Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  The spaceship stopped, hovering above the clearing where the robot sentinels stood, either abandoned, or lying among the fallen, broken. It then proceeded to levitate the giant robots into itself with an accompanying sound that was quite ominous. To be distinguished from the skin-crawling sound it made with the regular pulsing of its energy field. It was as if the atmosphere-disturbing, crackling noise had hit another octave. The cumulative effect of the levitation trick? It was as if erasing time was no different than flicking the on switch on the giant vacuum cleaner in the sky.

  “That explains the one we found underground,” Natty said. “They must have tried dropping the Goliath-Bots out of the ship before they figured they’d better lower them via that anti-gravity beam.”

  Natty and Leon continued to watch in disbelief along with Truman and his men, who’d climbed to higher ground and so were visible from the valley. Truman’s people were doing more than just watching. They were firing like crazy on the ship, but it was protected by an energy field. Truman himself seemed as calm as ever; he hadn’t taken his hands out of his trench coat pockets. And who could wear a trench coat in the Amazon jungle heat anyway? Forget the spaceship; that was the real miracle. Natty figured the Ubuku were not under instructions to fire; they had merely panicked.

  “UFOs?” Natty said incredulously.

  Leon calmly sized up the situation. “No. Just more Americans. We really need to stop using these backwater countries for our war games.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Natty said, “the locals are in bed with the Greenpeace people who want everybody to leave the natives alone, and the corporate cutthroats? And the government people, who are they in bed with?”

  Leon looked at him as if he were a little soft in the head. “They're government. They're an equal-opportunity oppressor.”

  Natty, watching the robot-levitation trick in progress, said, “No, I know what this is. This is Truman, still trying to educate me on the facts of life. So I'll play along and help him build a world ever-more reliant on RevoCorp to pull it back from the brink.”

  Glaring at Leon, he said, “And this is you, playing along.”

  Leon lowered his eyes in shame.

  “Maybe you could pace your betrayals a little better,” Natty said. “I wouldn't want you to get winded. First Laney, and now me.”

  “Like I said, if we live long enough, I'd really like a chance to make it up to you.”

  The spaceship overhead sent out small ships that quickly drilled through the forest canopy like ticks on an Alabama hog. Presumably sending ground troops after Leon and his people. It was like being under asteroid bombardment, Natty thought. They crash landed with no less explosive force.

  As soon as OMEGA FORCE got out of range of the accompanying laser fire from the mother ship that was causing the trees to explode like fireworks, and was clearly directed at them, Leon gave Natty a nasty look. “Maybe I’m the one who should be pointing the finger.”

  Natty threw up his hands defensively. “I went through this hippy-dippy period, it was all Area 51 shit, and I was seeing bug-eyed aliens in my sleep. It was a phase, okay? I outgrew it.”

  Leon groaned. “Next time you have a phase, I’d appreciate a heads-up. I’ll time my vacations accordingly.”

  Natty looked up at the sound of the Mother ship heading up and out of sight. “Hell, all it really needed to win this war was to set down on top of us,” Natty said. “So why leave now?”

  “If Truman wants to keep his off-book wars, off book, probably best he not draw the attention of every government on Earth, far less the Brazilian authorities.”

  The ominous hovering sound of the mother ship gone, another ominous sound replaced it. “What the hell is that?” Natty said.

  “Something worth investigating.”

  “I’m not leaving this spot on any news that vague.”

  “To be honest with you, it sounded like eggs hatching,” Leon said, his grimace suggesting he was still using his ears more than his eyes to orient him. “Now, let’s get going.”

  “I’m not leaving here on news that terrifying.”

  Leon sighed. “Must be nice having such a fertile imagination you can’t even remember all that you’ve created.”

  He headed in the direction of the ominous sounds. Natty, deciding it was safer at his side than away, trailed him as best he could.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Truman went through the motions of Catholic mass as a priest, using Laney, frozen in the block of liquid nitrogen, as an altar. Natty had tweaked the formula of the liquid nitrogen so it wouldn’t damage the specimen inside, and more to the point, so the block of ice was entirely transparent. So transparent, she could have been levitating off the floor for all anybody new. Even more remarkably, the substance, once hardened, no longer required refrigeration. An adaptation made perhaps in the event of equipment failure.

  Truman, dressed in the Pope’s regalia, mumbled his sermon in high Latin, observed the ritual of holding up the cup of Christ when the script called for it. Ate the body of Christ. Drank the blood of the savior, in the form of the sacred wine, in yet another golden chalice.

  Finally, his service complete, he returned his holy implements to their storage container just below the feet of the crucified Christ hanging against the wall. He returned to the altar, gazed down at Laney and said, “You probably think I’m making a mockery of Sunday services.” He wiped the dribble of wine at the edge of his lips with his finger towel. “But I’m not. You’re the perfect altar to carry out the mass on because it is through you that we shall be delivered. How you ask? Well, that chip on your forehead is a big part of it. It allows you to hear everything I’m saying. And participate in all that goes on in the outside world. Natty designed it when he was in his Eastern Science Energy Medicine phase. I thought he’d lost it, nearly had him committed. But as it turns out there is such a thing as a ghost in the machine. You can astral travel your consciousness, with the aid of that chip, to affect things in the outside world. And if you ever want to be let out of there, you’re going to affect it in just the way I want.”

  He took a moment to relish the wild-eyed look she was giving him. Such intelligence in those eyes. Such fire. Such passion. Good. She’d need all those reserves and then some. “Don’t look at me as if I’m quite mad. Granted, I get that a lot.” He chuckled.

  One of the bigger lizards dashed in unannounced. Still a juvenile in age, looking not too unlike a T-Rex, only, with more pronounced forearms, standing about twelve feet tall from head to foot, but about thirty foot long from his head to the tip of his tail, it circled Truman and the altar. Sliding his face along the transparent block of ice, getting an eyeful of the ice queen. “He’s very protective of you, you know,” Truman said. “Making sure I’m not getting any wrong ideas about you. Can you feel the psychic connection you have? He can.”

  Truman padded his forehead with his handkerchief from all the perspiration. Worries over being eaten seemed to clean him out better than a dry sauna. The lizard’s handlers, Panno and Mudra, showed up in church next and ushered the lizard out. The creature cried as he fled in response to the pain racking through his system, produced by just a thought, mind you, sent by his handlers via the headgear the handlers wore. Their headgear functioning as thought amplifiers. The headgear on the lizard functioning as a receiver.

  “You know why the dinosaurs came before us?” Truman said to Laney, tucking his handkerchief in his pants pocket. “Because they had to. The reptiles are more susceptible to genetic mutations. The slightest bit of radiation, the minutest changes to the environment. Hell, you look at them the wrong way, and it triggers another lifeform to arise. Makes them perfect for colonizing. To say nothing of their regenerative capacity. Or their savagery. Not bound by maternal instincts as are their mammalian counterparts. No families to protect. Just drop the eggs and go. The eggs hatch ready to go to war, everything they need, millions of years of killing machine, just itching to ge
t out. No training necessary. And best of all, they respond to fear like no other creature.”

  Truman locked eyes with her again. “We’re still part reptile, you know? As we evolved, the mammalian brain grew around our reptilian brain, and later still, our modern day brain grew around the mammalian one. But at our core, we’re still cold-blooded reptiles.

  “Come see my Barnum and Bailey three ring circus, Laney,” Truman said laughing. Laney’s ghostly apparition, a see-through version of what she looked like in the flesh, materialized by his side. Her expression remained tentative, at best.

  Together they walked past the sound barrier edging the place of worship where the fans’ screaming could be heard clearly. His church hadn’t been built traditionally. It was just an altar area, really, built into the uppermost ring of the coliseum, where he could perform his services in full view of the coliseum’s attendees. They could hear and see him enact the service by watching directly or on a JumboTron, just like at any current-day sporting event. “Don’t let their togas fool you,” he said, waving to the crowd of thousands. “Like the coliseum itself, it’s just part of a larger homage to ancient Rome. The attendees, I assure you, are all Ivy League college graduates like myself in just about every field of science you can imagine. They attend the many projects going on inside the spaceship.”

  In point of fact, the rise of Christianity coincided with the decline of gladiatorial games in Ancient Rome. But, as Truman saw himself as the closest thing to the second coming this world was likely to ever see, he saw no reason why they couldn’t get history right this time.

  There was a sudden tremor that shook everything. The Laney Avatar gazed down at her feet. “Yes, the floor shifting subtly under you, the occasional vexing vibration… we’re hovering above the Amazon rainforest right now, cloaked of course. But I digress.

  “In the center ring, the old man himself, Jacko,” Truman said, pointing. “In the arena on the far right, Panno, and on the far left, Mudra.”

  The circus show involved getting the giant, adult-age lizards, full-sized dinosaurs, really, to eat people inside one of the three rings, as opposed to the spectators. Not all at once. Taking a limb here, a limb there, and only with the thumbs down from the crowd, the head. The natives, for their part, had the toughest job. They just had to survive. Fortunately for them, they had been trained by Jacko, Panno, and Mudra to do so like nobody else could. Not even Navy SEALS. The natives had been adopted, or should Truman say, coopted, from neighboring warring tribes, assimilated, indoctrinated, and their trance-fighting taken up a notch; they were the perfect warriors. Every bit as fearless and as savage as the dinosaurs.

  The tribal warriors were even quite adept at using their size disadvantage to their purposes, namely staying alive. Scaling the beasts with ease, as they would climb any tree, to get into position to stab an eye with a knife or a spear, or dig their way under a scale to a fleshy, vulnerable spot.

  “Only the beasts that survive the arenas get let out into the jungle,” Truman explained to Laney, whose avatar continued to stand just to his side. “Where, of course, they get to come up against Leon and his boys, as their final test. Natty’s presence will ensure that Leon’s team has every advantage. Though I don’t expect them to survive against my lizards the way they did in the Nano and Goliath-Bot Wars. But I needed to build up their fighting spirit first.”

  “You say we’re actually inside a spaceship?” Laney’s avatar said, looking heavenward.

  Truman chuckled. “Had to build the thing at the bottom of the ocean of Europa. Only place we could get any damn privacy.”

  “One of Natty’s ideas?”

  “Which he dismissed as sheer lunacy, of course. Like most everything he comes up with. Sometimes I think he’s more philosopher than artist. Loves to debate the ins and outs of his creations, just not actually build anything. You can see why he needs me? Why we complete each other?”

  “Why would you build such a thing?”

  “Oh, don’t be naïve, Laney. In a cosmos this big, it’s just a matter of time before we get on somebody’s radar. What kind of defense do we have against an alien invasion? Bupkus, that’s what, if the only thing we’re used to killing are other humans. We’re the most fragile meat sacks on the planet. And our brains, which we so pride ourselves on, are probably millions of years more primitive than what’s coming for us. No, the Nattys of the world are the future. They’re at least the hope of a sustainable future.”

  “Not even Natty can play with the timeline like this,” she said, trying to take in the vastness of the spaceship. From the top of the three ring coliseum she saw a city without end.

  “As a prodigy in your field, your naiveté doesn’t suit you. Tesla was prepared to send electricity through the atmosphere without wires as early as 1900, a feat we’ve yet to replicate. Did you know air is an insulator? But send enough juice through it and it behaves more like a superconductor. It undergoes a phase change. We didn’t have the math at the time of Tesla to describe phase changes; that would come out of chaos theory much later. But clearly Tesla understood the principle. Many more of his inventions have yet to be rolled out, kept under taps for fear of that much power being unleashed in the hands of such primitive primates as ourselves. Was his mind little more than a radio receiver for alien transmissions and/or the Akashic field, the memory of God, where the sum knowledge of all civilizations throughout the universe is stored, as he himself believed? Who knows, but we’re well past proving if such a thing as this ship is possible. Only less supple minds remain trapped in time like bugs in amber.

  “Did you know that time itself is not something we’re moving through? It’s a fourth dimension, as concrete as any of the three dimensions we’re used to. Once again, only our relatively more feeble minds prevent us from seeing anywhere into time. The Nattys of the world, like Tesla, are born with this ability to access that fourth dimension. Is it a rare genetic mutation? One day we will find out, if I have anything to say about it.”

  “And these lizards? You’re testing their hardiness? Their mutability? To survive and adapt to hostile alien worlds? I mean, why else build such a ship, if not to reach the stars.”

  “Sadly, the Amazon jungle was the best mockup of a savage alien world I could give them. Guess it will just have to do, for now. The ability to genetically diversify in the face of intense environmental threats, the fearlessness of true fighters—that they’re largely born with. Looking forward to seeing what pressures the Amazon River basin has for them and what it’ll coax out of them. We just need to give them a taste of what they’ll be up against. Enter the holy trinity there of Jacko, Panno, and Mudra and their people. And we need to see that the dinosaurs can follow orders. Come, let’s take a closer look.”

  Truman headed down the stairs toward the first row about the center ring. Each ring was a coliseum onto itself, surrounding the gladiatorial dirt stage in the center. Laney’s ghostly avatar remained at his side, a thought projection empowered by that mindchip on her forehead, and yet, something more, something spookier. He felt the hairs on his skin stand on end as she brushed against him.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The middle of the three rings was where the dinosaurs were pitted against one another. The first rows of the coliseum, immediately adjoining the wall ringing the dirt floor, were thus not a place for the faint of heart. The dinosaurs’ heads rose to about the tenth row. If one of the dinosaurs got its teeth around the neck of another one, the head of the unfortunate victim might find itself pressed back against the seats, its neck arching over the wall. Those spectators had to move fast if they saw the head coming their way or risk getting caught up in the animals’ chomping.

  Similarly, if the dinosaur was standing too close to the wall when it turned around, whipping its tail unwittingly through the audience, many coliseum goers could find themselves shish-kebabed on the spiked ends of the tails.

  Laney wished she could say the odds were good against death-by-dinosaur, but she’
d seen quite a few spectators taken out by the giant prehistoric creatures chewing on one another’s necks up against the arena walls and flailing their tales at one another already.

  The center ring was also where the dinosaurs were made humble. The stronger one and the better fighter could be brought down by a weaker opponent who was more willing to follow the advice of its handler. And when the stronger one was down on the ground, close to death, the old witch doctor, Jacko, would get the smaller opponent to back off. He’d come over and stroke the bigger one affectionately. The dinosaur, with its own head gear, would feel the surge of adrenaline and feel-good hormones flooding his system.

  Once the dinosaur was back on his feet, the old man would continue to feed strategy and tactics to the big one by way of his visualizations, until the tide turned, and the smaller opponent was finally killed, only to be dragged away and replaced by another. Sometimes it would be the bigger one that was killed and dragged away. It really all depended on which of the dinosaurs listened to Jacko better. If both listened well, both would get to leave the coliseum alive to return to their cages so another duo could be broken.

  Once the animals were subdued they moved to the outer rings where the son and daughter took over. There the dinosaurs would learn to fight against the Ubuku tribesmen, Jacko’s people. In tribal terms, the Ubuku was the Roman Empire, assimilating neighboring warring tribes it had defeated into itself. Making their “superior” culture and fighting methods available to the indoctrinated. Panno handled the ring with the newly assimilated warriors who weren’t quite as adept yet in fighting methods as were the born-to-the-Ubuku tribespeople. The latter were in the ring with Mudra.

  Laney led the way over to Panno’s arena to the right of the center ring, curious to see for herself what was going on. The mindchip showed her everything at once. There was no need to foot it over to the outer rings one at a time. But old habits die hard. And she wanted the visceral experience only the avatar could give her.