Day 152 - Babel - Chapter 48 - Epilogue (2347 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 48

Epilogue: Thirty years after the eruption

Auckland was now a through and through harbour that separated the bulk of the original north island, now called central New Zealand, and the new north island which started at the site for the former Glenfield, which was now a beach front property looking over Takapuna and Devonport islands. The long stretches of cool basalt streams and the original volcanic cones were above water level but much of the land that ran from harbour to harbour was now under water, in some cases deep enough to drive a container ship all the way through to the opposite harbour.

Philip was tired and exhausted as he flew into Rangitoto City for the first time since he had left the country almost thirty years ago. Through the Loop he knew the place well and had felt what it was like as the survivors rebuilt on the site of what had been. Philip had not set foot in the country since he left to start bringing in more people to the Loop some thirty years beforehand. In the intervening years he had travelled to many places on the globe, spent a large amount of time in Europe and Africa even though there was no need to physically be there. The Loop started expanding beyond the need for the original nodes to be required. The thirty seven from Sydney airport all took different paths and when they hot a new population centre they created a new Thirty Six and theye too would branch out and spread the connection.

The landscape of New Zealand had changed, the Loop had been working on it constantly, cooling and reshaping the harbour to make it liveable again. The Volcano in the Gulf was now dormant again, it smoke and bubble a little in the short term, but as the tubes cooled and the spaceships settled into the earth and fused with the basalt they plugged firmer into the cracks in the crust where there was pressure and worked like caulk in the woodwork to stabilise the area. Thirty years on and grass covered most of the new islands, and what had once been down town was now underwater, a home for the fishes, with some tall buildings peaking out of the water, but most were under the surface and degraded over time.

Most of the smaller buildings were salvaged, though many closer to the original waterfront were caved in or ash encased from the explosions. The tallest buildings had been knocked back by the blast, and the crack that cause a channel to rip through the center had opened up in Onehunga, driving up through Epsom, Eden and Remuera to connect where the City once was, now a channel with the odd skeleton of a high rise in it, but mostly what had been the semi affluent suburbs landlocked and without a view like Penrose, Ellerslie and Mt Wellington they were now waterfront themselves. No beaches had formed yet, though the idea of trucking in sand had been thrown around the Loop quite a lot, yet no one had the overwhelming need for it and there were bigger fish to fry.

The biggest change was to the Few, the immune who had all the advantages before were now literally out of the Loop and things progressed so much faster now that ninety nine point nine of the population could vote democratically on any subject instantly. Life was harder for them, they were an underclass and had to have things explained to them. They needed a media, where the Loop was in itself a media. They had to interact with each other and Looped individuals manually, but not many had the patience for it. They had sterilisation imposed on them, though it was a controversial decision it did pass in the interests of the many. There were those that believed in the right to exist, but the concept that they could breed a new generation of immune, people who would never had a chance and always be the underclass, that felt wrong and unfair to those in the Loop.

Not everyone agreed, but more than enough for a majority and they were given options as individuals, passed on by the people who could talk to them, and they were fewer and further between as time wore on. The immune Few could not mobilise, could not resist without being seen or heard by the Loop. While the vast majority of the Loop had no language, the ability to route those translated messages through members who understood was easy and instant enough. It still caused problems and no one was forced physically, but they were pressured and coerced at times, only those wanting to separate themselves from the pack could really stand out and remain unchanged. On the other hand the chances of them finding the one percent like them to breed their genetic legacy on to was made near impossible.

The problem was knowledge though, and in the short term they wanted to solve the issue of immunity and inability to connect to the Loop without really understanding the nature of the Babel itself. It was about three years before the Loop came across a sole man living in the wilderness, raving and insane as the connected him and then they found the awful truth. The man was Dr Nick Bianni, and while the Loop had known that the Alien ships that came had not brought the disease, but in fact had come to help, only to be assaulted and attacked, they did not know for sure where or how the Babel originated. Nick was not naturally immune, he was artificially so, and once the initial phase had passed so did his immunity, so he was able to integrate immediately and the Loop was read in on all of the origin and the sad story of the failed nuclear attack on the mother ships.

They had not seen the ships again, they watched the skies for signs of the visitors, but the general consensus was that they were never actually there. They examined what they could access of the downed Ship in the harbour, but it was empty and the only sign of life was the chambers where the original thirty six nodes had been housed and connected before moving outwards. Philip recognised the places, the rooms and gave them the context of his own recall with the couple of other survivors of Victor's first bombing on the wharf what seemed like an aeon ago. They had come, they had helped in the only way they could, or so the prevalent opinion was, by making and allowing the Human Mind to make the evolutionary leap to connect in the Loop. Then we had slapped the hand that fed us, violently and harshly. No knowing that the ships were empty, they were giant resonating aerials that facilitated the connections at the neurological level. When the Loop reached a critical mass of three million individuals, then the need for those ships disappeared. Earth's provisional defenders who thought they were saving the planet managed to strike, albeit by showing Victor that his plan was the way to get at them, but there was nothing there to get. The aliens excelled in communication and they had created the Loop with humanity and made them progress beyond location based existence. It made sense that they were never even there in the first place.

That New American provisional government had fallen apart after the failure of the attack, some of the people who had fled in the initial escape after the missiles were caught and made redundant had avoided the Babel the first time around, and they added their side of the story early on. The extended version where Nick was held to work on a cure for the Babel, knowing full well that it was impossible as the people who held him got more and more desperately insane was a horrifying memory for him and the Loop once they had shared it. Eventually his jailers gave up and let him go, the core of them setting off a bloody suicide pact, taking the New America Government HQ out with them.

Nick walked all the way home to his mountain cabin, it took months to get there but he avoided all people and main roads, walking through woods and around the cities to avoid contact with anyone. The captivity and the constant walking onwards and upwards to his safe haven made him even more distanced from humanity and he was slowly driving himself mad. He called himself the Omega Man, the last Man of Earth and plenty of other self indulgent titles until eventually he was found and then the full picture of the Babel's beginnings was known. While he himself was a little unhinged, the Loop did nothing to fix that, but they did see all of his memories, his workings and theories that he had worked on while a prisoner.

There was no cure for the Babel, and there was no way to reinstate it as the immune would remain immune and all it would do is infect the next generation. Once the information was in the Loop though it was a starter for a generation before the Babel, now Looped in and able to draw on theory and the processing power of a billion minds to find a cure for the Immunity. There was an enzyme that gave the point one percent the ability to block the Babel infection, but it also meant that the part of the brain that accepted the frequency of the Loop which bound to another enzyme present in Broca's Area could be tuned out, affected so that the incoming connection of the Loop could be heard and could send out the signals as well. Nick continued on in his madness, now shared with the entire world, he was no longer the sole curator of his insanity, but like the small percentage of people in the Loop with perceptive issues, his judgement was irrelevant. The Loop worked out what was real, what was right and what was acceptable.

Then they found the cure a few years ago and the decisions came back to haunt them as the regret and despair of the former immune who could now take a enzyme that turned off their immunity, and opened them to the connection was now available. The guilt of the Loop, the I told you so thoughts and feelings made for an awkward integration as the last vestiges of disconnected humans came into the Loop. The chances they had, missed and never saw were forgotten as they now saw, heard and felt everything they had not until now.

That had been five years ago, and Philip had finally stopped moving when his health began to fail. There was no denying it, it was impossible to ignore when the whole world could feel the tightening in your chest along with you. They could feel the headaches and the inability to sleep properly and eventually despite years of being in the forefront of the Loop he decided to come home. Not to see it, or experience it because he had plenty of that from the people who still lived there. He came home because it was home.

An accident of birth, a random enough selection of geography by his progenitors who who were no longer alive, having not made it through the Babel. Here he was, standing on the hill, an island in the Rangitoto Channel, what was once One Tree Hill was now the largest of the Channel Islands and the label for it in the minds of the Loop was the significant one tree, the one that had disappeared from the site decades before the Babel, long before the Volcano tore the region in half, but still an image in the mind of the country. Once the immune Few had finally been integrated into the Loop and language came to be in there with them, and the children of the next generation began to pick it up, that was when Labels came back along with the pictographic system.

It was very, very rarely spoken aloud and in the younger generation there was a lack of the muscular definition and practice to make spoken language very useful, it existed all the minds of the Loop and in the ageing Few who had made it to survive the intervening years.

The sun was setting on Philip's life, his physical life was bound to his body and his mental life was bound to the Loop. He was not the first person to die since the Loop had taken Humanity to the next evolutionary step, he would not be the last, but somehow he was thinking and this was backed up by the people who agreed with him, that there was life beyond the physical now. The Loop was like a cloud, and they had collectively shared the memories, feelings and thoughts of people as they lost them to Alzheimers and dementia before and those 'missing' pieces could come back to them on demand from the Loop.

It proved nothing but there was a definite agreement that there must have been a way to make the transition to Loop Only entities. They still needed bodies to act as servers and hosts of course, the Loop was not a physical thing, it was a spider web of connected lumps of neurological jelly in peoples head, all vibrating at the same frequency.

He sat on the hill, overlooking the new coastline of Rangitoto City and felt the one billion people to which he had a special connection, drawing on the memories of people who had already died, they were there but they were offline, archived and accessible, but devoid of will and intent. They were shadows, not even ghosts in the machinery as a section of the Loop would think about as a metaphor.

There had to be a way. He just didn't know what it was yet.