Bob’s mind flashed. A man impaled on a pike in a medieval battle, red and white banners flapping in the breeze; a woman sitting by a garbage heap, haggling for the price of her child with a group of men; a slave pushing his hands up between the floorboards of a ship, its sails heaving in the mid-Atlantic; a hulking Grilla, its eyes glazed over in a drug-induced stupor in a ghetto; the imprint of the digital slaves, the synthetic intelligences that he’d help create inside of the virtual worlds of Atopia. These and countless other impressions crowded his mind.
“But not all life is suffering.”
In another mind he saw a different world, a world without humans. This mind soared above green forests and plains filled with buffalo and seas singing with whales.
“Humans are not evil by nature. The evil is in what causes the suffering, the desire and attachment of the mind.” The priest paused. “Intelligence is the root of attachment. Intelligence is the evil.”
Bob closed his eyes.
The priest kneeled in front of Bob. “There is a path to the cessation of suffering.”
“Yes,” whispered Bob.
He had no physical form here anymore. One universe was as real as the next now. The vastness was suffocating.
“All of reality is created, it is both as real and not real, everything and nothing.” The priest cupped Bob’s chin, trying to get him to raise his head. “How many worlds have you already created and destroyed?”
“Hundreds, thousands…” mumbled Bob, keeping his head down, keeping his eyes closed.
“All things that come to be, come to an end,” said the priest. “Everything tends to disorder until a reordering is due.”
Bob felt Nancy’s dead hand in his.
This suffering was too great.
31
Sid and Vince sprinted the two hundred feet up the access tunnel to the main chamber. There wasn’t much time. Bob ran with them. Like everyone else, their display spaces were forced onto the image of Bob sitting on the bench next to Nancy, the priest kneeling in front of them. The wind whistled through the trees, carrying smudges of smoke that still rose from the burnt grass around them.
The entire present and past of the planet watched—ten billion humans, ten times that many resurrected humans, and at least as many sentient non-human creatures. Whatever languages they spoke, everything was being intermediated so they could understand. All were focused on Bob and the priest.
The priest squeezed Bob’s hand. “Do you want to end this suffering?”
Bob’s head was down. A tear streaked down his face from eyes squeezed shut. “Yes,” he replied.
The split copy of Bob stood in the middle of Sid and Vince, staring at himself on the roof of Atopia. “No,” he whispered.
Sid glanced at him. His psyche must have split when he died, and a part of him—his anger and fear—stayed with the priest on Atopia. The rest of him was here in the Commune. Sid was desperately trying to help Bob reconnect with himself, but Bob didn’t want to speak with Bob anymore. Sid worried that the priest might use Bob’s connections to launch an attack, but all the weapons were dormant. In fact, all of the weapons were disabled.
But it wasn’t the weapons he was after.
The oscillations in the space power grid weren’t just reverberations, not just echoes of the struggle for power in Atopia. The space power grid was steadily cycling power from around the planet, redirecting the energy into the capacitive storage grid outside of Lagos. The only thing connected to this was a supercollider. Mohesha was working to regain control of it, but this had been an afterthought.
Until now.
Sid pulled Vince back in their private workspace. “Have you ever heard of a vacuum meta-stability event?” The supercollider was designed to test extremely high-energy physics, creating miniature black holes, studying the very fabric of space-time. He pulled a graphic, a curved line down with a dip and then a lower dip in it.
Vince shook his head.
“A meta-stability event is an idea that the fabric of our universe is not in its lowest possible energy state.” He pointed at the first dip in the graph. “But that we’re in a dip, a local minimum.” He pointed at another dip in the curve, this one a saddle point lower down. “The problem is that there might be a lower dip nearby.” Between the dips was a small hill.
Vince frowned at him. “Get to the point, please?”
“The problem is that if a part of space—even a teeny, tiny part—manages to get over the energy gap and tunnel through it”—he highlighted the small rise, opening a small gap underneath it from one dip to the other—“then all of this universe will leak out into the other one.”
Vince stared at the small gap between the dips. “And you could use this supercollider to do that?”
“Maybe.” Sid didn’t know. It was just a theory. You could create miniature black holes with the collider, but they winked out as energy dissipated over their event horizons. He couldn’t see any other threat that made sense. Sid urgently messaged Tyrel at Terra Nova, telling them they had to destroy the collider somehow. A ping returned. They had already come to the same conclusion.
Vince and Sid stared at the graph in front of them. Bob was with them as well.
Sid turned to Bob, pulling him aside to sit on a packing crate. “You have to get in there, Bob.”
The mediaworlds roared as they watched the scene playing out on the roof of Atopia. People were questioning the synthetic realities connecting them to their old family, wondering how the system had glitched. Most of them were upset that whatever alternate reality they’d burrowed into had been disrupted.
Very few understood that Judgment was being passed.
On the roof of Atopia, Bob opened his bloodshot eyes. “Make it end.”
32
Bob sat on the crate and stared at Sid while his mind raced through the POND data. It was like he was having a conversation with himself, a self that had lived a hundred lives in a hundred different worlds. There was never any ancient civilization, at least, not one on Earth. It was all just a ploy, a feint to keep their attention elsewhere. Finally, all the pieces fell together. It all fit.
It was always him.
Bob was the fourth nexus. He was the Fourth Horseman. He was Death. And if Bob was Death, then the priest was the Destroyer. Jimmy had just been a pawn in a struggle that stretched across worlds. The priest had used Jimmy, preying on his weaknesses but also using his strengths, and in the same way the priest had used Bob. Used his ability to inspire trust, his emotive intelligence, to gain access at all levels. As if in a game of chess, Bob was moved into the center of events, the priest sacrificing one piece to win the prize.
The other side of the coin was Bob’s anger, his willingness to capitulate to others to solve his problems, his desire to hide behind the pain. He remembered the desert now, when he opened his mind to the priest, let him inside. He should have known. He did know. And yet he wanted someone else to take responsibility. To save him. To stop the suffering.
The priest had never been real, not in the physical world. It was an echo that had infected Bob, co-opted him. Reviewing the sensory stream from the POND data, it was something that was happening again and again, not just in this world, but in all worlds. Bob was never forced. He always invited the Destroyer in, and he always chose the end.
But, perhaps, not all was lost yet.
Bob was trying to connect into himself, but his other self wasn’t responding. When he died, the priest split Bob’s psyche, schisming off the parts it didn’t need. Or perhaps he’d done it to himself. His angry self was sitting on top of Atopia, holding Nancy’s hand, wishing for destruction.