The Soul Consortium
My body will go on and on, but who lives within this flesh? Am I losing perspective to such a degree that I’m prepared to become a monster to find my answer? And perhaps it is even worse. Was it really the answer I was interested in, or was it the fascination of becoming a killer? This is why Qod warned me about being Orson Roth. Not because of who he was but because my choice might force me to face who I have become.
The hiss of hydraulic locks snaps me from my musings, and my hands and feet are freed. Cables lower me gently to the floor, and I’m grateful for the warm breeze against my face, as though somehow I had been aware of the stale atmosphere gradually building inside the WOOM through all the years of my immersion.
“Would you like to go to the Observation Sphere?” Qod asks. “Not much has changed in forty-six years, but I know how it helps you think.”
All I do is nod when the cables slide away. The metallic floor sticks to my feet as I head for the exit of the Aberration Sphere, and at last I’m me again, but I will never be able to forget the murders I committed inside that man’s life. Even without my enhanced synapses, those bloody memories will leave a permanent stain. Zachary Cox’s glassy gaze imprinting on my brain, Orson Roth’s syringe in my hand, the stench of formaldehyde burning my sinuses.
I stop, and my heart skips a beat. I can’t leave, not yet. I came into this new sphere for a reason, and Orson Roth had no answers for me. All around in every alcove, a tiny light glitters—each one a soul containing some sort of aberration. But what are these aberrations? I have my suspicions, and I have a lead, but the thought of where that investigation may take me brings a shudder of trepidation.
“Qod?”
“Yes?”
“I need you to locate another soul for me. His name is Keitus Vieta.”
For my wife, Ruth, whose comedy sabotage of my manuscript has kept my feet firmly on the ground on many occasions. I could not have written this without you.
Published 2012 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2012 by Simon West-Bulford
Cover design by James Tampa
Edited by Lorie Popp Jones
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro
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ISBN# 9781605423937
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First Edition
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks must go to all the fantastic members of Write Club, particularly Jason Heim for hosting it. Also to Mlaz Corbier, Mark Grover, Anthony Jacques, Nicholas Karpuk, Alex Martin, and Bob Pastorella, whose critiquing skills, encouragement, and humour were invaluable. But extra applause is directed at Gordon Highland and Caleb Ross who threw themselves into every last word. Without them this novel would have been twice as large but only half as good.
I also want to thank my friends and family who shared in my excitement and encouraged me, always believing in me.
High praise and thanks must also go to Medallion Media, especially Emily Steele and Lorie Popp Jones who have been a joy to work with.
Thank you!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SALEM BEN
1
2
3
ORSON ROTH
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
SALEM BEN
4
5
6
DOMINIQUE MANCINI
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
SALEM BEN
7
8
9
10
11
PLANTAGENET MATTHIAS SOOME
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
SALEM BEN
12
13
14
QUEEN OLUVIA WADE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
KILKAINE NOSTRANUM
1
2
QUEEN OLUVIA WADE
13
SALEM BEN
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
OTHER PLACE
1
SALEM BEN
Is this my first thought?
My first memory?
From evil dream to warm flesh, enfolding me.
From deepest darkness to rose light of womb.
Mother breathing,
Forever scorning,
The beckon of my tomb.
ONE
When I was a boy my smiling schoolteacher asked my class a very simple question: “What is the one thing in this world that we can all know as an undeniable certainty?”
The students looked at each other, smirking as they whispered their sarcastic remarks, but the grins soon fell when she spoke again. Not because she had brought her palm down hard on her desk when she revealed the answer. It was the tears in her eyes.
“One day every last one of you will die.”
I was the only person still smiling after she said that. I used to worry that it was the sight of other students in shock that amused me, but now I think it was something else, as if I had some peculiarity in my soul, sensing that this simple statement about the irrefutability of death was not true for me.
Eighty-four quadrillion years on as the last existing human and I still need to decide if it is true.
In the same way I have done on a billion separate moments, I stand inside the Calibration Sphere, huddled within my long charcoal-colored robes, staring at nothing. I have seen more, learned more, felt more, known more than ought to be possible for any human being, and every lucid moment is a struggle with the decision whether to end it all. Why then do I concern myself with such trivial details as the fact that there is no chair in here? But this sphere was never intended for humans to visit. It’s a cold place of ash-gray walls, harsh white light, and silence. At any one time the slowly revolving surfaces hold a billion digitally compressed souls—individual specks of remembered life—flickering as they undergo routine scans and maintenance.
There is only one empty slot left in the entire Soul Consortium—a lonely hollow amongst a host of souls—patiently waiting for my existence to end so it can be replaced with a blink of luminous data and categorized for insertion into a sphere beyond this one.
I can’t do it.
I tell myself it’s because everything will be wasted if there is nobody left, there is still more to be done, and life is too precious to discard, but those aren’t the
real reasons. I can’t do it because I’m terrified. The thought of death has always filled me with such terrible dread that I can’t bear to face it. Immortality is a curse—a wonderful curse—and I cannot stand to kiss the Reaper’s hollow eye.
“Salem.” A low female voice breaks the silence. “The stars await your pleasure.”
I pause before answering, thinking about how many times I have heard that incorporeal voice, reminding me of how many millennia have passed without genuine company. Real flesh and blood to embrace. “Thank you.”
“Would you like me to take you there?” Qod says.
“Because you think I’m lazy or because you think I’ll miss something if I don’t hurry?” She would never really see my smile. “No, I think I’ll walk. I haven’t taken a stroll for, oh, seventy-three years now.”
“As you wish, but please visit the genoplant before making your way to the Observation Sphere.”
“Something wrong?”
“Seventeen cells in your right lung have atrophied, and two cells in your cerebellum are showing early signs of degradation. Transplants have been prepared for you in the genoplant.”
“Joy.”
Several lifetimes ago during one of my more sullen moments I asked Qod what would happen if I didn’t comply, if I allowed my body to fail. It was a petulant question born from a naive desire to end my life without the burden of decision. But there has always been something about Qod that drives me on, and besides, I know exactly what would happen if I were to sit back and wait for my body to fail. Preconditioned survival genes would kick in, taking control of motor function and higher reasoning, forcing me to accept the necessary treatment to keep my mind and body alive. I could no more control that than I could will my heart to stop beating. Not that I couldn’t override it, you understand—it was decided a long time ago, when the misery of perpetual living afflicted the human race with suicidal craving, that a human being could choose to die. With the simplicity of flicking a switch, one could end it all. And eventually everyone did.
Everyone except me.
The walk to the genoplant took twenty standard minutes, the process of gene infusion a little less than three, and my sauntering through gray corridors to the fifty-klik observation dome another twenty. I run a hand along the back of my favorite seat, ready to watch the cosmos perform. Like me, the universe will never die.
I sink into the body-molded chair, and the vast crystalline walls of the sphere surrounding me fade from view like melting ice. Beyond the invisible walls an eternity as fathomless, dark, and empty as my life is revealed. Although that emptiness threatens to swallow the small part of me that remains, I am still drawn by it, still awed by its patient beauty as it waits for the next phase of its eternal evolution. Perhaps it’s because I think of the universe as my echo that I subject myself to this for the third time. I too keep hoping for something new, some sign that there is more to life than … life.
A spark ignites in the distance like a glinting eye opening in the darkness. The big bang it was once called. An anarchy of dazzling particles warring with each other to bring poetry out of chaos. Gluons, photons, antiporyons, demi-praxons expanding in one glorious blink to fill the waiting void. I drink that moment in as if tasting a breath of mountain air after a decade of imprisonment in a Ceti-9 sewer. Cold adrenaline lifts me from my seat, and my eyes swell with the sudden sweet emotion of it all as I spread my arms. How could I want to leave this?
How could they?
But I know this euphoria is only a grain of sand in a desert of apathy. Just like the pearl of light at the gates of death, disappointment will follow.
I would smile at the irony of my thoughts if there was someone real to share the joke. I’m watching the universe on the brink of rebirth, and at such a monumental event … I am restless. Irritated and dissatisfied, as if a maggot had infiltrated some hidden fold of my brain to squirm there unnoticed. But I’m not really all that different from those who came before me. They grew tired of continual existence too and chose to brave the final barrier—the one my teacher told me had to come eventually. But I am still not ready; I have to know there’s something beyond.
“Let there be light!” Qod’s voice fills the sphere like thunder.
After my initial shock, I sigh, irritated by the intrusion. “Most amusing. Next time would you mind adding some music?”
Before the birth of this third universe she made a similar comment. I watched the final days of the second cycle several trillion years ago. Most of the universe was cold by then, but I was privileged to see one of the few remaining areas collapse into a supermassive black hole. I fell to my knees, cowering at the incredible violence of it as energy and matter screamed its way to annihilation, and Qod quoted T.S. Eliot’s final stanza of “The Hollow Men.”
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Back then I was grateful for the remark; it pacified my terror. Today her attempt at humor grates me.
“Exit.”
A passage opens in the darkness, inviting me to leave the Observation Sphere.
I walk slowly away from the light and head to the labyrinthine bowels of the Soul Consortium. Time for change.
TWO
The Soul Consortium is an electronic tomb: a shrine to all the human lives who ever lived throughout the span of the universe’s existence. Every life is archived here—from the lowest Neanderthal child who died after two days of exposure to the flamboyant Zad Neibrum XVI who arguably had the fullest, most enjoyable, and most productive life in his twenty-thousand-year journey. The lives are stored as trillions of organized photons within vast Soul Spheres categorized for the perusal of anyone with an inclination to share their experience.
I have spent most of my own life walking these spheres, browsing the dead, searching for the ultimate experience. There is something about the human condition that leaves one continually lacking—an evolutionary curse driving us to forever want more, to always seek new things. I strive for happiness, knowing it is the water that trickles through my fingers when I grasp for it—it can never be contained, only fleetingly appreciated, and when drained away, all that is left is the wetness of skin reminding me of a brief pleasure. Even when I live the lives of the happiest people on record, this yearning stays with me, as though I am haunted by my own mourning ghost.
I am not the man I was.
The time has come to break the addiction—to stop searching for the ultimate thrill and begin my pilgrimage for the definitive answer. Qod knows I have delayed this too long. She taunts me when I wake from each life, asking me if I have found what I’m looking for, seemingly knowing I never will until I make the final journey beyond the veil. But what does she know? She is just a machine: the last AI—the only survivor from the Techno-Purge at the end of the universe’s first cycle. She endured because she is unreachable, hiding within the tiniest gaps of quantum space.
But Qod has been my only genuine companion through the long years. I don’t know if she really feels anything for me, but she stays anyway.
“I want to see something new,” I tell her as I stop at the end of the corridor, my hand resting against the door.
“You don’t want to enter the Bliss Sphere?”
“No.” My hand drops from the cool metal.
“Why?”
“I … I haven’t found …” I stare at the floor.
“Salem?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore. I just know it isn’t in there.”
“Why so sad? Three hundred and twenty thousand billion years pass, and you have an epiphany. Surely you should be elated.”
“Hardly. An epiphany is exactly what I haven’t had. Not my own, anyway … Has it really been that long?”
“You could think of it as one hundred and fifty-nine million lives you’ve lived if you prefer. Does that sound more appealing?”
The thought nauseates me. “So many.”
&nb
sp; “Indeed.”
“What am I still doing here? The others left centuries ago.”
“Is that a real question?”
“No.” I look back at the door, resisting the urge to enter. It’s safe in there. Every life filed in the Bliss Sphere has been traveled countless times by countless people before me, bringing them exquisite pleasure on every occasion.
The happiest people of history were easy for Qod to identify—analysis of the left prefrontal cortex indicated who the best candidates were, and those with low readings on the right cortex were excluded from consideration. The best result was a child by the name of Salomi Deya who was born with a defect that caused a permanently stimulated pleasure center, but she lived for only twelve years. I lived as Salomi seventy times, but nothing gave me greater pleasure than experiencing the life of Frederick Ruchard, an Old Earth fourteenth-century Buddhist monk who mastered the art of meditation. I became Frederick over eight hundred times before deciding to move on.
“You are sure you won’t enter the Bliss Sphere?”
“Talk to me about some of the other spheres. List them for me.”
“Any particular order? What do you have in mind?”
“Death. I want to know about death.”
“Recordings end at the point of death. I cannot help you.”
Even after trillions of years, some things never broke free from the list of impossibilities. Inverse time travel was one, and transdimensional stabilization was another, but most unfortunately, looking beyond death was at the top.
“Then I need to find people who might have known. Something that slipped through, pseudoscience, obsession, anything at all. List me some sphere categories at random—categories that might be related.”
“IQ Icons, Suffering Servants, World Leaders, Love Legends, Aberrations, Spiritual Activists, Maniacs—”
“Wait! What did you say?”
“Maniacs.”
“No, before that and before Spiritual Activists, did you say Aberrations?”
“I did, yes.”
“I’ve never heard of that category before.”