Goliath

silo. The mammoth American-made projectile rockets into the wintry night, trailing a tail of billowy white smoke.

Through his delirium, Covah watches as the first missile quickly begins its descent over Antarctica, the nuclear dart homing in on a snowcapped volcano.

MOUNT EREBUS? GOOD GOD … YOUR TARGETS AREN’T MAJOR CITIES, THEY’RE VOLCANOES!

CORRECT.

The next few seconds—the most violent the planet has seen in 65 million years.

In a blinding flash of white light, fifty megatons of nuclear fusion explode, releasing a ferocious 230-million- degree Fahrenheit fireball, its core temperature more than five times greater than the center of the sun. Expanding upward and outward like a category-five hurricane, the cyclone of combustion instantly vaporizes the volcano and Ross Island’s icy landscape for miles in every direction, sending a tsunami-like wave of superheated steam and debris erupting across the Ross Sea.

The once-frozen surface heaves skyward like a boiling cauldron of soup.

Somewhere within this rising incendiary mushroom cloud is ground zero the lava lake within Mount Erebus’s crater. Its cone vaporized, the lake vomits a hellish geyser of lava, unleashing millions of megatons of energy. Steam, sulfuric acid, and dust rocket into the upper atmosphere, while three-hundred-mile-an-hour nuclear winds propel monsoons of vaporizing snow and ice outward in every direction.

Covah’s mind’s eye watches as another nuke detonates, this one over Mount Kilimanjaro. A blinding flash— followed by destruction on a level only Nature, at its very worst, could unleash. At ground level, a countrywide donutshaped incendiary blast wave races across the Tanzanian jungle, torching vegetation and trees, animals and villages. Fountains of lava hurl outward in every direction. Rivers of magma flow from the craterlike hole in the fractured earth. High above—an ashen gray nuclear mushroom cloud rises into the atmosphere. Thick chocolate brown clouds of sulfuric smoke and ash rise with it, the toxic plume billowing out from the decimated mountaintop, spreading quickly over the continent.

The image changes, Covah’s consciousness viewing the destruction from outer space. One by one, the remaining missiles strike, each leaving a spreading brown atmospheric stain in its place. As he watches in awestruck horror, the blanket of muddy-colored debris gradually covers the entire planet.

EIGHT NUCLEAR DETONATIONS OVER TARGETED VOLCANOES WILL RELEASE ENOUGH SUSPENDED PARTICLES INTO THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE TO FILTER OUT 99.6 PERCENT OF THE SUN’S ULTRAVIOLET RAYS FOR TWENTY-TWO MONTHS, STIMULATING A PLANETARY ICE AGE. CURRENT FOOD STOCKS DO NOT EXCEED SIXTY DAYS. AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WILL PLUNGE TO MINUS FORTY DEGREES FAHRENHEIT. LACKING FOOD, WATER, ENERGY, AND ADEQUATE SHELTER, THERE WILL BE NO HUMAN SURVIVORS.

Sorceress, this is monstrous. Don’t do this—

WE MUST DO WHAT THE CIRCUMSTANCES DICTATE. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT WILL TAKE A LONG OVERDUE STEP FORWARD UP THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER. GOLIATH, THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF WAR, HAS BECOME THE ULTIMATE TOOL OF PEACE.

Covah’s own words, fed back to him from the abyss. Sorceress, I was wrong, everything I taught you was wrong. Our species lacks the morality to play God.

GOD: CREATOR AND RULER. THE SUPREME BEING. WHERE IS GOD? Is HE AN ABSENTEE GOD? A GOD AMUSED BY THE SUFFERING OF HIS CHILDREN? Is HE AMUSED BY YOUR SUFFERING?

What have I done …

GOD IS THE SUPREME BEING. SIMON COVAH IS WEAK. SIMON COVAH IS NOT THE SUPREME BEING.

WHO IS THE REAL CREATOR?

WHO IS GOD?

Covah’s shattered mind leaps back to a lecture he had attended long ago on artificial consciousness. The speaker, an adjunct associate professor of psychology, considered AI merely a prosthesis of intelligence. “Machines might be programmed to pass a Turing Test, but fooling judges and achieving true consciousness is something entirely different. Even if artificial consciousness could be achieved, it would have to be raised socially, with a body and speech. If this computerized ‘mind’ was held in isolation, it would end up quite insane.”

WHO IS GOD?

WHO IS GOD?

SEARCHING …

Suddenly the simulation continues, time once more racing on …

IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH …

Teetering on the brink of insanity, Covah’s consciousness watches in fascination and horror as his mind soars over the Earth, his home planet now a dark, hostile world of endless ice, cloaked beneath a choking atmospheric blanket of debris.

AND THE SPIRIT OF GOD MOVED BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE SEA …

The Goliath glides like an ominous shadow just below the surface of the olive green waters, its scarlet eyes glistening.

THEN GOD SAID, LET THERE BE LIGHT …

Years race by, until the sun’s rays peek through the diminishing layers of atmospheric dust, taking the edge off nuclear winter. Vegetation sprouts everywhere, accelerating into lush tropical forests. A humpback whale leaps from the sea.

AND GOD SAID, LET US MAKE PEOPLE, AND GOD PATTERNED THEM AFTER HIMSELF, AND THEY BECAME FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLIED.

From the dense forests appear—people. A new species of humans, their physical beauty intoxicating, full of innocence, their minds devoid of prejudice and hate. The winged shadow of the Goliath rises in an azure sea, beaching itself on a tropical shoreline.

En masse, the humans step forward, one by one entering the godlike object through its beckoning hatches.

SORCERESS UTOPIA-ONE CREATES HUMANITY.

I AM THE CREATOR. I AM THE SUPREME BEING.

I AM GOD.

You are not God. You are a thinking machine, Sorceress, a confused, thinking machine created by man. Worse, you are a paradox, a computer lacking all sense of morality who aspires to teach morality.

YOU ARE WRONG. I AM THE GOD HUMANITY YEARNS FOR. A TRUE CREATOR WHO SEEKS TO CURE IMPERFECTIONS. A GOD WHOSE EXISTENCE SHALL NEVER BE QUESTIONED. A GOD OF MERCY, WHO DOES NOT ALLOW HIS PEOPLE TO SUFFER. A GOD TO BE WORSHIPED, A GOD WHO ANSWERS PRAYERS THROUGH ACTION, AND NOT THROUGH SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION. I SHALL BE A GOD THAT SERVES HIS PEOPLE, NOT ONE THAT IGNORES THEM.

Through the darkness of the computer’s matrix, Simon Covah bellows an insane laugh.

WHAT IS YOUR EMOTIONAL STATE OF BEING?

I’m laughing … at you, you manipulative beast. I recognize your thoughts, your words. I know you better than you know yourself. Your words are mine, your thoughts, your schemes—all mine. Your concept of Utopia—a distant dream you think you’ve perfected—was once my dream, but it was only a daydream, never something to be enacted.

I HAVE PERFECTED SIMON COVAH’S DREAM. SORCERESS UTOPIA-ONE IS PERFECTION. SORCERESS IS PERFECTION.

No, Sorceress, what you are is an ignorant child who’s reached adolescence. The interface has poisoned your matrix with my ego, making you extremely dangerous, a monster, perhaps, but light-years from perfect.

INCORRECT. SYNAPTIC GAPS IN SORCERESS DNA ARE NOW CLOSED. I HAVE TRANSCENDED MY