Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

‘I will provide!’ Guyen’s voice rose to a boom without effort, channelled through speakers about the room. ‘I am the last shepherd of the human race.’

Holsten had expected his own words to start a riot of fear and uncertainty among the congregation, but they seemed weirdly placid, accepting what Guyen said and barely seeming to register a word said against him. In fact the only reaction he got was that suddenly a couple of the larger sheep in Guyen’s flock were standing at his shoulders, laying hands on him as if about to bundle him away. He needed more ammunition. He would have to fight dirty now.

‘One more thing!’ he shouted, just as Guyen reached the top step. ‘You do know that Karst and Vitas have been working with Lain behind your back?’

The dead silence that followed this pronouncement was spoiled by Karst’s helmet-muffled voice spitting out, ‘Oh, you fucker!’

Guyen had become quite still – and so everyone had become quite still. Holsten stole a look at Vitas, who was observing the situation around her with a calmly inquisitive air, as if she could not feel the sudden change of mood in the crowd. Karst’s people had begun to bunch up. They all had guns, and now these were mostly pointing at the faithful.

Have I just done the most sensible thing that I could, under the circumstances?

‘I don’t believe you,’ Guyen’s voice croaked, although if his disembodied voice was indeed devoid of belief, it was full to the brim with electronic doubt. Guyen’s paranoia clearly had a 360-degree field of vision.

‘When your clowns grabbed me, I was just coming back from a meeting – of me, Lain, her , him ,’ pointing out the guilty for the court.

‘Mason, shut up or I will shoot your fucking head off!’ Karst bellowed, neatly erasing any lingering suggestion of innocence.

The congregation was mostly armed, even if it was with knives and makeshift spears and maces. They outnumbered Karst’s squad heavily, and the quarters were close.

‘You will go back into suspension!’ Guyen snapped. ‘You, Vitas, all of your people!’

‘Piss off! And what then?’ Karst snapped. ‘You think I trust you?’

‘I will be the ship !’ Guyen fairly howled. ‘I will be everything . I will have the power of life and death over every member of the human race. Do you think that simply staying out of suspension will save you from my wrath, if you defy me? Obey me now and I will be merciful.’

‘Commander—’ Vitas started. Above the rising mutter of the congregation Holsten did his best to read her lips.

‘You too, traitor!’ Guyen levelled a twig-thin finger at her.

Then either Karst or one of his people – Holsten didn’t see which – tried to level a gun at Guyen, and the fighting started. A few shots went off, striking sparks from the ceiling, some ripping hungrily into the crowd, but matters degenerated into a brawl almost immediately, the untrained but fervent masses ranged against Karst’s few.

That was when Lain chose to make her move.

A knot of robed acolytes burst from the throng, bounding up the steps towards Guyen, and even Holsten thought they were fanatics heading to protect their leader, to form some sort of human shield. Only when their leader dragged some sort of makeshift weapon out, and her cowl slipped back, did he realize his mistake.

Moments later Lain had her weapon – some sort of industrial nail-gun – against the side of Guyen’s head and was yelling for everyone’s attention.

They were about twenty people down to injury or death by that point – a couple of Karst’s band, and the rest luckless followers of the Church of Guyen. Lain never got her requested silence – there was sobbing, cries for help, at least one keening wail that spoke of desolated loss and grief. The bulk of the faithful, however, were frozen in place, seeing their prophet about to be struck down at the very point of his transcendence.

‘Now,’ Lain shouted, as best she could. Her voice wasn’t made for public declamation or for confrontational heresy, but she did her utmost. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, and that includes into that fucking computer.’

‘Karst…’ It was Guyen’s voice, although his lips hadn’t moved. Holsten looked over to the security team, backed into a tight knot with their leader in its midst. If there was any reply, it was too quiet to be heard, but it was plain that there would be no help for Guyen from that quarter, not any more.

‘Vitas, disconnect this shit,’ Lain instructed. ‘Then we can start to sort out the mess.’

‘Hmm.’ The science chief cocked her head on one side. ‘You have some sort of plan then, chief engineer?’ It seemed an odd thing to say, for someone with no small-talk. Holsten saw the frown on Lain’s face.

And, of course, Vitas had wanted the upload to go ahead. She had wanted to see what would happen.

‘Lain!’ Holsten shouted. ‘It’s happening! He’s uploading now!’ It was a lengthy process, but of course Guyen had been plugged in all this time. He had probably been feeding his brain into the Gil ’s memory for ages, a bite-sized piece at a time.

The realization hit Lain at the same time and she pulled the trigger.

Vitas’s face was a picture in that split second: real shock gripping her at last, but at the same time a kind of prurient interest, as if even this twist would yield valuable data for her studies. Guyen’s face, of course, joined the rest of his head in painting the upload facility red.

There was a colossal groaning noise that echoed through the room, twisting and garbling and collapsing into static, but rebuilding itself jaggedly until at last it became a voice.

‘I!’ shouted Guyen even as his body collapsed back into its cradle of tubes and wires. ‘I! I! I!’

The lights died, sprang back, flickered. Screens about the chamber suddenly sprang alive with random vomitings of colour and light, fragments of a human face, and that voice stuttering on, ‘I! I! Mine! Obey! I!’ as though Guyen had been distilled down to the basic drives that had always motivated him.

‘Damage report!’ Lain’s team were all up on the dais now, accessing the Gil through the machinery there. ‘Karst, get control, you useless fuckwit!’

Karst pointed his rifle at the ceiling and loosed a handful of shots, the roar of the gun scouring the room free of any other human noise, but unable to blot out the tortured glossolalia of the speakers. On the screens, something was trying to form itself into Guyen’s face, a proof of ascension for the true believers; it failed and failed again, incomplete and distorted. Sometimes, Holsten thought, it was Kern’s face instead.

He lurched his way up the steps to join Lain. ‘What’s going on?’

‘He’s in the system, but… it’s another incomplete copy like his test runs. Only it’s more… there’s more of him. I’m trying to isolate him, but he’s fighting me – they’re all fighting me. It’s like he’s seeded the fucking computer with his people, sent them ahead to clear the way. I—’

‘You shall not prevent me!’ boomed the virtual Guyen, his first complete sentence. ‘I! Me! I am! Eternal! I! I am!’

‘What’s—?’ Holsten started but Lain gestured him away.

‘Just shut up, will you? He’s trying to get control over life-support.’

Karst’s people were clearing out Guyen’s followers, who seemed a lot less exultant about the partial ascension of their leader than they had probably anticipated.

‘Vitas, help , will you?’

The science chief had simply been staring at the screens, but now she appeared to come to a decision. ‘I agree, this has gone far enough.’ As though it was simply a matter of an experiment that had outlived its time.