He set down the Tesla-servo. Maybe she was determined to mentor more than just the naturals; she was intent on guiding and going after the hybrid human-machines and the all A.I., or sentient robots. Maybe this time machine guy was her gateway to them. If so, doubtful she was as of yet conscious of her own unconscious drives. It was a smart move, come to think of it. Because when the skirmish came—and it always came—between the naturals and the hybrids and the one hundred percent AIs, it would be epic. It always was. He sighed. Relax, Ardel. I doubt seriously if you’ll be around that long for these events to play out in her timeline. Besides, every once in a rare while, there was that timeline where all three vectors to self-transcendence intersected without things becoming explosive, and the naturals, the AIs and the hybrids coexisted peaceably, coevolving together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. About one in a million timelines. Maybe she’d beat the odds.
He glanced down at his gut wound.
He ran his hands over some of the other parts on the table, and caused one to fall over. The disturbance summoned the excitable scientists.
But by then, he was gone.
TWENTY-NINE
“What do you have by way of rentals?” Mort asked.
Stonewall, the rental clerk, who clearly believed in “dressing for success,” stepped out from behind the counter, and with a gesture waved them towards the lot. “Of course, for such distinguished folks like yourselves, only the best.”
“Distinguished, huh?” Mort said. “I like the sound of that.” Stonewall’s face brightened.
“Might I suggest the Mercedes sedan.” Stonewall let them out onto the lot through the glass door.
“Excellent!” Mort replied. “See no reason why we shouldn’t ride in style.”
Gretchen and Santini continued to watch the show between the two with some amusement. Mort pretended not to notice.
“Of course, for dignitaries, we have the urban warfare upgrades of the Mercedes S Guard,” Stonewall said. “Bomb-proof under-carriage. Bulletproof windows. Self-sealing gas tank. Jacked up suspension fit for driving off a bridge.”
“You never know when you have to drive off a bridge. What are our cities coming to, anyway?” Mort was eager to play along. He figured he had his motives; Stonewall had his.
Gretchen frowned as they passed by a perfectly acceptable retinue of cars from a Ford Fiesta to a Volkswagon Passat. She seemed particularly taken by the Renault.
Stonewall redirected Mort’s attention. “Drive-flat tires—”
“I always loved that concept,” Mort said.
“Best part.” Stonewall put his hand up against Mort’s back. “Don’t need much by way of insurance, not with those upgrades. You’ll save nearly as much on insurance as you’ll spend on the upgrades. All for a first class ride.”
Stonewall gestured to the car that fit the profile. Mort whistled on cue. “We’ll take it. Where do we sign?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Stonewall said. “We can track the car anywhere. When you’re through, just bring it back, and we’ll settle accounts then.”
“Done.” Mort shook his hand, eased up when he saw Stonewall wince. Stonewall bowed, opened his jacket, picked out the key in question from his inside pocket, and handed it to him.
As they drove off, Santini at the wheel, Mort could see the happy fella waving at him from the side view mirror.
“No insurance, Mort?” Santini said.
“When you got a fish on the hook, best not to tug at the line too hard,” Mort explained.
Santini shook his head. “Awfully trusting sort.”
Gretchen pointed to the cameras. “If we’re not on the level, he probably figures we’ll pay whatever’s necessary to stay out of jail. He comes out ahead either way.”
Mort snorted. “I put better odds on this car surviving than us.”
***
“You know, I’ve seen enough men in black for one lifetime to start contemplating men in flamingo pink, men in chartreuse, men in lilac blue,” Mort groused, dodging the latest bullet.
“Who knew you had such a flair for color?” Santini dispensed The Judge’s judgment at the man in black shooting at him. The .410 shotgun-size shell deployed with the force of Thor’s hammer. “God damn it,” he cursed. “Shoot straight.”
“Sister Gretchen, I think you may have to say the last rites this time, as Santini is too busy arguing with The Judge over hitting what he’s aiming at.”
Gretchen glanced out the car’s side-window at the giant crane being used to assemble a skyscraper. Angling towards them with a sheet of steel, it looked frighteningly like a guillotine bearing down on their heads. “Dear God, preserve us.”
Mort fired his gun. “Not to be overly critical, but I was hoping for something with a little more pizazz.”
Santini ran the red light in time to see the semi-truck barreling through the intersection headed straight for their execution.
The truck never made it.
Santini and Mort and Gretchen surfed the wake of their rising anxieties, stoically regarding the sheet of metal as it slipped from the overhead crane and sliced through the truck like butter and stopped it cold. The two severed heads of the rider and passenger in the truck’s cabin glared at them angrily from the dashboard of the cabin. Having not yet had time to die yet, they mouthed, “bastards!”
The unimpeded view of the scene had been afforded them courtesy of an antique Chevy Chevelle they’d rear-ended. Santini didn’t have time to register the pain of such a vintage antique car going up in smoke forever, considering his own garage-mechanic deep dives into auto restoration. Their view had also been cleared by the air bags which refused to deploy in their “Grade A” Mercedes S-Guard sedan.
“You just keep saying those homey, uninspired prayers, Sister Gretchen, and ignore my pretensions about being any kind of art critic,” Mort said.
Mindful of the bullets still flying from the men in black, Santini detached from the rear bumper of the Chevy, while reciting the last rites over it. “May you be reborn an even greater classic than you were before.”
The scream of the tires peeling out barely covered the report of the latest shots from the men in black.
Mort reloaded, pushed the shells into the chamber of his pistol one by one. “Those are Glock .45s they’re firing. I’m a conossieur of these things.”
Disentangling the sounds of bumpers and fenders grating and wrenching as they separated, from the sounds of burning rubber and gunfire, was apparently nothing for him. Navigating the chaos of war was just an aptitude he was born with, or maybe something with which he had been imbued by growing up on Oakland’s mean streets.
Santini zigzagged through the labyrinthine streets until he could peel rubber into a parking garage without being seen by his pursuers. His game plan was as inspired as it was lethal—if it worked.
He rode the spiral ramp up six floors.
Waiting nervously, Santini watched the street below through the reflection in the windows off the glass tower across the street. One more choice calculation, as he had to allow for the angle of the setting sun. He hadn’t been half bad at geometry and elementary physics in high school, even if he wasn’t bright enough to ever take it any further.
At the chosen moment, he revved the tires, and peeled out; he sailed over the railing and down to the street below.
He landed square on the roof of the chase vehicle.
The two men in black inside the car sunk beyond the reach of any last rites prayers Santini could utter, if he had been so inclined.
“Damn impressive work,” Mort said. “Even if I have a few more compressed vertebrae now to worry about—as if the others weren’t bad enough.”
“Sorry, I didn’t warn anyone to hold on,” Santini said, “but I was afraid if your bodies froze up, it’d make things worse.”
“I’m glad I didn’t go with that wig I was thinking of wearing this morning.” Gretchen fluffed her hair. After some delay due to reflexes slowed by shock
, the two men laughed.
Gretchen put her hand on Santini’s forearm. “Do you have any implants? A pacemaker, possibly, or—”
“A pacemaker,” Santini said. “Why?”
“The chip feeds information to the medulla oblongata,” Gertrude explained, “so it can adjust body chemistry until it corrects the firing mechanism of the heart. That way the pacemaker can go back to sleep, and save on batteries.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Santini tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Why do you pick now, exactly, to worry about my heart? You’d think you’d be far more worried about my head.”
“I’m with Santini,” Mort said. “I’m well versed in the logic of insane people and I’m more worried about his head than ever.”
Gretchen squeezed her purse; it shut with a snap. “Because it’s possible instructions could have been downloaded wirelessly from the Internet to cause you to act as you did.”
They stared at one another in silence.
Santini watched his knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. “You’re thinking of what Robin Wakefield was saying about flashes of consciousness stirring in the Internet, and the first signs we’d see of it.”
“It was a rash action that could have gotten us all killed,” Gretchen said. “It only makes sense if someone, or something, a lot smarter than we are, worked out all the angles first, and decided, given the other options, it was the way to go, even with the risk factored in.”
Santini put the car in gear, preferring action to thought, and crawled off the crushed vehicle. He was glad they’d gone with the urban warfare upgrades: the bombproof under-carriage; the shatterproof windows and bulletproof doors; and other modifications designed for touring dignitaries. The run-flat tires proved their worth as they inched over their victim’s crushed glass and metal shards.
Breaking his silence, Mort said, “Personally, I find mind-numbing shock infinitely preferable to thoughts of what might happen if you’re right.”
THIRTY
That night they lay around Milton’s flat feeling all hollow inside. At least that’s how Gretchen felt. She could infer as much about Santini and Mort from their faces and the rest of their body language that not even the dark shadows could fully conceal.
Throughout the rest of the night they clung to the shadows, quiet, and introspective.
Mort periodically stepped out of his protective bubble long enough to retrieve a beer from the fridge before retiring back to it.
Gretchen figured they were all busy stitching their psyches back together in preparation of the demands of tomorrow.
Something had happened to them that day that had opened a portal in their minds, a portal to the past, the 1940s to be specific, to the lifetime that she had insisted earlier they were all borrowing from so heavily in this lifetime in order to work out prior traumas. Only, before tonight, she could never entirely access those memories. She had never managed to find the right key to the past. Traumatic experiences there were a plenty in their lives, but something about the nature of the traumas experienced that day was the master key for all of them. Probably not so strangely coincidental when she considered that something had drawn them together in this life, something very familiar regarding their respective karmas.
Maybe, among the potpourri of shocking circumstances that was early twenty-first century life, the idea of self-evolving algorithms finding their way into their heads seemed the most incongruent of all. Maybe it was, as a piece of technology, no more or less fantastic than any other. And the master key that had turned the locks in their minds had to do more with how it upped the chips stacked against their lingering humanity.
There was certainly a lot of inhumanity going around in the 1940s, especially in Germany. Maybe the threshold of inhumanity in this age had finally crossed the tipping point, past which, memories of a like kind were accessible even across past lives.
Not wanting the moment to pass without their mining it to the fullest, and afraid of the others’ reactions, that they might bury their heads back in the sand and repress the past life memories coming to the surface, Gretchen found her way over to Santini and Mort, figuring she would start them off by sharing her flashbacks. The right moment may never come again. And those who don’t remember their pasts are doomed to repeat it. She was the high-functioning one; she knew it was on her to guide them through this.
“You’re remembering, aren’t you? I know I am,” she said softly, not wanting to disturb the two scientists working on the time machine at their project-table, as fired up in the dead of night as they had been all day, to hear Aala tell it.
She paradoxically took their refusal to answer as inspiration to babble on. Maybe it was just the soothing tone of her voice they didn’t want to interrupt, and she was wrong to read any more into it. “I remember walking up a snaking cobblestone street with a steep grade in Palermo, Italy, during World War II. A hundred hues of sandy cream blended the storefronts and the dust-covered street sutured to an olive-green sky by a thin horizon line.
“I stopped to stare in the window of a chocolatier. Inside, a mother and her two sons were enjoying the rich chocolate of the maestro, their faces smeared, their grins wide. They lingered in the store, wanting the experience to last forever.
“And then they stepped into the street. A half second sooner or later it wouldn’t have mattered. But at that moment, a German pilot flew over and strafed the street. Mother and both sons were killed instantly.
“And just when I thought the nightmare couldn’t get any worse or any more freakish, the chocolatier ran out of the store, wailed loud enough to cover the roaring propeller sounds of the departing plane.
“The wife and kids were his.
“And none of it should have happened. Even with the Allies fighting their way up from Sicily, there were no targets of strategic value to the Germans in that area. It was just one pilot, taking it on himself to make a difference.
“The next day, I carted myself to the beach, parasol in hand, determined to empty myself into the sea, inclement weather or no, just keep staring out at it until there was nothing left inside me. The beach was dotted with families. There was no lifeguard; there never was along this section of beach. It was privately held, so we were all trespassers.
“My mind, refusing to lie idle, counted children in the water, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and then ten, nine, eight. And none of them were actually climbing out of the water. It took me a while to realize a school of sharks was tearing into them.
“I stood up and screamed but the wind and surf silenced me better than fear of the Nazis.
“Not one made it out.
“And the answer is, ‘No,’ in case you’re interested; sharks just don’t frequent those waters that time of year. Just doesn’t happen.
“The rest of my year went like that, day in and day out. Funny, space the incidents out, sprinkle them more lightly, and you probably have a great novel. But packed in together tight like that, you have a life that leaves you broken and vulnerable.”
Out of the fog of silence surrounding her story, Mort spoke finally. “I was working on an aircraft carrier during World War II. We were the first wave to deploy, so we saw the most action. Yet, not one hit. By all accounts, that ship was the safest place to be in the entire war.
“Only, it wasn’t for me and my friends.
“Willy, he was the practical joker, the one to set a whoopy-cushion under your butt, or shake your hand with a clown-shocker, all the things people thought outrageously funny back then. He was in the middle of cracking wise with me about the blond bombshell I kept pinned to the door of my locker, Rita Hayworth, saying I should help her out of that position before she got cramps, when the pull line used to catch the incoming plane snapped and sliced him in half. He was still joking and laughing about Rita as his upper body flipped in mid-air, causing him to finish the joke upside down. He landed, grabbed hold of himself, and said, “Ain’t this the funniest thing you ever saw?”
Mort took a swill of his beer before continuing his tale. “We were test-firing the ship’s cannons one day, when two sailors came running through, totally oblivious to anything but the one keeping the other from getting away with the picture of his girlfriend. He got away from him, all right, got to keep that picture to stare into the rest of his days. Because the one in the rear caught the recoil of the cannon as it came back through, smashed him to paste.
“I imagine his friend must have felt like shit for the rest of his life. I know I did, since I was the one test firing the cannon. I guess I could have stopped it from happening, too, if I was an ounce less focused on doing such a bang-up job.”
Mort, ordinarily quite the tough guy, wiped back tears, and took another swill of his beer. “It was days before the dead sailor was even identified, and it turned out to be my best friend, Charlie.
“I lost all of my close friends to the war by means no less strange. I really thought I’d walked away unscathed, though, in more ways than one; that I’d put all of it behind me. I guess not even now.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 107
