"Are you dreaming?"
"Yes."
"Then how are you still speaking to me?"
"I'm good at multitasking." I smile a little and open my eyes. Ghost hovers just above me, moonlight gleaming across her copper shell.
She blinks. "What are you dreaming about?"
"Home."
"Where I found you?"
"No. Where I was born."
"Oh." She thinks about it a moment. "I have no record of your birthplace. What was it like?"
I search for the right words to describe it. I settle on just one, one that seems to encompass how I feel when I think about it.
"Ethereal."
Seven long, black bags lie on the floor. A man and a very pregnant woman look at them in silence. The man appears stoic, almost angry; the woman is sad, but doesn't cry. "They knew what they signed up for," she says. The man nods.
"I don't think I can keep this up," he says slowly, as if each word is a struggle for him.
"Roland." The man turns to his wife, and she cups his face gently in her hands. "You say that every time." She kisses him gently and walks away, cradling her pregnant belly.
Roland stays a moment longer. From around his neck he pulls a small, silver chain, from which hangs a cross. He runs his thumb along it, feeling the cool metal on his skin and thinks about what it means to be a God.
Late that night, Roland sits by the window and writes a report. He sips coffee and gazes out at the surface of the moon where their research colony is situated-bleak, dark plains as far as the eye can see. Only under the dome of glass does their colony show a sign of life, fields of different plants providing a brilliant splash of color against the darkness. From his view in the research and development tower, the tallest building in the colony, Roland can see it all.
The reports are getting easier to write, he thinks, finishing up the last line: EXPERIMENT C36-D OUTCOME: FAILURE. CASUALTIES: 7. PROJECT "HADES" REMAINS IN DEVELOPMENT.
"Still up?"
Roland turns and looks at his wife. "Just finishing the report." He glances back at it. "Never liked the name. 'Hades.' Accurately depicts the torment of it all, though." He smiles at her.
"The torment will end eventually."
"Maybe when this little guy pops out." He rubs her belly gently.
"What makes you think it'll be a guy?"
Roland laughs. "I don't. I have no idea what kind of person is getting cooked up in there."
"That's part of it though, isn't it?" She says, sitting down next to her husband.
"What do you mean?"
"That's part of life. How unpredictable it all is. There is no law dictating who we will become when we're born. Or who we choose to be as we grow."
"We're taught by our elders, though. Things happen to us-we absorb experiences. That shapes who we are."
"Those are all just variables, though."
"Variables can be predicted. They can be created."
"Sure, but not all of them. And you can't predict the soul."
"No, you can't, can you?" Roland looks out the window at their moon, and the stars beyond. "But it exists. Right? Outside of our beliefs, thinking scientifically here-there is some undefinable aspect of consciousness that has… Weight."
She thinks on it. "Yes," she says. "Yes, you can replicate just about every other aspect of life-the bones and the blood and the organs, the skin and muscle, the electrical signals and the chemicals in the body and the brain. But when you bring them together, the end product is more than that-it somehow has a soul, as well. A deepness of self."
"Maybe that's the key. We've been trying to store human consciousness like you save a file to a hard drive, but we're more than that. We haven't been accounting for the soul."
"But if the soul can't fit without all of those parts, how do we convert it into data? Something to be stored away?"
Roland frowns at the computer, saving his report. As soon as it finishes saving, the prompt for encryption pops up: PLEASE ENTER THREE KEYWORDS FOR CUSTOM ENCRYPTION. All things concerning Project Hades were to be encrypted, keeping all information as top-secret as possible. They were researching great things here.
"We can't," Roland says quietly. "We have to come at the concept of immortality from another angle. We can't put ourselves in computers and hope for the best. It has to be something else. Something closer to us."
Roland types three words into the prompt: IMMORTAL, LIFE, SOUL. He hits enter.
PROCESSING…
…
…
...KEYWORDS "IMMORTAL" "LIFE" "SOUL" ACCEPTED.
The program auto-encrypts the file, and the report is sent off to Roland's superiors.
"Project Hades wasn't started for any other reason," his wife says. "Our purpose is finding a way to keep the human consciousness alive, even if it means uploading ourselves into a digital format."
"We have to give it a new reason," Roland interjects. "Or we'll just keep burying the dead. I'm not a cryptkeeper, Penelope, I'm a scientist trying to save the human race."
"I know," she says. "And you will. Just… Be careful." She leans her head on his shoulder. "I love you."
"I have no record of 'Project Hades.' How do you know of these things? Did your parents tell you? Where is this moon?" Ghost is clearly disturbed by what I know. Ghosts don't like not knowing things.
"I remember them," I tell her.
Ghost seems more disturbed by that.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Roland stares at his son, asleep in his crib. Seeing the birth of his child changed him. Penelope's death changed him, too; the thought that a woman could die in childbirth here, with some of the most advanced medical technology known to humankind at their disposal, had never entered into his thoughts. But death was part of life, and it finds its way into life no matter what.
Roland thinks about that now: death. He thinks about why they started Project Hades: fear of death. Fear of the war that had broken out, that spread like a disease. They were supposed to be in humanity's Golden Age, but death creeps towards them as the war is slowly lost.
"Doctor Stone?" The babysitter appears at the door.
"Yes?"
"The board is calling you in your office."
"Thank you." He takes one last glance at his child, then goes to his office.
Roland sits in a chair and converses with the board via holographic conference call. Two holographic men and three holographic women sit in holographic chairs, millions of miles away on Earth, and ask Roland to let go of his life's work.
"Doctor Stone, the natural resources of that moon, as well as the technologies you have on-site, are ideal for an undertaking like this. Your species needs you to help with the war effort. Noncompliance will be considered an act of treason. Is that understood?"
There it is. The gauntlet being thrown down. Roland wants to tell them to take their ultimatum and stuff it somewhere else, but he knows he can't. He can't be that selfish, that destructive, with a child in the next room depending on him to make the right decisions.
"I understand."
And that is how Roland agreed to become an arms dealer.
Months rolled by and the facilities on their moon stopped researching ways to make the human life immortal, stopped creating technologies to help them live forever; instead they began to forge weapons, ammunition, armor. Project Hades became an afterthought to all but Roland. For Roland, it was all he could think of. And after enough thinking, he found a way to continue his research in secret.
Another holographic meeting. "It's a weapon," he tells the board. "Though that's over-simplifying what I'm doing here."
"What kind of weapon?"
"The autonomous kind." He waits a moment, letting that concept sink in. "Deployable anywhere at anytime, without need for supervision."
"Like a drone? A Smart Tank?"
"Not exactly. Listen, I have a prototype. I'm sending it through some stress tests this week, then I'll get back to you with the specs. But it's useful, I promise."
"Ensure that it is, Doctor Stone. Stay in your lane." The board hangs up. Roland smiles. What they don't know won't hurt them.
It began as another computer, albeit one with a lot of moving parts. Synthetic nerves and tissues, artificial veins with artificial blood; a brain, of sorts, made from synthetic parts.
But the longer Roland had to hide his intentions from the board, the more he found himself forced to make what they wanted, too-an autonomous weapon. Beneath its brain grew a body built for combat: armor plating around the head and chest, bones and muscles of materials so durable they could withstand explosions, limbs capable of such movement and force that they could crush stones beneath them.
Roland found himself becoming Frankenstein, sewing together a machine for life and a machine for death together into one.
The morning it was completed, Roland woke up and fed his child before he fed himself-as he did every morning. He drank two cups of coffee, thanked the babysitter for coming in, and kissed his son on the forehead before heading to work.
In the lab, Roland was greeted by a man he didn't know. "I landed early this morning," the man told him. "I'm a representative of the United Earth Governments. I'm afraid I'm here relieve you of your position as Director of Project Hades."
The board has discovered Roland's side project. What they didn't know was that it was all but finished.
"Why won't it wake up?"
"Honestly?" Roland's most faithful assistant sits across from him. She runs a finger through her hair and sighs. "I don't know. It needs something running it. The synthetic bodily fluids are in perfect balance, the recycling rate is optimal, and the electrical currents are working as intended. The brain just… Won't wake up." She shrugs. "You write a combat subroutine and plug it in there, it'll be the best looking tank you ever seen, but it would only be using a fraction of its computing power."
"We're not trying to write a combat subroutine. We're trying to write a consciousness. A life."
"Only God can write that, sir." Roland nods and looks across the room, at the door to his son's room. "Have you named him yet? Your son?" She asks him.
"No. After Penelope… And with everything that's been happening, I just haven't been able to stop and think about it."
"What to do call him in the meantime?"
"My son." He turned back to his assistant. "What would we have to do? To run it?"
"Theoretically, we'd need another volunteer. Somebody willing to die to put their consciousness into the body. But we don't have the authority now that you've been removed from the project."
Roland looks down, things occurring to him that immediately make him ashamed, disgusted with himself for thinking about them.
"Don't even think about it, sir." He glances back up in shock.
"What?"
"I said, don't even think about it. You can't give your life for this project. Your son needs you." Roland smiles and nods at his assistant.
"Thank you. I know."
That night, the assistant is woken by an automated alert telling her somebody has broken into the lab. She remembers Roland and, panicking, runs to the lab in only a bathrobe.
When she gets there, she finds Roland hunkered down over their creation-their Frankenstein's monster-inside the operation chamber. From his terminal, he's locked all the doors and overridden the access to them; the assistant walks to the intercom and speaks into it.
"Roland… What are you doing?" Roland stops and turns around, and as he does she sees something lying next to the monster on the operating table. A child.
"This is the only way," he tells her, and turns back to his terminal, overriding the intercom, too. Ignoring his assistant pounding on the observation window, he focuses on the task at hand.
Roland links wires from one of his creations to the other, their heads connected by nanofibre wiring capable of streaming trillions of bytes of data in milliseconds. At the terminal, he writes the algorithm that will transfer the electrical signals from his child, to his monster; the program that will translate all that makes his son a human, into something else-something the synthetic brain can absorb, and hold, and protect.
Is that why I'm doing this? He asks himself, typing away. To protect my son? Or have I gone insane?
He glances back at the observation room window to see his assistant is gone. Went to get the police, he realizes. I don't have much time.
Roland's fingers fly across the keys, and suddenly-it's done. The algorithm is ready. He jabs enter and looks at his son, waiting for the transfer to start-but it doesn't. He frowns and looks back at the computer to see: PLEASE ENTER THREE KEYWORDS FOR CUSTOM ENCRYPTION.
Slowly, the words come to him, and in that moment he feels there could be no others.
Roland remembers his wife, and what she said about the soul, and the self-as being an undefinable deepness. He types:
DEEP
He thinks of his child, his child with no first name, only the name of his family to carry with him through eons of existence.
STONE
Finally, Roland thinks about the bodies. The bodies he laid to rest getting here; the body of his son he is ready to lay to rest in this moment; and the potential of bodies to come-the realization that his son, no matter how pure his soul, was in the body of a machine built for war. You will either destroy worlds, Roland thinks, or you will be one of the wisest beings to ever live. And he types:
CRYPT.
Roland hits the 'enter' key.
PROCESSING…
…
…
...KEYWORDS "DEEP" "STONE" "CRYPT" ACCEPTED.
The algorithm uploads. Roland holds his breath as machinery hums and lights in the monster's body flicker. He holds back tears as the body of his child goes limp.
Then, silence. The weight of what he's done begins to sink into Roland, the infanticide he's committed just to-what-prove himself? He begins to doubt his every choice. And then, something happens.
Stone-01 opens his eyes.
Ghost is sitting on the ground now. It's something I've never seen a Ghost do willingly, which probably means she's at a loss.
"Deep Stone Crypt?"
"Yes."
"That makes you…"
"The first."
"But… How do you remember all this? It was thousands of years ago." I shrug.
"Not easily. But I know it's important."
"How? How do you know?"
"I feel it. In my soul."
Ghost is quiet. I feel like she's getting ready to ask more questions, but then we hear it-a howl in the near distance. A call. Ghost jumps into the air, suddenly alert.
"The Fallen are on the move again."
"Scavengers don't rest." I stand, brushing dust from my armor. "Unfortunately for them, neither does a Guardian." I grab my rifle and check the chamber. Loaded.
"Did you ever wonder which it would be, Stone?"
"What?"
"Which you would become. Wise, or a destroyer of worlds."
I blink. Nobody's ever asked me that. I realize, though, that the question has a simple answer.
"I think I always knew what I'd be, actually."
"Which is?"
"I'm both."
I cock my rifle and walk in the direction of my enemies.