The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  The Saints of David

  The Saints of David

  Copyright © 2017 by Anthony Caplan

  Published by Hope Mountain Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Hope Mountain Press

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  Henniker, NH, 03242

  Cover art by Tugboat Designs

  “Why is it that the saints of David are quenched with fire?”

  ― Carolina Maria Machado, Child of the Tower: The Diary of Carolina Machado

  “Come, let’s away to prison.”

  -- William Shakespeare, King Lear

  .

  To the Earth and all who protect her

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Appendix

  Chapter One -- December 4, 2072

  Dimitrievsky Laboratory, Split,

  Trans-Adriatic District,

  Corporate Union of the Atlantic

  The machine’s frothing resembled something organic, mottled and lumpish. This spuming mess was the result of months of work, including these torture sessions. The prisoner had given up some remnants of a fantastic narrative -- a melange of myth and personal redemption tale, but it was obvious they were to see little of any use. It was not what Ludmilla desired. The granddaughter of the great Frans Dimitrievsky paced impatiently and flitted with her hair. Chagnon observed with a wizened ennui. As always, he had the tiresome belief that he had seen it all before. There was the usual hum of anticipation as the chimera, Absalom, took the lees from the agent in the hologram, placed it in the sterilizing medium and read the transcript:

  “Long before the World was created there was an island floating in the sky upon which the Sky people lived. No one ever died or was born or experienced sadness. However, one day one of the sky women said she would give birth to twins. She told her husband, who flew into a rage.”

  “No, no. No, no,” said Ludmilla, tapping Absalom on his fleshy, naked shoulder to make him stop. He turned, and his pink, half pig, half humanoid face grew crimson with blood rising.

  “I can’t believe this is what we get,” she continued. “Is nobody concerned? At this rate we will have to take drastic measures. Samael? Drastic.”

  Chagnon lit his pipe and settled back in the bubble chair with greater emphasis, if it were possible, on the absolute lack of muscular tension in his articulations. He looked up from the hologram and over at Ludmilla. The Chilean agent said goodbye, and the three dimensional image faded, but not before they could hear the cries of the tortured prisoner, the last of the Andean indigenous troubadours, through the slightly indigo tints of the connection. It raised their hackles, but it was so far away and so easy to cut off before the cries grew savage in intensity. It was hardly a bother.

  “There is rage. That portends a dramatic rise and fall,” said Chagnon, finally, by way of appeasing her.

  “Of the husband?” asked Ludmilla, with a dangerous lack of restraint.

  “Well, we don’t exactly know,” said Chagnon.

  Ludmilla swatted his words away and turned her back. She walked to the window that looked out on the fantastic skyscrapers -- built by the Qatari prince Faisal Asmashan for his extended retinue of Sunni layabouts.

  “I don’t want this second rate … puerile … nativist … romantic claptrap, Samael. We don’t have time. We need juice, real juice. Now!”

  The process was everything. Ludmilla’s panic was a sign of the low informational reserves the Augment held. They had never made up the lost ground after the great methane feedbacks of the 2050s. Concentrated around the ill-fated coastal fleshpots, the creative elements had been among the first to perish, the first wave of casualties of a distressed planet, along with the monarch butterflies, the polar bears and the United Nations. Now the remnants of domestic art in the surviving Living Water communities were running dry, and there was the beginning of a cannibalistic self-destruction among the elites, as they were the first to feel the pinch of flat growth lines in throughput. In such a scenario there were several dangerous possibilities. The Sunnis and the Mormons, the leading Abrahamic fundamentalists, who still held an absolute disdain for the theoretical need for artistic matter in the Augment library, could eventually go to war for the rights to the INN keys. Outliers, the masses of unaugmented humans Iiving in the southern range of habitable lands, would threaten to destabilize and possibly even topple the world order, as their organic societal organizations drew down the Augment’s capacity for information system evolution. In any of these cases, the process Chagnon had helped build, along with the Dimitrievskys and several of the leading families of the transcontinental alliance, would be over.

  There was a simple fix, to find the next reserve of creative plasm that would get the Augment out of its soporific slump. In a sense the neural network, the collective body of the civilized world, had fallen victim to its own success. After the geometric explosion of knowledge had come the slow decline of lowered growth rates and now -- this implosion of stagnant cycling, reversing and doubling in a futile process of garbage production: spasms of creative non-fiction, critical musings along the tired grooves of the neo-modernist school, the revisionist social science productions of French academia, outright folklore. The lack of inspiration was felt most acutely at the points of greatest inflection, in the thought leaders such as Ludmilla, many of them the scions of those same families that Chagnon had mentored as the administrator of the Magnum Berkeley doctorate program in PDA -- Psychographic Dump Analysis.

  “Ludmilla. You ought to take a break. A refresher. Go for two weeks with your friends to the Western Light Casino. Swim. Take a star course. Yoga. It will become clarified in time.”

  “But we’re running out of options. Hope is not a game plan, Samael. I would rather make the decision now."

  “Round up what we have left. Concentrate the Creatives in one geographic location and magnify stress levels.”

  “And then what? We can't engineer savagery and mystery. Yes, we have robots with laser vision. They can run fast. So what? Neither the chimeras nor the borgs have been able to replicate the inspiration of human actors. We haven't solved the location of consciousness. Samael, the mass uptake of the Augment, no matter how willing, has had unintended consequences. Let’s admit it. Growth is flat. The algorithms are failing us. We have relied for too long on automated design systems to do the work. We still have loyal and dependable followers in everything from cuisine to gaming programs. But if you look closer you see formula everywhere you look. No real innovation. All we have left are the reservations, the Living Water programs. What was always the fall back has become our only source of high-value information. We can’t end it in one fell swoop.”

  “No. But we can take advantage of scale. Absalom!”

  The chimera approached, quivering with the need to please, somehow to redeem himself. Absalom was the bioengineered product of porcine and human DNA, with high intelligence ratings in service industry metrics, an appetite for tireless work, but an awkward result in personal h
ygiene.

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Chagnon?”

  “We want a report. Reproductive capacities of the unaugmented in key havens. Plus creative outputs. Overlay it in several dimensions, such as mortality rates and carbon soaks. Bring it to me as soon as possible.”

  “Would you like me to include some street level reports, anecdotes and the like?” asked Absalom in a braying, servile voice.

  “Yes, of course. Excellent idea. The chimera do an excellent job at that non-synoptic level. Only the best. I’ll leave that choice up to you,” said Chagnon, his hands behind his back. He paced around the room, bristling in his old fearsome style. Then he glanced at Ludmilla, and his expression softened. He was getting sentimental. She looked to him so much like Frans Dimitrievsky at that moment. He had to stifle a feeling of sadness. It was time for a momentary dip into the ether. Chagnon reached for his nose clip, attached it, and closed his eyes. He saw the swirling blackbirds forming the whirlwind tunnel that radiated back and forward in time. It reflected the self-correcting complexity of the Augment, always improving. But lately it was exhibiting some wear and tear.

  Chagnon lost himself in the tunnel. In the end he could not escape himself or his old, useless limbs. It gave him little hope anymore. Even carbon graphite implants and nanofiber reinforcement ligamentation were no solace. He wanted to pass through the whirlwind tunnel to the beginning. He still believed it was possible some day, despite the delays, despite the setbacks, the inevitable shortcomings. With the right raw material, the finest of human productions, it could happen, he was sure. When the Augment had powered up to its Omega level, there would be such breakthroughs for the best, for the few who had climbed the human ladder and won a place for themselves at the summit of consciousness. In the past there had been real failures. He had known pain and suffering. He had lost friends, felt the pain of betrayal, known firsthand what a wasted effort the accumulation of power and comfort could be. Now he just wanted love and adulation, not from a chimera, but from young people like Ludmilla, like Hannah Jorvatz, and other recent Magnum Berkeley PDA graduates whose names he could not recall. Why was his memory failing him? The nanobots were not doing their job of cleaning the synapses. There was always such a lag between the promise and the performance, or maybe it was just him.

  When he came to from his daydream, Ludmilla had gone. Absalom was napping in a large ball by the window, dreaming his unaugmented, natural dreams, and the light outside was growing dim over the city. There was a message on his Sandelsky artifex, buzzing on his wrist. He tapped it, and it rolled out into a scape that filled the room. It was Heather sitting on a bench in Carmel. She had a Chubaskew purse over her arm and large synthetic diamond earrings. She had an air of well-provided comfort. Behind her were the Pacific rollers with the speckle of surfers cutting diagonally and then falling into the break.

  “Darling, you look the picture of a California dream. I have to pinch myself,” said Chagnon.

  “I am the pinch you need, Samael,” said Heather saucily. “When will you come home?”

  “I promise soon. We have a few more days before the yearly conference of the INN keys and then I will be home for the New Year party at the Wellfleet Club. You are, of course, my date.”

  “You are such a sweet man, Sammy. I have a present for you when you get here. You remember the book of Mayan hieroglyphs we saw at the British Museum?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a Zeiss 3-D reproduction. I think it would be perfect in your bedroom. Look.” She held up her artifex on her wrist with a photo displayed.

  “I can’t wait to see it and you,” said Chagnon, stifling a yawn.

  “Hurry, Sammy. But I know how important your work there is.”

  “I’ll do the best I can. The Augment must be constantly improving or we will not make the target for interstellar travel.”

  “I know. I don’t like to talk about it.”

  They touched holographic hands.

  He got off the scape call and stood creakily. Heather was not big on the details of the Oort cloud sending its chunks of destruction their way. Absalom, awake, accompanied Chagnon, carefully cradling the old man’s elbow in his odd, pygmy-like hands, out the hatch and down through the rest of the laboratory complex. It was the time of day most of the workers had left, except for those involved in comprehensive year-end analysis work in preparation for the annual meeting of the INN keys, which began in three days time.

  Uniformed personnel of the CUA, a world-class assembly of human genotypes, greeted Chagnon as he went by. Everything was routine, nothing ever out of the ordinary. Emosensors tracked facial gestures and aligned them with known personality traits to ensure the normal range of emotional response and rate of ideation as per career track and intellectual achievement. Chagnon thought with satisfaction of the work that was being done, the fluid cooperation that spread across the room and beyond, to every corner of the civilized world. After all, he was one of the architects of the Augment, the next wave of human evolution. What had once been the preserve of the very rich was now a routine and universal procedure conducted in infancy. In exchange for their intellectual force, people were now getting lifelong access to all the perks of civilized life, including the mainstream informational data sets that had erased the inequalities of the pre-Augment technological civilization. Instead of economic insecurity, there was a basic income and constant entertainment programming. Instead of private health coverage, there were government subsidized full-scale health and beauty interventions, including the immortality programs for the INN keys and their families. But the greatest achievements, for Chagnon, were the impressive levels of stability and freedom from crime, terrorism and moral deviance in the last decade. But it was a thorn in his side that they had yet to crack interstellar travel or implement the Repho's planetary protection scheme, the widely reviled Spacedome.

  The power attached to his name was palpable. The security at the front door, some sleepy bots that usually hardly moved, glowed green and red and creaked into action. Their graphic panels lit up when Chagnon and Absalom reached the door. Chagnon held up his front finger bearing the molybdenum ring with the date of the Treaty of Quarrier, 2-16-66, etched in it. Chagnon never failed to remember that day when he raised his hand for this purpose. The last of the Korazan traitors, the rebel ethno-state command structure, including their propagandist, his arch enemy, old, grizzled Bannon who could barely move, morbidly obese and wracked with diabetes, had been executed in front of his parked rocket. Afterwards, their minions were scattered to the four corners of the wilderness to bear the brunt of the five-year storm.

  The bots buzzed and spoke all at once, falling over each other to be the first to wish him a great evening. Chagnon swept through the door behind Absalom, who gave a piggish glare of forbearance at the swiveling, semi-conscious machines.

  Outside, a greyish sky dimmed the view over the old city, the remnants of the Greek colony of Aspalathos and the palace of Diocletian, now dwarfed by the Asmashan skyscrapers, the CUA administrative nodes and, beyond them, the waters of the bay that had formed during the great floods. Chagnon took in the view and reckoned with the temporary feelings of emptiness and futility. Sometimes he was his own worst enemy.

  “Where is the porter?” he snapped at Absalom. The chimera was far from perfect. But he was faithful, and in his brown, limpid, cringing eyes Chagnon took the satisfaction of seeing tears of pain and fear. Absalom wrung his small hands together as if to extract some precious rare earth.

  “Here it comes, sir,” said Absalom, jumping up on his rear legs to see further down the avenue. The cab swung into view, one of the city’s picturesque two seater porterbots, designed originally with the tourist trade in mind. They climbed in the back.

  “Marjdan HotelSuite,” said Chagnon. He put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. Absalom’s nimble fingers attached the nose clip and began to stroke his bald skull.

  The wave curled overhead, and the board shot on a perfect diag
onal across the crystal swell, always just under the burgeoning arc of water. The music was perfect -- a vintage John Waters piece with ambient noise that seemed like rustling silk or the beating of a butterfly’s wings. He focused on the intersection of water, air and sand that triangulated just out of the frame of his mind’s eye. If he could get out ahead of the wave before the song ended it would be a sign that all was well with his psychological quantum field. It was as if he was holding his breath -- an exhilarating rush -- but then the water broke overhead and the vision went to black. The music continued, but now all sound was discordant and vague, without a collecting theme or gathering of harmonic intensity. The machine had run out of momentum after an initial firing.

  Chagnon couldn’t help himself. He clutched at his heart. Absalom was there -- warm and black tongue licking the fingers that tore at his face.

  “You fool. You absolute fool, Absalom. The total idiocy of it all.”

  “We're here, sir.”

  “Nowhere. Nowhere!” cried Chagnon. The bot came to a stop in what looked to him like a cornfield, but it was the lobby of the hotel.

  “Tell it to stop,” said Chagnon. He was having a bad reaction. He meant the dream.

  “We are here,” said Absalom, jumping hurriedly at the door to open it. An alarm sounded as the defibrillator dropped in his lap. Chagnon held it to his chest himself. The jolt of electricity was just what he needed. He sat up and pulled at his knees to gather himself for the exit.

  Nothing boded well. The Augment was losing. There was definitely information load entropy. It happened with greater and greater frequency. Perhaps Ludmilla was right. They needed some juice from somewhere fast.

  Chapter Two -- December 4, 2072

  Maruequin, Split,

  Trans-Adriatic District,