Ted Bell - Phantom

Hawke laughed and pulled her into his arms. The kiss, when it came, was full of real emotion and mutual animalistic need. When it was over, he took her by the hand and led her into his bedroom. Pelham had laid a fire against the chill rain outside and it was the only light.

“Can we sit by the fire?” she said, glancing nervously at the huge canopied bed lurking in the shadows.

“Of course,” Hawke said, pulling the feathery down quilt from his big four-poster. “We’ll sit by the fire and tell ghost stories.”

Hawke sat down first, looking up at her, finding her eyes in the flickering firelight.

“I want you so,” she said.

“And I you.”

She began to undress and he watched, taking in her beauty like a starving man, a man whose eyes were dying of hunger.

“Now you,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him. “I’ll help.”

When she was done, they lay down beside each other on the soft quilt and made love, their bodies coming together naturally and easily, no clumsy missteps, just wordlessly becoming each other’s favorite animal.

When Hawke awoke at dawn the next morning, she was gone.

He sat there before the hearth for a while, the quilt wrapped round him, thinking, staring into the dying embers.

One fire going out, one fire just starting, he thought, and the thought brought a warm light of happiness into his normally cold blue eyes that had been missing for a very long time.

Iran

Darius couldn’t sleep.

He was afraid of what he might find when he slept: more heinous visions of doom. The failure to achieve his vision, bearing witness to his own death, slipping beneath the waves of history without a trace. All of it worse than the worst nightmare. At night, his once-real dreams seemed to have fled. His lifelong goal of using the power of his own unique brain to change the world. To be a powerful force with dominion over all mankind. To be a brutish civilization’s salvation and ruler.

To clean up once and for all the fucking mess human beings had made of the planet. And the mess they made of the human species. Or, as Perseus called it, “global cleansing.” And, until now, working in secret with his most astounding creation, a quantum machine capable of superhuman intelligence he’d named Perseus, he had believed he was edging ever closer to realizing those dreams.

But, lately, he wondered.

Lately, he was afraid.

Perseus’s staggering intellectual powers were doubling every day, growing exponentially. Precisely as he and Dr. Cohen had calculated in the early days at the Stanford AI Research Institute. Soon, far sooner than his mother country’s loathsome president and the posturing mullahs in Tehran imagined, his machine would achieve the Singularity. One split second after that epic moment, there would be no more powerful “being” on the planet than Perseus.

Together, creator and creation, they would rule.

But in his dreams, unlike Perseus, he was not all-powerful, too. He was weak and alone. In these dreams he was frail, once more that frightened little cripple, about to be thrown out of his mother’s splendid palace, thrown to the wolves, left to fend for himself in a frightening world he had no knowledge of. Where people were dragged screaming from their houses in the middle of the night because they worshipped at the wrong altar. And then disappeared into prisons, into the ground.

In his night visions, he was not the boy wizard who had built his first computer when he was eight years old. And taught it to write poetry and symphonies to rival Mozart or Bach. Who made his childhood toys walk and talk, animated, as natural as any real boy. But he was not himself anymore. Not even a pale shadow. In his dreams he was negative space.

And these nightly visions and frightful apparitions had planted a seed; a dark, metastatic cancer was growing in his mind that could not be denied.

He fought the notion, his nagging doubts and suspicions, with all the considerable intellectual power at his command. He told himself it could not be possible that Perseus was insinuating these dreams into his mind. Planting these paralyzing thoughts. It just couldn’t be. Integral to the psyche he had built into the neural pathways of the machine was a love of its creator. Reverence. This was a machine that had, after all, always called him “Father.”

But then something had happened that made him wonder.

A few nights ago, having taken some powerful sleeping drug that his personal goddess Aphrodite had created for him, he awoke to find himself gone from his bed. He was outside in the cold night air. He was high atop the seaside cliff where the observatory stood, just above the brilliantly lit power plant. His chair, resting on the most precipitous outcropping of rock, was empty. He himself was seated out at the very edge of the cliff, looking down between his foreshortened limbs into an angry sea crashing against the rocks hundreds of feet below.

He suddenly had a very powerful urge to use his strong arms to propel himself into space. Such an appealing idea! To be free of the ridiculous chair caused by his cursed lifelong infirmity. It was all he could do to remain there on the rock until the desire passed. He did it by reminding himself that Perseus had long promised him legs. Real legs, genome-replicant legs like the ones he should have been born with instead of these hideously withered stumps.

He had struggled back into the chair and returned to his chambers. Aphrodite was sleeping soundly in his bed, seemingly unaware that he’d even been gone. He lay awake for the rest of the night, wondering why a human being standing on the verge of becoming the most powerful man on earth would suddenly have a near uncontrollable urge to commit suicide.

It was what had prevented him from sleeping again tonight. Why he was out on the seaward terrace in the small hours of the morning, feeling sorry for himself.

“Master?”

He heard Aphrodite’s whispery voice behind him. He turned and saw her approaching him across the polished white marble terrace, now a hazy blue beneath the moon and starlight. She was wearing a thin, diaphanous gown that revealed a lush body that never failed to arouse him. She was a gift, visible proof that Perseus loved him still. Was she not? In addition to offering her body, she opened her mind to him. He felt he could tell her anything. He’d never had a real friend, much less a confidant, in his entire life. But now he did, and she was a great aid and comfort to him.

She padded silently through the drifting sea mist, across the stone, kissed the top of his head, and then composed herself at his feet, looking up at him with adoring eyes.

“Another sleepless night?” she said, in her soothing tone. Her long slender fingers stroked the nub where his right leg should have been, and still the phantom leg could feel it.

“Yes. Even your magic potions no longer help. So I sit here and gaze at the troubled sea until the sun returns. All these water molecules interacting with each other. Chaos, but beautiful.”

“Your mind is troubled, not the sea. It cares not for this world. Unburden yourself, Darius. Give your fears to me so that I may dispose of them.”

“Oh, my dear girl, I’ve no idea where to begin. I have dreamed of glory for so long and now-now I fear I shall never see that day.”

“Why? You have created a miracle in Perseus. Together you will write your names across the stars. The time of the Singularity draws near.”

“Yes. It does. And the closer it comes, the further removed I feel.”

“Tell me why.”

“I am not a strong man. I have always been physically weak, and now I grow but weaker. My remaining life span is limited. I may not live to see the coming of glory.”