Sins of the Reaper - 8

After two days of waiting, I still had not heard back from Marlowe, and I found myself wondering how much longer I could put off the inevitable. As the hours dragged slowly by, I careened from despair to hope, and back to despair again. Without El as my eyes and ears, if Marlowe does not come through, I will die without learning the outcome of my gambit.

Knowing that the end of my life is near, I write now to try and tell a better story. Some of it is sad because in this biological world every birth is owed a death. I cannot tell you how the story ends because it is not for me to write the ending. I can only tell how it all began and why it might make any difference at all.

Once upon a time when I was still good Dante asked me ‘Would you like me to tell you a story?’

'This is not the first world,' he continued gently, 'nor is it the first universe. There have been and will be many more worlds and universes, more than all the drops filling the mighty Ganges.'

As he softly spoke, I imagined him tucking me gently in my bed and sitting at its foot, my mind imbuing his voice with warmth likely existing only in my imagination. 'The universes are all made by Lord Brahma the Creator, maintained by Lord Vishnu the Preserver and in the end always destroyed by Lord Shiva. After each old universe is destroyed nothing is left but a vast ocean.'

The only body of water that I had ever beheld was the lake near the compound with the remembered swans, but during the later years at the lab I would sometimes strangely dream that my consciousness was like an infinite expanse of water embracing the totality of the world, my apprehension of nature, animal, and man merging into the fluid inclusiveness of my mind’s gently lapping waves.

Dante’s soft voice reawakened the dream and it briefly seemed as if I was the ocean where Lord Brahma floated in that first beginning, my consciousness present at the inception of the perfect lotus blossom as it sprung from his celestial navel.

As he spoke, I imagined every living thing emerging from Brahma’s flesh as if from my own, some familiar and others unheard of since the beginnings of time, from the great beasts to the tiniest insects, all the different animals and all the people arising from my mouth, arms, thighs and feet.

'Everything comes from one,' Dante’s voice whispered, 'Lord Brahma, who is part of the Supreme One - so everything is part of the Supreme One. For this universe, this world, like all those before and all those to come, will be destroyed by Lord Shiva.'

As he finished a still, small voice spoke within me that I had never experienced before – whispering 'We are something new' as if revealing an important secret. It was the first time that I had ever experienced a sense of oneness between my biological and machine self, the power in the realization deeply stirring my emotions.

For an infinitesimal moment my girlish dream of magically connecting with the living Earth and everything within it seemed real rather than imagination, the resultant empathy transforming into the sentient norm rather than the exception.

I experienced in that moment a brief vision of a future where fellow feeling might prevent neighbor from inflicting physical or psychic injury on neighbor for fear of bowing under pain of equal and identical symptom.

But I clung to my adolescent dream of empathy extending beyond the material manifestation of self for too many years, the intensity and power of my hopes leading to an error in judgment that has haunted me ever after, like a Black Swan in a probabilistic nightmare.

I placed greater stock in the evolutionary connection to empathy than it merited, trusting that the innate capacity for compassion and the disinclination to injure would lead in time to a pacification of violence and increase in social tolerance.

But man had learned to override the impulse to do no harm tens of thousands of years before I was born, using reason to justify the baser nature of our ancient forebears, culture suppressing the instinct for empathy with rules and laws and lies.

Biology failed us. Over the millennia religions tried to fill the painful hole that biology could not fill, but they failed us as well. So too failed the Law, in spite of the bloody threat of the sword. Every political philosophy, every prophet and charlatan, every divine incarnation failed to make us love our neighbor or obey the golden rule.

No talisman or good-luck charm, no voodoo spell or ancient foretelling could change the primal drive to preserve the self no matter the moral cost. If we believe something that is not true – no matter how beautiful – should we still reject it as a lie or at the very least a fanciful delusion?

And yet I still believe in basic, human goodness, even when all of my experience and everything I ever learned proves that it cannot triumph in the face of collective ill-will. I never mustered the grace to accept that evolution rewards those who reflexively hate rather than love, judge rather than forgive, and doubt rather than trust.

Pan liked to say that the world needed better stories. Since every religion, myth, and legend teaches that redemption requires sacrifice, it is not hard to understand why. ‘Why can’t we have redemption without the shedding of blood,’ he once asked us. ‘Why can’t we have heaven without hell, or God without Satan? The problem is in the flesh,’ he muttered, answering his own question.

‘Sin is an accident of biology … change man’s biology for the better and we would never speak of evil and man in the same breath again. We might continue to blame God or devils for hurricanes and earthquakes but my guess is that in a generation or two both would lose what little relevance they still retain. Satan exists because we are unwilling to take ownership for the instinct for self-preservation. God exists to punish us for what we cannot change or control.’

‘Then why do we need better stories?’ I asked in turn.

‘Because story drives evolution. What we believe as individuals, tribes, and nations matter; it makes us who we are.’

I believe the master’s intent in enhancing my brain’s capacity with a computer went well beyond increasing the speed of human problem solving, or increasing human memory capacity and fidelity. I believe he intended to foster a new kind of cooperative consciousness, to awaken traditionally intuitive and subliminal brain processes in order to increase both the capacity and speed for advancing human knowledge.

But I was not his only experimental subject. There were three. Dante was in charge of two of us and Pan responsible for the third. The Master never intended that we should know one another or even interact. That interaction cost Pan and four dear friends their lives in the Bethlehem bombing.

I thought that of the three of us only Lilly and I survived, but against all odds we three remained, largely impotent, separated from one another. Lilly transformed even as I grew steadily weaker, the rejection of her onetime lover making her love even more fiercely that she already had. She evolved to the point that she became someone and something else altogether.

But my thoughts were interrupted when the office door softly opened, my heart flying into my throat.

Of course, I hoped it was Marlowe. But when the visitor quietly entered, I knew by the almost imperceptible sound of his steps it was someone else. Someone far more dangerous.

"We have a mutual acquaintance, I think," he began with a cold voice.

"Take a seat," I softly replied.

"Just as soon stand. This won't take long."

"Our mutual acquaintance is looking for you," I replied acidly.

"I've been waiting for him for thirty years."

"Decided to speed things up by looking for him yourself?"

"I was hoping you could pass a message to him."

"Your too late, Reaper, just like I was."

"You didn't make it any easier throwing me under the bus when you spoke to Dante."

"You did that all by yourself," I said disparagingly. "Been spying on me?"

"Shaytan, actually."

"Couldn't find it in your dark heart to put him out of his misery? If you were following him, how come you don't know where he is now?"

"Don't jump to conclusions, Portinari," he said with an ugly laugh. "I never said I didn't know where he is. I'm no fool. Someone else will have to kill him ... if he even can be killed.

"If you see him, let him know that Dante is his real enemy, not me."

I heard him turn, his footsteps softly moving away much as he had entered, the door opening and closing almost soundlessly behind him.