The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

Toadies? Petitioners? Lesser ministers?

CHAPTER 3
The Masters of the Universe at a Private Meeting, York, 2318:
They Deal with the Breaking Scandal
    “It’s not fair,” said Bugleg miserably. “We didn’t make that Options Research place. We didn’t send anybody there.”
    “Well—we sort of did,” said Rappacini.
    “Some of us did,” said Freestone. “Not me, though.”
    “It was one of
them
made it really awful,” Rossum pointed out. “All we wanted was a place to do tests on the operatives. We never said to torture them.”
    “We just wanted a way for them to
not be,”
agreed Bugleg.
    “If only nobody had found out about Options Research,” said Dippel with a sigh.
    They were scientists. They were all young men, and though they had been born to different races and nations, there was something disconcertingly similar in their smooth uneasy faces. Their clothing was uniform as garments can be without actually being uniforms, plain functional garb, no complicated fastenings, no particular style. They sat around an oval table with a polished white surface that invited scribbling. In the center was a can of bright-colored doodlepens, which had been placed there to encourage creativity. Nobody was drawing anything on the table, however, creative or otherwise.
    “We shouldn’t have put one of the big mean ones in charge, I guess,” said Dippel.
    “That was probably a mistake,” admitted Rappacini.
    “And he didn’t even find a way to terminate them,” said Freestone, shaking his head. “Even though he was supposed to be superintelligent.”
    “They’re all supposed to be superintelligent,” objected Rossum.
    “Maybe they can’t be terminated after all,” said Rappacini.
    “What did we have to go make them not die for?” wondered Bugleg, staring at the table.
    “Well, it seemed like a good idea when we came up with it,” said Dippel.
    “But now they’re really mad at us,” said Bugleg.
    He was referring to the immortal servants created by Dr. Zeus Incorporated, and their somewhat understandable outrage at the discovery of a covert base, hidden in the deep past, where some two hundred missing immortals had been imprisoned for research purposes. Suleyman had liberated them, and gone public with the story. Some very fancy plausible denial indeed had been necessary, with blame shifted to the renegade immortal Marco, who had run the place, and who was now (fortunately) missing.
    “Everything’s happened so fast with this Company,” complained Rossum. “One minute it was all just this really good idea and the next minute it was all this awful causality stuff that had already happened without asking us.”
    “Like those toy things,” said Rappacini. “What are they called? You’re just winding a crank playing a nice little tune in a box and then all of a sudden a lid flies open and this scary thing jumps out.”
    “Schrödinger’s cat,” said Rossum.
    “No, something else,” said Rappacini in frustration, and held out his arms and waggled them to suggest the thing he was trying to name. “Anyway I never liked those.”
    “We wrought not wisely, but too well,” said Freestone.
    “Don’t talk like that!” cried Bugleg. “You sound like one of them!”
    “No, they sound like me!” said Freestone with some heat. “We’re the human beings here. We made them, and not the other way around. They might have forgotten that, but I certainly haven’t. How are we going to stop them from taking over, that’s the question we should be asking.”
    “Well, the only thing we can do is not make any more of them,” decided Rappacini. “And keep trying to find a way to terminate them ourselves.”
    “Ah, but how?” said Freestone.
    “We were too smart,” said Bugleg, shaking his head.
    The meeting broke up, as it usually did, in hand-wringing. Bugleg was still wringing his hands as he left the conference room and followed the tunnel to the parking garage.
    He was a rather pale man,