“I’m thinking it’ll make playing video games easier,” Brian said, smiled, and then shrugged again. “We’ll have to see. It hasn’t sunk in yet. Are there any other programs like me? Former people?”
Creek shook his head. “Not that I know about,” he said. “As far as I know, no one else has thought of creating an intelligent agent this way.”
“Maybe because if you think about it, it’s not exactly ethical,” Brian said.
“I was thinking more because most people don’t have access to a quantum imager,” Creek said.
“Cynic,” Brian said.
“Brian,” Creek said. “I don’t know if bringing you back is moral or ethical. But I do know I need your help. I can’t tell anyone else what I’m doing, but I need someone I can trust working on this, someone who can do things while I’m doing other things. You’re the only intelligent agent who is actually, honestly intelligent. We can talk about the ethical issues later, but right now we need to get to work.”
“And what are we doing?” Brian asked.
“We’re looking for sheep DNA,” Creek said.
“Oh,” Brian said. “Well, then. Nice to see we’re focused on the really important things.”
“You did a good job with the search,” Dave Phipps said to Archie McClellan, in one of the many Pentagon commissaries.
“Thanks,” Archie said, and rubbed his palms on his jeans. His military analogue to an Egg McMuffin sat forlornly on a plastic tray; Phipps motioned to it.
“You’re not hungry?” he said.
“I’m kind of on a caffeine rush at the moment,” Archie said. “I drank about a gallon of Dr Pepper last night. I think if I eat something, I’ll just throw it up.”
Phipps reached over and took the sandwich. “Listen,” he said between bites. “We have a little more work to go with this project. Real ‘think outside of the box’ crap that needs someone who knows his way around the computer. I’ve checked your security clearance, and it’s high enough for what we need.”
“What would I be doing?” Archie asked.
“A little of this, a little of that,” Phipps said. “It’s a fluid situation. We need someone who can think fast on his feet.”
“Sounds action packed,” Archie said, jokingly.
“Maybe it is,” Phipps said, not.
Archie wiped his palms again. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I’m just some guy who works on your legacy systems. You’ve got an entire military full of computer geniuses who are good with guns. You should be using one of them for whatever it is you’re doing.”
“And when I want to use one of those boys, I’ll go get him,” Phipps said. “In the meantime, I’m looking for someone who is competent and won’t make a fuss. Don’t worry about using a gun, incidentally. You won’t need one. But you might need a passport. Also, how do you feel about aliens?”
“The ones from outer space or the ones from other countries?” Archie asked.
“Outer space,” Phipps said. He took another bite of the egg sandwich.
Archie shrugged. “The ones I’ve met seemed nice enough.”
Phipps smirked between chews. “I don’t know if the one you’d be working with could be considered ‘nice,’ but fair enough. So are you in?”
“What was I working on last night?” Archie asked.
“Why do you want to know?” Phipps asked.
“If you’re going to hire me for something, it helps to know what I’m doing.”
Phipps shrugged. At this point he couldn’t see any harm in telling him. “You were looking for DNA matches for a particular breed of sheep called Android’s Dream. Now we’re looking to close up a few loose ends. It’s a fast project, a few days at most.”
“This work I’m doing,” Archie said. “I’m guessing it wouldn’t be covered in my contract with you guys.”
“That’s a pretty safe guess,” Phipps said.
“Then I want double time,” Archie said.
“Time and a half,” Phipps said, setting down the sandwich.
“Time and a half from nine to six and double time every other time,” Archie said.
“Fine,” Phipps said, grabbing a paper napkin to wipe his fingers. “But if I catch you padding your hours, I’ll shoot you myself.” He reached into his coat to grab a notepad and a pen, jotted down an address, and pushed it over to Archie. “Go home and take a shower and then go here. You’re going to meet with a man named Rod Acuna. He’s going to be your supervisor from here on out. Don’t be put off if he’s a little blunt. He’s not paid to be a nice guy, and neither are the people he works with. But if you do your job, everything will be fine, and there might even be a bonus in it for you. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” Archie said, and took the paper. Phipps pushed up from the table, nodded to Archie, and walked off. Archie sat there for a few more minutes, staring at the remains of the egg sandwich, before a yawing jag got him up and moving to home.
Sam Berlant was waiting for him as he got off the Metro. “Well?” Sam said, after a hello kiss.
“I’m in,” Archie said.
“You weren’t too eager about it, right?” Sam said. “If you were too eager about it, they’re going to be suspicious of you right from the beginning.”
“I wasn’t too eager,” Archie said. “I even bickered about what I was going to get paid.”
“Really,” Sam said.
“I asked for double time,” Archie said.
“Did you get it?” Sam asked.
“You bet,” Archie said. “Well, between the hours of six and eight, anyway.”
“You aren’t beautiful, Archie,” Sam said, “but you sure are smart. Damn if you’re just not the sexiest man I know.”
“That sounds good,” Archie said.
“Don’t get too excited,” Sam said. “There’s no time for that. You and I have an appointment at the meeting house. We’ve got to get you wired.”
“I think these people would notice if I wore a wire, Sam,” Archie said.
Sam smiled and reached for Archie’s hand. “Only if you wear it on the outside, you silly man. Come on.”
The meeting house was not so much of a meeting house as a meeting basement, located on three subfloors of an Alexandria corporate high-rise. The topmost of these floors was a private gym, a cover for the members’ comings and goings. Occasionally someone working in the high-rise would come down and try to get a membership; it was, after all, conveniently located. These were all politely turned away, with coupons for a month’s free membership at the fitness center right down the street. This usually worked, as everybody likes “free.” The bottom two levels were the meeting house proper, and did not exist on any architectural schematics; the members had long since amended the blueprints on file and anyway, the same organization that owned the meeting house also owned the high-rise.
Archie and Sam walked through the gym, waving at a few of their friends who were exercising (front or not, it was in fact an excellent, working gym), and headed to the men’s locker room. At the back of the room was a door that read “Janitor” and featured a palm lock; Archie and Sam went through the door individually, each palming the lock.
Behind the janitor’s door were janitor’s supplies and a small stairwell that led down. Archie and Sam took the stairs, palmed a second lock at the bottom, and went through.
They now stood in a small antechamber which members jokingly referred to as the Hallway of Peril. About once a decade someone would get into the hallway who wasn’t supposed to be there; these unfortunates were then “milk cartoned,” to use an obscure but evocative phrase of The Founder’s era.
Archie and Sam were scanned one last time; there was a small click as the door at the end of the hallway unlocked. The two went through, into the meeting house of the Church of the Evolved Lamb.
The Church of the Evolved Lamb was notable in the history of religions both major and arcane in that it was the first and only religion that fully acknowledged that its foun
ding was a total scam. The Founder was M. Robbin Dwellin, an early 21st-century science fiction writer of admittedly modest talents and man on the make, who had published one novel to deafening critical and commercial indifference and had no prospects of a second when he found himself teaching an adult education short-story workshop at the Mt. San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California.
It was there, while vetting housewives’ stories of plump, middle-aged women seducing high school quarterbacks and computer technicians’ stories of freaky libertarian space orgies in zero-g, that Dwellin came across Andrea Hayter-Ross, his class’s oldest participant at age 78—and incidentally the sole heir to the combined fortunes of the Hayter and Ross families, earned in bauxite ore and vending machines, respectively, which made her the 16th richest person on the globe.
Hayter-Ross was in fact an accomplished writer (six books under pseudonym) and was attending the class as research for an article. She was an interesting woman who used a façade of bored-rich-person-dilettante mysticism to hide sharp-eyed observation. She was the sort of person who enjoyed going to séances and crystal tunings for the atmosphere and to study those around her, but didn’t actually expect to speak to dead great uncles or resonate with the subetherean vibrations of the universe. Dwellin was observant enough to note the first of these but not the second, and so when he hatched his scheme to graft some money off the old biddy, he was not aware to the extent to which Hayter-Ross was ahead of him in his game.
Cribbing liberally from various new age and science fiction texts and adding a dash of his own meager invention, he created a new “religion,” in which he was the prophet and avatar, which foretold of the coming of the next level of humanity. Hayter-Ross’s writing, he claimed, spoke of levels of sensitivity that he’d rarely seen before. He was ready to unfold the mysteries of the fourteen divine dimensions to her, as described to him by N’thul, a spirit of infinite empathy, who asked only for the construction of a temple, placed in a certain sacred location (a small commercially zoned strip of land in Victorville, off a frontage road, which Dwellin had bought some years earlier in a misguided development scheme), the better to focus its energies and assist humanity into the next stage of its evolution. Dwellin’s plan was to extract the construction costs from Hayter-Ross and pocket them himself while coming up with some plausible series of excuses as to why the temple never seemed to get built. He figured he could keep this up until Hayter-Ross dropped, which shouldn’t be too long now.
Hayter-Ross, who knew a great story idea when she saw one, was also possessed of that casual sense of cruelty that incredibly rich people often develop at the first whiff of financial desperation from others. She pretended to swallow Dwellin’s line with wide eyes and then proceeded to make the man dance like a monkey on a leash. She funded the temple out of petty cash but did it in such a way that Dwellin had no access to the funds; instead Hayter-Ross would provide “offerings” based on prophetic short poems derived from Dwellin’s encounters with N’thul—prophetic writings which she would direct by occasionally dropping hints as to what she would like to see in them. One time she rather mischievously mentioned to Dwellin how much she enjoyed sheep. At Dwellin’s next “session” with N’thul, the “Evolved Lamb”—the melding of the gentle, pastoral qualities of sheep with the rough, aggressive nature of man—made its first appearance.
For six years Dwellin churned out thousands of prophetic poems, feverishly chasing the relatively paltry income Hayter-Ross doled out before finally dropping dead of exhaustion and anxiety at the relatively young age of 38. Hayter-Ross, who would live to 104, had his ashes interred in the newly completed (and, truth to tell, quite lovely) Temple of the Evolved Lamb, in the base of a statue representing N’thul. She then collected his prophetic poems and published them as a volume accompanying her book—the first under her own name—on Dwellin’s attempted scam of her and the “religion” founded thereof. Both books became huge bestsellers.
Ironically, Dwellin’s poems were the best things the man ever wrote and achieved a sort of mystical lyricism at the end of Dwellin’s life. Researchers suggested this was due to the hallucinatory effects of fever and alcoholic malnutrition, but some also believed that Dwellin, though a scam artist outwitted by his own elderly, sadistic muse, may have tapped into something mystical, quite accidentally and despite his own moneygrubbing nature.
These souls would be the first to identify themselves as members of a new Church of the Evolved Lamb, and who called themselves “Empathists” or “N’thulians.” They would soon be joined by another group of individuals who liked the idea of taking the prophetic poems of Dwellin’s and working toward making them come true, not because they were divinely inspired but because they weren’t. If a group actively working to make entirely fictional prophecies come true managed to pull off the stunt, the whole concept of divinely inspired prophecy was thrown into doubt, chalking up a victory for rational thought everywhere. This group became known as the “Ironists” or “Hayter-Rossians.”
Despite their diametrically opposed approaches to their so-called religion, the Empathists and the Ironists worked smoothly together, hammering out a practical doctrine that accommodated both flavors of churchgoer and allowed the two to integrate their differences into a cohesive whole that combined with earthcrunchy agrarian feel of the Empathists with the tech-driven, pragmatic thinking of the Ironists. Nowhere was this integration more keenly developed than in the Church’s animal husbandry project on the Brisbane colony. It was there the church developed multiple strains of sheep through the combination of conscientious breeding practices and judicious use of genetic manipulation. After all, there was nothing that said that the Evolved Lamb had to evolve naturally.
Andrea Hayter-Ross was as surprised as anyone that an actual religion had sprung up from the pathetic scam attempt perpetrated by a hack writer, and twice as surprised to find that she rather enjoyed the clear-eyed company of the people who had adopted the religion as their own. When Hayter-Ross died with no legal heirs, she parceled out her estate among various philanthropic groups but willed the controlling interest in the Hayter-Ross family of industries to the Church of the Evolved Lamb. This caused rather a great deal of consternation among the board of directors until the Church deacons proved themselves to be unsquishy advocates of the bottom line and stock performance (the Church members in charge of the business end of things were almost all entirely of Ironist stock). Within 20 years, nearly everyone outside of the Hayter-Ross board of directors forgot to remember a religious institution ostensibly controlled the company.
Which was fine with the members of the Church of the Evolved Lamb. The Church preferred not to be noticed whenever possible, and remained small both by selective inclination of its members and by the fact it takes a certain sort of person to want to join a church based on the desperate maneuvers of a secondrate science fiction writer. The Church chiefly recruited among the technical sciences and among the folks who enjoy a good renaissance faire (there was surprisingly substantial overlap), and typically among those who already worked for one or another of the Hayter-Ross companies or concerns. Archie, for example, originally joined while he worked for LegaCen, one of the oldest branches of the Hayter-Ross corporation, which specialized in creating large, proprietary information structures for major corporations and governments.
It’s where he was scouted by Sam, who was a Church deacon and Archie’s direct superior at LegaCen. It was strictly a Church thing at first; the hot sex part of their relationship didn’t happen until after Archie left LegaCen. The Church didn’t have any rules against deacons sleeping with congregants, but LegaCen didn’t like bosses to sleep with their underlings. That’s the corporate world for you.
On a day-to-day basis, Archie didn’t think much about his religious affiliation. One of the things about the Church of the Evolved Lamb was it was entirely silent on the big religious issues of God and the afterlife and sin and all that happy crap. The Church’s goals of fulfillin
g the Dwellinian prophecies were almost entirely rooted in the material universe. Even the Empathists didn’t go so far as to suggest that Dwellin had communed with actual spiritual beings; N’thul was more like Santa Claus than Jesus Christ to them.
This agnosticism on eschatological matters meant that Evolved Lamb churchgoers didn’t spend a great deal of their time praying or worshipping or spending Sundays singing hymns (unless they also happened to be members of a more traditional church, which was not an infrequent occurrence). As religious experiences went, it was a relaxed thing. This much was evident in the layout of the Church’s meeting house, which looked more like the interior of a social club than hall of contemplation. A disco ball still hung in the corner, part of the decoration for the Church’s monthly karaoke night.
But this just made the unfolding of the prophecies just that much more powerful. What Archie had seen on his computer screen in that Pentagon basement had been foretold in the fevered writing of that poor bastard Dwellin:
The Mighty will bring their powers to bear to search for the Lamb;
Into its very molecules they will seek it; but though they look
One shall bear witness and seek to keep the Lamb
From harm.
Not one of Dwellin’s best prophecies, but at the time he was laid out on cough syrup and Dramamine and had another 126 prophecies to go before Hayter-Ross would sign off on another payment. So there was that excuse. And anyway, it turned out to be true, which excused its lack of style.
Whether Dwellin had foretold this incident because he was tapped into something spiritual or because the Church had been plugging away for decades at making his writings come true was immaterial to Archie. All of a sudden, he’d been whacked upside the head by the freaky details of his belief system and punted into playing a part in their workings. Archie had always classified himself as an Ironist, but this shit was turning him into an Empathist in record time.
Archie and Sam didn’t waste time in the meeting room. Sam took Archie’s hand and directed him down a second set of stairs and into a small, brightly lit, and sterile room with what looked like a dentist’s chair in the middle. Waiting in the room was another man: Francis Hamn, the local bishop, whose day job was as “manager” of the fitness center two stories up.