Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)
Read Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Online
Authors: Richard Farr
ALSO BY RICHARD FARR
The Babel Trilogy
The Fire Seekers
Ghosts in the Machine
Infinity’s Illusion
(forthcoming)
The Truth About Constance Weaver: A Novel
Emperors of the Ice: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in the Antarctic, 1910–13
You Are Here: A User’s Guide to the Universe
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Richard Farr.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York.
The publisher wishes to dedicate this book to Nick Harris. We hope he enjoys it, wherever he’s reading from.
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477817896 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1477817891 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781477827918 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1477827919 (paperback)
Cover design by Will Staehle
Book design by Jason Blackburn
C
ONTENTS
C
HAPTER
19 A D
EAD
M
AN WITH A
R
UINED
F
ACE
C
HAPTER
21 T
ERROR IS
T
HE
C
OLOR OF
T
EA
“A butcher’s sharp blade liberates the flesh from the bone. But the words of the Architects are sharper still: they liberate the mind from the body.”
—From the Akkadian Version, translated by Morag Chen (compare Hebrews 4:12)
“History is repeating itself. I know a lot of history, and I’d rather it didn’t.”
—Professor Derek Partridge
“Science begins with doubt.”
—Fang Lizhi
A M
ESSAGE TO THE
P
LANET
According to the Seraphim the message that follows was written by their founder and leader, Julius Quinn, shortly before his death—or “ascent,” as they claim—on Mount Ararat. It is being reprinted as a new introduction to
Anabasis
, his account of his interaction with the so-called Architects.
Anabasis
has been described as “the founding scripture of the world’s newest religion” and “a conversation with the gods.” Quinn himself vigorously opposed the use of such language. He denied that his movement was a religion or faith and described the Architects only as “free intelligences.”
Anabasis
(the word means “ascent”) is now available in 147 languages, and has been read by an estimated 300–500 million people worldwide. Ironically, one of Quinn’s key messages has been that the proliferation of human languages and cultures began only because—in the period of “doubt and rebellion” that led up to the catastrophic eruption at Thera in 1628 BCE—humanity drifted away from the “true voice” of the Architects.
Our immediate task, Quinn has said, is to “reject these inauthentic cultural influences and return our minds to their origin.”
Do you experience tastes and sounds, pleasures and pains—but also an inner self that is conscious of itself? Are you, in short, a human being? Then we, the Seraphim, salute you, for soon you will join us on the stairway. After five thousand years, humanity’s ignorance of its own true nature is drawing to a close. We are poised now to rise together and join the dimension of the infinite.
Deep in our past, we were animals. By slow degrees, over hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved into the cleverest of all animals. But our full humanity was given to us only when the Architects first enabled in us the capacity for language. Since then we have had understanding, and have found, in our myriad ways, how to cope with the great gift that comes through language—the full inner light of consciousness.
And yet how painful our humanity has been, this temporary way station between the animal body and the infinite mind! Animals experience, but they do not plan and build, hope and fear, because they have no sense of a self that continues into the future: it is their great good fortune not to live, as we do, under the savage lash of time. Time is the medium through which we experience the frustration of our hopes, the sense of our limitation, and the well-founded terror that the self, which we carry within us like a guttering candle in a jar, will be extinguished in death. No wonder we have invented so many new languages, ideologies, and religions in our desperate attempt to understand the paradox that we are minds trapped in the decaying prison of the body. No wonder that so many of our ideas contain, like flashes of lightning, hints of the astonishing truth!
Hear the news, then. Hear the truth.
The period during which we humans have been conscious of ourselves as unique individuals is a mere eyeblink in the larger story of our development. A mere stage, like childhood. And now, at last, our waiting—our very history—is coming to an end. Just as we left our animal nature behind on the way to becoming human, now we are ready to leave our humanity behind and become what people throughout history have mistakenly called “gods.”
No longer will we be mere animal bodies.
No longer will we be self-conscious minds imprisoned within bodies.
In the next inevitable stage of our development, we will become free intelligences. Eternal thoughts. Untethered from the physical world. Immortal.
Prepare your mind for this transformation; prepare your inner self. Listen to the original language that we corrupted, the language of the Architects—for they want us to come back; they want us to be with them; they have announced that we are ready at last!
Em-DA-chol
Ul-KO-vok
Ret-YEM-an
Ar-QA-het
When you are ready, when your mind is ripe, they will come for you. Do not be afraid. For it will be time then to leave your body behind.
To leave time itself behind.
To rise up at last and become what you are.
New calculations indicate that, although much smaller than the eruption at Thera, the “Ararat event” unleashed energy equivalent to over eight hundred kilotons, concentrated at first in a narrow column that seems to have triggered the main eruption. Due to the scale of the ensuing devastation, neither Quinn’s body nor those of approximately a thousand followers have been recovered. Eyewitness accounts are almost exclusively from Seraphim converts who survived unscathed on the lower slopes to the north of the mountain, and even their accounts vary widely. A much larger number of survivors became Mysteries—or Partials, as the Seraphim prefer—their bodies still functioning, at least for a time, but their minds and personalities gone.
What really happened there continues to be disputed across the globe by scientists, religious leaders, and others. Not in dispute is the fact that global rates of conversion to the Seraphim, far from faltering, increased exponentially in the wake of the “event.” This is, they say, both an effect and a cause of “the growing power of the Architects to aid us in our coming transformation.”