Time Bandits (Age of Abundance Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  Torin, who’d long since been given his own desk adjoining hers in an L-configuration, turned to face her and answered with, “Well, like Einstein, I believe in a God, and like Einstein, I don’t believe God plays with dice. Now if there is a higher power, the first thing I must assume is that he or she is a good deal smarter than I, and has a much bigger heart. So I say to myself, what would a much smarter version of you do if he or she wanted to allow us poor, misdirected souls to obtain nirvana as quickly as possible, to put an end to our unnecessary suffering? Well, he’d build pretty much what we’re talking about, a multiverse full of infinite parallel universes and he’d set that multiverse in amongst infinitely many multiverses. Why, you say? Well, so that every wrong turn we could possibly make that would only take us further away from the Godhead instead of admitting our true fate which is but to reunite and become one with it, has already been taken. And because it’s been taken it can inform the rest of our past and future lives, all lived out in parallel, mind you, within this scheme of things. Inform us with insights that bubble up through our unconscious or superconscious that are really just communiqués from these other lifetimes saying, ‘Nope, don’t want to go down that road, buddy, trust me, been there, done that.’

  “And what would each person we meet be but a mirror held up to us, showing us some facet of our personality we just don’t want to see, or perhaps that we need to see and to validate, putting on display for us our many strengths and weaknesses? We can’t help but be drawn to such people again because of the pressure of all these parallel universes weighing down on our head, informing us, such that every moment of every day is lived with maximum economy with a minimum of wrong turns.”

  Kendra sipped from her coffee, which she had to admit, captured her need for comfort food for the body even better than Torin was providing comfort food for her mind right now. “But it’s entirely possibly to go through life without being conscious of any of that. In fact, it’s been my experience that most people do just that.”

  “Yes, well, that’s because enlightenment is still a choice. It can’t be forced on you. But the deck can be stacked to facilitate it if you but take the smallest step. You could say that God does ninety-nine percent of the hard work. That one percent he leaves up to us. And in the end that one percent comes down to a choice to live in fear or live our lives instead with courage and heart. The instant we reject fear, the apparatus turns on and starts churning all around us.”

  Kendra took another sip from her cup, letting the brew inspire her thinking from a place of increased ease. “According to your cosmology, there really is no us. There is just God playing with Godself.”

  “Yes, precisely so. We maintain this delusion of self until we’re ready to merge into the Godhead. Of course, if the Godhead is anything and everything, then we are anything and everything. So it’s just as correct to say you are you and you are also everyone else.”

  “You two ready to get back to regular police work?” Davenport said. He’d been bouncing his eyes back and forth between the two of them as if he were following the ball in a tennis match, perched behind his own desk. Maybe after bowling, tennis was his second favorite sport.

  “Hell, yes,” Kendra said.

  “That’s a ditto from the cheap seats,” Torin said.

  “Got a great case for you then.” Davenport walked the file on his desk over to Kendra and plopped it down in front of her. “Guy’s been selling sodas from vending machines. Just one brand of soda and just from certain vending machines. But anyone who drinks the stuff gains the capacity to instantly hypnotize anyone he gets near. The effects eventually wear off. But by then their life is in ruins and so are the lives of the people they hypnotized.”

  “I don’t know that my life would be ruined if I could suddenly hypnotize people.”

  Davenport winked at Kendra. “That’s probably because you wouldn’t have them do bad things, like jump out of windows or lie down in front of a moving car.”

  Torin clapped his hands. “It’s made for us, or should I say, it’s made for Kendra. She’s still working out her control freak coping mechanism so she can come at life less from the third chakra or power center and more from the heart.”

  Davenport just shook his head. “Whatever, you two. Just get out of here before you start driving me crazy. Two wackos per police department is already two too many.”

  Torin jumped out of his chair with his usual excitement, donning his hat and his trench coat. “Well, are you coming or not?” he said, ogling Kendra.

  She stifled a smile. He was already a little too predictably overexcited, and she was already a little too predictably over-annoyed by the latest curveball some techy was throwing at her, turning her nice neat world upside down. Apparently they had left their “enlightened” selves back in that parallel universe. That or they hadn’t made it past the blinking-Christmas-tree light phase of enlightenment as the stepping stone to the light staying permanently on. All the same, she was secretly glad to be heading out that door and dealing with something just a tad more manageable than Clyde Barker, cosmos creator extraordinaire.

  SOLARIS TIMELINE

  SEVENTEEN

  “Arrrhhh!” Clyde Barker shouted as he swept his laboratory table with the back of his hand, sending delicate instruments and glassware clattering across the counter and shattering to the floor. “So, I’ve gone from being the greatest threat humanity has ever faced—not its greatest redeemer, mind you—to being totally insignificant! We’ll see how you feel about me in a couple of months, Detective Kendra Harding and Chief Coroner Torin Zealton.”

  Having Notchka monitor what the twosome were up to since arriving in his latest timeline was not proving a panacea for his moodiness.

  “Can we get out of this creepy house now?” Notchka said. “Cause I managed to chase away the willies this time, but who knows how long they’ll be gone?” she said, eying the creaky floorboards overhead. Every time Clyde felt shaken, so did she. Without her self-confidence in check, she couldn’t hold on to the castle and its surrounding moat for protection. Or her pet dragons. What’s more, the castle interiors were once again reverting to the insides of the old Victorian home. That meant the ghosts would come next, and soon even the castle’s exterior, for now, more anchored to the planet than to her mind, and to her conscious dreams and desires than to her unconscious fears, would shift as well. Damn this impressionable world. All it took was one fear creeping in and—poof!—everything she created was gone, like sand castles at the beach after a big wave.

  “Yes, take us into the future, in this timeline, to Kendra’s office at the police precinct.”

  “They don’t work there anymore, remember? You killed them in this timeline. And the visiting Kendra and Torin from the Nexus timeline have already returned home.”

  “That’s why you’re going to find the point in the future where the dead Kendra and Torin learn to cross back over. Surely they must. They’re too clever not too, those two. And this is too psychically impressionable of a world to present much of a barrier to souls wanting to go back and forth between realms, providing they have an ounce of savvy.”

  “How will I do that?”

  “Just visualize the moment when they first manage to pop through. Oh, and I just want to be a couple flies on the wall for now. Let’s use that trick the Kendra and Torin from the Nexus timeline used when they visited us here, present, but not fully manifest.”

  “You wouldn’t know about that either if I hadn’t figured it out and told you. I feel like that’s twice now I’ve betrayed them.”

  “How many times have I told you, can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” He extended his arm to her because he couldn’t move around in time without her. She hesitated before taking it. Dead Kendra and Torin were right; the most important thing right now was figuring out if this guy was worth slavish loyalty to or if she should mash him like a bug. With that in mind, she reached out her hand to his and squeezed it, and they were
gone.

  ***

  Kendra and Torin gasped in two part harmony as they materialized in her office precinct as if they’d both been holding their breath the entire time they were dead. They continued to breathe hard. Torin bent over and supported his upper body on his knees by his hands.

  She went over to one of the windows facing the city. Each pod of detectives was situated so they had some angle on the metropolis, giving them a full three hundred and sixty degree overlook. Ironic that in these times of media saturation, a quick look over the city was still one of the best early warning systems they had, what with far too much breaking news to filter through otherwise to really know which item to respond to first.

  The city was as they’d left it, largely overgrown with vegetation, from the rooftop gardens and garden restaurants, to the fruit bearing ivy climbing up the skyscrapers that added fruit picking to the window washers’ duties, and the factory farms that had replaced most of the car garages. Every city was trying to turn itself into a self-contained acropolis of late, whether they’d been designed that way from the get-go or not. Erosion of citywide infrastructure pertaining to roadways, that was also true for much of the country, made depending on outlying rural areas for food impractical. Besides, those regions were needed for habitat restoration to primeval forests replete with repopulation of long-since extinct animals, mammals, plants, and insects, with genetic hybrids everyone was hoping would take. It was still too early to tell if they would. Ironically, exotic animals were in such high demand, either for pets or for medicines, that these restoration habitats were becoming little more than breeding grounds for this generation’s poachers. So they were still “farming” the land in a way, just differently from anything anyone had intended.

  Torin imagined Kendra was refamiliarizing herself with all this world’s problems, visible from her window as part of anchoring herself to the present.

  She made her way to the break room. Torin decided to follow her. She shook her head dismissively. “I had hoped some things had changed,” she said, scrutinizing the vending machines. Nothing but superfoods of one kind or another was on display. For the truly devout, the stuff was made fresh by pressing a button, as opposed to coming in wrappers. “What I’d give for a burger.”

  “They have the fake ones, now that meat has been outlawed, between 9th Street and 7th Avenue,” Torin volunteered. “Hear they’re pretty good.”

  “Yes, for such an au natural world, I seem plagued by fake everything. Including fake people who have no choice but to act the part so convincingly it was as if they were born to it in order to hold down a job.”

  “For some, good acting is still a better solution than chip enhancements. And only mission-from-God dedication can make anyone good enough to be competitive in this job market. Hence first rate actors might well be the last au natural humans left standing.” She looked at him to indicate he definitely wasn’t helping.

  “Hey, you two,” said Davenport, their fellow detective in arms, uprooted from Madrid, Spain, after botching an investigation there. According to his superiors. They were actually just pissed he solved a case that was never meant to be solved. “Thought you were dead.”

  “Oh, very funny,” Torin said exchanging guilty glances with Kendra. “You should be so lucky.”

  “Damn right, I should be so lucky. First promotion I would have seen in years with Kendra out of the way. And with you gone, who knows, the next sexy coroner to come along might actually be unattached and gay.”

  “Love you too, Davenport,” Torin said, still trying to catch his breath. He wiped the sweat off of his forehead rather impotently with a handkerchief, considering he was sweating from head to toe.

  “Oh, don’t tease.” Davenport brushed by them with his mug of coffee he’d just got done refilling from the break room.

  The sight of Davenport after all this time put a smile on Torin’s face. He made full use of his darkly tanned complexion to get away with wearing outrageously colored suits that no lighter skinned person could get away with; he frequently looked like a triple decker ice cream cone set in motion on account of it. It wasn’t just the bright or pastel colors, it was the hues he seemed to pull out of the rainbow that no one had ever seen before. If his face were any rounder, it’d be a bowling ball, not a face, the eye sockets and mouth the perfect distance apart for a big, long-fingered bowler. The hats completed the picture, but that treat was reserved for arrivals and departures, as it was quickly hung on the hat peg against the room divider, with an assortment of others in case he needed to change from dashing and debonair on a dime to determined and daunting.

  Davenport regarded them more closely, as well, as they followed him back into the squad room, and he took his seat at his desk. Catching Torin’s mopping up act with the handkerchief, and noticing the perspiration also beading up on Kendra, he said, “You two just back from the gym?”

  “We were working out some things, but it wasn’t in the gym,” Torin said.

  Kendra was trying to ground herself in her new reality which was really her old reality by acclimating herself to her desk and to her routines, hanging up her trench coat, sliding back her chair, opening a drawer for a pair of gloves that left her fingers free to type, and opening her laptop. Every small action and gesture meant to be as familiar and as reassuring as possible.

  Torin, reading her like an open book, which he hardly needed to be psychic to do, bought her some time to make her adjustments as he continued to exchange barbs with Davenport, which he figured was Davenport’s way of getting some friction going between them the best way he could. “Oh, I got you,” Davenport said smiling. “More than one way to exercise your bodies, huh? Let me guess, one of the lockers, right? I’ve been meaning to break in one myself.”

  “What? No. And besides, there’s not nearly enough room.”

  “Yeah, there is. After the retrofit. You didn’t notice them tearing up the locker room after doing away with the SWAT team? Now the lockers have to hold all the riot gear and everything else we need to suit up in case of a citywide meltdown.”

  “How did they justify that?”

  “Apparently all we have to do is watch a training flick to get into shape for full on combat. We’re that impressionable. Mind you, the subliminals and editing and special effects have to be just right. Guess someone figured out the formula for self-transformation. Soon you’ll be watching a movie to be all you can be or playing a video game, no matter what you want to be.” Davenport bounced his eyes off of Kendra and Torin who were still acting a little odd or a little guilty, he wasn’t exactly sure what was going on between them. Torin was throwing himself into his lab work with exceptional zeal, even for him. He seemed hurried, pressured. “Hey, what’s with you two?” he said. “First you act as if you’ve been checked out of reality for days, now you act like you’re more dug in than an Alabama tick.” He couldn’t help but notice their rituals designed to ground them in their respective spheres of work.

  “You notice anything strange while we were gone?” Kendra said, looking up from her monitor straight at him.

  “Strange? We’re all strangers in a strange land. What do you mean by strange?”

  “An alarming increase in crimes? Or decrease, for that matter.”

  “Yeah, now that you mention it. And that would be increase, not decrease. A little too early to suggest it’s anything but a blip on the radar. Statistical improbability is still a statistical fact. Ask me again in a couple of months.”

  “No, Davenport, I’m asking you now. And shoot the case files to my computer.”

  “Yeah, sure. Knock yourself out. No, I mean it, knock yourself out, and hope when you wake up you’re once again likable.” He shot her the files.

  “Where is everyone?” she said, looking around the office.

  “It’s Monday. Half the guys are hung over, the other half are just sleep deprived. They’re probably all cloaked, figuring they’ll pretend to just be walking in late, take their licks the
n rather than hear your haranguing from now.”

  She shook her head. “The entire city is off-limits to that kind of thing, Davenport. What, are you saying the psychic dampeners are down?”

  “Not exactly.” He pretended to be too busy with his own work to answer her further.

  “What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

  Davenport sighed. “You know I have to work with these people too, not just you?” He held up to her glare as long as he could. “Fine. They switched their shift schedules. So long as they’re not punched in, they can pretend to be invisible or the last person on earth.”

  “That’s still against city regs, Davenport. Otherwise people could commit crimes without anyone noticing. The law clearly states…”

  “Yeah, yeah, if you’re at home, or in a situation that doesn’t impact anyone else, you can remake the world however you like. Or at least convince yourself you have, so long as no one else is affected. Well, they coordinated their efforts and came up with a bit of a loophole.”

  “What loophole?”

  “They send a doppelgänger out into the real world to investigate breaking crimes for them, leastways until they’re sober enough or awake enough to play themselves for real.”

  “You mean they’re engaging with reality from the part of them that never sleeps, from their medulla oblongata, that’s also obstinately immune to drugs and sleep deprivation?” She’d picked up a few things over the years by having a husband that was a coroner.

  “Especially with one of these little guys,” Davenport said, holding up a pill.

  She threw a glance over at Torin, amazed he could be so absorbed in his experiments and so oblivious to the import of their conversation. “Just tell me one thing, Davenport, are these doppelgangers as good as the real thing?”