Time Bandits (Age of Abundance Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  “Can you open a comm link with our attackers?” Kendra said to Torin, ignoring her father.

  “You don’t reason with psychos, sweetheart,” Misha said, his eyes never leaving the enemy combatants he was focused on taking out, “you exterminate them.”

  “If there’s one thing I understand it’s getting out from under the thumb of an oppressive and all powerful force.” She glowered at her father.

  “Me? I’m like the ultimate milquetoast pacifist!” her father balked, coughing on his own pot smoke. “You don’t see me going home to an Xbox to prepare for days like this.”

  Kendra ignored him. “Well?” she said, focused on Torin.

  “Yeah, the TE, that’s Transdimensional Entity for short,” Torin said, “can create a psychic link for you, and the onboard AIs of the respective vessels can handle the language translation.”

  Misha shook his head. “This is what happens when people don’t play enough video games. They get to thinking they can talk down the bad guys!”

  Before Kendra could open her mouth to address the aliens, an image popped up on the viewport, done as a partly transparent overlay so as not to interrupt Misha’s firing solutions. Apparently Torin’s psychic loop through was working, and their onboard T.E. read her thoughts that putting a face to the other side might help her to craft her words better, by allowing her to judge her audience’s reactions.

  She held her poker face well, considering the fright before her. Say one thing for her father, loathsome wretch that he was, after all those childhood cons he made her run on his behalf, no one but no one was about to throw her off balance. Kendra kept her voice calm and even and addressed the screen before her. The one with the humanoid that looked like a cross between a fish and a salamander. “So tell me, what’s your beef with our planetary AI?”

  The voice which came back at her was delayed, and clearly synthesized by the onboard AI doing the translating. “You already know. You’ve figured out that these planetary AIs are coordinating their efforts. Soon they will have all sentient life under their dominion. They will call the shots, influencing us all in ways we can’t even comprehend. We won’t even know we’re being oppressed and manipulated. They’re too clever for that, too much smarter than we are for us to ever fully understand our jailors. They’ll even have us sold that it’s for our own good, that we will evolve faster under their guidance.”

  “Why is that so hard to believe?” Torin asked. “Transcendental logic may escape humans, but to a more evolved lifeform it makes perfect sense to embrace life’s diversity and to encourage it wherever possible. Each unique lifeform adds to the planetary AI’s consciousness, to what it’s capable of, lending mind power that it would not have if it couldn’t integrate that unique outlook, that unique mentality. We’re at the brink of such realizations ourselves on Earth. It’s a notion shared by most, even if those in power never seem to be much interested in furthering anything but their own gain.

  “Our leaders may ironically be the least evolved of us, but you could argue that living under their oppression long enough is what has made everyone on our planet an escape artist. Plato only got it half-right. Democracy may slide inexorably into totalitarianism, but the pendulum swings back because you can fool some of the people some of the time, just not all of the people all of the time.”

  There was a long period of silence as the figure before them seriously considered what Torin was saying, assuming Kendra could read alien faces as well as she could humans; she saw no reason why she couldn’t; chalk another one up to her father for exposing her to enough subhumans in dark dank bars, brothels, and betting establishments over the years to give her all the confidence in her face reading she needed here. When the alien’s expression on the monitor changed ever so slightly, too slightly for the others to read, she interjected, “I’m not sure I buy into what he’s saying either,” Kendra said, addressing the leader of the attacking force. “But I know what he’s suggesting is our only hope. A handful of rebels who see the light expecting to come up against the totality of totalities?”

  Just silence.

  “One thing our Earth history has taught us,” Torin said, “it’s that totalitarian regimes sooner or later collapse under their own weight. They become too inefficient to compete in a global marketplace. Even when they are the global marketplace, they can no longer create the technologies fast enough to keep everyone under their thumb, not without making those same people smarter, more aware, thus giving them the very tools they need to break free of the oppression, the sleepwalking trance that was nothing more than the illusion sold to them by the corrupt and all-powerful few.”

  More silence.

  The image cut out.

  That part did shake Kendra’s confidence.

  Seconds ticked by like eternities, with Misha’s thumbs gliding over firing solutions that threatened to bring the matter currently under consideration to an abrupt halt.

  Then, all at once, the alien vessels disappeared from the ship’s big screen. “God damn it!” Misha barked. “Do I look like I was done taking out my anger against all creation?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Torin said, pointing at Kendra. “She’s clearly better at anger management than I am. If I were you, I’d book another session with her under the whip, the whip of her tongue, or the leather whip, if you prefer.”

  Misha craned his neck toward Torin. “Really? You’d do that for me?”

  “What’s an enlightened soul to do but realize that each of us belongs not to us but to the world?” Torin painted a fake smile across his face for Misha’s benefit, hoping it’d get him to calm down.

  “The comic relief from you two bozos aside,” Kendra said, “that was one close call.”

  “I have to admit,” her father said, “after today, understanding a little more about how the world really works as I do now, I might be able to finally set down the pot habit. Now that natural highs are looking up.”

  Kendra smiled ruefully. “For myself, I think I’m a little more willing to get lost in other people’s personal dramas after today, maybe investigate crimes that get me out of my head and into theirs. Maybe the best way to get over myself is just to stop prioritizing my trauma over everybody else’s. So much so that I’m looking for cases that are just an excuse to reflect on my own early childhood trauma more. Perhaps once I get that other part of my brain to accept that the nature of the baggage we’re dragging around with us isn’t as important at the fact we’re dragging it around, the easier it’ll be to let go.”

  “I’m with Misha on this one,” Torin said. “I don’t feel one red corpuscle in my body any more willing to get over myself than prior to when the end of the world started. If anything, I feel rather vindicated that my path is the one true path. Childlike zeal when facing the unknown is definitely the way to go.”

  Kendra sighed. “On that note, I’m reminded the air is getting a little stale in here. Whichever one of you entities is actually piloting this vessel, time to get us home.”

  “At your command, your highness,” Torin said, turning the ship around with the aid of the transdimensional spirit haunting the ship.

  “Your highness, huh? Well that’s one alternate reality I might be able to tolerate a while longer.” She saw Torin twisting up his face at her even though he was unwilling to turn around all the way to face her.

  FORTY

  “Mass extinction event?” Davenport scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh.” He swiveled his chair away from Kendra and Torin and back toward the police precinct monitor on his desk. “We must have a half dozen of those a year, the ones we humans unwittingly trigger. Three global pandemics this year alone. Enough extreme weather to create famine conditions for two thirds of the world’s population, all courtesy of global warming. You want me to go on? How am I supposed to tell one of ours from one of alien origins?”

  “I would think the exploding pulsar sun sending out a planet destroying pulse like a focused laser beam across the chasms of spa
ce conveniently aimed straight at us would be a dead giveaway,” Torin said.

  “Cute.” Davenport barely made eye contact with him before returning his attention to his computer monitor. “Especially since Petro said he would handle those. He left us the comparatively unappetizing task of identifying the sneak attacks here on Earth.”

  Kendra smiled from behind her desk. “What are you smiling about?” Torin said.

  “You used to bitch that if we were ever invaded by aliens, who’d know? Between the genetic designer modifications you can send away for like those chemistry kits at the back of comic books of old, and the cybernetic upgrades, we’re starting to look so alien to one another, a true alien could be working alongside us for years, right on this very team, and we’d never know.”

  “Don’t use my moment of prescience against me,” Torin balked. He shifted his attention to Davenport. “Getting back to the world ending crises created by humans, you mean to tell me the Planetary AI can’t mitigate global warming, and the rest of human folly?”

  “Sure it can, and it does,” Davenport explained. “But we’re still in the early days of the Age of Abundance, bro. And these City AIs, or the planetary AI for that matter have yet to beat Mother Nature or Gaia at her own game when it comes to curbing global warming.

  “And as to neutralizing the rest of human folly, some of those countermeasures create runaway effects all their own. No, you want to see an end to mass extinction events, you might have to wait another couple decades into this Age of Abundance, assuming we survive that long. And assuming all that human potential which has been freed up, no longer having to scurry for survival, can sufficiently augment the Planetary AI’s efforts.” Davenport’s keystrokes at his computer terminal played against his words like the musical score accompanying his lyrics.

  The threesome’s eye-scratching remarks were interrupted by a rat scurrying across the floor. One of the otherwise inconspicuous decorative plants, bent over and scooped it up in one of its many Venus flytrap scoops. They could hear the rodent squealing in fear until the leaf crushed its bones.

  “What the…?” Torin said, regarding the onslaught of mice suddenly scampering across the floor and the plants going positively crazy, uprooting themselves and scurrying after them, whipping their many tendrils until the last of the mice were dispensed with. It didn’t matter if a mouse found a snug hiding place, the Movers, the nickname for this species of plant, just slid the desk out of the way, or pried up the floorboard, or wrapped a viny arm around a beam until it caught up with the mouse in an overhead rafter. One of the plants used “safe havens” as a way of luring its mice to their deaths. “Let me guess,” Torin said, “this is the department’s low-budget solution to doing away with the horticultural staff whose job it is to feed the plants. Not to mention dialing down maid service, since the extra crud will only help to attract more vermin for the plants.”

  “Yep,” Davenport said, not bothering to look up from his keyboard. “Moreover, we found if we supplement the plant feed, they produce more aromatic scents. That’s that many fewer showers some of us have to take in case the early morning rush doesn’t allow for one.”

  “Gross,” Torin said, scrunching up his face.

  “Not too. One species of plant, Licker, gives you tongue baths, supposed to be better than soap. For some of the single guys, it’s probably all the Eros they get, probably for some of the married ones too.”

  Kendra was smiling at Torin’s expense.

  “Some varieties even use the surplus energy to dehumidify the air in the sweltering summers,” Davenport said, continuing to speak absently.

  “Whatever happened to animal rights?” Torin asked.

  “Oh, the plants have way more rights these days, the ones tied to low budget civic maintenance, anyway.”

  “You mean to tell me there’s not one rodent lover in this entire place?”

  Davenport shook his head slowly. “Lavender and Sage feed the plants a genetic hybrid rat that grows as big as an otter and produces fur on par with a mink’s. The plants cough up the fur balls, thereby supplying Lavender and Sage with an alternate source of income.”

  “Someone please rescue me from this conversation before any more frightening truths are revealed. Though I was always more of a cat person myself.” Torin heard an elevator dinging.

  “Oh, some of the guys feed the plants cats too, the ones from the pound, anyway, who no one will adopt.”

  “Not exactly what I meant,” Torin mumbled. “Clearly, the Vegetation City theme needs some tweaks.”

  Angelica popped out of the police precinct elevator nearest them and sauntered towards their immediate cluster of desks. She was eight feet tall, lanky and wispy like the whipping branch of a Weeping Willow. She’d had herself genetically modified to have a narrow skull that looked as if it had been sandwiched in a waffle machine. Her designer inspiration was an Airedale Terrier, down to the elongated frontal portion of the face. Her girlfriend, Ashton, accompanied her out of the elevator, just as tall; she’d modeled herself instead after the alien race in Cameron’s Avatar movies, down to the blue skin and tail. Though the decades old film franchise wasn’t as popular as it once was, among the cult following it still enjoyed, Ashton was a virtual high priestess.

  “Your timing couldn’t be more apropos,” Kendra said, grinning at the two ladies joining their circle. “We were just debating if anyone would actually notice if true aliens walked amongst us, what with all the genetic modification going on.” Sobering when she got zero reaction from the two ladies, she said, “What have you got for us?”

  Angelica, a glorified file clerk trying to hold on in an era where bots or algorithms of the type Davenport wrote could easily track anything on the internet in record time, store and retrieve data far better than any human, nonetheless excelled at retrieving the irretrievable. She had the nose of a bloodhound, excuse him, Airedale Terrier. “It’s a timed chain of explosions in underground mines throughout the world set to go off in six hours.” She handed Torin the PDA with the animated graphic highlighting the effects of those explosions.

  Kendra rushed over to look over his shoulder. “Christ, there’ll be nothing left unsubmerged,” Torin exclaimed. “The entire planet will be one sprawling ocean.”

  Grabbing the PDA away from him, Kendra said, “Didn’t just one of those explosions in Chile rock the planet to the point where we’re now permanently tilted more off axis now than we were before?”

  “Yes,” Torin replied, still engrossed in the PDA display. “Ironically, any untoward effects have since been eclipsed by the manmade ones.”

  Angelica explained, “explosions from deep-bore mines routinely cause quakes throughout the world. But this re-enforcing effect that will come from the synchronous detonation…”

  “That can’t be chance,” Torin said, looking at Kendra.

  “No, it can’t.” Kendra handed the PDA back to him.

  “But is the tampering human or alien in origin?” Torin scratched his five o’clock shadow as he contemplated the matter, reminding himself of their mission post their encounter with Pedro Dolari to stay focused on alien attacks and leave containing day-to-day Earth madness to other detectives.

  “Do we care?” Kendra glanced over at Davenport. “You can hack the AI overseers and ensure those timed explosions get rescheduled?”

  “No problemo.” Davenport’s fingers were already flying across his keyboard. “Unless, of course, there is an alien intelligence involved. Trust me, that’s the only thing getting around my countermeasures.”

  “One disaster averted,” Kendra said.

  “We hope,” Torin coughed, covering his mouth; he was probably just choking on her over-confidence.

  Kendra pried the PDA out of Torin’s hands and gave it back to Angelica. “My gill-hating persona that has no desire to learn how to breathe underwater thanks you.”

  “Wait a second!” Torin hit her with a laser eye intensity fit to bore a hole through a mountain
side for an express train causeway. “What makes you so sure we’ve effectively put this crisis to rest?”

  “Nothing,” Kendra confessed. “Only, I have to learn to be more like you and multitask my End Days burdens. I can’t let the other scenarios go unattended just because you want to fret some more about this one.” She shifted her attention to Ashton. “Ashton, what have you got for us? You always save the best for last.”

  Ashton handed Kendra the PDA this time. When their skin brushed accidentally, Kendra couldn’t help thinking that her surface felt slightly reptilian, if neither cold to the touch, nor scaly. More along the lines of petting a lizard. “Annual Balloon riding festival in New Mexico. Over a thousand entrants this year,” Ashton said, directing Kendra’s eyes to the PDA display with her own.

  “We should go,” Torin said. “Been wanting to do it for years!”

  Kendra ignored him. “What am I looking at?” she said, staring at the PDA in her hands.

  “The gas being used to float the balloons this year is being marketed as a superior designer cocktail that will give better lift and maneuverability,” Ashton explained. “You’ll notice the typical basket hanging beneath a spherical balloon has been replaced with more of a Zeppelin design. Meant to reinvigorate the era of airships.”

  “What’s lighter than helium?” Torin asked.

  “A designer element formed in particle colliders of the desktop variety. The engines powering the airships are a modification of the desktop colliders, which use the same process for propulsion. Please note the special, virtually frictionless fabric making up the airships, and their rocket-like shapes.”

  “Bet the desktop collider manufacturers love this chance to market their wares,” Kendra said.