“Why?” Monica said, losing patience with Ethan.
“Yes, why! You know how I feel about this transhuman shit!” Ethan was practically shrieking. “I’d rather cut off my own head than put that stuff inside me.”
“Because he’s here,” Synthia said. “The Nano Man is here.”
FIFTY-ONE
Lazarus tore through the hole leading into Jarod’s basement, devouring the fancy woodworking as he went like a hive made up of nothing but flying queen termites. When he finally settled into human form, Jarod was standing, taking it all in, with his mouth hanging open. “Really?” Jarod said. “You can’t just kill a person, you have to kill their dreams too?”
“Call me, Lazarus, the dream eater. Looks like we all get a second chance at life, the chance to be a new us. All thanks to you, you little witch,” he said, his face morphing out of his body and extending to Synthia via a suddenly long, python-size neck.
“You don’t scare me anymore,” Synthia said. “You’re just a peculiar kind of gnat problem, like the ones drawn to the sweetness of my breath.”
“A little insecticide and you’ll give ‘falling apart at the seams’ new meaning,” Monica said in an even more mocking tone.
Lazarus extended his head on that long neck in a vexed expression, amplified by his swelling head, before coming apart at the seams and coming after all of them at once.
“Now!” Synthia shouted. They were all taking their signals from her, Jarod, Noah, Monica, Ethan, everybody. She’d synced to their minds. She was faster and better at this than even Monica, who was acting in a reinforcing capacity, error-checking her ideas so Synthia could run her mindchip and her nanites—and theirs—at full capacity.
Lazarus would get nothing but a mouthful of air.
Synthia had teleported the group out beyond the confines of the Faraday cage surrounding the property. She’d used that same Faraday cage to obscure their path of escape behind a wall of static noise. More accurately speaking, she’d sent their digital selves across the internet.
They were currently in an underground facility of some kind, reminiscent of Jarod’s lab only far vaster. There wasn’t just one incubator for printing out transhumans, but thousands, enough for a small army. Enough to regenerate that small army no matter how many times it was destroyed in a matter of minutes, or to keep adding to it until a small army became a big one, a really big one.
They all waited patiently for their bodies to be ready. The five minute “cook” time still felt like an eternity with Lazarus on their tails.
When they popped the lids and took their first breath of fresh air, Monica was the first to speak. “How much time have we got?”
“I threw up a dust cloud that should confuse him for a while,” Synthia said. “But he’s a war machine, and one heck of a strategic thinker, whose cunning just evolves over time. So long as he can outlast us, he can outthink us—eventually.”
Ethan surveyed the giant linked underground caverns with high, airplane-hangar ceilings. “I suppose it doesn’t help that this is a Verge compound. Has to be.”
“I chose it,” Synthia said, “because they have weapons here they fabricate, too, for their insta-armies that we might be able to use against him.”
Monica pulled one such weapon out of its case. “An EMP pulse rifle, nice.” She ran her hands over it to where she had Ethan jealous. “If you’d just stroke my dick like that, we’d get along much better,” he said.
“Quick, find the two other kinds of energy weapons. One is a voltage gun that shoots lightning,” Synthia said, “adapted from Tesla’s technology. Another is a pulsar weapon—a miniature exploding sun in the form of a grenade.”
Noah and Ethan were ripping open boxes to find the weapons in question. “Found the supernova weapons,” Noah said, loading up on them and turning himself into a walking berry patch.
“Found the voltage guns,” Jarod said. “I’m not sure I can handle one of these things. Can barely hold it. Switch with me, kid.”
“Yeah, sure,” Noah said, taking the rifle from him and letting Jarod peel the belts of grenades off him until he was ready to collapse under their weight.
“Think I’ll go find some rock to hide under,” Jarod said. “Not going to be moving much with this payload. But I ought to be able to throw the little buggers well enough, the arthritis in my throwing arm notwithstanding.”
“What keeps us from blowing up right alongside Lazarus?” Ethan asked, “when one of those supernova grenades goes off?”
“Nothing. But we’ll reconstitute better than he will,” Synthia explained. “That’s the glitch in his technology. The nanites that feed directly off of pure energy, such as electricity flowing through high-tension wires, were designed to replicate in response to sufficient food. Expanding his mind and body as needed. They can also morph into most anything he desires to be. But they can’t adjust their rate of energy consumption to handle more or less than they’re used to.”
Ethan nodded. “Hence the value of the energy weapons.”
“You can thank Volt, Pulse, and Pulsar for showing us the way,” Synthia said. “These weapons aren’t as devastating as what they can do but…”
“They’ll have to do,” Monica said.
Ethan had no idea who they were talking about, but he had to remind himself that Synthia’s and Monica’s worlds weren’t confined to their bodies, as was his. They could reach out to anyone on the internet and pull from any nano-infused or chip-enhanced mind attached to it that they could hack. Technically, so could he, now that he’d been force-converted into the ranks of the transhumans, along with Noah and Jarod. But it’d be a while before any of the newbies learned the ins and outs of the new them and what they could and couldn’t do. Hence Synthia pushing their buttons for them.
“How do the weapons and everything else in this silo keep from blowing up?” Ethan asked.
“They’re hardened against the sun-grenades,” Synthia explained. “I’m analyzing their composition now on the warehouse intranet, and figuring out how to apply the tech to us. With any luck, I should be able to get us to reconstitute faster and faster after every sun-grenade goes off. That’s one advantage of nano-enhanced biology. The synthetic and the biological halves of our beings accelerate one another’s growth over what silicon or carbon based entities can achieve on their own.”
“And Lazarus is entirely silicon based,” Ethan said. “Feeling better about Custer’s last stand all the time, ladies and gentlemen.”
“We better all hunker down,” Synthia advised, “so we can get off the first shot. Not sure I want him getting off the first shot.”
The others nodded and found their hiding places behind the storage crates scattered throughout the warehouse. Noah kept a line of sight open to Synthia, Ethan did the same with Monica. When that didn’t feel comforting enough, the two couples found their way back to one another.
***
Monica and Ethan were both crouched down behind one of the rifle crates. Each of the three groups had scattered to provide a nice triangle of crossfire for Lazarus, if he was so kind to land between them. If not, they’d still have three different vantage points on him far enough apart that no two of them could be taken out in one strike. Monica supposed spreading out to five points instead of three would have been even better. Especially thinking that it would take a fair amount of magic to bring Lazarus down, the kind of which a pentagram configuration was better suited for, if there was anything to those fantasy books she’d read as a child. But their emotional connection to one another buffeted them more than their strategic configuration, she imagined. “So, how’s that new mindchip and nanonet treating you?” she said.
“Shit!” Ethan exclaimed. “Easy enough to forget about them. That’s a surprising feature no one bothered to mention.”
“They respond to your will, Ethan. If you’re hungry for more information than you can take in on your own, they’ll engage. Or if you’re more physically or emotionally stress
ed than you like, they’ll engage, like a marathon runner getting his second wind.”
“That’s nice, I suppose. So what you’re saying is I’m still in control of my own mind?”
She smiled. “You have not been taken over by a conquering army. They’re more like having your own personal genie inside your head. Helping you to manifest whatever you desire, do whatever you like, so long as it’s within their ability.”
“I guess we’re about to find out just what’s within their ability,” he said, taking a deep breath.
She snorted. “No doubt.”
***
Noah and Synthia did a sweep of the vicinity to make sure Lazarus hadn’t snuck in on them, not that skulking about was his style, before popping their heads back down behind the box of light-grenades. “Probably not the smartest hiding spot,” Noah thought. Then again, hopefully he’d think twice about firing their direction. If Synthia was right, the light-grenades resisted an explosion far worse from within the shells than from without. With any luck, Lazarus wouldn’t catch on to that.
“I want you to know I really appreciate being able to die inside with you a little each day,” Noah said to Synthia. “This dying all at once thing—that’s an entirely new experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Lazarus killed you, you haunted me for the longest time. You came at me in many different guises, never exactly like the one I remembered. I was afraid after a while that I’d never be able to recall you exactly as you were in real life.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah, but I came to realize that real life is nothing to be afraid of. No matter how ugly it gets—is about to get—there are far worse things.”
She grabbed his face, pulled it to her and kissed him.
“Careful,” he said, “or these energy weapons will be no match for the electricity between us.”
She smiled. “Good to have a backup plan, in any case.”
***
Jarod dropped a couple of the grenade belts by his side, getting tired feeling buried alive under them. The grenades were still all within arm’s reach, so no harm, no foul. He glanced over at the two pairs of lovebirds to either side of him. “You really ought to print out a girlfriend, Jarod. You owe it to yourself. Thanks to you, the entire world is in a new Dark Ages. The least you can do is to help yourself forget that you’re the cause of it with a little nookie for distraction. It’s what any self-respecting bad guy would do.” He sighed. “Who am I kidding about self-respecting bad guys?” he mumbled, watching Lazarus take form in front of him. “Those were the days, huh?”
***
Lazarus quieted the tornado that was him, settling into solid form. He picked up one of the pulse rifles from the open case. “Shit! Should have seen this coming. Those who refuse to learn from their past are doomed to repeat it.” He glanced around the subterranean warehouse. “Now why would they come here? They can afford a mishap with one of these things even less than I can.”
He didn’t exactly get the time alone with his thoughts that he would have liked. The kid leaped out at him with a voltage gun. Ripping his insides out. Monica and Ethan, with the scent tracking abilities of good bloodhounds must have smelled blood. They opened fire with their pulse rifles, reinforcing the beam Noah was hitting him with.
“You will have to control your anger, Lazarus. Not like last time. You will have to think your way through this, despite diminishing energy reserves.” It was hard to hear the voice in his head over his own screaming. “Techa damn it! You survived a black hole. Talk about an energy suck. Pull yourself together, you fucking drama queen!” Calming himself, he thought, “How did you do that, anyway?” The answer was right at the tip of his tongue when the old man launched a fucking pulsar grenade. “Really? Who does that!”
In a flash Lazarus was gone.
And that’s when it came to him.
Zero point energy! Some self-evolving algorithm in back of his head had drilled through to it in an effort to make him more efficient at being him. Techa bless its little soul! He could be forgiven for forgetting about it. He had so many of those damn things running he had long ago relinquished them to the unconscious realm. He had enough to keep his mind on in the present moment.
He brought himself back into the here and now. Manifesting out of the nothing. Nice hat trick, if he said so himself. He didn’t expect to find anyone left, knowing that the same energy that destroyed him would surely have destroyed them. But they’d re-manifested themselves as well. “No way! No frigging way! Not even full-fledged CTWs could pull that off! They’re nothing more than CTW wannabes!” He took another calming breath, practically sucking all the air out of the room. “You really need an anger management class, Lazarus. Now let’s try and figure this out while running a little less hot under the collar, shall we?” He was about to think big thoughts, he could definitely feel one coming on, when they managed to blast him into oblivion yet again.
“This blinking Christmas tree light nonsense really has to stop!”
He pulsed back into existence. Luckily for him the energy to matter conversion this time had sent a little more juice flowing to his brain—his whole brain, including his unconscious. Another self-evolving algorithm managed to snake its way to the surface of his consciousness past all the other wormy creatures lurking in the dark recesses of his mind.
“They’ve trained both the silicon and the carbon based cells in their bodies to feed off of pure energy, like you! Only they don’t have a fixed setting. They can absorb as much or as little energy as you hit them with.” He tested the theory, rerouting their own energy weapons at them through his body, using it as no more than a conduit. It helped him maintain a presence in the material world without having to pulse in and out of existence. Sure enough, they didn’t simply disintegrate this time. Just glowed a little hotter, as if luminescent. “Ain’t this a bitch. The whole point of being the most advanced combat lifeform on the planet, Lazarus, is so you don’t find yourself in situations like this!” He took another calming breath, for what good his anger management system was doing. If he survived this, he was hitting the therapist’s office next.
“Please tell me you evolved some algorithms to allow you to pulse back into existence from out of the void, each time better equipped to fight than before you left. Because figuring things out on the fly really sucks!”
All it took was another voltage gun zapping from the kid, and two more EMP bursts and he was gone from the physical world yet again.
There it was. The lid to Pandora’s box. Apparently it could only be opened from the other side. Perhaps some precaution he’d evolved to keep him from tinkering with forces which by all rights shouldn’t be released on Earth. Not even by Verge standards of desperation. To his surprise it wasn’t a particular set of self-evolving algorithms that was handling his energy to matter conversions each time. How else could he have evolved this defense mechanism, right? Some of them must have hardened themselves and isolated themselves so they could regrow him like a plant from the seeds after the field had long grown fallow. To his surprise and delight, the rebirthing mechanism was far more profound and foolproof. His actual consciousness existed in the Akashic field, in the mind of a God he didn’t even believe in, in a quantum field of energy whose language so far no earthling had figured out how to speak, despite quantum computers popping up left and right in their however primitive early-generation incarnations. He’d evolved the ability to hide out in this energy field as an energy being—without physical form. And to consciously decide which ugliness to release on the world next upon flashing back into existence. In a sense, he’d turned all of the physical world into a testing ground for his weapons experiments. What a lovely idea! If only he’d bothered to tell his conscious mind about it on the other side—the side the physical universe was on.
This time he manifested, he was in full human form. Their energy weapons could no longer work on him. He’d given himself the same tweak they’d
given themselves. Before re-manifesting, he made his nanites into silicon-carbon hybrids. And he made them able to adjust the amount of energy they could absorb or reflect as needs required.
“Well, well, well,” he said to the long faces in the room. “I really must thank you. Up until today the genie had to keep returning to the bottle—the low energy state of the Lazarus body you see before you today—after shooting his wad. But now, I see that the bottle was of an entirely different nature.”
There was a flash of understanding across the witch’s face. That Synthia was perhaps too cunning for his long-winded diatribes to give her anything but the fuel she needed to light a match under his ass. Lesson learned.
He didn’t wait to be blasted to oblivion this time.
He retreated there on his own.
He had to find a kill-switch for this little witch once and for all. Surely there was something in his Pandora’s box. “Yes! I do believe this will do the trick!”
Lazarus pulsed back into existence.
He unleashed his in-your-face-with-a-rubber-hose solution at the abomination of a child. A virus intended to shatter the communications channels between her nano, her mindchip, and her biological cells. Let her wield her magic with her internal communications network down. He was ashamed for not having come up with the fix sooner. Clearly he’d offloaded too much of his brilliance to the deepest layer of his unconscious mind, the subquantum realm.
He smiled as he visualized the virus eating its way through her like a fire across a dry wheat field. But the gesture was premature. She was ready for him. She’d used the time he’d blinked out of this world into the next to procure her own secret weapon. It was a weapon not too different than his own. Only it was designed to short-circuit his connection with the Akashic field. It swept through his self-evolving algorithms like a wildfire across a Kansas wheat field drenched in gasoline.
Convergence_ The Time Weavers Page 30
