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cause, but he hadn't needed to. The inference that he could do so if they
turned down Sam's offer certainly hadn't been subtle.
On the face of it, what Sam offered was exceptionally tempting and even
logical. Rather than have
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La-kesh and his Cerberus warriors continue to wage their uncoordinated
guerrilla war on the barons, Sam
136 JAMES AXLER
wanted those resources under his dominion, where they would be given direction
and focus.
By allying with the imperator, Lakesh and his people would be protected and he
would have a voice in the implementation of a new order. There would be no
more need to hide, and the Cerberus exiles wouldn't bear the stigma of being
outlanders any longer.
Therefore Sam's proposal made perfect sense and that was what made all of them
so suspicious.
According to what Sindri had learned in the future, that suspicion was
well-founded. In the political backwash of the Consolidation War and Nirodha
conflict in Asia, the standard of living for the population at large dropped
off. Most of the individual governments in Europe fell, and almost all of Asia
came under a worldwide military dictatorship formed by imperial forces.
The fledgling economy of Sam's Consolidated Confederation of States was thrown
into turmoil. The new government groaned under the weight of countless
unskilled unemployables who had to be fed, clothed and housed at the expense
of the states. The corrupting influences of state-supplied SQUID implants kept
the idle from rioting and committing crimes, true enough, but it also deadened
them to truth and individual initiative, blinding them with a cloak of
illusory beauty.
No one knew or cared any longer about the difference between freedom and
cushioned slavery. Behind the facade of well-being created by the SQUIDs, the
culture seethed with indolence and ugliness, but it
Sea of Plague
137
was all part of the long-range program Sam called the Great Plan.
Ambition, even the Olympian aspirations of an im-perator, had to accept the
limitations of reality. It required much time and greater effort to control
the wild, mad human beings who infested the planet.
Even twenty-seven years hence there were still people scattered throughout the
Outlands who refused to become part of the imperial society and therefore
hadn't been subjected to the SQUID implants.
Although the advent of the imperator had changed the old caste system, those
who didn't submit willingly to Sam's authority were threats to the Great Plan.
The sheer enormity of the Great Plan was enough to intimidate anyone. But
Sam's ideals governed his life, and those ideals were focused on one goal to
dominate everyone, to control every destructive urge, to eliminate waste, to
unify, to establish the law of pitiless logic and cold reason wherever
humanity could be found. The only way the species could survive was by the
domination of it.
However, the neuronic energy provided by the SQUIDs channeled through the
Heart of the World didn't allow the imperator to read or directly control
minds. It did, however, permit him to give and receive impressions, ideas and
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visualizations. From these various stimuli, Sam possessed the ability to
extrapolate from a handful of known facts and to predict the logical sequence
of events. It was truly a talent, not necessarily a learned skill that relied
solely on cerebration.
To gauge and evaluate and to extrapolate a conclu-
138 JAMES AXLER
sion that was so probable as to be almost certain, was more than precognition.
It was a given. He had blended technology to augment his own natural psionic
abilities.
Definitely, Sam employed nanotechnology to maintain his health. The ill, the
old and the injured all suffered from misarranged patterns of molecules,
whether misarranged by invading viruses, passing time or genetics. Sam's
nanotechnology rearranged and corrected cells at a molecular level.
Therefore, in the eyes of many, that one single ability made Sam as close to a
genuine messiah as was ever born in the history of the world. He made no real
claim of divinity. He didn't need to, inasmuch as he set out to earn the title
of messiah by deed, not by word.
An aspect of those deeds involved doing away with those who didn't share his
vision or his lofty goals of a unified world, of an adaptive Earth. His
control of the SQUID implants helped that along, too.
The implants kept the population of old and new humans in check by numbing the
drive to procreate. It was a cleaner way to exterminate the useless eaters
than pogroms and mass executions, but just as effective. Sam foresaw that the
population would be slashed from millions to mere manageable thousands in less
than a decade. And those thousands would be slaves adapted to meet various
needs.
Even the hybrids who in the future coexisted peacefully with humanity were at
risk. No matter that they were not completely Homo sapiens, they sprang from
essentially the same roots and were humankind trans-
Sea of Plague
139
formed. Therefore, they were still a continuation of the race. Hybrid females
and human males had been pairing off, and the past two decades had seen a rise
in mixed-breed offspring, children bearing the best qualities of old and new
human.
The world may not have been as violent and brutal as before, but it was far
from being the Utopia Sam had described. It was a comfortable prison, but a
prison nonetheless.
But Sam had built more than a prison for the human soul he had constructed a
window that would reach into the past or the future and inject matter
throughout the chronon stream whenever and wherever he wanted.
Sam called it the microcosm, and he described it as that which arose from a
conjunction of two laws of physics. The first had to do with the changes in
the mass of a particle as it approached the speed of light.
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Through his work with the Heart of the World, he determined that measurements
of particles that had been raced up to close to the speed of light showed a
strong and rapidly rising increase in their mass so much so that it seemed as
if it would always be impossible to supply enough energy to bring the particle
finally to that ultimate speed.
The second factor that occurred to him was at almost the opposite end of the
research spectrum, the concept of absolute zero in temperature. It was known
that the temperature of an object was the product of the relative speed of its
molecules. As a body heated up, its molecules moved farther apart from one
another and moved faster.
140 JAMES AXLER
At absolute zero, the molecules would lose all motion and come to a dead stop.
Such a stop would presumably cause all the molecules to come together to form
one mass without internal motion. The final phase of the Great Plan was to
combine both operations.
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