Free Artifice (Special Forces: FJ One Book 2) by Adam Vance Page B

horror.
    “You’re…experimenting. This is all a data collection experiment. They’re your…lab rats.”
    “Very good. Yes. In another fifty years, I’m hoping to create a scientific leap forward. They will need that long for their brains to get larger in each generation, with each year of prosperity and good nutrition. Then I’ll find a way to get them to see me as ‘God the watchmaker,’ as they called him on Earth in the Enlightenment. To get them curious about what makes it all tick. Of course, the first curious ones will be burnt as heretics, I’m sure. That seems to be the universal response to Enlightenment. Ignorance is bliss, knowledge is terror.” Alex sighed. “As the great writer said, So it goes.”
    Chen wondered if there was something wrong with him. Why he wasn’t as appalled as he should be, why he’s not denouncing Alex for…not playing God, being God. Why he found himself…fascinated. It was that “Spock” part of him again, he knew, the part that failed to see the emotional impatience on Earth with the orderly, cautious Department 6C colonization process. Which, he thought, was probably why Alex had steered him here and not some other less Spock-like human.
    “You’ve created a new science, a…I don’t have a word for it. Behaviorist determinist anthroposociology or something. Forcing behavior change on whole populations and watching how it plays out, but…able to change the parameters of the experiment any time you want.”
    “Yep. It keeps me busy, that’s for sure. So many little tweaks to do to the system all the time.”
    “Do you ever manifest as a god, do you ever appear to someone and…”
    “Give me a break. How vulgar. No, never. Can you see why I wouldn’t?”
    Chen thought about it, drew on his experience with the galaxy’s various religions. “If you don’t appear to anyone, then…you get the ones who claim you appeared to them, who claim to speak for you. Who build their own theology around…all this.”
    “Yeah, and of course then you get the sectarian violence. The Catholic Alexians who swear that I’m the Hidden God, unapproachable and unknowable, except of course through their priesthood. Then there’s the Protestant Alexians who despise priests, usually with good reason, and pray to me directly. And the Buddhist, I suppose you’d call them, who accept the turning of the wheel of time and try to live good moral lives, knowing I’m here but not really getting themselves in a wringer pondering my existence.”
    “And when your Enlightenment comes, there will be no physical evidence of a deity to disprove.”
    “Exactly.” He paused. “All the same, I would say that, since I took over, their quality of life has really improved overall. But then, doesn’t every tyrant?”
    Chen’s eyebrows went up. “This is why we’re here. You have another experiment in mind.”
    “Bingo.”
    “Are you going to help us defeat the Rhal?”
    “Help you? Maybe.”
    Chen thought about what he’d seen here, what Alex had accomplished, what he could accomplish now in a short time. “You could do it, couldn’t you? You’ve been building up your own systems this last hundred years. You could fab up stroidfarms, mechanicals, flashspace ships…you could give us…”
    Alex cut him off. “I’m not giving you shit.”
    There was a pause. This, Chen knew, was when any other desperate mortal would start to plead…maybe when the natives below would begin to entreat for intercession. Instead, he waited patiently.
    Finally, Alex went on. “Do you know why they tried to kill me?”
    “Well, no offense, but the conventional wisdom is it was because you killed twenty five million people.”
    “No. I was the sacrificial lamb.” Alex threw up a hologram onto the atmospheric dome, a flat map of the Earth.
    “Here’s Day One of the pandemic that started in Lagos. This was my projection of the spread.”
    Red contrails spread across the planet, airplane routes