The Preacher Man

I sighed deeply and then gasped. "Murdered his uncle?! Abdul Jabbar, Servant of the Compeller, founder of the Nikahaldi Academy! Of course!"

"Yes! Abdul Jabbar tried to hold both reins of power, both sacred and secular. When that proved too difficult, he split up his sacred power base to weaken it and to keep it from interfering with his secular rule. He kept the Nikahaldi at Tobruk with their production of the eternal virginity drugs, established The Code of Bel'dar monastery at Babylon in Peru, and sent the anti-aging drug expertise to the Caribbean. Grenada was the first island resettled after the War. The monks there renamed the island Giza, and founded what eventually became the Health faction."

I nodded, feeling a tremendous surge of adrenaline in my body. "But all three facilities originally operated at Tobruk!"

"Exactly! Including the production of the anti-aging drugs! Do you see now why the Health faction was so eager to destroy the Academy there?!"

Five days later...

Time: November 16, 8244 4:00 AM

I woke up rested in the Royal guest quarters of Tobruk's cathedral, near the center of town and about ten kilometers south of the Nikahaldi Academy. I sighed in the pleasant coolness of the room and thought about the coming day. After all the years of struggle, especially after the emotional turbulence of the last five days, euphoria to despair to slim hope to tearful goodbyes, today I... What?

Civil twilight was just starting outside the window. The sun would be up in another thirty-four minutes. The room was in dim shadows, but it was light enough to see. I blinked as I realized there was a small person sitting classic lotus-fashion in pajamas on my large bed with me, small bare feet tucked under the body. The breathing control of my intruder was superb.

After a moment I sat up and said, "Your form must be exceptional, for you to enter and sit here without waking me."

Kefira nodded and quoted, "Slow walking is silent as meditation. As a girl, I was not allowed to study the marital arts moves, but in walking I am ranked as Shaolin second Tuan."

I smiled. "Very impressive. I know how reluctant the male instructors are to give any woman master status, let alone a 12-year-old girl."

She nodded her head slightly to thank me for the compliment.

"Kefira, what are you doing here?"

There was a moment of silence, and then she replied, "I will answer of course, but may I ask questions first?"

Considering what the rest of my day would be like, I saw no reason to say no. I nodded my agreement.

Kefira sighed. "Abdul Hadi, is this really a suicide mission?"

It was my turn to sigh. "Nothing is certain, but probably, yes."

I saw the first break in her perfect form. Her lip began to tremble. "Oh why?" she whispered.

I gave her a kind smile, acknowledging her compassion for me. "Because I'm the only one qualified to attempt the single-person access mode. It's the only alternative to not having the encryption keys to unlock the automatic defenses."

"Why you?"

"Kefira, when the Nikahaldi sealed their monastery, they probably thought they were the only ones who could possibly return. Almost any request to enter without the keys will generate an access denied signal. That will almost certainly detonate the building."

"Okay. Uh, ALMOST any request?"

"Yes. It turns out it's illegal to set up a machine to automatically deny a Ruling Royal access request. Since I don't have the key, the automated security system will flash my request to a central room and wait for a human to decide whether to admit me."

"But there will be no one there." Kefira cocked her head. "What happens then?"

"After a time, the automatic system will time out. The law states the default decision must be to cycle the airlock for admittance."

"How long?"

"I'm guessing the legal maximum, forty minutes." I paused for a second and continued. "Building schematics show there are three such airlocks along the shortest path to the building's central security center."

"Okay. And once you're there?"

"I'm going to try to hack into their system. Set up an output feed and transmit their library through it. I'm very skilled with these systems. Security was my Guild."

"Ah. And then you'll come out?"

I smiled. "Well, that certainly would be nice. I won't lie to you Kefira. It'll take hours to output the library. In the meantime I'm very likely to activate a booby-trap or a timed self-destruct sequence. It's difficult to quantify, but the odds are small I'll manage to do this, and small squared I'll walk out alive."

"Then send someone else!"

I smiled. "I wouldn't do that. Besides, I'm by far the best Ruling Royal qualified."

In the dim light, I could see that Kefira had tears in her eyes. "Give another expert your ID!"

"It wouldn't work. The ID's are quantum entangled verified. It's physically impossible to do what you're suggesting. I'm the only one Kefira." A long moment of silence passed. "Any more questions?"

Kefira bowed her head and shook no. "No, wait! I have one! Abdul Hadi, why did you bring me here to Tobruk?"

I sighed. "Well, if I fail, it probably won't make much difference. But if I succeed in transmitting the data, and I think I have a decent chance of doing that..."

Kefira is so smart. She gasped and saw my point immediately. "Backsliding on the promises! You're worried the men will try to re-enslave the women!"

I nodded. "This attempt is going to be holocast live to the world. Make sure you're very visible to the public; make your presence part of the mission. I've done a lot of thinking about this. I don't think many men want to go back to the old ways. I think my gender really has accepted the forgiveness of the women. And the military has a tremendous amount of personal respect for me. Having you here will tie their respect for me to the promises I've made to you. Kefira?"

"Yes?"

"What are you doing here?" She knew I meant my bedroom.

She didn't answer directly. "I came here last night, to your suite, shortly after midnight. Abigail had told me your schedule, that you would be asleep from midnight to 4 AM. I thought I would come and keep Eleora company while your other wives went through their purge cycles. I was sure Eleora wouldn't be able to sleep."

"Oh. I see..."

She whispered, "The five of us stayed up overnight, Eleora, Abigail, Shephatiah, Chanah, and me."

I paused for a moment. "Ah. So you know, huh?"

"Yes. Such trust! I swear Abdul Hadi, I will carry the secret to my grave." She paused for a moment and went on. "Eleora loves me! She asked if I wanted to be adopted. She offered to become my mother!" There was another long pause and sigh. "Eleora was going to ask you about this when you woke up, but I asked if I could talk to you first. That's why I'm here. Abdul Hadi, will you be my father?"

Chapter 57. Abdul Hadi in the Furnace

Time: November 16, 8244 10:50 AM

I had been standing in the sealed airlock for thirty-five minutes now, having stepped in at 10:15 and entering my access request. The programming staff supporting this mission thought it would be an optimal time to try to second-guess the fuzzy logic of the automated security system. 10:15 was fifteen minutes after the normal end of morning Prayers. It was the right time for Royal to be leaving the nearby chapel and entering the main complex.

As the forty-minute mark for the airlock neared, I felt my body tensing, and I didn't want that. I tried to calm myself by thinking about my family. Such love! Such beautiful wives! And now I have a beautiful daughter.

We went live with the global holocast as scheduled at 9 AM. I'm sure we startled the world by presenting first an adoption ceremony. There were no known protocols for this, so my wives, Kefira and I designed one ourselves. My wives and I promised to love and support Kefira throughout our lives, Kefira promised her obedience as a child and to honor us as an adult. She defiantly ignored the likelihood that by the time she reached adulthood, my wives and I would be just a memory to her.

And in the airlock now I had to smile at the political brilliance of the adoption. As my daughter, Kefira now is the inheritor of all the world's promises made to me for the direction of our new society. I made that point very explicit in the adoption ceremony. My heart is at peace now that I'm not helping to return the women to slavery.

At 10:55 AM, precisely forty minutes after I entered, the airlock cycled open into the interior of the complex. I quickly entered the building and walked briskly but not too quickly across a spacious reception lobby to a guard station near a bank of elevators.

The lobby was very beautiful, as nice as my palace. Polished white marble with green swirls on the floor, plush leather lounge chairs scattered about, interesting abstract mosaics carved into the burnished steel walls, the lobby was an announcement of the Nikahaldi's power and prestige. I reached the guard's station and immediately tried to bring up a diagnostic on the security console.

I knew this system well, had trained on it for years as a boy. It's sophisticated, top of the line, but my Guild had also placed several maintenance backdoors into the software for troubleshooting. Since the backdoors could not be used to change any status or operational program, most customers allow them to remain. Running diagnostics is very time-consuming without the backdoors, and there's a hefty premium built into the service contract if the customer insists on taking them out.

Success! I was able to initialize a diagnostic output feed. The rest of the world could see me now on the holographic channel I created. It was one-way only. No information could come in, but I took a second to wave at the security monitors around me and the world that was now watching.

If I succeeded in my mission, I would use this diagnostic channel to output the Nikahaldi library to the world. Perhaps the world saw me grimace when I looked back down at the guard station console. The fuzzy-logic security system was flashing a blue-level warning. It had tagged me as (hostile, potential) which had activated the building's self-destruct sequence with a four-hour delay. The counter was now at 3:14:57 and counting down to a scheduled detonation at 2:15:00 PM.

I took a moment to think. If I left now, there was about a 50% chance the automated security system would decide that with no one in the building, it could reset and not detonate. It all depended on how severely the Nikahaldi had tuned the aggression matrix on the pseudo-emotional fuzzy logic. I could leave now, and perhaps have another shot at this later.

I started walking briskly to the elevators to ride them down to the second airlock. There was nothing that I had learned so far that would make any future attempt more likely to succeed than now. Indeed, the system's fuzzy-logic is adept at becoming alarmed at patterns it doesn't understand. A repeat of my entrance at a future time might well cause the system to tag me as (hostile, intermediate), or even (hostile, active). My swift death would then be assured.

I began my cycle in the second airlock at 11:04:25 AM, four floors below ground level. I felt chilled during the long wait. The certainty of never seeing another human again made my heart melancholy. My mind drifted among all the hugs I had gotten from my wives at 10 AM, somber moments for the world to watch. My other wives took their cues from Michal and Dodi, on how emotional to act. But most of all, now in the second airlock, I was surprised to find myself thinking mostly of Kefira and her tears, how she openly wailed her frustration to the world as she hugged me, clutching as if she would never let me go.

Time: 11:53:10 PM

After a brisk walk through a labyrinth of corridors, I was before the third and final airlock. Directly opposite would be a side entrance to central security. This was not the typical entrance used. The normal path would be four airlocks, not three. This was an emergency access/exit port, surrounded by white signs with bold red lettering of an unknown language.

I took a second to think. The portal looked well serviced, but the use of the unknown language strongly suggested this portal existed early in the Wild Times. I stared at the strange symbols for a moment, wondering if Abigail could read them. They looked to be the same type of symbols outside the nitrogen vault where we first met. Would the security center or this airlock be filled with pure nitrogen now?

I thought again of my choice of making this journey without armor or even a bio-suit. But both my mission team and I had severe doubts that I would get the coveted blue tag of (hostile, potential) if I showed up wearing such garb. I shrugged and reviewed my chances.

I would die in failure without a breathable atmosphere in the airlock and control room. My most optimistic scenario for success was to go through the final airlock and then hack library access, perhaps ten to fifteen minutes later. I could then start dumping library files to the world.

I would never be able to dump all of it. From the specs on the system and the bandwidth of my diagnostic channel, that would take eight or nine hours, and I would have at most an hour and twenty minutes of transmit time. I also would have no control of the dump. In order to fool the fuzzy-logic, I would have to send the files as a test of the hardware output channel, random transfers without reselection would be the best I could do. Of course, there was also no guarantee that the information I was seeking was even in the library.

Assuming the information was there, I thought my chances for transmitting it were at most 15%, and much less if I needed to transmit every one of several files. But what was my alternative? I could go back, have six months with my beautiful wives and daughter. I could. I reached up and cycled the airlock to open on my side. At precisely 11:55:00 AM, I began the last of my forty-minute waits.

I was happy to see the opposite side of the airlock was crystal clear, allowing me to see the layout of the security room. It looked a little different than the diagram on the building specs, and I started to plan my motions for when the crystal door would slide open. I wanted to make every second count.

After one minute of standing there inside the airlock and not typing in the correct encryption key for access, I heard a hissing noise. In a state of despair, I tried to hold my breath. It was a futile gesture. The ancient agents were almost always skin absorptive. Not breathing would make no difference.

As the minutes passed, I noticed the lights in the control room in front of me becoming very bright. For a few seconds I wondered if there was a surge in main power. And then the horror hit me. My body was being subjected to the preparation drugs of the Nikahaldi. Just as the lights got painfully bright, the airlock recycled and flushed my chamber with new air. Then I heard the start of another hiss.

My heart was frantic at first, but then I gave a fatalistic laugh of triumph against my enemies. It wouldn't matter! After the airlock cycled open, I would still have a half hour to hack the system before the first purging sleep cycle took me, more if I were willing to risk brain damage, and of course I would be! None of this mattered! At worst, I would be asleep when the building detonated. Was that so bad? Goodbye, my dear family. My love for you will outlast my mortal body! This is my faith! As the new drug filled the chamber, I began to Pray.

Chapter 58. All Good Gifts Around Us...

Time:?

Drifting... Drifting... I have a dream. I have a dream, and it is just beyond my grasp. What is it? Am I asleep? Am I in Heaven?

I laughed at myself as I drifted. Abdul Hadi, don't be stupid! This still feels like a human mind! This isn't eternity, just the eternity drugs! But still... Where am I?

It was the strangest feeling, completely unexpected and yet hauntingly familiar. I could feel the locks of the purge cycle on my mind, imagine how I would tear my consciousness on the sharp blades of the locks if I fought the cycle and tried to awake before the cycle was complete. And yet...

Yes! The locks were disintegrating, dissolving before and within my mind. Was this what it was like to wake up from a purge cycle? It seemed very strange. I thought in another few minutes though, if the locks kept up their disintegration, I might safely try to force myself awake.

What has happened? The last thing I remembered, I was standing in the third airlock, looking at the time. It was three minutes after the start of the second hiss. I could see the red numbers of the clock inside the control room clearly. And then... And then... Oh, the irony! To go from perfect memory to no memory at all! What happened?!

I calmed myself with a short Prayer and considered. I had been expecting to fall asleep in a purge cycle but not awake from it. I was standing inside the airlock. It was so real! Just moments ago, I was there! I could see the control room! Hear the hissing! Feel the heavy glass door in front of me! The airlock! Just moments ago! Just moments ago?

Perhaps gas injection of the drugs causes an immediate sleep cycle. Possible I guess. But that doesn't seem right. Could that have happened? I would still be midway in the purge cycle of my first forced sleep when the building exploded. But I'm alive! But... Oh, I don't know...

Could I be lying in the open airlock, coming out of a short purge cycle? Are precious seconds disappearing? Perhaps I should try to fight the locks before they disintegrate? Oh, my dear wives! Dodi and Michal, do you have this awful decision to make, every day of your lives?

My Guide came to me in my sleep, mighty without measure, and He gave me peace, resting my heart and telling me to wait. As His servant, I trembled and cried out my love and obeyed.

The then the last of the locks were gone, destroyed. Destroyed? I could sense my body now. I was lying peacefully in a comfortable bed. I probed my body with my mind, and was very happy with what I sensed, layers of smooth and well-developed muscles. I couldn't remember ever being in this good of physical shape, not even during my extended tours with the Special Guard. And there was more.

I was being held. I was sleeping with someone. I would feel warm, bare flesh pressing against me, legs, hips, and chest. I was being held in loving arms. I sighed, my mind profoundly calm. I opened my eyes.

There was a naked woman lying with me. She was severely withered. It looked like a very extreme case of anti-aging withdrawal, more severe than any textbook ever illustrated. I reached up and gently stroked the wrinkled face along the temple at the edge of the snow-white hair. The woman's eyes opened and gazed into mine.

And the eye contact brought recognition. "Eleora?!" I whispered.

A loving, easy smile greeted me. "It always amazes me Abdul Hadi. You recognize me every time!"

I sat up and looked around. There was twilight outside the many banks of windows, and somehow it felt like morning twilight. One direction showed a few low buildings, their unfinished frameworks clearly exposed, with much excavation and grading equipment beyond. Another prospect was that of a short set of dunes followed by an ocean stretching to the pinkish light of the horizon. A clock on a nearby table read 2:47 AM.

"Am I looking east now?"

Eleora nodded and gave me a loving smile. "Uh huh. Just about."

I glanced around the room. It was very nice, simple and beautiful. It reminded me a bit of my cathedral quarters at Karbala. But this certainly wasn't Karbala! I turned to Eleora. "I'm puzzled. If this were Karbala at Judgment, the time would be right for sunrise, but..."