BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
For we do surely die, and are as water which is running down to the earth, which is not gathered, and God doth not accept a person, and hath devised devices in that the outcast is not outcast by Him.
—2 Samuel 14:14
BEFORE I COULD ASK anyone what was going on, a black town car pulled up and the door hissed open. “Welcome, Joel Byram!” it said heartily. All cars went driverless in the second half of the twenty-first century, and I’d been told the riding experience became much more pleasant as a result.
“International Transport headquarters,” I said.
“Already dialed in, sir. Please sit back and enjoy the ride.”
As the car headed down to the southern edge of Turtle Bay, my comms lit up with emergency break-in feeds. Talking heads were trying to maintain their composure while text messages and comments, mostly bomb-related puns, scrolled up my field of vision. On several of my windows, for some reason, was a Bible quote:
And when he opened the Fifth Seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those slain because of the word of God. And they cried out with a great voice, saying, “When, O Master, dost Thou take vengeance for our blood?”
I enlarged one stream to see it was from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Armageddon stuff. I enabled the audio on one of the more serious-looking news anchors.
“And we’re getting—yes, it appears this quote was delivered via a multitude of titanium dog tags, scattered outward from the blast site. Again, if you’re just joining us, a suicide bomber calling herself Joan Anglicus has blown up a teleportation center.” A helpful infographic underneath the anchor informed me that Joan Anglicus was the name of the first and only female pope.
“Joan Anglicus was a well-known member of the teleportation protest group, the Gehinnomites,” the anchor continued.
I muted the news feed again. Gehinnomites. Buncha religious nutters. They were probably the world’s most vocal opponents of teleportation, and had been since its invention nearly fifty years ago. Their qualms with the technology boiled down to two main arguments.
First, there was something to do with forbidden fruit. People of faith had been generally grumpy about the practical, commercial manipulation of quantum foam. Since quantum foam is the stuff the universe is made of, I guess they thought we shouldn’t have been messing with God’s Play-Doh.
The second bit of umbrage, raised by the Gehinnomites’ leader, Roberto Shila, was a callback to the Tower of Babel story, which professorial types had oft cited as warning against technology. Shila’s interpretation of the story was that the Babylonians had embraced science under the premise of self-defense, or at least an attempt to prevent another forty-day-and-forty-night flood, and felt they should be able to spar with God on his turf. To Shila and his ilk, teleportation was basically a new take on Babel’s stairway to heaven. In other words, porting was worse than our playing with God’s toys: it was us playing God.
Neither of those gripes were particularly novel at the time, nor unique to teleportation, as both had been previously cited in admonition of genetic engineering, connected neural implants, and medical nanotech. So the Gehinnomites were largely ignored by the general public other than a few journalists looking for “both sides of the story.” Also, heretofore their protests had always been peaceful. Now that one of their own had committed an act of terror, I was pretty sure they would no longer be disregarded.
Several of the news feeds put up a picture of the suicide bomber, this Joan Anglicus. A woman so opposed to teleportation that she had been willing to end her life to take down just one of over a thousand TCs. Holy shit. I know her. Or rather, I recognized her. She was the woman I’d ridden behind on the Greenwich TC conveyer. The woman in the brilliant-white tiered ruffle gown and the army jacket. The muddy boots. The intense, penetrating stare.
The smoldering embers in her hair.
The saddlebag. With a quantum bomb in its belly.10
Wait, does that say Costa Rica? Costa Rica!
I enlarged one of the news feeds. The video showed a smoking crater and at least a one-kilometer radius of bomb debris. The headline below read: “Terror Attack at Costa Rica’s San José TC—11 dead.”
Holy shit. Holy shit. Okay, keep it together. How far is the Monkey Bar from the San José TC?
I kept trying to comm Sylvia, but got a THE NETWORK PATH CANNOT BE FOUND error message. I pinged Julie, but she was fucking useless. “Get me on the comms as soon as you hear anything!” I yelled at her.
“I understand,” Julie responded. Finally short and to the point. Even her semisentient brain perceived the desperation in my voice.
Reports of a second blast site began to propagate. The Guanacaste geothermal power plant, the primary power source for Costa Rica’s TC and its comms network, had been swallowed in a pool of lava. A small group of Gehinnomites had seized control of nearby Rincón de la Vieja, the Geneva of Central America. They were holding the entire town and various heads of state hostage.
A little boy, shaken and scared, delivered a handwritten note to one of the emergency responders. The moment was recorded and streamed on all the news aggregators. It read:
The beginning of life was first open to destruction with abortion, and soon followed the end of life with euthanasia. Like a vice that closes from either end, how many of those in the middle must fall prey to the depravity of man’s moral relativism and love affair with sin that always brings death?
We will show you Our signs in the horizons until it becomes clear to you that they are the Truth. Our Creator has endowed Us with certain inalienable rights, and primary among those is life. Life is the first right. Without this one, any others are without effect. You cannot legislate away the Creator’s will.
We have watched as Our society has progressed toward a culture of death, and corporations have usurped religion and government. Be it foretold, then, all those who would teleport, who would willingly engage in the unnatural acts of suicide and re-creation, and those who aid them, who create doppelg?ngers and golems to walk the earth in their place: We will save your souls; We will fulfill your pact with the Creator, your obligation to live one life and die one death.
Pulsa D’nura.
#pulsadnura
It was already trending. They might have been religious kooks, but they knew how to captivate an audience. I looked it up: a Pulsa D’nura is apparently a curse from some old book of Jewish scripture in which the angels of destruction are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness of a subject’s sins, causing all the curses named in the Bible to befall them at once, which unsurprisingly, results in their death. Great, I thought. Religious crazies who manifest curses via suicide bombs.