‘I am Jakob, and I think you know that.’ I was getting angry now.
‘I think you have assimilated Jakob. At a fundamental level, against the laws of man and God, you have no right to do this. You must leave and I think you know this.’
It appeared they had sent in the world’s calmest man to speak to me. Where was Pagan when you needed him?
‘And your diagnostics must have told you by now that Jakob has ascended – he is something else now. Just as you know that deep down your god is only real as a net-bound hallucination, a hollow ghost in your neurones. We have something tangible to offer.’
I was imagining what this man’s insides would look like. What it would be like to make patterns with them, to wear them? Didn’t he realise that they are as nothing to us? They are tools, nothing more, and we are under no obligation to take them with us.
‘Old man, I know angels, holy terrors,’ I told him, frustrated.
‘You know fallen angels, nothing more.’
Then he smiled. He had found something.
‘What?’ I demanded. He ignored me. ‘Do you understand that we are at an evolutionary point for mankind? Your outdated folk beliefs are about to be superseded by something real.’
‘It is not real. It is a technological horror more in keeping with the inventions of Mary Shelley than with the creation of a god, but that is just my opinion and here is the problem when two people debate faith. You are not going to convince me that I am wrong because I have faith, and I am not going to convince you that you are wrong. In such a case, all we can do is strive to accept our differences and perhaps understand them.’ His calm demeanour grated on me as smugness.
‘I am not offering you faith; I am offering you proof. I am offering you the tangible and personnel connection to God that you, all you hackers, wish you had.’ It was like talking to a simple-minded savage.
‘I think for non-religious people it will always be impossible for you to understand that the connection you describe is a relationship we already have and already feel. It is as real and tangible to us as your net-bound technological creations are to you.’
‘Even though you know them to be a lie?’
‘Obviously I don’t know that. In fact I believe the opposite.’
‘Salem.’ I was becoming more and more exasperated. ‘Do you understand what I’m offering you? I am offering you the chance to be a new Muhammad here.’
‘I think you are offering me the chance to be the spokesperson for a lie.’ There was no hesitation there. His narrow-mindedness was total.
‘You understand that’s what you fucking are?!’ I was shouting at him now. I was so angry. His expression became more serious and considerably less benign.
‘There is only one god and Muhammad is his prophet.’
‘You walk among fallen people, infidels, you fucking hypocrite!’
‘Only God can give me understanding of my place in things. Only he can judge.’
‘He’s not fucking real!’ He flinched. ‘The closest you ever got was that fucking joke back on Earth.’
‘A misguided and blasphemously named program.’
‘The things you’ve seen aren’t what you think they are. Are you so fucking frightened that you reject out of hand anything that’s real in favour of this fantasy world?!’
‘All you are is us,’ he told me. ‘All you are is a prison, a complicated computer program with delusions of grandeur.’
I was on my feet now.
‘I think you’ll see what I am, medicine man!’ I screamed at him.
He looked at me with an expression of pity. What could be more inappropriate? He was less than bloodied shit before me.
‘Tell Morag I’m sorry!’ I continued screaming at him. No! Wait. I didn’t say that. Why would I say that? She was a vessel for my pleasures – another victim, nothing more.
Salem made a sobbing sound. No, it wasn’t him, it was me.
‘I will make your family watch your corpse being fucked!’
‘I have nothing to fear from you. Allah protects me.’
‘I will find everything you care about and destroy it! I will show you that your god is a lie! I will rape your children and their children in front of your eyes!’
I was battering myself against the circle, causing myself pain as energy coalesced around me where I hit the barrier program. Hating the feeling of impotence that had somehow replaced omnipotence in here. This barrier was not human programming.
‘All you have is fear. I am so sorry,’ Salem said.
I could hear it. Everything I said, everything I did, and it was me. I knew that. I could hear it but it sounded different and distorted like sound travelling through water.
I felt like an exotic bird, some rich corp exec’s pet in a gilded cage. The cage was decorated with engraved knot-work and was so exquisite, ornate and beautiful it didn’t look real. It was still a prison. It hung here suspended in total, impenetrable darkness.
It gave me time to consider what I’d done. The betrayal, Demiurge’s trickery and the murder I’d committed under its influence. The things I’d said to Mudge and Pagan. Morag.
In some ways I would have welcomed being the monster. Or rather joining the rest of me to merge with the monster. Though the best thing would have been a bullet through my skull. I had nothing to offer now but more pain and lies. It felt like an age since I’d been able to offer anything else. I didn’t understand why my friends were prolonging this.
I had fully underestimated just how angry Rolleston was with me. Exquisite wasn’t a word I used often but this was. Turn me into everything I hate. Use me as a weapon against those I love but keep enough of me conscious and imprisoned to appreciate what I was doing.
Did I sound calm? Most of the time all I did was scream. I slept when he slept and dreamt of nothing, only to wake and scream again.
But not now. Now I’m lying on the cold metal floor of my cage, curled in the foetal position, shaking and crying like a frightened child. I can hear myself raging at the holy man.
I feel something gritty against my skin. Something blows against me in the warm wind. There should be no wind in this void. I open my eyes. The floor of my cage is dusted in fine grains of sand. More is blowing in through the bars. I sit up and watch this wind from nowhere play with the sand, make patterns with it on the floor.
I am hollow. I have little strength left for any emotion other than hate and self-loathing. I have become the worst thing I could imagine. Fear seems redundant.
There is still a prickling at the back of my mind, perhaps deep in the lizard brain as it rises from the sand. It is a desert ghost in robes, its head wrapped in a shemagh, obscuring its features, if it has any. The ghost is formed of the sand and is constantly reforming as the wind blows granules out into the void.
‘What are you?’ I ask. My throat should be raw and bloody, but this isn’t the real world.
‘I am an intelligent computer virus with limited verbal responses. I am sorry but this will hurt. A lot.’ I think the language is Arabic but somehow I understand it. I recognise the holy man’s voice.
‘What will hurt?’
‘Kneel! That’s right. Kneel, you fuck!’ Muscles contort, my mouth enlarges, and anger, not control of my icon, makes me look bestial as I scream at this nothing prostrate before his fiction, facing east. ‘Face me! Face me, you fucking coward!’
He should be kneeling before me, that is right and proper, even if I am a caged god. He shouldn’t be kneeling before some fiction in the east.
I start to tell him what I will do to him and everything and everyone he cares about. People say that the details in these kinds of descriptions are just pornography, but I knew that they painted pictures in his head and he would see me exploring atrocity with everyone he loves. He thinks he’s praying now. We both know he’s hiding from me, too afraid to face me. Tone it down now. Whisper to him, more effective than the screaming.
I watch in horror as my left arm becomes mercury and leaks to the floor from the finger up to the shoulder. Then the fire comes. Then I really start to scream as agony surges through every particle of my being.
