Convergence_ The Time Weavers

by Dean C. Moore

  Pulsar really didn’t want to go all ka-boom again. Down this street, just past those cop cars, was her favorite restaurant. All she wanted to do was eat. It was all she could think about. Truthfully, she wasn’t thinking about it so much as visualizing it. Thinking hadn’t exactly returned yet. There was just the baser need of filling her stomach. Some voice in back of her head told her she was not yet at full power. She couldn’t just explode again even if she wanted to. Still, what could a chick who could blow up a building at full power do at a quarter power, exactly? The thought wasn’t driven by her higher brain getting all philosophical, but by a pressing need to remove the irritants in her way to the breakfast of her dreams.

  Setting one foot in front of the other, Pulsar sauntered straight up the center of the street. Walking right through the cars blocking her way that melted away like butter and fell to either side of her. So this is what a burnt out sun feels like. Kind of tingly all over, but mildly soothing to let off steam even before she was all cranked up again, at which point, she imagined, the impetus to explode would be stronger than ever.

  She caught sight of her pale blue glowing fiberoptic strands of hair cut in a bowl shape just above her neck as she sauntered past her reflection in the driver’s side window of a police car. The hair seemed every bit as lit as her very large eyes. Both seemed strangely radiant against the dull charcoal coat of dust covering every inch of her body. Her figure was a match for Marilyn Monroe’s. Her lips too.

  Pulsar vaguely remembered gunshots streaming at her from all directions. But none of them actually made contact, melted away in the halo about her body. Or simply disintegrated.

  By the time she got to the restaurant and took her favorite seat at the table she was compelled to come to some conclusions despite her mind’s reluctance to think about anything. First of all, she just couldn’t sit in wooden chairs anymore. They burnt through. The tile on the floor she collapsed on burnt through. When the whole place went up in flames she had little choice but to run to the kitchen and grab up what plates she could. But the food never made it to her lips, consumed in the same corona of death that surrounded her like a shroud meant for the devil. Realizing she would be denied one of the simple pleasures in life that had sustained her this far, she felt her anger and her power cranking up again.

  Screaming patrons running out the door on fire she noticed didn’t annoy quite so much at this energy setting. Though seeing her favorite chef and waiter succumb to the heat and flame sent a spasm of pain up her spine; one way or another now, she’d never taste her favorite foods again.

  The cincher on her really fucked morning was some asshole—he looked like the Colossus of Rhodes—sticking his feet where they didn’t belong. The splintering buildings beneath them sent shrapnel flying at her, taking out the entire block—every eatery for half a mile. It really hadn’t dawned on her yet that it hardly mattered as she could no longer consume food in the traditional manner. But like she said, she wasn’t exactly thinking straight. More like acting on pure impulse. And her impulse right now was to blast this guy back to oblivion.

  And that’s why she was flying around him now like a mosquito looking for just the right place to stick her pincer. She blew up for no apparent reason before she could reach his shoulder. She wasn’t even thinking of blowing up. It felt like one of those tweener ejaculations that happen from behind the pew of a church while on bended knee and praying to the Madonna—like she said, no rhyme or reason despite raging hormones.

  On reconstituting, she noticed her senses coming back on line faster. The recovery time dropping from minutes to maybe thirty seconds or more. She had no idea what tethered her to this life, other than if she was already in hell, where was there to go exactly upon dying except back to sender? She had to get her premature ejaculations under control. And this Colossus dude was becoming the perfect opportunity. Never was there a guy more deserving of blowing up.

  When she finally got off a big bang she intended she was actually starting to feel good about herself. Though that made no sense at all. Someone had reduced her to a human firecracker and all she could do was think, yeah, blowing up is pretty cool. “Surely I have some raison d’etre beyond this?” she thought, recalling the one term from French class once upon a time she could actually remember. But any ability to be self-motivating was gone. In that respect she was secretly thankful for Colossus to focus her rage and her entire being on. If it weren’t for him, she’d probably be right back wandering the streets, waiting for the next thing to set her off. Waiting for the next impulsive, ill-considered acts to tear their ways out from inside her.

  Before today she was a bank executive. Okay, not executive exactly, more like middle management. Point being you couldn’t find a more calculating bitch on the planet. Everything she did she did for her own enrichment and the bank’s. She thought dozens of steps ahead. Now, to be reduced to following instinctual cravings, unable to mount an action plan for what to do with herself even from moment to moment… Someone had to have done this to her with deliberate intent. Someone she’d crushed under the heavy weight of her well-plotted machinations, reduced to poverty, homelessness. She tried not to think about it. It was a game. Every person had to play it to the best of their ability. She didn’t design the game, she was just playing it same as everyone else. So it wasn’t like she was evil or could change her destiny in the slightest, short of to lose the game, which was just stupid. So what vengeful mother fucker did this to her, thinking she deserved it, when she damn well didn’t?

  Wait! That doctor she’d interviewed for a loan once. He’d said something. Something pertinent. That’s right. He was droning on about his fieldwork needing more research. He was studying the way the reptilian, mammalian and higher brains interacted in each of us. Apparently we all had three brains—news to her. In criminals, particularly, the lower brains were fired up in relation to their higher brains, which seldom intervened as it should. Remained more like a passive spectator. Well fuck her if that wasn’t what it felt like to be her right now. Was it the doctor who’d done this to her for turning down his loan? Bastard. Had to be. She’d find him and blow him to hell. She may not be able to hold a thought in her head for five seconds, but her search and destroy functions seemed to be working perfectly. She could thank the cranked up animal instincts for that. This guy would find out what karma was all about when she was done with him. But first she had to be done with this Colossus fellow.

  The fact that he was resisting her every blast was eroding her confidence, pissing her off further, and definitely distracting her from her new mission in life. She had to be done with him so she could get on with killing that doctor. What was the doctor’s name again? Shit! She blew up, her unfocused anger getting the better of her in the middle of trying to focus it. And now her memory was even more for shit than usual again. Okay, Pulsar, just wait for those neurons to connect again so we can get on with remembering whatever it was you were trying to remember.

  ***

  Each time Pulse fired his E.M.P. rifle to little effect against the Colossus of Rhodes, he tweaked it with one of the many tools he kept on his person. The pouches in his army fatigue pants and vest were designed for just this purpose, field readiness. He’d designed and built this weapon, and now he was retooling it, virtually after every shot fired. Making it more powerful. More or less focused depending on the experiment. All that seemed to remain of his higher brain functions any more was the OCD-like need to keep his weapon in full operational order. Oh, and to use it. Nothing else mattered. His wife, his kids, his military career, the memories were all there, but like mirages in the desert that would just fade every time he tried to grab hold of them.

  Someone had done something to him. He had that much figured out. He was the guy that went on assignment, the perfect killer, then came home and put it all behind him, to play the role of the perfect husband and father and family man. He had friends he drank with, went fishing with, hunted with, raced mountain bikes and off
-road vehicles against. He even went mountain climbing with them up K2, whatever impossible challenge one of his buddies wasted off his mind on too much liquor dared the rest of them to do. Sobering up never seemed to change their determination to follow through on the dare. That was just the type of guys they were. All in all, a well-rounded life. That for some reason he couldn’t get back to because he couldn’t give up the compulsion to retool his weapon and find new worthwhile targets to fire it at. Thank Techa for this Colossus dude or he’d have one hell of an itch to scratch right now. But having someone to test his weapon against—who challenged him to make it better—better than Fourth of July fireworks... it centered and calmed him, in a manner of speaking.

  Each time Pulse tried to pull up memories of the other him, the one that could think beyond the scope of rifle repair, do other things, be other things, have a well-balanced life, they seemed harder to come by. The memories either didn’t come or didn’t linger long or felt like they belonged to someone else entirely. He wanted to cry from frustration but that emotion too was denied him. Apparently it got in the way of his OCD-like need to fix his rifle in time to take this guy out once and for all.

  He did manage to look up briefly from his handiwork at the city, which was smoldering. Shit, did everyone wake up like him this morning? Forever changed. Some nano-virus maybe? What else could explain a brain and personality rewrite? His endurance was up. He seemed not to fatigue, at least, not to need sleep. He could tell even without moving that his cardio conditioning was better than ever. He could probably chase this Colossus dude to the edges of the Earth without having to stop for a drink. Just reabsorb the sweat from his skin and the atmosphere. He didn’t just suspect he could do these things. He knew. His mindchip, in the process of upgrading itself, and his nano net, connected to it, were happy to confirm any of his abilities related to hunting, killing, maiming, surviving. They just weren’t particularly interested in upgrading his mind, body, and spirit so far as his family was concerned; they had been deemed immaterial to the act of survival.

  His military training told him what this was. It was the reptilian and mammalian brains flourishing at the expense of the higher brain. He was warned that it was a symptom of combat fatigue. Too long in the trenches, and this is what happened. It would also trigger PTSD later as the higher brain continued to fight to reassert dominance. But that wasn’t him. He didn’t do battle fatigue; he didn’t do PTSD. No one in his class of soldier did. Now the question was, could he find his way back to the old him? Or had this nano-virus beaten him? To hell with that, his kind didn’t know the meaning of quitting. They’d broken him down and rebuilt him before to make him into what he was. They’d taught him the skills to do it to himself. And he’d be damned if he wouldn’t apply that learning. How else was he to bounce back from torture if caught? From psy-ops games so extreme that most people would happily take their lives just to escape them? No, he had not yet begun to fight.

  Pulse ran his hand over his GI buzzcut. Used the sharp-needle-like hairs to help return feeling to his hand. He’d been using it to clamp down with his tools so hard during his rifle adjustments that lactic acid was causing it to stiffen up and go numb. He slid his palm over the diesel musculature of his exposed chest to wipe the grease off, only to realize he was pretty greased up everywhere.

  Resighting his rifle, Pulse fired his weapon at the Colossus. It had a better impact than last time. It worked best when he coordinated his fire with the other two freaks trying to take Colossus out. That in itself gave him more ideas for how to upgrade his new toy.

  It wasn’t long before he got lost again in his rifle repair, all thoughts of everything else gone from his mind.

  ***

  Lazarus roared like a lion being attacked by his own pride at the latest synchronized assault from Pulsar, Pulse, and EMP. He dissolved into black dust and flew off on a mission to recharge. Unlike these Rageaholics, he didn’t feed on anger, fear, resentment, and the rest of the cocktail of negative emotions. He fed on a sense of control, the idea that he could outsmart the competition and so had the world at his fingertips.

  Meaning he felt weaker than ever.

  He chewed through some skyscrapers, sending them toppling onto the supervillains below, swarming the streets like some new kind of cockroach from his perspective. They had a few things in common with the old kind of cockroach, their smaller cousins. They could crawl out from under toppled buildings just as easily and were just as hard to kill. Thus sapping Lazarus’s sense of victory, and making it that much harder to recharge his batteries.

  He needed a kill he could savor. Who better than Synthia and her little entourage? The satisfaction of putting an end to them might just charge him up enough to see his way clear of an Armageddon that the group had had the indecency to create, which Verge couldn’t profit from. I mean, what are the odds that Verge couldn’t profit from any take on Armageddon? No wonder no one had bothered to come up with a plan B for that.

  FIFTY

  Monica and Ethan had joined Jarod in his incessant cabinetmaking, deciding to end their lives with some purposefulness, even if the world they’d created would make short work of their creative acts, swallowing them up inside far greater acts of destruction.

  Synthia rolled her eyes and shook her head eying the lot of them. Noah was a breed apart. Choosing to zone out instead by smelling her hair and rolling it through his fingers. Raising her arms one after the other to smell her armpits. Occasionally he would run his face across her breasts as if testing for different shades of velvet-like softness, compared say to what it felt like to rub his face across her back or her arms. His slavish attention to her would have grown annoying hours ago were it not for the fact that her mind was running along another track altogether.

  “I have a theory,” Synthia said, her tone imparting a ray of hope. It may not have been bright enough or aimed well enough because no one responded with the wished for, “Oh, please tell us!” Continuing undaunted, she said, “Our higher brains are wrapped around a more primitive mammalian brain. That in turn is wrapped around a still more primitive reptilian brain which existed before the others grew up to replace it. I believe our nanococktail excites the two lower brains at the expense of the higher brain. If we can focus our tweaks there…”

  She sighed. It was evident that giving a lecture to a class of kids too traumatized from their daily life to concentrate on their schoolwork was a waste of time.

  But then Monica nodded, the light returning to her eyes. “We can fix this.”

  The others pulled themselves back into the moment as well, though they looked far less enthused than Monica, who, by all accounts, needed to believe in anything, rather than that she’d put an end to all sentient life on earth, reducing it to the equivalent of pond scum that could actually walk around on two legs and procreate.

  “We should prepare for the worst,” Synthia said.

  “And what’s that?” Ethan asked, setting down the drawer he’d finished knocking together using a tongue and groove method and a rubber mallet.

  “The Nano Man will get to us before we can tweak the cocktail,” Monica explained. “If we have to inject ourselves with it just to defend ourselves, then we will be trying to pull the world back from the brink from a position of serious disadvantage. We won’t be part of the solution. We’ll be part of the problem.”

  “Could we stop talking and get to work then?” Noah said. “Please!”

  Synthia smiled at him and squeezed his upper arm supportively. “Monica and I have been working on it the whole time we’ve been talking. Want to know how you can help?”

  “Just tell us what to do,” Ethan said.

  “Gather up some needles and draw blood from me or Monica to inject yourselves with.” There were some gasps and long faces. “Ordinarily we’d hack you, even without upgrades, but thanks to Jarod, we are now officially surrounded by nothing but wood surfaces, ironically, in a world that would have made Jules Verne cringe, considering the
adieu to the Nautilus.”

  “What for?” Ethan asked.

  “Just do it!” Monica and Synthia screamed in tandem.

  The others rushed to get the needles from Jarod, who’d fished them out of one of the drawers. Only he knew where things were now that, ironically, all the mess that was once out in plain sight had been tucked away in innumerable hidden compartments.

  They drew the blood as asked. Noah, of course, would only take blood from Synthia.

  “Now inject yourselves,” Synthia said.

  “Why?” Ethan asked. His voice surprised him with its degree of whininess.

  “Just do it!” Monica and Synthia screamed.

  The three unupgraded humans in the room injected themselves. “It won’t matter that you don’t have a mindchip,” Synthia said. “The nanococktail is quite capable of synthesizing one for you. And don’t worry about matching blood types. The nano will handle that problem as well.”

  “And then what?” Ethan asked.

  “Then you just pray,” Synthia said.

  “Why?” Ethan asked, his frustration climbing by being forced into the position of a five year old with nothing but nagging questions.

  “We now all have what the rest of the world has got,” Synthia explained.

  “And that includes their problems,” Monica said.

  “Why?! Why couldn’t you tweak the cocktail first, at least give us some chance over what you know will destroy our last vestiges of humanity?” Ethan could hear the sobbing in his voice. Despite not tasting the outside world firsthand since arriving at Jarod’s, he’d nonetheless gotten a good sense of it on the holovision feeds, while the broadcasts were still coming in, before they broke down. Whatever those creatures were, their twisted expressions made it hard to believe they were even from the same species. They were transhumans, all right. Only, nothing like anyone had ever seen before. Suddenly transhuman didn’t mean more than human, or post-human, it meant super-powered sub-human.