She fought the urge to grind her teeth and growl at him. “That’s because the one strand of technology that no one bothered to stir into the mix was the one I’ve selected.”
“I guess that makes sense. Western Science isn’t big on Eastern Science, which they see as profane and a bunch of mystical hokum. Concepts of the energy body, the chakras and nadirs—what acupuncture is based on—even meditation, is largely lost on them. So they would have been at least likely to downplay these influences if not ignore them altogether.” He thought about it some more. Somehow, this time, managed not to sabotage his own thinking. “Okay, better get back to it then.” He resumed his peddling. “As it turns out, this pointless exercise of peddling out to the center of the lake should serve your desire to awaken the conscious meditator in you perfectly.”
“Nah, screw this. Too easy. I have to figure out how to maintain a meditative state from the middle of a busy downtown street, and the pandemonium of a big city.”
A plane was headed towards them. Actually it looked determined to crash into them. The peddle boat took one look at the plane and made a big exaggerated face—presumably as it had been programmed to do for the kids. “Who are these people?!” it squawked. The question must have been rhetorical because it immediately threw a hatch over their head, switched to submarine mode, and took them underwater.
“Relax, Microdot for Brains,” Monica said. “That’s our ride. It’s an actual puddle jumper, not a pretend one like you.”
As the plane, visible through the largely clear waters from their submerged perspective, landed on the water above them on its pontoons and idled its engine, the peddle boat settled down. “Yeah, okay. I suppose I buy that,” the peddle boat said. “Not like I’m rated for Double-O-Seven boat action fantasies in any case. You sure you wouldn’t like a contrastingly calming tour of the bass and carp under the lake, more suitable to children?”
Monica smiled condescendingly. “Take us up unless you’d like to be shipwrecked down here as scuba-diver bait.”
The peddle boat hurried them to the surface, popped its top.
Monica climbed on to the plane’s pontoon first, and helped Ethan out of the boat. They both crawled inside the cabin and she proceeded with her internet download to figure out how to pilot the thing.
“Um, it’s self-piloting, you know,” Ethan said.
“I can’t let excitement or anxiety over learning new things throw me from my meditative state, assuming I can ever find it. Consider this good practice.”
He frowned. “As usual you seem to know what you’re doing and I’m just along for the ride.”
“Hey, Jarod beat me at this game and he wasn’t the least bit upgraded. So, there you go. What more inspiration you need for being more than just the sidekick?”
Ethan swallowed hard. His voice sounding a little horse, he said, “That’s okay. I’m big on the whole sidekick thing.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Misfit plied his craft along the rooftops, edging his way towards the fools that had dared to splash the proverbial puddle in their playground. He ran the thin lip of wall rimming the building he was on, barely the width of one of his feet, like a tightrope walker. Somersaulting or vaulting over impediments that got in his way with a handless cartwheel or two. He needed to get lower.
And he needed to get rid of the damn ponytail. It was whipping him in the face every time he did one of his acrobatic moves. As a Native American, he was woe to cut it, but ethnic pride would have to take a backseat to his thirst for vengeance. In the middle of his next flip, he sliced off the cord of hair with his bowie knife formerly strapped to his shins along the knee-high moccasins. The hair managing to irritate him one last time as it brushed against his shirtless chest on the way down to street level ahead of him. Sooner or later it would end up on some cancer patient’s head, the black market street commerce being what it was.
He slid down the tension wire securing the building to the top of the telephone pole. The old neighborhoods could always be counted on for the extra handholds. He scurried down the pole headfirst, jumping from one spiked handhold to the next. Like skydiving in increments.
Once on street level, he slid up a handrail in his moccasins and grabbed a skateboard out of midair from the guy jumping with it, pushing him out of the way and making sure his feet contacted with the board first.
He was losing sight of their targets running on the other side of the street. So he headed into the middle of the street and started grabbing air off the “ramps” of the rear windshields of cars. Vaulting high enough to land on the bonnets that would get him to the next inclined rear windshield. The only time he had a clear view of the husband and wife duo was when he was hanging in the air high above the roofs of the cars.
***
Gunner took the explosion of galvanized garbage cans colliding with the sidewalk in stride. Literally. He ran the capsized canisters as if he were on a log rolling contest on water, coordinating their spinning beneath his feet with his rifle shooting, steady and sure, for all the fast footwork. Like he said, just like at a carnival show. His nickname in fact had been Carni before he took up his latest habit of shooting, always from a running stance. “Gunner” probably suited their gang’s one heavily-tattooed card-carrying skinhead better.
He knocked misfit off his appropriated skateboard the second he was on their side of the street, and, riding the ramp Prop Man threw for him—typically used for changing oil on cars—took advantage of his hang time to take another shot. The carni game had shifted to “Ducks in a Shooting Gallery.” Their targets’ heads blending, from his perspective, with the heads of several other pedestrians close together. Gunner missed the female he was aiming at, but got the one standing just to the side of her—not her lover, unfortunately. He cursed his miss, but in any real game, he’d get at least three tries to win the prize. So far he’d just used up two.
Prop Man, on the motorbike, had swept up the ramp he’d dropped for Gunner and threw it down in front of him again, this time from further down the street. His motorbike keeping up with the action, but just barely. The rest of their urban acrobatic team was just that good. All that heavy metal Prop Man was wearing, between the body piercings and the jewelry, might have made him look like a natural outgrowth of the motorcycle, but it had to be slowing him some.
When the driver behind Gunner didn’t take the hint, Prop Man tossed some jacks his way, flattening all four of his tires. The driver careened his car into a little girl selling lemonade on the sidewalk. Them’s the breaks.
Gunner’s line of sight taken from him by a truck at a crucial moment, just as he was reaching the crest of his vault off the ramp, he switched to grenade launcher mode and blew a hole in the truck. That reopened his sightline real nice. He took the shot in the very narrow window of opportunity opened to him. Nicking the male. Close enough for the small teddy bear—if this was a carni game.
***
Pez, so named because he had a big head on a stick-figure frame, and he was always dispensing advice to his gang in the form of orders the way a Pez dispenser discharged candy, was closing in on the couple that had dropped the gauntlet in their district, essentially daring them to take their heads off. Being as removing heads was a bit of a forte, Pez and his peeps were only too happy to comply.
The others were giving chase in their own inimical manner. As for Pez, he preferred to clear a path using his martial arts. His flying, split-legged kicks, his whirling roundhouse kicks, and his karate chops, all delivered midair, were equally good at clearing physical objects out of the way as they were clearing people. He seldom went in for the more acrobatic stuff. But if he was going to do a somersault or a midair pique, as a diver would off a diving board, it would be to come down on someone’s neck, or to take their breath away by smashing their ribcage. It sure as hell wouldn’t be for the beauty of it, but for the extra force he needed to propel the blow.
Sure enough, for all the others’ fancy footwork, he caught up with th
e couple ahead of the rest of them. Even if they were close on his heels.
***
“How’s the, you know, playing master of the universe thing going, while running from hoodlums?” Ethan said panting. He gazed back at the street thugs firing automatic weapons at them, laser blasters, looking in far better shape for running than the two of them. Though running seemed to be the least of it. Their urban acrobatics, jumping over every possible hurdle between them and Ethan and Monica would have made Cirque Du Soleil professionals stay in bed rather than risk shaming themselves yet again by comparison.
As one of the bullets nicked Ethan on the neck, he put his free hand to the wound reflexively. “Damn, those things sting like bees.” He was fighting not to let go of her with his other hand, because he was certain she could run a lot faster than him. “Seriously, Monica, you couldn’t pick, say, a brisk motorcycle ride between stalled lanes of traffic for your waking meditation? I would have thought ducking protruding side view mirrors enough of a challenge for your first day.”
He glanced back as he heard garbage cans overturning. “Okay, it’s clear they’re chipped and nano enhanced, and they have more weapons than I remember having Christmas gifts under the tree as a child… remind me again why they feel so emotionally needy they have to run around in gangs, terrorizing people?”
“I kicked their robo-dog.”
“Really? I must have missed that. Does that thing even have feelings?”
“It’s pretty clear they do,” she said referring to their stalkers.
Monica stopped after jumping the kid’s Big Wheel on the sidewalk, which meant Ethan had stopped. “Okay, got it,” she said. She let go of him to support herself on her knees as she bent over panting.
Ignoring the Big Wheel that had morphed into urban combat mode the instant they’d jumped over it, in case of collision, and keeping his eyes fixed on the encroaching gang, he said, “Trust me, we don’t got this.”
The gang had them surrounded. They were taking a moment to catch their breath and wipe the spittle from their mouths and to figure out which way to best hold their guns in order to look the most menacing. “I really don’t think we got this, Monica,” Ethan whispered under his breath.
The gang members’ sole reason for existing melted away as they grew right before Monica’s and Ethan’s eyes. Kind of like watching the Incredible Hulk transform in those comic VR vids. Only they didn’t exactly all turn green and muscled. One had his bones growing through his flesh as his endoskeleton became an exoskeleton. He was the one that had been on the motorbike. Another one looked vaguely serpentine as his bad skin turned into scales—oh, and he did look green—chartreuse, to be precise. Exo was raising his fist to deliver a crippling blow, when Chartreuse—evidently the gang’s leader—grabbed his arm and arrested the blow. “You did this to us?” Chartreuse said.
“Yes,” Monica gasped. “Need to get good and mad to make the transformation.”
Chartreuse nodded. “Nice. You get a pass, lady. In fact, you need bodyguards for life, you know who to call.”
She smiled, gave him a thumbs up, as she managed to find her way to vertical again. Her panting had come to an end courtesy of her nano-infused body. She was looking increasingly as if she hadn’t been working out at all. Ethan was still panting and sweating like a steam pipe in winter.
Monica pulled Ethan by the arm and walked them away before he said or did something stupid enough to rile the gang again. She was obviously thinking better than he was as well because he had no doubt that was precisely what he would have done. He and wayward youth didn’t exactly get along.
“You turned everyone on the planet into… whatever the hell that was back there?” he shout-whispered to her, not wanting to be heard by the gang members.
“Everyone but us, Jarod and Noah. In case I didn’t get the cocktail just right, someone has to be left standing to remedy the situation. So I decided to preserve our little think tank.”
“What about the ones with no mindchips and no nano net?” Ethan asked, picking up the pace alongside her. He didn’t like how the gang members were suspiciously eying all their whispering back and forth, as if Monica and Ethan had something to hide. Call it gang instinct for brewing trouble.
“They were easy enough to get to. They touch their cell phones multiple times a day, or a car steering wheel, or a cup of coffee, or a bedsheet. Doesn’t really matter what they touch. Most everything is nano-enhanced. The nanites embedded in these materials to give them self-healing ability when stressed can be coaxed to migrate into their human handlers to perform stealth missions for me.”
Ethan nodded. “Nice, so the very same nano-upgraded everything that crashed the economy so nothing ever breaks and wears out, which was also used incidentally to help kick-start UBI… As it turned out people with money want more stuff anyway and are even more demanding with what they want from their smart-everything, like bed sheets that turn color on demand and clean themselves, same with the paint on the walls… thus causing the economy to explode all over again… You used that to launch yet another revolution? Downright poetic.”
“I engendered an apocalypse that lasted five seconds before taking us into a post-apocalyptic world, Ethan. Let’s hold off on the self-congratulation. For now, I just want to get to Noah and Jarod to explain what’s going on.”
“Yeah, a port in the storm. Sounds like a good idea.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Monica and Ethan found Noah pushing a swing in Jarod’s backyard. It was an empty swing. It didn’t take them long to realize that he was imagining Synthia in the seat. And that it was a little more than wishful thinking. He looked to be in nearly as bad a shape as Jarod down in the basement. Noah was unshaven, which, granted, for fifteen, didn’t mean much. Just amounted to some stubble. But he stank even worse than the old man. His clothes wore big on him as if he’d lost a waist size or two. Ethan had to remind himself that Noah wasn’t upgraded either. He was one of the few on the planet who could afford not to be. He’d inherited his father’s genius for tech.
Ethan turned the hose on him as Monica stripped off his clothes and soaped him down. They figured it might snap Noah out of his reverie, if nothing else. They didn’t have much luck with that—he kept repeating the swing pushing motions even though they’d pulled him away from the swing to where they could stretch the hose. Monica scrounged some fresh clothes for him from the house, dried him off, and put them on.
They repeated the same process with Jarod. It took both of them to pry him away from his incessant cabinetmaking. He fought and yammered incoherently and cursed—quite coherently. They had to be careful not to be too forceful with their redirection to avoid breaking his bones on the way to the garden hose. Not that he looked all that fragile for a sixty-some year old man.
Jarod had continued with his sanding on his latest drawer the whole time he was being bathed.
Finally, Monica and Ethan took a step back. “Do you see the family resemblance?” Ethan said, watching the two of them leaning on the same two coping mechanisms. Noah with his swing-pushing and Jarod with his drawer-sanding.
“Allow me,” she said. “Jarod, I’ve gotten the other ninety-eight percent of humanity upgraded to CTW status now. They are forever-more safe from the Nano Man, from Verge, and the rest of their ilk. Noah, I think I know how to bring Synthia back.”
Noah and Jarod both came out of their reverie in sync with one another. Took nearly a minute for their blink rates to settle down and for them to focus their eyes on what was in front of them. Evidently their eye muscles had gotten so out of shape, it was difficult for either to get a sharp image on Monica and Ethan. When they finally managed it, they cued the detectives accordingly.
“Monica?” Jarod said.
“Ethan!” Noah said managing a little more boyish excitement amid tears he kept wiping clear.
“Come on,” Monica said, grabbing Noah by the arm, and leading him back to the basement.
“She does that a
rm dragging thing with me all the time!” Ethan shouted. “Just go with it.”
***
Monica keyed the control panel of Synthia’s incubation chamber, which she could thank Noah for restoring for her. It would save time. Time they needed to save.
“How did you figure out the numeric sequences?” Noah asked.
“I pried them out of your father’s head. Mostly. Some remain behind the firewalls of his collapsed mind.”
“How?” Noah asked, sounding more than a little dubious.
“You don’t want to know.” Monica’s fingers stalled as she realized she couldn’t go any further. “Just how much short of the original can you deal with?”
Noah said, “I’ve come up short many times recreating her in my mind, where I too took a crack at the incubator. Trust me, after all this time, I can deal with any version of her just fine.”
“It’s okay,” Jarod said. “I can key in the rest of the formulas for you. The fog has lifted from my mind. Thank you for that, by the way,” he said, nudging her out of the way so he could get to his stool and get to work on the incubator’s control panel.
“Don’t mention it,” Monica said.
When he finished keying the last sequence, Jarod hit initiate, and they all stepped back and took a collective breath.
“It’s working much faster than before,” Noah said.
“She’s not being tasked with building herself and rebuilding the world at the same time like before,” Jarod explained. “That, and it looks like Monica made some improvements to the 3D printing process.”
Five minutes later, Synthia opened her eyes, and popped the hatch on the incubator herself from the inside with a wireless signal from her mindchip presumably to its control panel. She sat up and regarded them intently. “He’s coming.”
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 27
