Jack Chalker - The Messiah Choice

“Geoffrey—it’s eleven twenty,” Sir Reginald said nervously.

Ten minutes, MacDonald thought anxiously. Just ten more minutes …

“All right—I’ll go. Have a nice chat, if you wish. I’m sure that Mr. MacDonald can be brought around to our point of view, one way or the other, at our leisure. He would be a wonderful replacement for Ross. Treat him well. After all, he is married to our Angelique…”

With that, the Dark Man vanished, this time by walking back through the door.

Sir Reginald put down the pistol and took a seat himself. He looked both nervous and very, very tired.

“Reggie—what is that thing? You called him Geoffrey.”

“He’s my brother,” the computer genius responded.

“Your brother hanged himself almost nine years ago.”

“Yes, yes. I know. Oh, god! I’m so tired and sick of all this mess!”

MacDonald frowned, recovering a bit from the Dark Man’s visage although it was never far from his mind. “Hey— aren’t you the one behind all this?”

“Well, yes, in a way I suppose. You see, I was working up at Cheltenham on the defense computer system at the time. Geoff had been dead about a year, and until those books arrived I’d quite forgotten about it all.”

“Then you weren’t in any cult?”

“No, I had little use for such stuff, then or now, I’m afraid. But, you see, shortly after the books arrived, I went down for a visit to Geoff’s grave. I’d put it off—it’s a silly custom—but when the books came I thought about him and just decided to go. I was there, at the grave, which had already been seeded with grass and overgrown, when I noticed some odd symbols at the bottom of the headstone. I kneeled down to get a better look and—” his voice trembled and broke rather suddenly”—these two arms, these strong, terrible arms reached up from the grave had held me. I—I screamed, broke free, and ran, but he followed me, somehow. He was there, outside the windows of my house, in the shadows even in the high security area at Cheltenham and I couldn’t do anything. I thought I was losing my mind. Finally I confronted him, and he told me what he wanted me to do.”

“Eight years… Then he couldn’t be a creation of SAINT.”

“No, nor anything else in this rational world. The project here was already under way, and he told me I’d get an invitation to supervise its final stages once construction was complete—and I did. He also sent a number of people to me; bright, young people with solid computer backgrounds who were none the less involved in cults of one kind or another. We designed many of the proprietary chips and circuits at Cheltenham for SAINT, and they were there, offering suggestions that were far beyond their possible knowledge, and he was there, too, in the shadows. The innovations he and they offered were brilliant, far beyond the capability of anyone I had ever known, even the Japanese geniuses on their projects.”

“And you never tried to fight them? Never tried to foul them up? You just went along?’’

“I—I’m not as strong a man as you might think. How do you fight someone like Geoff? How do you rationalize it? You tried—and see where it’s gotten you. And as a man of science, a man whose whole heart and soul was in computers, to be fed those incredible new designs, those whole new and revolutionary ways of doing things—it put me on top. It was the sort of knowledge a man of science would sell his soul for.”

“And that’s what you did.”

“I suppose you could say so.”

“Reggie—what are they doing out there tonight?”

“Something revolutionary. Something that many of those new circuits were designed to handle, and something that fulfills almost an ultimate dream.”

“Eh?”

“The fusion of human and computer. To actually link someone directly to the machine so that the two are essentially one. The human mind can never hold or comprehend the power, speed, and data of a computer, but imagine having all that at your command, instantly, when and if needed. To get any fact, do any computation—instantly. To control any computer-controlled device as needed.”

“Angelique. You mean Angelique, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not possible, Reggie! I say that having looked into the face of a living corpse and surviving a bout with a monster that could not exist. You said it yourself. The brain would fill up.”

“No, we licked that. Even the personality shell will reside within the computer, not the brain. Only the autonomic functions, the lizard brain and the mammalian brain, will remain. The rest will be a blank slate, able to hold whatever data is needed. The transfer is at the speed of light. There is no need to hold anything permanently there.”

“Good lord! You mean she’ll look like Angelique, sound like Angelique, but she’ll really be nothing more than an extension of SAINT, a living robot.”

“It’s a bit more than that. I would gladly do it myself if I were permitted.”

“Uh—Reggie? What time is it? How long until this happens?”

The Englishman looked at his watch. “It’s eleven thirty-five now. No more than twenty-five minutes.”

MacDonald’s heart sank to its lowest depths. Eleven thirty -five… We should all have been radioactive dust five minutes ago.

“When is this all taking place, Reggie?” MacDonald asked him. “The witching hour of midnight?” He was still amazed at being alive, and amazed, too that being alive now disturbed him so much.

“Oh, that’s rubbish. They have all their leaders here, you know—kings of African tribes and Himalayan principalities, ministers from many countries, all that. They’ll give them a real show before the climax, from their point of view. They have until the crack of dawn, as I understand it. His power wanes in the daylight.”

“But not SAINT.”

“No, not SAINT.”

“How come you’re not down there watching it all, or running around fixing up our damage?”

“I’m very tired, and stick of all this, frankly. They are taking the scientific breakthrough of the century, perhaps for thousands of years, and turning it into a mumbo-jumbo circus. As for SAINT—the sort of work you are talking about is heavy stuff, best done by the staff. When it’s ready to be operational again, I’ll have to check it all out I suppose.”

“Why?”

“What? What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly that. Has it occurred to you, Reggie, that you’re not really one of them? They needed you as the front to get their stuff installed in the computer, and they needed you up to now as insurance. But once they have this done, once SAINT and Angelique are one, the computer will be in complete control and you’ll be like the revolutionary that puts the dictator in power. His friends know how to wage a revolt and topple a government, and they have expectations when their man is in. So, the first thing the dictator does is wipe out his friends who put him there—if he wants to survive himself. It’s called a purge, Reggie.”

Sir Reginald nervously took a cigarette from a silver case and lit it. It took him two tries. “That’s ridiculous. Oh, I admit I’ve been used, but I’ve gotten a lot out of it as well. They still need me. No one but me could have located that diabolical erasure program Sir Robert snuck in with a mass of accounting data. Not even SAINT could remember or find it—but I did.”

“And you totally deactivated it just in case we killed Angelique while she was in our hands. Clever. Now it fears nothing. As soon as it enters into Angelique, it’ll have only one human being, one in the whole world, it actually fears, because there will be only one man it doesn’t own who can harm it. You, Reggie. I don’t think I’m going to live to see that dawn, but by god you aren’t, either. When it’s sure, if it works, you’ll be the first item on its agenda. You’re the ultimate sucker. You sold your soul for knowledge, but they always leave loopholes, don’t they, eh? They always have an out. The very knowledge you gave them is the very same knowledge that they can’t afford to have loose any more. Your only hope is that the project fails. The possibility of that is the only reason you’re still alive now.”