The hairs on their arms and the backs of their necks all stood on end.
“She must be stuck back at that moment the Nano Man came for her,” Jarod explained.
“No, he’s not coming just for me this time,” Synthia explained. “He’s coming for all of us. He holds us all responsible for what Monica did. In a way, I suppose we all are.”
“I don’t care,” Noah said, grabbing her and hugging the life out of her.
She smiled at him. “It’s good to see you again, Noah. Though for me it’s hardly been any time since I saw you last.”
“How is it you can wake up anew and not need to be briefed on everything you missed out on?” Noah asked.
Synthia tapped the side of her head. “Better access to the quantum realm than most, remember? I can access what has been going on in any timeline.”
“Oh yeah, duh,” Noah said, feigning complete understanding, partly because he was getting lost staring into her eyes.
“Hate to spoil the moment,” Ethan said, “but what are we going to do about the Nano Man?”
“There’s only one way to stop him,” Synthia explained. She had to pry Noah off of her so she could properly address the room. “We have to give ourselves the nanococktail that Monica gave to the rest of the world.”
“But...!” Monica exclaimed.
“Yes, the formula is problematic, I know, but I’m afraid we don’t have any other choice. Otherwise we won’t have the power to stop him. As it is, it will still take all of us working together to have any chance at all.”
It was still weird after all this time for Ethan to process the divine oracle speaking to them in girlish tones and inflections.
“Problematic?” Monica mumbled, gulping. She lowered her eyes in shame. “So I was right to be worried.”
“I should have told you all sooner,” Synthia said. This time she lowered her eyes in shame. “I noticed a strain of passive-aggressiveness in the CTWs I created. They seemed to be fine until cornered. But they did things with their minds that forced other parties to take notice of them and to react violently. It was almost as if they wanted a confrontation.”
“A defiant streak?” Ethan said. “All artists have that. They’re hard wired to fly in the face of authority. CTWs especially.”
Synthia shook her head. “I thought so too, but then Corbin goes and builds a black hole device just to vacuum up the locusts on his farm.”
“Orion goes and builds a miniature golf course that’s actually a highly militarized battleground,” Monica said, reflecting on her run-in with him.
“Albright sets his daughter to play in the middle of the road,” Synthia said. “Retro, on Mars, couldn’t wait to go on another mission to retrieve Mars-borne pathogens, just so he could trek them into their underground compound. Ferro, who roamed the desert alone, like some Bedouin, had more body-nano modifications than any CTW alive. He’d evolved his mind and body into the most sophisticated bioweapon and bio-warrior in one.”
“But,” Ethan protested, “you can’t tell me that CTWs could design anything that wouldn’t create the kind of pushback that they had every right to prepare themselves for.”
“That’s not true,” Jarod said. “Most CTWs are registered with Anonymous, Sousveillance, and various globe-spanning human rights agencies. They run their creations before these committees before releasing them on the world. Only when the various group minds have weighed in on potential risks and countermeasures and have given approval do they go ahead with their ideas. I know because I’m a member of all of those committees.”
Ethan sighed. “So our CTWs were just going to do what they were going to do, the rest of the world be damned.”
“Something in the nanococktail increases individual creativity at the expense of the greater good, instead of subjecting the former to the latter,” Synthia explained.
“If that’s true, then it truly is a post-apocalyptic world I’ve brought us to,” Monica said.
FORTY-NINE
Lazarus sipped his coffee and overlooked the view of the city from the Verge Penthouse suite. “I was wondering what madman looks at a breathtaking view like this and then decides to take his own life,” he said to Locus, whose hara-kiri episode Lazarus had decided to immortalize by leaving him where he was on the floor. Locus was in no position to answer him. Which was probably for the best. Lazarus was in no mood for backtalk.
The city that was currently engaging his attention was being torn apart by a new super-hero and super-villain class of mortals. Though he wasn’t sure there were any heroes out there, just some on the defensive more than others. Self-healing buildings, cars, sidewalks and streets were no match for that kind of carnage. In another few hours there would be nothing to separate his precious Chicago from downtown Beirut. Pillars of black smoke rose in the sunshine as if warring tribes were burning entire buildings as incense sticks raised to their gods. What buildings were still standing looked like blocks of Swiss Cheese, entire chunks taken out of them by little more than a swinging fist.
“That bitch Synthia is behind this, I’m sure of it. They must have found some way to bring her back from the dead. I swear, if it’s the last thing I do…” He threw his cup and saucer in a rage with a sonic blast of a roar that disintegrated the floor-to-ceiling glass windows over the city. The saucer and cup never landed, just dissolved into a nano cloud and returned to his body. He looked around at what he’d done. “Oh, so that’s how the windows got shattered last time.”
Lazarus petted Locus’s head. Strolled through the rest of his museum. He’d enshrined the humaniks Johnson and Axelman on pedestals, in a standing position, minus their heads, which he kept on his desk for paperweights. They looked more like jigsaw pieces glued together than the sycophants he remembered them to be. “I suppose I’m just the latest addition to the museum,” Lazarus said.
He donned Johnson’s and Axelman’s heads like boxing gloves and proceeded to pummel their bodies back into jigsaw pieces. He did the same with his SME, Locus, when he found he still had rage to spare. Finally he de-gloved and threw Johnson’s and Axelman’s heads out the window. “You can’t hold on to anything in this world. Not the past. Not even the past five minutes.” If he could profit from the warfare, he wouldn’t care about the current state of the world. His job was to make money, not moralize about it, like his predecessor. But there was no profiting from warmongers who could build themselves better weapons to throw at each other than Verge could supply them with.
He returned to the view out the window. “Sorry to say, Locus, I’m more the homicide type than the suicide type. I’ll be damned if I go down without a fight, I don’t care how purposeless it is.”
Lazarus switched into the nano cloud that was his true nature and swept out the window like a flock of migrating starlings flying in sync, content to make fractal geometries to denote their sentience, just as he did to denote his.
He landed, taking form as an homage to the Colossus of Rhodes, each leg flanking one of the rivers streaming through downtown Chicago. Picked up the enlarged supervillains he could get his hands on, one in each hand, and squished the life out of them. His victims’ steroid-pumped muscles tore in his hands like the flexing bands of grip-strength equipment. Their exoskeletons, if they had them, shattered like Christmas ornaments. Their goliath fourteen-foot frames just made it all the easier to get a decent hold on them.
Before he could finish his exercise regimen, which included flinging his busted toys like an angered child every which way, he felt bolts of lightning zapping him from the ground. Jolt had evidently evolved the capacity to wield and channel lightning through the palms of his hands. He could also summon it from out of the sky. The bolts were sucking the life out of his hive-mind arrays. It was getting harder to hold his form.
Another attacker, not waiting for the first to finish with him, zapped him with the equivalent of an EMP blast. Pulse was causing his nano to have to reboot constantly. Lazarus fared even worse when Pulse and Jol
t managed to reinforce one another by hitting him with simultaneous strikes. It was probably just dumb luck on their part; he doubted they could coordinate so much as a handshake. But he was shrinking in size. His nano unable to maintain the energy coursing through them to work their magic.
Pulsar—to be distinguished from Pulse—flew about Lazarus like a gadfly. Only her claim to fame was to explode into a blue white light ball, just like a Pulsar, a particular class of sun. Remarkably enough, she could reform herself after emitting the discharge, but by then she’d sapped even more life from Lazarus than Pulse and Jolt were taking out of him. He had to admit it, energy weapons and him did not get along. If he didn’t get out of here fast, about all he’d do was telecast to the world how to bring him down. A world in which any of these bastards could then evolve the tools they needed more or less on the spot to get the job done. His adversaries had managed to turn his size against him by allowing him to broadcast his weaknesses across an entire city. Smooth move, Lazarus.
***
Volt waited for the discharge he knew was coming. His bones continued to grow out of his body, surrounding his limbs and torso and head in a metallic cage that looked more like climbing dark-silver ivy surrounding a building. When his bones had become metallic exactly, he couldn’t say. But he imagined that the metamorphosis had begun with the first discharge. Even the stubble on his handsome square-jawed face and the long wiry hair on his head had become metallic, taking on a blue-grey sheen. He confirmed as much running his hands through each as he admired his reflection in a puddle of oily water on the potholed asphalt. Each lightning bolt coursing through his body drove further cellular modifications to better accompany the energy moving through him, to widen the flow, intensify the burst, all presumably without frying him to ash.
The Colossus of Rhodes offering himself up as the perfect lightning rod seemed like too much of a gift to turn down. The guy was a bastard, so why not take out his anger on him? Why not feed his growth spurts on him? Volt just couldn’t remember being this angry before. This worked up. All the time. He seemed to live to feed off his own adrenaline, his own rage.
He flashed back on the dream that had stirred him into consciousness that morning.
Inside the dream, he was at his place of work, the electric company, with Harvey standing in his face, literally—they couldn’t be closer together if they were Siamese twins—and with Harvey yelling at the top of his lungs at him. “I told you not to flip that switch!”
To which he’d remarked calmly, “I told you to be ready.”
Harvey groaned and stomped off muttering a stream of curse words. In the distance, he ran into one of his work mates, and he could hear Harvey shout-whispering from where he was standing. “No matter what you say to that guy, you can’t get a rise out of him. It’s like he’s dead man walking.”
“Not everyone can be a live wire like you, Harvey. Give the guy some points for staying calm around you. He’s a better man than me on that score.”
“It’s not natural, I tell ya! No one’s that serene. You drop a pebble in the water, there are ripples. Where are his ripples?”
“He works with a bunch of livewire, impulse-control freaks like you, no self-control; it’s why we all numb themselves out with liquor at the end of the day, just so we can unplug. What do you expect? For him to fuel the fire? He’s the manager; it’s his job to set an example.”
“Ah, screw you,” Harvey said, stomping off.
Volt had woken up that morning with every intention of going to work at the electrical plant. As chief engineer, it was his job to keep the juice moving throughout the city, prevent any grid sector from going down. But he never made it out of the bedroom. He woke up and started feeding an incessant hunger that had actually woken him from his sleep. To feed it he initially bit into the cord feeing his alarm clock. The trickle of juice was hardly satiating. So he drove his fist through the wall and pulled out a larger feed line.
The more electricity he drank down the more the thirst grew.
He jumped out of his upstairs window onto the balcony, and from there onto a telephone pole. And he surfed the tension wires, drawing the electricity right up through the lines, through his feet. He could ski the lines as if some magnet was pulling him forward and as if the high-tension cables created no friction against his feet. They were pulling him to the power plant.
Once he got there, he juiced up on the main power lines. Each time he took a hit, he blacked out another section of the city. His growing muscles and height forced him to rip through his clothes. He remained naked for the longest while until his bones started growing up through his body, like the first sprouting of ivy determined to climb up a post. After feeding just a short while longer he realized he’d reached critical mass. He could cause lightning to happen in the atmosphere, feed off it and channel it no matter where he was. The wild animal in him felt it had been let out of a cage.
Anyone who crossed his path after that, accidentally bumped into him while walking, or shouted at him to mind his nakedness, he just dusted with a discharge from his hand. He turned a little old lady to ash just for making the cars honk crossing the street too slowly.
Then he cut loose on the cars. They flew into the air as he essentially turned them into exploding bombs.
He had continued moving mindlessly through the city, no real goal, not really mindful of anything but throwing off excess juice to drain the anxiety that kept welling up in him. Killing was doubly cathartic. It unknotted his tense muscles. But it also removed the disturbances that caused his nerves to flare. He hated feeling this nervy and the electrical discharges at the sources of the irritation were the only thing that brought relief.
And that’s how he’d found himself here, standing before the Colossus of Rhodes. Someone who’d probably awoken this morning just like him, just trying to manage his stress in his own inimical fashion. But though he tried to empathize, Volt just couldn’t. He seemed to sense love and compassion, calmness and serenity as a faraway land he was sailing to that he would likely never reach. Strange, being as that was his baseline before this morning. If he didn’t know better he’d say someone had zapped him with a nanococktail that put one of his more primitive brains in charge, the reptilian or the mammalian brains, and relegated his higher brain to a passive voice in the background that could scarcely be heard over the incessant droning of the more primitive mind’s demands. He’d had more than a few anatomy and physiology classes en route to becoming chief electrician owing to what electricity could do to a body. In fact, the prefrontal cortex where the higher brain was situated was more susceptible to being juiced than the lower brains, which is why it was the last to emerge when the person was recovering from shock in the wake of being electrocuted. But it wasn’t electricity that had zapped him.
His mindchip, which had been shattered by the first burst of electricity coursing through him, was reforming. The nanites in his body rebooting to help with the rebuilding. They were both reconfiguring themselves to be more impervious to the lightning surges coursing through him. He was afraid that when he was fully back on line his higher brain would still not be in charge. Instead the animal that was him would be all the more empowered to prey on the unsuspecting. What would a leopard or a lion with a 1000 IQ be like exactly? With jacked up reflexes and superhuman healing? He shuddered to think of the new him. He found the thoughts so disquieting that it was increasingly a relief to unload on the Colossus of Rhodes. A hell of a thing to call a guy who apparently just couldn’t stop growing. “Volt, you think you have problems?”
***
Pulsar soared about the Colossus of Rhodes. She felt like a fly next to this thing, and for all the mental activity she could get going in her head, she may as well have been. This wasn’t some serene, meditative state she was in. Where the mind shuts down in a good way. This was more like trying to hand crank one of those old Model T’s to get the engine started. She’d been trying to get lost in memories just to remember who she was
, reclaim some sense of self. To zero effect. It didn’t help that she was in a perennial state of shock. Each time she blew herself up and changed back from energy to matter, she felt dazed and disoriented. Small wonder. She was still trying to get her head around that.
She’d woken up this morning, felt a headache coming on, rubbed her head, and bang! When she opened her eyes again the radiance she had thrown off was still barely fading. Oh, and the shady tenement building she inhabited, she and her pet cockroaches, was gone. In their place was a crater. Lo and behold the cockroaches were crawling out of it before she had the sense to.
An ambulance racing to the hospital, its siren blaring, fell into the sinkhole she’d unwittingly created. She dragged it out of the pit behind her, attached to one arm. She got to street level and flung it in the direction of the hospital. She had every confidence it would land in the emergency parking bay. Not that anyone inside would survive, just that the vehicle itself would end up where it was going. She wished she could say she performed the act out of some effort to play the Good Samaritan. But honestly, she just wanted the loud noise away from her. To say nothing of the flashing lights.
She was just making her way up Main Street, none the worse for wear—okay, she was stark naked, sporting nothing more than a charcoal dust overcoat, when police came at her, flying up every cross street. Maybe it was some funeral for a cop they were attending? That always brought the boys in blue out in force. God knows crime in the city sure didn’t. Certainly not in her district. Okay, so she just blew up a building. But that could easily constitute urban renewal given the proper perspective. Surely that can’t be why they were standing by their cars pointing guns at her, talking through loudspeakers, flashing their vehicle lights… She couldn’t process any of it. Everything was a bit of a blur. Her sight was coming back, sharpening up the image gradually, but it was a long way from a hundred percent. Her brain was starting to sort the sounds better, feel less overwhelmed by them, but she was a long way from comprehending what the hell those jerks were spouting at her over their megaphones.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 28
