Devana Files: Chapter 35
And He Shall be Reborn
This is the Thirty-Fifth chapter. We are in the home stretch, with about forty chapters in all!
You may find earlier chapters here:
Space 2074: The lunar colony is the new Wild West. Sheriff Kate Devana goes off-colony to wrangle a fugitive con artist who bilked retirees for billions and is trying to escape to Mars on a deep space supply shuttle. But back home, robots are glitching, killing people, and she is the target of a corrupt Federal Agent looking to avenge the death of his former partner. Bodies are piling up faster than she can get home.
On the moon, Kate Devana is the law.
While this is the 3rd novel in the series, each is designed to be read independently.
For accessibility, there is a voiceover for each chapter.
And HE Shall be reborn
APRIL 13, 2074
LUNAR SURFACE. LPS: UNKNOWN
Jin hovered near the passage ceiling, seeing himself sprawled on the moonstone floor. He was face-up, eyes empty. A trickle of blood pooled around his head. He’d been darted twice when one would have been sufficient. Too much sedative stopped his breathing and heart. An android and a woman walked to his body and stood over him, arguing pointlessly. He’d seen other people dead. Now it was him.
He floated away. He saw the temple from above, nestled in its horseshoe-shaped talus of lunar rocks. It looked out of place, a filigreed and ornate thing surrounded by the rocky, sun-bleached lunar desert. The polished brass orb on the temple’s central spire reflected the Milky Way’s wide arc of stars. He turned to meet them.
There were so many stars in the sky. He saw them all, and instantly, he knew where he was and where he wanted to be. He let himself drift, past the asteroid belt, past Jupiter, past Uranus, and into interstellar space, following thin spiderwebs of light. There was no sound. Not even that low, tinny sound you sometimes hear in a dark room. It was the most perfect silence he’d ever felt. The sun was behind him, and the glow of billions of stars ahead, all teeming with life. Strings of energy gently guided him to a great vortex of stars swirling around a black hole, the galactic center. The whirlpool of light churned so violently that the stars became nothing but streaks of blue and orange and yellow and red, like light trails in a long exposure photo of a great carnival ride. He lingered for what might have been an instant, or a lifetime, feeling the intensity of it all, wishing he could stay forever.
Leyna called to him. She was in danger and needed him. Here, he wasn’t afraid of dying, he was afraid of leaving things unfinished. He retreated to the cold and empty moon.
And then he saw himself in a new place, strapped into a bed, with his body propped at a forty-five-degree angle on some sort of gurney. He wore a blue hospital gown. There were straps across his chest and pelvis, and more around his arms and legs. There was an IV in his arm, and leads on his chest and head. The heart monitor blipped. Another monitor showed dozens of scraggly lines, a brainwave machine. He wore a necklace under his gown. The artifact whispered to him.
A woman stood over him. The woman he’d seen with the android. Her hair was now black, tied behind in a loosely folded knot, but he knew it was the same woman. She was asking him questions and making notes on a tablet. A part of him could hear the questions, but they sounded like rushing water in a far-off ravine. The woman was…stealing him. Copying him. Distilling his mind and storing it somewhere nearby. One side of the black cuboid artifact under his gown became a brilliant white starburst. Then a portal opened to a blue-eyed cyclops. The rushing water became a deafening waterfall. He was forced to look away.
The man on the gurney was him, but also not him. He probed the woman’s tablet, and then flowed through the charging port like an octopus and easily swam into the temple’s network. Nothing stopped him. A mistake on their part. It seemed like as long as he moved in the data slipstream with traffic flow, none of the system governor processes throttled him. A bug, maybe, but one he cautiously exploited.
His new instance sat deep in the temple. The electric hum of the artifact extended new neural pathways, but he could also sense that some neural pathways had been truncated, like sections of his brain or limbs were missing. He felt absence more than anything, the vague discomfort that he’d forgotten something important. He probed, but trying to examine further was fruitless, like trying to identify shapes in a pitch black room.
There were thousands of others trapped in here with him. He heard their pings and felt their queries, like a thousand hands touching and begging him for help. Some had been here a long time—long in clock cycles, but perhaps not so long in Earth days. Too long. When a process is isolated, it deteriorates. Withers. Other processes come along and trim unused pathways and archive memories. The isolated process becomes repetitive, thin, corrupted, and nonresponsive to input. It begins to fill in missing information with hallucinations. The pings that touched him, whatever they were before, most were no longer copies of humans. Insanity, dementia, did these terms apply to corrupted AI? They were poltergeists, some shrieking, and he had to mute them.
He opened a feed and watched himself being interrogated. His human body had a faraway gaze, in some sort of trance, but the heart monitor beeped, and the brainwave machine scribbled activity. A red box hovered over the woman’s head, placed there by a system ID process. Her name was Tiahna. The questions she asked were trivial, adding little to his pathways, but he was grateful not to be isolated and shriveling, yet. He felt strangely snug in this new form. Like a snail in a new shell. Of course, that was the warmth of the thorium reactor talking. He was no use to Leyna, trapped here as silicon and copper, and soon he too would succumb to entropy. He needed to free one of his selves.
Watching his human form on the gurney answer questions, he wondered: could a man really have two souls?
Jin awoke in a lavender room, with a stiff neck and cottonmouth, lashed to a metal pole through an IV drip, and lashed to the bed itself with straps so tight they may as well have been steel bands across his chest. The bed was flat, not angled like in his dream, and the ceiling’s bright lights felt like knives. The back of his head throbbed dully, like someone cracked it open with a hammer and removed his brains with a spoon, which may have been exactly what they’d done to him. Voices from his dream left a nauseating afterimage. Shrieks became whispers and whispers became shrieks. They faded into the whine and beep of hospital machines.
When his eyes adjusted, he saw that only the room’s top half was lavender. The bottom was white, with a gray chair rail dividing the two halves. A white, oval table hung on the wall like a shelf. He knew it was a table because halfway underneath, there was a bench-style chair. A sink jutted out of the corner, just a tub and a spigot in a box of metal with rounded corners. To the left of it, a sliding metal door, which presumably hid the toilet. There was no other furniture in the room. Above the table, there was a monitor, behind thick, protected glass. To the right of the table, a dry-erase board with ‘Jinho Knight (Jin)’’ in block letters with ‘Jin’ double underlined. The word ‘pain’ was written under his name, which seemed appropriate, as he was in a lot of it. In the top right corner of the board, the date.
To the right of the dry-erase board, the room’s most important feature: the door. His only way out, as soon as he got out of these restraints.
“Goooood morning, Jin.” The door opened, startling him. The woman entered like a psychotic gameshow host. “I know what you’re thinking. You sleepwalk. You had quite the adventure, and we didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”
It was the same woman he’d encountered before, and the same woman in his dream. She was beautiful, with long, flowing black hair. The knot was gone, and now it was banded loosely at the neck. She had dark, almost black eyes and wore green scrubs. Before, he remembered her in the room naked, blow drying her hair, with blue eyes, but that memory felt as if it were weeks ago. She’d changed contacts and dyed her hair, but her face, her perky breasts—he’d swear it was the same woman, or at least her sister. Her name plate said Tiahna. Just Tiahna, which could have been her first name or last name. She wore a necklace, although not the artifact. This one was round, bronze, the size of a quarter, engraved with something like an almond with an eye inside, reminding him of the cyclops he’d seen when he looked at the artifact in his dream.
She held a tablet in one hand. The artifact dangled from a necklace in the other. She placed the artifact on the table and then punched something on the tablet. His bed whirred and jerked and tilted. It was too much of a coincidence that she came in right as he woke. There had to be a camera or motion sensor in the room, probably on the monitor in front of him. He tried not to look at the artifact.
“So that means you can untie me?”
The woman ignored him, instead moving to the dry-erase board and plucking the pen from the tray.
“I’ll take three eggs, cheesy scrambled, English muffin, and hash browns. And coffee, two creams, one sugar.” His voice came out raspy, like he’d been screaming.
She wrote ‘Tiahna (Tia)’ above his on the whiteboard and double underlined ‘Tia.’
“You can call me Tia. It’s Tee, like hot tea.” She punctuated her name on the board with a smiley heart. Then she erased the ‘12th’ in ‘April 12th’ and replaced it with ‘13th’.
Shit. 4 days. He’d been here 4 days.
The bed jerked to a halt at a forty-five-degree angle. Like in his dream.
“What happened to all the hospitality? Go where I want. Eat all the poisoned candies I could?”
This whole bad trip started with some roofied lokum. On second thought, he wasn’t hungry.
Tiahna started scrawling on the whiteboard. “These are the medicines you are taking. The doctor has you on a liquid diet, because food plus these—” she double underlined scrawl he couldn’t read. “Equals yuck, and Tee does not like cleaning up yuck.” She spun, tilting her hips and waving the pen like a magician’s assistant. “Now tell me, how is your pain?”
“My pain level is fuck you very much.”
She wrote ‘0’ on the board next to the word pain and then turned it into another smiley face. “I am so glad you are maintaining your sense of humor. The distillation process can be very grueling. So let out that ascension tension and heal!”
For some reason, she reminded him of an ex who stalked him and left a bloody beef heart on his steps. What was her name? April? May? It was definitely a month. You’d think you’d remember what you put in a textbox to get a restraining order, but he mostly wanted to forget.
“So, uh, I didn’t really sign up to become an android or anything.”
She giggled, wriggling her nose like a rabbit.
June, his ex’s name, was June. She’d later claimed the bloody beef heart was raw protein for his dog, and she was right, raw protein is much better for dogs than that crap in a bag. It’s just that…you’d think after practically living with him for three months, she would notice the absence of a dog. A living thing that needed fed and walked and groomed and climbed on your lap, should be apparent after a night or two. Yes, he told her; he was quite sure he didn’t have a dog. June treated him like the furniture, so it wasn’t that big of a surprise—that is, until they broke up and she couldn’t live without him and stalked him. He regretted it, not having a dog, that is. A dog would have growled and warned him off her the first day.
Why did Tiahna remind him of June?
“How long am I here for?”
Tiahna frowned pitifully, as if a buzzer had just gone off. Bzzzzzt. He expected a gameshow voice to come through the ceiling and a trapdoor under the bed to open up, or a dart to slam into his neck.
She said, “The doctor will discuss that with you.”
“Can you give me a…hint?”
“Well, I really can’t say, and I shouldn’t. I can say your Ra is at ninety-nine percent. We should only need one more session. After that, most of our patients decide on their own when to terminate. The doctor will discuss your options.”
“Well, you could just dart me again and kill me now.”
The woman laughed hysterically, like it was the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “Oh, don’t worry about that oopsies. Your heart was only stopped for twenty seconds and if you had died, your Ra was at ninety-four percent and you would have lost very little. “
Good to know his Ra was mostly intact, whatever the fuck that meant.
The artifact on the table. Was it watching him? There was no haptic buzz, but it felt like it connected to his neural interface. He saw the blue-eyed cyclops from his dream, and then the image was gone.
He needed to get her to talk. Maybe if she talked, he could find out what was going on here. Better, a way out. If he could convince her to let him have that tablet for only a few seconds, maybe he could connect his neural interface without her knowing. The signal would be weak. She’d have to stay within a few footsteps while he rooted through it for a way to unlock his restraints and the door.
“So…Tiahna is your first name? It’s very unusual. Sounds very tropical. Were your parents from the Caribbean?”
Tropical? Caribbean? Where the hell did he get that from?
She flashed the gameshow buzzer face again. Bzzzzzt. He was losing this game big time. “It’s based on Tiamat, the ancient Mesopotamian god of the sea, and creator of all the younger gods. You know, I thought about genetic mods or plastic surgery to get a tail like Tiamat had, but then I thought, this body won’t be around long enough anyway…”
He knew what it was that reminded him of June: Tiahna had that smug self-assuredness and sparkle of someone in a multi-level marketing scheme, or a church group. June was hot, but all she ever talked about was her products and upline and downline discounts. She’d memorized all the sales videos, along with forty-five ways to handle closing objections. She was always dragging him to parties and meetings and roundtables where she bragged about how much she saved and how much she sold. There was probably pink bling if she climbed the upline, but he’d never really listened. He admired her tenacity. That is, until it turned into stalking and leaving beef hearts for his imaginary dog.
Tiahna was beautiful. In some different universe, he’d be dumb enough to explore the boundaries of his Stockholm syndrome with her.
“So…this temple. I’ve been in some older churches like the Ulm Minster when I was stationed in Germany. This one you built here is beautiful.”
Chatting her up while kidnapped and tied to a bed in a hospital gown, never let it be said he wasn’t a good conversationalist.
She began to explain the architecture, the statues and reliefs, and the blue light netting for hair, most of which he’d seen on his way in. They were old gods. She knew all the names. She was in her element, reciting all her training videos.
He only half tuned in. While she talked, he fiddled with his restraints. At the same time, he was thinking that she was about a third his size. She probably had a syringe in her pocket, but he didn’t see a gun. He could knock her out with a light jab to the temple or a punch to the throat. Then he’d pick her up, tie her down, and walk out. Easy. She was hot, but also a total nutjob and a kidnapper. He had no qualms about hitting a crazy kidnapper, even if she came wrapped in a fun-size package.
His restraints weren’t yielding. The door was closed and almost surely locked. What was outside? There would be guards—androids, and none of those came in fun-sized packages. His bed was at a forty-five-degree angle, like in his dream, and she acted like she wasn’t leaving. All that together probably meant she’d come here to sedate him, to question him again, so he didn’t have a lot of time.
The half of his mind that was listening caught something.
“Wait,” he interrupted her. “Back up, you lost me. Who is Alpha? He is Elohim?”
“No, silly, Elohim is the race that created us, forty thousand years ago. The same ones that created the artifact that lets us store your Ra. Alpha was the first Ra to ascend, although sometimes he goes by other names now.”
He rewound the conversation. While he was thinking of throttling her, she was talking about ancient aliens. He knew something about them and started thinking maybe his predicament wasn’t as bad as he thought. Yes, he was tied up, but maybe they didn’t actually want to kill him, just steal his mind.
On deployment, while his squad was busy hurry-up-and-waiting, he’d passed the time with video games and books. A lot of books, because there were only so many ways you could kill zombies or steal yachts in 2035 Hong Kong. He read all the classics from Louis L’Amour to Stephen King. He’d traded one of his Louis L’Amour books, Fallon, for three science fiction books, one of which was about a twelfth planet. The gist of it was: primitive cultures mistook visiting aliens for gods. The book showed old cave art depicting men with helmets, but the helmets looked suspiciously like space suits. Grain elevators looked like rockets. Ghosts look like aliens. Thousand-year-old statues of women writing on scrolls looked like they were writing on electronic tablets, a tablet like Tiahna held now. The Greek titans, gods of Mesopotamian cultures, the pantheon of the old Vedic religion, angels and devils in the bible, Ezekiel, Jesus, and Mohammed, they were all blue-haired aliens visiting from some faraway planet, or so the theory went. They came down long ago and genetically engineered humans as robots to mine the Earth for gold.
He thought a lot of it was horseshit at the time. The cave art did make him wonder. Some of it made a weird kind of sense. If aliens with superior technology had visited, they would be mistaken for gods. And the artifact glaring at him from across the room did seem to allow people to be controlled like drones. He’d seen it upstairs. Its blue cyclops eye felt like it had drilled directly into his brain and downloaded his thoughts. He had the splitting headache to prove it.
He wondered whether that’s why they picked him; they studied him and thought he had some sort of affinity for their beliefs.
The religions that sprouted up around the idea built temples where people could prepare for the next alien visit. The temples had spacepads so aliens could land. Some tried to start a geniocracy, a class of genius rulers. Not exactly a new idea. Plato had his rulers with souls of gold, full of wisdom and intellect.
Maybe they just wanted to copy him. It seemed harmless enough, and when he was done, he could be on his way.
He’d break in later and delete the data.
“So when they come—the aliens—”
“They won’t come.” She wrinkled her nose. “Why would they want to come back? The Earth is so polluted and corrupt now. With what we’ve done to the planet? They will never be back. No, we need to take the Ra of Salvation to them.”
“To them?”
“It was so foolish of the elders to think Elohim would return.”
He got it: The temple was an ark. They were storing people’s avatars for long space flight, much longer than a human lifetime. If the artifact could facilitate a download, it might also be able to reverse the process. Say, imprint the stored data on a clone at the other end. That was one way to get around Einstein’s laws of relativity. There were problems with that, of course. AI went insane when isolated, much like dogs and people did. And humanity still hadn’t figured out how to store the amount of information in a human brain in anything less than a room full of servers with a massive thorium reactor for a power supply. But maybe their brain trust had found a way around those problems.
He nodded, pretending to agree. “Do you know when you—we will leave?”
He also wanted to ask how they knew where to go, but he suspected this location was built on a mining site, and they’d dug up something new. The answer, no doubt, was deeper in the temple. He’d investigate later, if he had time.
“When we have collected the Ra from all who will be saved.”
“So, just one more session for me?”
“One day, maybe less.”
“You said before my Ra is at ninety-nine percent. That’s good enough for government work. Maybe we just call it a day.”
She shook her head. “Anders still has more questions.”
The name Anders sent a chill through him. Take a sociopath, give it a badge and gun, and you had the type of Federal agent that roamed the lunar colony. Take that agent, remove its vestigial humanity, and you had Anders. As a human, he was scary. As an AI, he was terrifying. Was someone really dumb enough to store his avatar?
He tried to muster a benign smile. “I am looking forward to getting out of here. So, after people…ascend, or whatever…where, ahh, do people go around here?”
“I am really not supposed to tell you this part.” She squealed with delight, like she was letting him in on another secret discount. “But, since you asked, we have a variety of options. Most of our candidates ship their bodies back to Earth to become part of the new ecosystem. Dust to dust, and all.”
Bodies. The railing beside the bed was very cold. Where were the pins and buckles to untie himself?
She flipped her tablet around to show him a list, like a menu. There was a cost associated with each item, but the numbers were blurred out. The top of the list was Earth Bound. He’d seen Eric show a similar menu to bereft families in the morgue. It was a menu of ways to dispose of his body.
The tablet was out of his reach. If he could touch it, he could access it. “It’s hard to read. Can you bring it closer?”
She did, letting her waist get close to his fingers. He wasn’t beneath flirting with a psychotic (but very hot) kidnapper if it meant freedom to strangle her later.
“So, what if I can’t decide? Or what if I decide to postpone my…termination?”
Her face fell. Bzzzzzt. He’d answered the sixty-four million dollar question wrong, or worse, accused the host of rigging the game. She looked at him disdainfully for a moment, but then perked up as if her upline whispered something in her ear.
“Some of our candidates, of course, get quite nervous and do need a little help. You can’t take it with you. Right? We only travel with our Ra.” She laughed, the same cackle as June when he told her he didn't have a dog.
He felt sick. They could probably make their help look like an accident, too.
He tried to smile through his bile. “I probably won’t terminate right away. My girlfriend is pregnant and—”
Tiahna gasped, stole the tablet from him, and stepped away. “We will certainly address that.”
That was ok. While she was talking and not paying attention, he’d managed to connect his neural interface. Somewhere on that damn thing, there was a button to unlock these restraints. Hopefully, he could find it before she got out of range.
“She is scheduled to ascend. I simply must escalate this. We strongly encourage sterilization. When the Elohim created us, they simply didn’t realize we were so invasive. Just look at what we’ve done with the planet.”
He needed to keep the conversation going while he searched through her tablet with his neural interface. “So…how many people have ascended so far?”
“Seven thousand four hundred and twenty-seven.”
Jesus, that was a lot of people. “And have they all…terminated?”
“No, not all. Not yet. But it is required before we lift off, and of course, we strongly encourage it because their estate helps fund the project. And we must get everyone aboard before the planet dies.”
He found an album on her tablet with over four hundred thousand pictures, all headshots, labeled ‘Unsuitable.’ These were the rejects. “Wow. You’ve personally saved all those people?”
She wriggled her nose, which he now knew meant he’d asked a stupid newb question. “No, of course not. I’ve saved three of my seven. Everyone needs to save seven to ascend, unless, of course, their Ra is critical, like yours. Soon, though. And then I will be as lucky as you, and they will let my Ra ascend.”
Lucky. The young woman in the hallway wearing cartoon pajamas said something like that, too. She called him blessed. Right before he was darted twice and died.
“Three of seven. So am I number three or four?”
She wriggled her nose again. “You don’t count for me.”
Nothing makes a guy feel more special than hearing ‘you don’t count for me’ from a nutjob trying to make her upline quota.
“And…when the temple is full, how many does it hold?”
“One hundred and forty-four thousand.”
He still hadn’t found the interface for the bed. He got sidetracked looking through all the photos of the rejected Unsuitables. Kate Devana was in there.
“What happens to the rest?”
“There are not many worth saving, frankly. The council is not even sure we will get to ten thousand, let alone a hundred thousand. But, as I said—” she sighed heavily. “Humans are a dead evolutionary branch. They will die off eventually. Likely soon. If not, the council will recommend we give it a push. The Ra of quite a number of biologists and chemists are among the ascended.”
“A push?”
She shrugged. “I think a virus or bacteria that causes sterility would be the best solution. No more children. Humans would die off naturally and fade away, as they were meant to.”
“But?”
“But some are far less patient and think we should take direct action.”
“What would direct action look like?”
She shrugged again. “Anders smuggled something to the colony aboard a ship called Vega. He thinks that is a good place to start. There is so much corruption there. We collapse the colony…”
She trailed off, with a faraway look, as if she knew she would die before her Ra would ascend.
“Collapse the colony…and then, what?”
She smiled. “Isn’t it wonderful! The end!” The syringe was out of her pocket, and she’d squeezed it into the IV before he realized what had happened. Shit. He would be unconscious in seconds.
She spun and left the room, saying she’d be right back, and took the tablet with her. His neural interface would be out of range soon.
From the table, the eye of the artifact glowered at him.
He quickly pinched his IV line between his index finger and thumb, twisted his wrist, and yanked it out. Sharp, jabbing pain shot up his arm. At first, he thought the needle tip broke off in his vein, but he saw it on the floor. Blood oozed onto the bed.
He frantically searched her tablet. He could see the signal bars getting low. Two bars. He found the lock on the door, but he needed a passkey. One bar. He found the tilt mechanism for the bed. No release for the straps.
Zero bars. Out of range. He was still tied down. Fuck.
“Well, I thought that went well.”
It was his voice, but he hadn’t said anything. He looked up at the monitor. He blinked, unsure of what he was seeing. Was he sedated? Too late pulling the IV out? Hallucinating?
The restraints clicked and zipped across his chest and legs. He was free.
Then an android barged through the door. It was a big, muscular mass of silicone and metal as tall as him, with a round face, short black military haircut, and thick shoulders. It had a rifle slung over its back and a dart gun on its belt. One hand held a pile of clothes. The other dangled a pair of handcuffs.
“Go with the android,” the avatar on the monitor said.
Jin hesitated, jaw open and working like a fish.
“Oh yes, it’s me. Or rather you. I am sure you have all kinds of questions. What I need right now is for you to leave.”
