Except it wasn’t the same. This one was even bigger. Two or three times the size. Monstrous. And it was glowing. It was alive.
I thought about that word. Alive. Felt it. Tasted it. Knew it to be true. The machine was actually alive. It pulsed. Throbbed. Breathed. Lived.
But that was only part of what I saw. As troubling and frightening as that machine was, it paled almost to insignificance by what hung in the air above it. I’d glimpsed it before, but now I saw it. It was titanic. It stood there, miles high, dominating the sky. More powerful than the tortured landscape of the fuming vents of superheated steam.
It was a thing. A creature. Maybe a god. I don’t know and even though I was already dead and insubstantial, I knew this monster could hurt me. It could consume me. Its legs were like towers, like skyscrapers, and the body was vaguely humanoid. But the head… Jesus Christ. The face was covered by thousands of wriggling feelers that knotted and twisted like gigantic gray-green worms. Long worms surrounded its mouth. But… no, they weren’t worms, they were more like tentacles, but each one was bigger than the largest arm of the greatest squid or octopus that ever lived. The creature tore at the air with scaly claws that looked like they could slash through plate steel, and behind it, stretching out from its back, were leather wings.
That’s what I saw standing above the machine. A god from some drug-induced nightmare universe.
I hoped.
I prayed. I screamed. I begged the world to make this thing nothing more than a fantasy of a dying mind. Or a dead man’s nightmare.
The godlike creature threw back its head and from that mouth, hidden by those writhing tentacles, came a roar so impossibly loud that it shattered the ground on which it stood. I saw vast pillars of lava leap up and then everything was covered with smoke and fire.
The flames wrapped around me, around my ghost, and burned me down to nothing.
INTERLUDE FIFTEEN
“Christ, Corrine,” gasped Bell as soon as she entered his study, “you look like shit. What happened?”
“I need a drink first, Oscar. Bourbon. Hit me hard.” She sank into a chair and held out a hand, grunting her thanks as he gave her a tumbler he’d filled with four fingers of Pappy Van Winkle. It wasn’t his usual drink, being more of a scotch man, but Sails had brought the bottle on one of her previous trips. She preferred the rougher taste of bourbon to the smooth burn of single malt. Sails took a huge gulp, forced it down, gagged, coughed, and nodded her thanks.
Bell set the bottle down on the edge of his desk and pulled a chair close to hers. Sails looked like she’d aged ten years; she was grainy and pale, with dark smudges under her eyes and a nervous twitch in her hands. She took another substantial mouthful.
“That fucking machine,” she said.
“What about it? Was there an explosion or something? I told Prospero he needs to make that regulator work or—”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s not that. I mean… maybe it’s that, too. But this was… this was…”
And she began to cry.
Oscar Bell came out of his chair, pulled her out of hers, and held her close. It pissed him off that he had fallen in love with her, that they were in love with each other. That was inconvenient and it went against one of his strictest rules: never let sentiment interfere with business. But, it had happened, and now it was a fact. He loved this cold, vicious, brilliant monster and she loved him.
He held her close and let her cry it out, let her cry herself to the point where she could find her voice again. It took a while. It required more of the bourbon, and by the time she was calmer and they were seated together on the big sofa by the fireplace, her voice was thick from weeping and slurry with alcohol.
She spoke and he listened.
“It’s the God Machine,” she said. “I hate that godforsaken thing….”
The Gateway team, led by Marcus Erskine, had built two scale models of Prospero’s machine. Each one had cost upwards of forty million dollars. The first one, Bell knew, had been a spectacular failure that had exploded seconds after it was turned on. Five technicians had been killed, eleven others injured, and the lab destroyed. It was almost exactly the same thing that had happened at Ballard Academy when Prospero had fired his first prototype.
The first Gateway test had yielded other effects, as well. It generated an electrical nullification field — one of the “side effects” that irritated Prospero — that was far more powerful than anticipated. It was so strong that it blanked out power on half the continent. The Russian and Chinese research stations had gone dark for an hour and when they came back online there was a massive exchange of furious communication with Moscow and Beijing. Diplomats had to scramble to keep everyone from going to a high state of combat readiness. Not that America ever accepted blame for it. They claimed to have been victims, too. Luckily there had been some sunspot activity and in the end everyone blamed that. It was the “Kill Switch” Oscar Bell had promised, but it was still uncontrollable.
That was bad, but it was fixable. Erskine had anticipated some kind of problem along these lines, though not as massive. The null field was the golden egg at the end of this hunt. A controllable, predictable, reproducible electrical null field was the whole point of Gateway. Erskine had been putting increasing pressure on Bell to obtain the last component for safe management of the device — the crystal firing regulator — but so far even though Prospero now had three of the Unlearnable Truths he had failed to discover exactly what that was. Prospero said that it was a numerical code for passing the God Machine’s power through transformers attached to each of several large gemstones, but there were thousands of possible patterns, and experimentation to try and crack the code had resulted in damage ranging from explosions to true electromagnetic pulses that fried the machines at Gateway. It was becoming cost prohibitive to do anything more than keep the God Machine in idle mode, and the whole program was millions over budget. Erskine and his superiors were looking to hang the blame on Oscar, and there had been thinly veiled threats about consequences. Bell could lose the contract and there was an outside chance that if it all failed Gateway would require Bell to pay penalties to the government. That would ruin him. Bell had coerced Stark and his staff at Ballard to turn the screws on Prospero and he’d railed at Mr. Priest to find the rest of the books. He was bleeding money.
And now Sails was here, talking about how much she hated the God Machine.
Oscar Bell wanted to scream.
“What’s the problem?” he asked cautiously.
“Side effects,” she said.
“What are you talking about? This whole thing is about exploiting the side effects. The whole Kill Switch project is a fucking side effect.”
“No,” she said. “Not that. It’s the dreams. Those terrible dreams…”
Bell’s heart nearly jumped into his throat. Memories of what Stark had told him after Prospero’s machine blew up the first lab at Ballard. Oscar had never shared that part of the God Machine with Sails. Until now he’d thought it was only tied to that one test. “What dreams…?”
“It started that night,” said Sails. “Bad dreams. Jesus, Oscar…”
She told him about a problem that was not reported at first, and not taken seriously even after people started talking about it. Everyone put it down to stress and grief over the disaster. It was only after the second machine was fired that Dr. Erskine and his staff started paying attention to those dreams. And to their effects. The second machine ran for three weeks before failing. The Gateway scientists had done a lot of work on the sequencing of the power regulators, and though they were far from perfect, they seemed to allow the God Machine to run in idle mode, at 5 percent capacity.