At the back of these more futuristic books was an artifact of some kind, wedged into the back of the hardbound cover. Some of the relics looked like computer chips. Others were just too out there to place, but she was beginning to think they were chips, too, or data storage devices— just from further out in the future—from which the books had been printed. Maybe he didn’t have the technology here in the lab to utilize the chips. But how then did he access their contents to create the books?
She looked up from the text at the tank below. It dawned on her that it might be a kind of Samadhi tank, designed for sensory deprivation, so as to facilitate meditation and altered states of consciousness. Holy shit! Had he found his own way of time traveling?
Buddhist monks were known to access alternate realities in their meditations, often meditating in groups to combine the power of their concentrated minds to drill through to other dimensions, parallel universes. Did the tank have some mix of chemicals that allowed him to do the same thing in isolation?
She rubbed her forehead, looking for relief from the stabbing headache. Being inside Soren’s head was going to take some adjustment. She wasn’t sure if the insights she was getting came from absorbing his touch, the fact that he’d handled these books at one time or another. She might still be experiencing residuals from their touching directly earlier. The truth was she had no direct knowledge of Buddhist monks and what they could and couldn’t do. So that had to be something right out of his head. The thing about the tank…. Was she just filling in the blanks, as he might, or was she remembering more stuff from inside his head?
***
The more Soren stared at the crystal, the more it drew him in. It seemed to invite the altered states of consciousness associated with divining its secrets; to crave communion as much as he did. The more he meditated on it—focused on it to the exclusion of all else—the more he was certain the fragment contained fathomless consciousness. It was alive, and in more ways than he could determine.
But his instruments were too primitive. His microscopes were hardly meant for zooming in on a shard this large. They wouldn’t abide by further amplification. Lenses meant to rotate into position, just didn’t have the room to do so. And what more could they reveal, anyway? The key to the door seemed to be his mind, not the instruments. One form of consciousness seeking to interact with another. For that, he needed the tank.
***
“Fuck this,” Naomi heard Soren say. She looked up from the book to find him stripping off his clothes, and heading down the ladder. She was no longer wondering what was behind his strange behavior. She was too distracted by the sharply defined muscles of his lean, tanned torso. He moved like a walking human-anatomy chart. It should have been a turn off. It should have been.
He proceeded to jump into the tank and drown himself.
Her heart tried to leap through her chest. When it didn’t just burst right through on the first try, it kept hammering, determined to get through. “Easy, Naomi. There’s got to be a method to the madness, right? God, I can’t believe you’re so rusty at this Spongy shit, you can’t just access his mind to pull out what you need. Where are your telepathic abilities when you need them? You can’t even pull a good Soren right now, and just morph into him.” One thing for certain. That was no Samadhi tank. They were made of salt water with a very high percentage of saline—so he could float—face up, she’d care to add, so he could breathe. He was floating face up, alright, just halfway down in the pool. But he did appear to be breathing. Breathing water? Impossible.
Then she looked at the open book in her hand with the pictures. “Then again….” She snapped the book closed and tossed it onto the table with the microscopes. She kept both hands on the railing and both eyes on him, just in case she was going to have to get in there and pull him out. Six minutes. That’s how long he had before brain death set in. Just in case she was hallucinating the breathing thing. She’d give him three minutes, just to be on the safe side. It wasn’t like her CPR skills were any more up to snuff than her Spongy skills. Curse her for lying low so long to avoid getting on anyone’s radar that she could no longer readily access her powers. She might well need them to save him—and to deal with whatever compelled Soren to take that suicidal dive into the pool; otherwise known as The Masked Man.
EIGHT
Soren let the waters take him. Deeper than any place it had taken him before. He couldn’t remember all the sites he’d visited in his dreams or his astral travels when inside the tank—but he could remember the residual feelings. And this felt—different. Somehow creepier and yet more inviting.
He journeyed into the crystal chunk on the balcony lab table with his mind. They became one. He was right; it was a sentience. An age-old one. It belonged to this universe. But it seldom took physical form. Something Victor had done had lured it here. But what?
A challenge.
It had accepted the challenge. But what challenge?
The Mirror Challenge.
What the hell was the mirror challenge?
“You must be able to face the darkest demons in yourself without being consumed by them when the mirror of truth is held up to you, the things you buried away long ago, to play at my level. Either they will consume you or you’ll survive them—only to face me.”
“And what challenges beyond the mirror game do you pose?”
The voice in his head laughed. “I offer fears that will consume you, if yours won’t do the trick.”
Soren awoke, gasping for air—levitating over the tank. Naomi had him in that tractor beam of hers she emitted from the palm chakra in her right hand.
He was so blinded by fury he fired at her from his own right palm chakra, screaming in rage all the while. The lightning bolt hit an energy shield this time, rather than contacting with her. The shield just grounded the energy, absorbing it, draining his wrath along with it.
He settled down. “Let me down.” The anger was still in the voice, but muted now.
She brought him to a standing position just a few feet in front of her, and set him down on the cement floor. He was panting like a dragon, the outbreaths taking what he hoped was the last of his out-of-control temper with it. He still wasn’t ready to forgive her. “You broke my connection.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize! I was ready to kill you for it. Seems like I’m the one who should apologize.”
“Don’t bother. I was looking for a way to trigger dormant abilities I haven’t used in a while. Looks like you found one trigger.”
When he refused to meet her eyes, she asked, “What did you find?”
“It’s a wizard. A very powerful one. He said I must face my demons first, win that contest, if I ever expect to face him and win.”
“What demons?”
Soren snorted. “The ones I can’t face or refuse to acknowledge, of course. Honestly, I had no idea where to start until you helped me.”
“I helped you?”
“You severed the connection. And by doing so, you showed me just how much stock I put in self-transcendence. I’ll do anything to get over myself, including kill someone I….”
She was nearly as afraid of him finishing that sentence as he was.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’ll find plenty of people willing to hold you back whenever you try to grow out of yourself. Trust me, I know. You have to be willing to cut the strings.”
He was curiously annoyed at her for not being madder at him, but decided that was just more residual anger to drain away. “No, this is something else. To truly transcend yourself, you have to be able to let go of all that you’re attached to, all that defines you, otherwise, how can you be more than you already are?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
He sighed. It wasn’t out of frustration of not being able to speak his mind. It was out of a sense of just how much he’d let himself down. “I guess you just made me face one of my demons.”
“Is it the same as
this one?” She held out a book to him, opened to the back cover.
He grabbed the tome from her, saw the chip embedded in the binding—not like any other computer chip he’d ever seen. He thumbed it, tried to get a feel for it. Its surface was frictionless; the metal possessed properties unknown to him. Not even the nanites, migrating to his fingertips, could make much of it.
He flipped through the book, glancing at the lithographs. Futuristic, almost surreal images. The pictures seemed to be depicting how to use nanites to create a fully morphable body—able to keep up with the best shape shifter magic. Some of the larger, more fantastic morphs, would be challenging even for someone with shape shifting magic. They would require the nanites to proliferate themselves and the cells of the body so rapidly in real time—well, it didn’t seem possible. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s one of your books,” she said, looking over his shoulder, looking nearly as mesmerized by the images as he was by the crystal. Was she someone he could truly share his world with? Or was this just the part of her that was still merged with him as part of her Sponger abilities, which would make their coupling analogous to making love to himself; not exactly what he was looking for.
He popped the book shut just loud enough to snap himself out of it, out of multiple reveries at once. “Are there more like this?”
She nodded. “I pulled this with a few others at random from your shelves. They all had some kind of artifact embedded in the back of them.”
He handed the book back to her. “Yes, it’s the same demon. Apparently, I’ve been using the tank to more than just astral travel, which I suppose is harmless enough. The most I can do with that is blow my own mind; no one else gets hurt. But it looks like I’ve been snatching things out of the future, bringing them back here.”
“Not just the future. I found things from scientists who share your same passion for making yourself over—from far in the past. They were ahead of their times, I guess, so far ahead, history didn’t know what to do with them. You must have felt they still had things to teach you, even after hundreds of years.”
He groaned. “I wonder who is the greater threat to the world, Victor and his manifestations, or me?”
“I vote him.”
“Yet, I was willing again and again to disrupt the space-time continuum, just to advance my thirst for a greater connection to the cosmic consciousness. Do you understand what that means? I risked all of creation for the sake of the communion.”
She touched his arm. “You did that out of a love for humanity, not out of a thirst for power. There’s a difference.”
“Is there? The path to hell is paved with good intentions—or so they say. We both should have learned a thing or two from Icarus, who also dared to fly too close to the sun.” He stared into her eyes and seemed to calm down some. “I think I know what’s going on here.”
“What?”
He met her eyes again, held them this time for the first time since he’d been out of the tank. It was a mock surrender of all that he was, pretending to not be weighed down by his history. But fake it till ya make it, huh? Not sure who said that, but he was definitely on to something. “Care to join me for a spot of tea?”
“When did you become British?”
“Well, we are in the Victorian Era section of town. The least we can do is slip into character better.”
She smiled. “Maybe a pleasant diversion from deep and meaningful will do us both some good.”
***
Naomi took a sip of the tea and couldn’t stop coughing. “It’s an acquired taste,” Soren said, smiling. She stood up by pressing against the table, and then paced the kitchen, so she could gain some purchase on various other surfaces in case the different angles and additional leverage would help her apply greater force to the coughs, and so finally end them once and for all.
“I swear I know this vaudeville routine from somewhere. You a fan of vaudeville too? There’s some going on right now just down the street.”
She seemed to catch herself, “Very funny. Just what’s in that thing?”
“Supposed to get the chi moving. An old Chinese formula. Fo Ti it’s called here in America, Ho Shou Wu root, in China.”
“I think it’s fairly safe to say, whatever forms of magic I absorbed over the years, chi channeling isn’t included in the tool set.” She pried open his ice box. The kind kept cold not by electricity, but by blocks of ice. “You really take this Victorian era stuff seriously, I see.”
“Up to a point.”
She pulled out a Perrier, and twisted the cap off. “I can see that.” She took a sip of the carbonated water and coughed that up, too, though not as badly.
“Maybe it’s a spiritual malaise,” he suggested. “As in, something else you really can’t quite swallow right now.”
“I’ll take it under advisement, when I don’t want to snap your neck.”
He smiled as she took her seat.
“So spill, this revelation about yourself.” She coughed some more.
“The transhumanists like myself,” Soren explained, “are building an Age of Abundance right now, to birth us out of this Age of Scarcity we currently live in, where the top one percent continues to vacuum up the riches of the world, leaving the other ninety-nine percent increasingly impoverished. In an Age of Scarcity, I’m afraid it really is a winner-take-all game. There’s no other way for it to end. I suppose, in some ways, that’s a good sign. Mass impoverishment signals the end of an era, where we just bottom out entirely with one way of life, one adaptation, one view of humanity. And we have no choice but to leave humanity behind for transhumanity.”
“Which, according to you, is defined as part and parcel of an Age of Abundance.”
“Yes, you need the mindset and the psychology to truly enter it, not just the technology. Though I suppose, the technology fosters the mentality. I mean, why not, if you can make homes for people to live in that cost next to nothing, mobile computers that likewise are virtually free and can fit in people’s pockets or inside their heads and connect wirelessly to the internet and to the closest version of the All or the cosmic consciousness that we have currently—namely Google Search. Thus opening the fruits of all sentient minds to one another, ripe for the plucking.”
She laughed. “Never thought of it that way before, but I suppose you’re right.”
“Then it’s much easier to shed the psychology of neediness that comes with The Age of Scarcity. Think of that psychology as a kind of perpetual hunger; it may as well be one of the seven deadly sins, hell, more accurately, like all of them combined—feeding, driving this age we’re in now, tethering us to it. Those psychological chains are a lot harder to break in some ways. And until we do, even the champions of the Age of Abundance, the zealots, like myself, who embrace transhumanity in all its many splendored forms—will be warped and bent out of shape by it.”
She clambered out of her chair again, as if forced out of it by the pain of the revelation, sipped the Perrier—as if it were a beer. Maybe that was one more ability of hers, to turn water into wine, as it were. “That’s the demon you were referring to earlier?” she said gasping, as if swallowing and talking back to back had just become a lot more challenging.
“Yes, riding me like a good prize racehorse, all but invisible to me, until you showed up. It’s a good reminder to those of us who would truly wish an age of equanimity and prosperity for all people, beyond our wildest imaginings, to check our egos at the door.”
“Egos?” She wasn’t just playing dumb; he could tell her mind was locking up under the pressure of her own psychic resistance to what he was saying. She kept averting her eyes, and interrupting her pacing to lean with her back against the wall and a leg up or… whatever pose she found herself in, the alley cat litheness of earlier was gone; she could no longer get comfortable in her own skin.
“Yes, ego is the part of us that would fool us into believing we’re truly transcendent, more enlightened than the greater lot
of humanity, when we’re truly not. Oh, we might be smarter, more educated, more informed, even more in touch with the cosmic consciousness, but so long as ego rules us, so, too, does the Age of Scarcity mentality—and we’ll never truly escape it.”
She continued talking to him as if she were just another voice in his head, “No surprise then when it brings the future down on our heads like a house of cards. I mean, that’s what it’s been doing all along.”
“No surprise at all,” he said, meeting her eyes again, sensing genuine understanding there. It seemed sometimes, by contrast, no matter how articulate he was on the matter, people just didn’t get it. And she took everything in despite her clear resistance to much of what you’re saying and the discomfort it’s causing her. Most people, by contrast, just couldn’t process the one defining truth about modernia: that the human condition was giving way to the transhuman condition. There was no avoiding it. Just as there was no avoiding doing the work on yourself. Maybe in that respect, The Masked Man, this cosmic wizard, was a good thing; maybe he was as much deliverer as destroyer of worlds. If, indeed, the only way to survive him was to shed your fears and the warped psychology powered on them in a hurry.
She coughed again. “I think I know why you can’t shake that cough,” Soren said.
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?” she asked, sounding dubious.
“I think you know where this conversation is going. I bare my soul, you bare yours….”
She coughed harder. Took another sip of her Perrier. “I suspect you’re right.”
“So what demons are you afraid to face?”
“Let me stop you right there,” she said, taking the bottle away from her mouth again, which had been going down more like a desperately needed bottle of Michelob for some time now.
“I can’t face The Masked Man alone, Naomi. If the rest of you won’t follow me on this soul-searching quest, then we’re all done for. I’m sorry the game changed on us before any of us were ready to play by the new rules. Trust me, I wasn’t prepared for this either. I’m nowhere close to forgiving myself for becoming every bit the menace to the human race as Victor. But what choice do I have? If I can’t forgive myself, I can’t move on. I can’t heal, and if I can’t heal where it truly matters, I’ll never be strong enough to face The Masked Man. The chair and the tank—both of which I built to heal different parts of me—they have nothing to offer me on this score.”
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 7
