***
Leon dematerialized again and rematerialized in front of Laney and Natty. His skin nano managing the equivalent of a swimmer’s speedo Jammer trunks for him, the kind they used at the Olympics.
“How the hell is it you can break down into a dust cloud?” Natty said.
“Hey, dude, it’s your tech. All I did was visualize what I wanted.”
“I upgraded the communications channels to allow the cellular machinery to coordinate their work better even under duress,” Laney explained. “Enhancing the quantum light signaling at the cellular level. Even the cellular organelles retain their connection to the quantum field once the cell wall has been shattered. And the stem cells kick into high gear the more they have to rely on the quantum fields for guidance. Actually, every cell reverts to a stem cell if its integrity is disturbed enough.”
Natty’s eyebrows furrowed. “You made use of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields to provide the templates, and to guide the nano with stitching everything back together? And made their jobs all the easier by making every part of every cell in the body take its cue from the templates as much as from the nano?”
“Duh.”
“And I did make the nanites rather bombproof; the little buggers pretty much use the explosive forces to power their own interactions, like a substitute energy source. And the nano hives can restore the personality of the individual, their memories, from the backup they store.”
“So, all things taken together…”
“Yeah, yeah. But how did we accomplish so much in so little time?”
“You were ninety-nine percent there already. I think you knew the direction you were headed, at least on an unconscious level.”
“A few discrete lines of coding added to the software of the nanobots and the self-evolving hardware could take it from there.” He met her eyes again. “God, we’re a lot smarter working together than we are apart.”
Leon smiled. “If you can just get your bodies to come together as well as your minds, my work is done here.”
His audience made sour faces back at him.
“Aren’t you going with your men?” Laney said, changing the subject.
“Can’t afford to leave you two unprotected.”
“And if one of those three manages to hack you?” Natty said.
Leon held his breath as long as he could and stared at them. Finally he gasped, “Point taken.” He lowered his eyes to think, then, a beat or two later, reached into his shirt pockets that had been shed earlier and left on the ground for his camo face paint cans. Tossed them at the couple. “Make yourself invisible the best way you can. Find some place to hide. I’m going after the triple threat.”
They nodded. In a heartbeat, Leon was gone, morphed into nano cloud form again and whisking off like a hive of pissed-off bees.
Natty still couldn’t get his mind off of the phenomenon. “I programmed the nano clouds to evolve within limits, but that’s wild they could make sufficient use of that range to learn to fly while holding on to whatever chunks of the body they could salvage. As to vaporizing at will like that, I wonder if the nano triggers an explosion on its own, like those combustible people you sometimes read about, or if they just each grab a cell, and wall it off inside a buckyfullerene for safekeeping until come time to put the puzzle pieces back together, and fly off, no explosion needed. Maybe they even handle cryo preservation at the cellular level inside the buckyballs.”
He was going to earn himself the nickname The Magician if he kept it up, Natty thought. As much as he hated nicknames. Why else would his team not give him one? It was usually a sign of respect.
“Don’t look now, but scientific mode and survivor mode is no longer one and the same,” Laney said. The sense of urgency in her tone conveying the real message.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Natty and Laney stripped and started painting one another up.
The second they got each other covered in the black and green paint, they checked for any exposed patches of skin, going over one another like monkeys. “Usually this is where the mud wrestling and the real fun begins.”
“You plan to get through this turning point in our lives with sexual fantasies?” she said, sounding flummoxed.
“Why should this moment in my life be different than any other?”
She shook her head at Natty. “Come on. We’re still not fooling anybody standing out in the open like this.”
TWENTY-THREE
Leon noticed Crumley, hot on the triple threat’s trail, crouch down to inspect the nano in his hand. The nanites were blinking in and out from visibility to invisibility, making the shorn off skin patch they were interwoven with do the same.
Solidifying from cloud form, Leon landed behind Crumley. “Relax, Crumley. I got this. The triple threat is all mine. Go help the other guys with running down the rest of them. I’m sure more than a few of the bird men got away in all the pandemonium.”
Crumley stood and laughed at him. “And what if I’m not of a mind to do that?”
Leon filtered the intel through the strained look he was giving Crumley. “You let yourself get hacked? Well un-hack yourself! Because we’re not doing this. Not my quartermaster. Anybody else, maybe. But you I dare not lose.”
“The rest of us heard that, you insensitive bastard,” DeWitt said over the COM line. “Take it back.”
Leon groaned. “Why? Does anyone actually disagree with me?”
Silence.
Then… Sighs and… a collective “No.”
“On further consideration,” DeWitt said, “touch a hair on his head, and we’ll have you for breakfast.”
Crumley wiped the invisibility cloak dust over himself with an “I’m done playing around” expression on his face. And then proceeded to disappear. The nano in his body quickly learning from exposure to the substance how to emulate it. Not that Crumley couldn’t have made himself invisible just by thinking about it. He’d probably done as requested by the old shaman, Jacko, as a way for Jacko to deepen his hold over Crumley. The skin patch no doubt was infused with nanites Jacko better understood how to control, along with other mind altering substances that would put Crumley further under his thumb.
“Shit!” Leon exclaimed.
He kept his hands out and paced in a circle as if he were in a wrestling match and just looking for a way to get the upper hand on his opponent. He heard Crumley’s disembodied laugh. “Yeah, I guess old habits die hard,” Leon said, eying his hands and how ridiculous he looked in his reflection in the puddle in front of him.
“If you make me hurt you, Crumley, I’m holding you personally responsible. Un-hack yourself, I said!” He groaned with frustration when he got no response. “You’re giving the triple threat every chance they need to get away. If you can’t unhack yourself, just let the guilt eat away at you, you son of a bitch. That ought to break that witch doctor’s connection to your head quick enough.”
Feeling something gnawing at him in the pit of his stomach, Leon broke eye contact with the big nothing. What was he staring at anyway? Took in his midsection. There was a gaping hole in it and it was getting wider. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“You really need some new material, Leon,” Crumley’s disembodied voice said. “That can’t be a generic response to every spot of trouble you find yourself in.”
“Think, Leon. You’re sure as hell not going to let him get you with a gag you used on the bad guys.”
Crumley materialized, eating a bag of potato chips and leaning against a tree. He made finger-licking, lip smacking, “yum, yum” sounds in between portions. “Best chips I ever had, though, technically, I think this means I’m eating myself.”
Leon fell to his knees, moaning—but not screaming, mind you; that would be unmanly—from the pain. “Don’t mind me,” Crumley said. “Just wanted a ringside seat for my favorite kind of show. Love a good horror movie. What’ll we call this one? Hole in one? The Gaping Void? The Big Empty? The Mother of All Relationship End
ers? I’m a bit partial to, “A Big Fat Zero. Sort of sums up how I feel about you.”
“God, in the middle of dying I have to stomach your psy-ops games, too?” Leon groaned from the belly ache. “You really know how to kick a man when he’s down.” Another wince.
Leon forced himself to think like a scientist. Running Natty’s words in his head over and over. “Think less like a soldier, and more, you know, like me, more creative.”
Every time he visualized the hole closing up, and it did a little, he lost focus. Maybe he should have mentioned to Natty he had a touch of ADHD. It rarely came up because he usually could kill most anything before his mind had time to wander, even if he had the attention span of a gnat. He had to be that way, at least a little bit, to grapple with all the things that a leader had to keep in his head. When the other wave hit, the extended concentration, it was just as valuable, just not for the same things. Usually for hunting and tracking foes like the triple threat. So maybe it was just as well he was being forced to switch cycles midcourse before going after them.
Say one thing for Crumley, nothing wrong with his concentration. He hadn’t wavered from imagining that hole getting bigger and bigger inside Leon.
“This the way you feel about yourself, Crumley? Like a big gaping hole that’s just devouring everything that’s solid and sacred about you?” He gasped and flinched the words out in between all his panting and moaning. “Is that really why you collect up every crumb you can find of your special substances? Trying to stir together some magic potion that’ll bring you back from the dead? Or rescue you from the big empty?”
The psy-ops game must have been working, because the hole in Leon’s gut was getting gradually smaller. It had never occurred to Leon that the guy who made it his job to prop everyone else up and make them feel more comfortable in the most stressful of situations, wartime, might need some doctoring himself. He’d always figured Crumley was just propping everyone else up until they could replicate some of his Zen master cool in crisis. Maybe he had Crumley figured right and this was just Jacko’s doing. “You can’t hold your attention on your gut, Leon, so find another solution!”
He went back to the thought of playing scientist in his head. Tried to think what the mad scientist Natty would do. He imagined those nanites evolving on their own to seal the hole, without him having to understand how the hell they did it, or having to hold his concentration on his end goal. Self-evolving algorithms. You read about them long before Natty brought them up. Tell me that ADHD doesn’t come in handy for something? There isn’t shit you haven’t read about at some time or another. “What if the nanites’ hive mind isn’t smart enough to figure out how to evolve a solution for this particular problem? Then they’ll just have to hack the internet to get the help they need. Don’t see why they can’t turn your body into a satellite receiver. That’s it, Leon. You’re thinking like Natty now.”
A few seconds later he was standing on his own recognizance. Still drawing back from the pain, but solid. “How’s that junk food treating you, Crumley?”
Crumley found himself on all fours vomiting out the chips he’d been gobbling down. “That’s not the junk food, by the way,” Leon said. “Figured if you were going to let the witch doctor inside your head, you may as well let me in too. That was just me making you think you were sick.
“Now, let’s see how these two fighting fish do swimming around inside your head at the same time.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Quiet!” Natty shout-whispered at Laney. She was rustling about in the leaves too much.
“Sorry for giving away our position,” she said.
“No, not that. Listen. That creepy sound. I know it from somewhere.”
She strained to take in what he was hearing. There was no doubt about it. There was a very disturbing ruckus coming from the right of them. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound natural. But it didn’t sound entirely unnatural either.
“That’s it!” Natty said, snapping his fingers. “That’s the sound that different dimensions of space and time make colliding into one another.”
“And you would know that because…?” When Natty looked guilty, she just said, “Never mind. In any case, how can that be? The fabric of space-time can’t rip. Certainly not on account of anything man made. And who’s to say the phenomenon you describe produces any sound at all? Could just as easily gobble up all surrounding sound.”
Natty sighed. “Because one of the communications methods I designed was a way to cut through space-time, so mankind could explore the far reaches of space, which would otherwise effectively maroon humans on whatever planets they landed on.” She stared at him jumbo-eyed. “The prototype I came up with was a singularity phone. Basically opens a wormhole through which you can send and receive messages sans delay, no matter how much time and space existed between the two parties doing the communicating. Only, the design is buggy. Never actually built a test model, but one of the factors I accounted for was the fact that using it might create the kind of disturbances you’re hearing.”
“I’m frightened to think what other disturbances it could create.”
“Oh, could open an out-of-control black hole, devour the entire planet. For starters.”
“And why would Truman or any of his goons have need of a singularity phone?”
Natty gulped. “Not even quantum encryption can touch a singularity phone for unhackability. Maybe he’s just bringing another of my toys into play. And wants to make sure it’s a surprise.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any toys off-world, would you?”
“I designed this self-assembling spaceship once,” he said excitedly, “that could be built clandestinely in the subterranean ocean of Europa. Just need to inject the initial seed-robots into the ocean with a small probe first. Kind of a doomsday device to protect the Earth in case of alien attack. Something humans might not appreciate and sign off on, but that aliens would definitely appreciate with even a cursory scan of the solar system.”
“You’re mad.”
“In my defense I was seven at the time and was into Futurama cartoons in a big way. By the logic of that universe, I assure you, the extrapolation is rather straight-forward.”
She sighed. “We need to get back to camp so you can build a device to block the transmissions. Now that you know what you’re up against…”
“No need,” he said. “Listen. The noise is gone. They must have broken off communications. Maybe my design was less flawed than I anticipated, and their message got through on the first try.”
“Let’s get going,” she said.
They climbed down from the tree. No sooner did he have both feet on the ground than he sped off in the direction of their camp. Laney just mumbled trudging after him, “Oh, let me help you down, Laney. Don’t worry, I’ll never let go of you for fear of never finding you again. I mean, how would we track one another, painted up like this? Besides, what does it matter if the singularity phone fires up again and this time stays on long enough to gobble up the world? So long as we’re together. I don’t define myself by these war games. It’s my love for you that makes me who I am.” She sighed. “Maybe you should just write the script of your lives together each night and make sure he gets up each morning ahead of you to learn his lines in time.”
Cassandra’s superior camo colors briefly overtook the crude ones she was painted up with as she surfaced. She was having trouble keeping her identity distinct from Laney’s. This was more than her ability to roleplay well, that was just part of her training. And it was more than feeling the effects of her psychic connection with her sister. The mystery of what was ailing her was more than an academic one. She needed better access to warrior mode. Being stuck in her sister’s persona was becoming damn inconvenient. It was also the last thought she had on the subject as Laney’s persona once again resurfaced. And her camo colors degraded to their more primitive form.
***
DeWitt found himself surrounded by a dozen o
r so of the tribal natives. “What is it with me and unfair fights?” He sighed. “I’m beginning to see where I might have developed some of that faux bravado Laney was talking about.” He waited for one of them to charge him, flipped the bird man on his back with an over-the-shoulder throw. Before the guy could contemplate his next move, DeWitt tilted his head back as if he was giving him CPR, and promptly spit in his mouth.
The guy’s nano was no match for DeWitt’s. He convulsed and frothed at the mouth and looked as if he were having a genuine spiritual experience. This was possession of a different kind. And then he went still. The others looked up from their fallen partner and laughed. “Just wait, dickheads. See if your friend comes back from the dead this time.”
Efforts on the part of the triple threat, who evidently maintained some psychic connection to their minions, to reanimate the dead Ubuku native were already underway. DeWitt could tell because the guy was having phantom limb movement like with the best of corpses in the early stages of rigor. But then he was still again, and it was increasingly clear to everybody he wasn’t getting back up.
DeWitt commenced with the chanting of gibberish and dancing around clown-devil like. It wasn’t long before the indigenes decided his magic was better than their leader’s and they went running off. “I predict a distinct reduction in cult followers for at least one witch doctor in these parts,” he said.
He glanced down and, in the wake of the mid-afternoon light, noticed the tracks led off in every direction. “Of course, now I have to hunt you down. And you didn’t even have the courtesy to all run in the same direction.” He groaned. “Why couldn’t I have exploded all over them, firecracker like, then pulled myself back together? Saved myself all kinds of trouble. You really need to think out of the box better, DeWitt.”
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 20
