“My family was Catholic, but it never appealed to me,” Connors replied. “Too much fire and brimstone. Why, are you?”
Vince carefully stepped his way through the junk. Looking overhead, he was relieved to see that the roof seemed intact. “No.” Some planks near a far wall looked like they were in good shape, and he went to have a look. “Or, I mean I wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, you weren’t?”
Gingerly, Vince reached down to pull up one of the planks. He remembered his grandmother’s stories about always checking under the seat in an outhouse. Black widows and brown recluse spiders would just love a pile of wood like this. He inspected the timber he picked up. Covered in cobwebs, but it was straight and dry. “Did you know that Buddhists think that people in the past—the very long past—were basically immortal? And that the Jataka stories from India, written down thousands of years ago, talk about an infinite number of parallel universes, side by side, and that we create reality with our minds?”
“You know,” replied Connors after a pause, “I did not know that.” Her mind was obviously elsewhere as she tried to figure out the drone controls.
“Ever wonder why the prophets describe epiphanies as ‘out of body’ experiences?” Vince continued. “That when they talked with God, they felt like they were moving into another world?”
“I don’t know—because they were talking with God?” Connors emphasized the last word. Her sarcasm was obvious even through the virtual comm link.
Vince shoved aside debris with his foot to clear a wide patch of earth to make a fire pit. He worked in silence for a few minutes.
“Where’s this coming from?” asked Connors.
Vince picked up a rusted tricycle and inspected it. “When I met Mikhail, he was talking about Iran, about how the old Nazis were obsessed with it.”
“Seriously?” The avatar Connors was presenting in the shared discussion space frowned. “That’s what you talked about?”
“She finally believes something I say, and then she can’t believe what I’m saying,” mumbled Vince under his breath.
Satisfied he had enough space, he started laying down several of the thicker planks, and then put the rest cross-wise on top of them to create a platform. “Have you ever seen those images of Buddha with the multiple arms and heads? Like when Vishnu tries to impress the Prince in the Bhagavad Gita and takes on a multi-armed form?”
Connors grunted as she pulled out a circuit board. “I don’t know what prince you’re talking about, but yeah, I’ve seen the Buddhas with the arms and heads. What does this have to do with anything?”
“You’re going to laugh.”
“Try me.”
Having finished building the platform for sleeping on, Vince looked around for anything that they could use as a cover. The sun was going down. He sighed. “Doesn’t all of this sound a lot like pssi? Multiple phantom arms sprouting out with splintered minds, out-of-body excursions into other worlds—humans on the verge of immortality?”
He was right. Connors did laugh. He couldn’t blame her.
“Mikhail also mentioned the Voynich manuscript—have you ever heard of it?”
“No, I have not.”
Hotstuff pinged Vince that they had finished what they could on the drone, and that Connors was on her way inside the barn.
Vince uploaded the data he had on the six-hundred-year-old Voynich manuscript, and images of naked nymphs, unrecognizable plants, astrological diagrams, all written in an unknown alphabet, flooded the shared display space between them. Translation tools hadn’t been able to make sense of it, but they did confirm that it contained coherent information. None of the plants or animals were anything that had existed—at least, not in this world. In their shared space, Connors looked at it and sent Vince another frowning emoticon.
“When I was running around a few months back, trying to save my life from whatever future threat was trying to kill me,” Vince said, rummaging around in a pile at the back of the barn, “I spent a lot of time decoding ancient texts. I’m sure I saw something in there.”
“In where?” Connors was leaning against the frame of the open barn door.
“In the past. The end of ordinary reality is the start of the merger with the divine for Buddhists—so my question is, if we’ve reached the end of ordinary reality with pssi, what exactly would we be merging with?” Speaking of miracles, Vince found a metal case filled with what looked like tablecloths. He pulled one out and held it aloft. They weren’t even that moldy. They’d make great covers.
Connors nodded. “I think what you need to merge with is a good night’s sleep.”
Climbing back through the scattered junk, Vince tossed the metal case on the floor. It was going to be cold. They’d better get a fire going soon. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Anyone want to chat with the outside world?”
Hotstuff materialized sitting on a cross-beam above their heads. She was back to wearing battle fatigues. No sexy outfits anymore.
“You got it working?” Connors asked.
Hotstuff nodded. “Main avionics are shot, it ain’t getting airborne, but we can get comms working. A clean channel right into the main data trunks in the sky. But you’ve capped the connection on this side.”
Connors nodded and smiled. “Didn’t want you guys escaping.”
“So you’re going to contact your government buddies?” Vince looked down at the floor. “Last time you tried that, they flattened half of Louisiana.”
“There are still some people—”
“I think it’s time to give me a chance, no?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Look, you can chaperone, throw a security blanket around me, whatever you want.”
Connors lifted her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes.
Vince held his arms wide. “I’ve got a lot of friends, Connors, in a lot of places.”
“Okay,” Connors conceded, “we can try it your way. But I remain in control of the connection.”
Smiling, Vince nodded. He wondered if he’d be able to get in touch with Sid or Bob, or perhaps the Commune and Brigitte. He hoped someone was still left out there.
While Hotstuff and Connors began setting the parameters of the communication link, Vince retreated inside his head to look at the texts Mikhail gave him. Like the Nag Hammadi libraries, they appeared to be ancient pre-Christian Gnostic, but it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
The texts were written in precursor of Aramaic, so Vince’s automated translators were having a difficult time making sense of it, but in the Book of Pobeptoc an impossible passage popped out at him: “Wal lie body is where the flesh eaters live.”
The Book of Pobeptoc. Was he seeing things? How could it be possible?
23
A sea of green sludge sat fermenting between rolling mountains of sand under a sky dotted with distant clouds. In a hollow between the dunes, on a dusty peninsula that jutted into the blooms of algae, was a shanty town of corrugated tin and mud brick. Everywhere was garbage. At the side of a putrid stream in the middle of the town a man in ragged jeans was sprawled out, shirtless, emaciated, and covered in sores.
“Wake up, young master.”
Bob opened his eyes to find the priest looking down at him, cradling him in his arms. The smell of rot and decomposing flesh nearly made him gag. He spat out a mouthful of water.