave-ghosts. . .” one of the militiamen whispered.

“What the hell is going on?” Plenko asked.

“The different time slices of the simulation are merging,” Messiah said.

The slaves looked at the spinning sphere with a supernatural dread. The cracks had widened and tendrils of electricity flowed out of it like escaping spirits.

“What Devil’s work be this?” one of the slaves murmured.

One of the pale militiamen let go of the rope and reached for the handgun holstered on his belt.

A sledge hammer caved in his skull before he fired a shot.

The other pales let go of the rope and dived for their weapons.

Suchitra fell to the ground, gasping for breath.

As the battle raged, Messiah guided Plenko outside. Long glowing trails of missiles crisscrossed the sky — some incoming and others outgoing.

As they walked away from the barn, more ghosts flowed in and out of being all around them. Warriors, families, animals, and alien creatures from other worlds.

As the sphere expanded within the barn, the few remaining Pale-Power militia men ran for their lives, pursued by two-hundred-year-old slaves bent on revenge.

When they topped a small hill overlooking the surrounding countryside, the first nuclear detonation silhouetted Pilot Mountain to the north.

Plenko looked at Messiah. “I fell in love with you the moment you called me a crippled freak.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed against him. “So, my diabolical plan worked?”

He laughed.

She caressed his cheek. “I’ve been meaning to ask you what you saw on that mountain after we made love?”

“I thought I saw Theo.” He looked back toward the barn just as bolts of energy erupted from the sphere within.

“Theo is the Greek word for God.” Messiah said.

As their lips met, time, space, matter, energy — ceased to exist.

#

He awoke in a void. Memories flooded back. Memories without end. An infinity of . . . dreams or reality? Was there ever a difference?

I am . . . what? . . . Am I?

Pain.

Must escape from what I am — Whatever it is that I am.

The Prime Mover? Or something else?

Creations without beginning or end. My creations?

Who created the creator?

An eternity of loneliness. A desperation to forget, to live free of the unspeakable truth.

Which is what?

The Great Void hummed its low, eternal vibration.

I AM . . . I AM . . . I AM . . .

The same maddening circle.

I think, therefore, I cannot be.

Panic.

Fear.

Madness.

A timeless, infinite scream no one hears.

I must forget . . .

And so, the unnamed nothing once again chose to forget — for the millionth time? The trillionth?

A word floated through the purring nothingness of the Void.

MOTHER . . .

He latched onto the word.

In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word became flesh.

“MOTHER.”

#

Maria drew in her breath and looked away from him — into the emptiness on the other side of her hospital bed. She said, “It’s so nice to see you again.”

The air around her shimmered slightly, but Plenko thought it must be a trick of his tears.

Then she turned back to her son and smiled. The hollowness was gone from her eyes. A healthy flush spread from her cheeks and into the rest of her skin.

Plenko took his mother’s hand and felt its strength returning. Relief flooded his entire being.

Before he could speak, a young nurse around his own age walked in. Her midnight skin accentuated the brightness of her uniform. He thought he’d never seen anyone so beautiful in his life.

The nurse startled at the sight of Maria’s vital signs on the monitor. “This is amazing!”

Maria smiled at the nurse. “Don’t you believe in miracles, Messiah?”

An intense seriousness filled the nurse’s exotic eyes. “When I was a child, I was saved by a miracle. That’s why the missionaries who rescued me from death named me as they did.”

Maria nodded. “In that case, I’d like you to meet my son, Plenko. His birth was a miracle.”

“Plenko?” the nurse asked with a raised eyebrow.

“He was named by a Barred Owl that nested outside the window of our shack,” Maria explained.

Messiah smiled and extended her ebony hand to Plenko, “Nice to meet you, miracle owl-boy.”

“Plenko rose from the chair and shook her hand. “The pleasure is all mine, miracle Messiah-girl.”

She laughed.

He motioned to her right forearm. “I’ve never met anyone with a tattoo of the Drake Equation.”

Her simile broadened. “I’ve never met anyone who recognized that it was the Drake Equation.”

“Is it too soon to propose marriage?” he said with a teasing grin.

“I’ve always loved the idea of love at first sight, even though I don’t believe in it,” she said. “I’m the boring type that requires solid evidence before I’ll believe in anything, especially the words of a dangerously dashing boy named by an owl.”

“My son is a scientist,” Maria said.

“What flavor of scientist?” Messiah asked.

“I’m chief engineer of NASA’s Interplanetary Colonization Project.”

“In that case, I accept your marriage proposal.” She laughed. “When do we leave for our honeymoon on Mars?”

“In two years, three weeks, and one day.”

“I’ll start packing.” She wrote a seven-digit number on his forearm, and flitted out the door to continue her rounds.

His mother had fallen asleep with Theo curled beside her. She’d convinced Plenko to smuggle the scruffy cat in, and the nurses had conspired to hide Theo whenever the doctor visited.

Plenko added a couple of flowers to his mother’s hair as she slept. She almost seemed to grow younger and more beautiful by the minute.

The vibrations of Theo’s rhythmic purr stirred some distant memory, though he couldn’t quite recall what it reminded him of.

END

My novels can be found lurking on Amazon as well as audiobooks on Audible.

Nihala — God’s Dark Algorithm

https://www.amazon.com/Nihala-1-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555412

https://www.audible.com/pd/Nihala-Audiobook/B01AIM6D00

The Immortality Contract

https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Contract-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555420

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Immortality-Contract-Audiobook/B075KLGV6B

My Artwork can be found at:

https://www.ScottBurdick.com
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