61 Juarez
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, two weeks AGD
Bekka and Thucydides stand on a prominence of the Franklin Mountains, high above the desert plain. They have already toured twenty-three cities that were the targets of the Great Desolation, the previous being Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, which had been struck last, as though an afterthought, the act of a bitter person settling a long grudge. By then, Thucydides knew what to look for, and he clearly saw the missiles arcing in from the east in the moments before the predawn darkness was starkly illuminated by blasts designed to kill living things while leaving structures intact.
Afterwards, they moved a week into the future to view the aftermath. Bodies were still strewn everywhere, positioned as they had been when the blast occurred. Some were sitting, some were lying down, some had even been making love when the surge of neutrons turned their brains to insensate mush. Away from the epicenters, the casualties were even worse; these victims did not die quickly. Living for hours, or days, their skin was covered in blisters and ulcerations, and the dried contents of their stomachs and bowels was emptied upon the ground about them. Because flies, other pests, and bacteria had died as well, there was very little decomposition.
Here, outside Ciudad Juarez, they look down at the city to which Izabel and Matteo Guzmán had returned after a brief sojourn in Samalayuca to rest from their labors. On their last blissful night in the desert, the sky had become as bright as day as they cooked their dinner outside their tent. The Great Desolation had arrived. Prompted by some feeling that although the world was crumbling they had a role to play in its re-emergence, they had made desperate love beneath the stars. Nine months later, a boy would be born. They would name him Javier, and he would become a historian whose avatar would travel through space-time to record the events that led to the creation of the Transhumanist Coalition and the birth of the first true democracy.
That avatar, Thucydides, looks down now, and, in accordance with some technology he cannot comprehend, his vision zooms in as he focuses on objects in the distance. He sees PPE-clad workers in the Mexican city still clearing the mostly empty streets of debris and checking for spots of contamination. Farther out, on the outskirts of the city, he sees clusters of tents where medical staff treat survivors. Somewhere, among them, he thinks, are Matteo and Izabel, his parents, who are lending their expertise to the recovery.
The cleanup of Ciudad Juárez will be proclaimed complete in another month, and the Guzmáns will have stayed the whole time, unable to move on from the heartbreaking loss of life and the devastating reduction of once-fertile minds to a living mindlessness. Izabel and Matteo will have done their utmost to fix the damage, but many of the victims (los zombies, as they are known here) will be dependent upon others for their survival for the remainder of their lives.
The lives of the zombies will be short. All humane treatment, Thucydudes knows, will end shortly. An army organized by the Sinaloa Cartel has been moving northeast from Culiacán Rosales. Seeing the devastation of Juárez as a golden opportunity to expand into the territory of a competitor, Sinaloa will seize what remains of the Juárez Cartel and make it their own. They will do so, quite handily, and they will then round up and truck the unfortunate brain-damaged victims far out into the desert and return without them.
The new cartel will also capture the Guzmáns, and they will learn (Thucydides does not want to think of the cartel’s methods) of how the Spanish couple have been spreading the solution that sparks a form of telepathy that connects humans to computers and to each other. The fascinated cartel boss, who has been wondering about the rumors of connected people in the former United States and Europe, will have Izabel and Matteo flown to Culiacán, and he will speak to them in his private library.
An avid reader, the Sinaloa head will pull a book from his shelves, and place it on the table between him and his two captives. The book is Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. He asks the Spaniards to create a version of their formula that recreates a humanity that hears and obeys the command of the gods. He and his lieutenants, having now received the Guzmán’s original formulation, will be the new gods, and the god-follower formula should selectively filter out all communications except theirs.
Moreover, the Sinaloa boss demands that the new god-follower formula be strong enough to overwrite the original formulation’s coding. Only those who receive a periodic boost of the original formula, to be maintained by the cartel, can remain the voices of the gods. In time, the Sinaloa Cartel will become the Gods of Earth!
It is all very civilized, but the Guzmáns will understand that the request is a demand, and they will not survive for long if they do not comply. They are returned to Juarez, where they will become permanent residents of a vacated hospital that contains a cutting edge laboratory where they will work as technical slaves for Sinaloa.
By the time Javier is born, the new one-way formulation will have been tested, proven, and ready for distribution. Both the god and follower variants of the DNA-altering substance will have been shown to work as required, and these new variants will resist being overwritten by the Guzmáns’ original formula — a final requirement. Once gods and followers have been created, the cartel does not want anybody changing back because they drank some tainted American water.
Wide scale distribution of the God Complex, as the cartel boss refers to it, will begin in Tijuana. If it works as expected, the cartel team distributing it will then move east along the border with the American federations to create a zone of ‘mules’ who follow orders without question. These dedicated followers will later be commanded to move north, into the federations, to spread a religion in which the Sinaloa leaders will be the gods.
At a celebratory dinner, the Guzmáns will be feted in the evening before the teams move out. Seated beside the cartel boss, who will arrive in Juarez dressed as the feathered serpent form of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, Izabel and Matteo will stare out with dead eyes at a gathering of the worst of humanity and await their fate. They expect to be executed once it is clear that their formulation works; the cartel will not want them, or their infant son, who was born connected, to remain alive.
Solace for the Guzmáns arrives in the form of two of the child’s niñeras, who look after little Javier while his parents work. With the assistance of a top lieutenant, a former sicario, the parents will be told that Javier will be smuggled out of the city during the celebration and flown to California. There, he will be safe and cared for. It will be a lie, and both Izabel and Matteo will know that is likely a deceit, but even the slimmest chance for a parent to save their child is something to be cherished. They will acquiesce.
What the Guzmáns will not know is that a long-time, unwitting informant of the Okhrana, will receive their child. A renowned technology mogul who was tapped as a worthy subject to follow many years earlier, this man has undergone medical examinations and scans to determine the cause of growing muscle weakness and balance issues. His doctors will, regretfully, inform the man that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS. They will also tell him, in puzzled tones, of the presence of anomalous nanoscale devices in the man’s cerebrospinal fluid, and they will wonder what they are.
The man will receive the child. He was then supposed to place the infant aboard a private hyperjet and bring it to Moscow. He will not do so. Instead, the man, and the baby, will disappear.
As the ersatz Quetzalcoatl stands in the Antigua Presidencia Municipal in which the celebration will be held, and as he toasts the “birth of a new world regime,” high above the Earth, Thucydides knows that tungsten rods will slide from satellites and silently accelerate to Earth. This building, and everything around it for many blocks, will be reduced to powder.
The same deadly torrent will rain down on the structures of what was once the Hearst Castle.
Thucydides feels like crying, but tears are not a feature of this avatar.
“Have you seen enough?” Bekka asks softly.
“I had seen enough with the first city,” Thucydides replies.
“And, yet, you needed to know.”
Thucydides nodded. “I did. Please take me home.”
Bekka grasps Thucydides’ hand, and they jump back to the Transhumanist Coalition.
