Ted Kosmatka - The God Engine.pdf - Ted Kosmatka - widez2

The God Engine

by Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka is a laboratory analyst for the steel industry. He grew up a

few miles from the dunes of Lake Michigan and earned his degree studying

biology, anthropology, chemistry, and genetics. Ted has done research for the

National Biological Survey and the Field Museum. In his spare time, he

developed a decidedly unusual strain of mice that are now part of Jackson

Labs’ Craniofacial Mutant Resource. “The God Engine” is his first story for

Asimov’s .

* * * *

You’ll kill yourself at age thirteen—your first votive act, you’ll call it in the

note because you know only I will understand what you mean. And because you

know how much it will hurt me to read it.

And they’ll page me over the intercom during my meeting with physics, and

I’ll see you spread boneless out across the courtyard in reds and pinks, precious

brain spilled like so much loose change on concrete, orderlies trying to resuscitate

what doesn’t even look like a boy anymore. And the report will state simply that the

four-story fall was incompatible with human life . Incompatible , I’ll think, saying the

word over and over in my mind. Incompatible. And they’ll bag you up, and mop

you up, and there will be another meeting scheduled on just what went wrong this

time.

At the long table the following day, I’ll hold it in like it doesn’t matter, choking

on the words I don’t say to the dozen important men. They’ll sit with their eyes

pointed at me, morning light spilling in behind them through wall-sized windows that

look out across the vast grounds from a vantage exactly one floor below the one you

jumped from, and I’ll answer the suits about their money, and I’ll answer the

white-coats about possible undetected somatic recombination, and I’ll answer the

sweaters about their fucking Jungian revisionism and their conveniently postmortem

prodromal phase diagnosis, and when John Sabrams mentions experimental

confounds again, I’ll try to take his head off with a reckless roundhouse that knocks

him cold but leaves him breathing—and before I can remedy that detail, Stephen will

tackle me from behind, and they’ll all pile on while I scream, “Incompatible!” at the

top of my lungs—kicking over leather boardroom chairs, face crushed to the light

brown carpet while one eye notes the delicate upside-down parabola described by a

falling sheet of paper.

But still, they’ll say you’re the crazy one.

* * * *

I concentrated on the feel of the road, the subtle vibration of the steering

wheel in my hands. I tried very hard to blank my mind. Outside the car window, the

hills were black under the weight of predawn purple. It had been a long night driving.

At the guard shanty, the face under the blue officer’s hat was young,

unfamiliar. He looked at me, my I.D., then back at me again. He squinted but finally

gave the pass back and waved me though. I glanced briefly at the laminated card

before replacing it in my wallet. No wonder, I thought. It was a younger man staring

up at me from the plastic rectangle. Time for a new pass. How long had it been? Six

years? Eight, I decided. The boy was eight years old now.

I was struck again by a wash of déjà vu as I pulled into the complex. The

buildings never changed. The same gray brick, the same carefully manicured

grounds. It looked like the campus square of a small university. But there would be

only one student here. One very special student.

Dr. Sidaque met me in the lobby. His limp had gotten worse since the last time

I’d seen him. Rheumatoid arthritis. His canted hand slid into mine for a firm shake.

“Welcome, Dr. Michaels,” he said.

“How is the boy?” I asked.

“As well as can be expected. None of them do well the first couple of nights

here, but we’ve done our best to make him comfortable. The adjustment can be

difficult.”

“The whole thing is difficult.”

“Yes, well, it can’t be helped. Would you like me to take you to your room?”

“I want to see the boy.”

Dr. Sidaque led me through the building, and I was struck again by the

familiarity of it all. Like I’d never left. “How much does he know?” I asked.

“The standard. There’s been no deviation.”

Of course. There were protocols. There was nothing left to chance, nothing

the sociologists hadn’t scripted out decades ago; and we all had our parts to play.

I followed Dr. Sidaque into the activity room. Only the carpet had changed.

The boy’s face was so familiar I almost didn’t need to see it. Blonde,

square-faced—the boy looked Dutch, or like my idea of what Dutch looked like.

Growing up Lutheran in North Dakota, I’d seen a hundred similar faces staring out

from between the pews of my childhood. His blue eyes wheeled toward me, and in

them I found his true mark of distinction. They were eyes I’d spent most of my adult

life looking into.

“Leave us,” I told the caregivers.

The two women complied with a huff, gathering their clipboards and papers.

They hadn’t liked me last time, and the span of years had done nothing to temper

their distaste. It had done something to me though. Yes, something to me.

This would be the last time for us all.

I descended to my creaking knees. “What are you building?” I asked.

“A spaceship,” the boy answered, looking up from his model. He had no fear

of strangers. Not yet, anyway.

“Oh, a spaceship. That’s a fine ambition.”

“These are the wave-particle reactors,” the boy said, touching a pair of oblong

struts that ran alongside the fuselage.

“You’re a special little boy,” I said. “Do you know that?”

“Yeah.”

I smiled at his modesty and then glanced toward the door to make sure no one

was looking. The women were gone, the door shut. If there were cameras in the

room, I couldn’t see them. I leaned forward, putting my mouth close to the boy’s

ear, and then I said the first thing ever uttered to him that hadn’t been written by

sociologists and approved by the board. “Our time is short, little one.” I said. “I’m

dying.”

* * * *

You’ll kill yourself at age seventeen, when the voices start. Always such an

inventive child, and you’ll eat the extract of a plant endemic to the project

grounds—we’ll never really learn which one. It’ll be your own special concoction

though, condensed and purified in the chemistry room, a subtle, chalky poison

you’ll spread over your dinner like salt. It will not be a painless death, and afterward,

botanists will be called in to clear away flora that might be dangerous. They’ll favor

Kentucky blue grass, and it will be laid in a carpet from fence to fence within the

grounds to the full exclusion of other species. It’s hard to kill yourself with

Kentucky blue, they’ll reason correctly.

You’ll love that grass.

You’ll do polynomials by age eight. Permutations of Avogadro’s number by

eleven. By twelve, you’ll have tackled Poincare geometry. They’ll teach you biology,

history, economics—you’ll read the classics. All in an attempt to round you out,

keep you sane, because they learned early on that an emphasis on mathematics, to

the exclusion of other disciplines, only speeds the process. By seventeen, just before

the voices start, you’ll begin working on the problem of the tacke drive. The

physicists will move into the complex full-time. The team will work around the clock,

going over your formulas. One of them will go mad, and the psychologists will study

that for years—how you could do that to him with just numbers.

You’ll never make love to anyone. You’ll never cry. They’ll find you after the

poisoning, writhing in a pool of your own vomit, eyes rolled back in your head,

precious mind already baking in a hundred and seven degree fever, leaving, like so

many other versions of you, the formulas incomplete.

* * * *

“What do you call this one?” I asked the boy. He had turned six today. We’d

eaten cake and ice cream earlier, and now he wanted to show me what he’d been

working on in the lab.

“I haven’t named it,” the boy said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

The Drosophila clung to the inside of the test tube, walking busy little circles

on the glass. Blue nutrient auger carpeted the bottom, a thick porous sponge sealing

the top as a lid.

“What’s the mutation combination?” I asked.

“White eyes, vestigial wings, yellow body.”

“Those are good ones.”

“At least they’re visible,” the boy said and held the test tube up to the light for

closer inspection. His blue eyes narrowed in concentration. “I was working with a

line that had a variant vein structure in the wings, and I had to put them under the

microscope to identify the phenotype. I used ether to sedate them. Too little ether,

and they’d wake up before I was done and fly away. Too much, and I’d kill them.”

“Dead fruit flies can be a problem,” I said.

“The bigger problem was when the ether didn’t kill them, but sterilized them.

I’d spend days working out breeding programs and doing set-up on flies that

weren’t going to reproduce. By the time I realized they were sterile, I’d wasted half a

week.”

“But these are different?”

“Yeah, ether toxicity isn’t a problem. In fact, I don’t need to use ether at all,

because I don’t need a microscope to identify phenotype. The mutations are easy to

see. White eyes, vestigial wings, yellow body—what you see is what you get.”

“What you see is what you get?” I said, tapping a finger on the test tube. “If

you believe that, little one, then you’ve still got a lot to learn about genetics.”

* * * *

You’ll make a breakthrough at age nineteen, adding a full line to the original

formula. The future will seem to bloom before us, the final solution just around the

next corner. The celebrations in the complex will last for days, and the suits will pass

out cigars like new fathers. Cuckolds , I’ll think to myself.

You’ll call me in the middle of the night, and I’ll meet you in your study.

You’ll be naked, crying, tearing out page after page from your library, and I’ll know

it’s over. I’ll know.

You’ll tell me you can see angels. You’ll tell me that Calvin was right, and I’ll

spend three sleepless nights trying to remember if I told you I was Lutheran.

They’ll give you clozapine to ease the symptoms. “Wooden,” you’ll say to

me, crying again—and on the drugs you won’t be able to manage so much as a

quadratic equation. “My head feels wooden.”

And that’s the irony, isn’t it? The drugs which leash you to reality will prevent

you from working your math. Your magic.

You’ll forget your name sometimes. You’ll forget to eat. You’ll walk the

corridors in superheated manias, occasionally scrawling mathematical hieroglyphics

across the walls in red magic marker. You’ll put the solutions on doors, looking for

that rapture of stepping through to the other side—a symbolic gesture. The teams

will take to calling it your graffiti, but each mural will be photographed before it’s

painted over, and mathematicians will go over the formulas meticulously looking for

hints of rationality. Increasingly, rationality and your formulas will have less in

common with each other, until finally the archaic runes you scribble will carry

meaning only in your mind. You’ll drift further away from this world into your own.

Until finally nothing reaches you at all.

* * * *

“Dental X-rays.” I answered.

“For what?” the boy asked.

“For your third front tooth.”

“What do you mean?” the boy said, probing the gap with his tongue. His top

two front teeth were missing.

“You’ve got what’s called a mesiodens, an un-erupted central incisor.”

“My gums feel fine. How do you know I have it?”

“You usually do.”

“What causes it?”

“Genetics. It’s not all that rare. About one percent of people have

supernumerary teeth of some kind. It happens.”

“So I’m going to have an extra tooth?”

“Probably,” I said.

Ted Kosmatka - The God Engine.pdf

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