“I had to see,” he said as if that explained everything. I guess if you were batshit crazy, it did.
“So now what, Dad?” Christine almost shouted. I’d never seen her so angry before. “You want me to read the words out loud while you take notes? And when I’m done you can send me home and forget about me? Mom was right about you. You’re an asshole.”
If her words hurt the Lurker at all, he showed very few signs of it. His eyes narrowed a little, and his grim expression got a tiny bit grimmer. “There had to be the right elements in one person,” he explained. “It had to be someone hidden somewhere the others could not find. It had to be you.”
“Well, find someone else, Dad. Screw you, and screw this.” Christine started walking back up the tunnel.
I started to go after her. So did Ultimate. I tried to push him aside, but this time he had braced himself and I bounced off him. “Get out of my way,” I told him.
“She and I have fought together,” Ultimate said. “I owe her. I’ll go talk to her.”
He and Christine had fought the Dreamer together. She and I had chatted for a bit. Maybe he was the guy who should go see if she was okay. Hell, Ultimate was the guy to call if you needed help. I was the guy to call if you needed to murder some asshole. He was the right man for the job. I didn’t give a shit. “Get out of my way,” I repeated.
Ultimate gave me a pitying, understanding look that made me want to punch him in the face. Only the certainty I’d just break my hand without messing a hair on his head stopped me. He stepped aside. “Give it your best shot,” he said. He was so sympathetic, so contemptuous, I wanted to vomit all over his silver costume. But I went. He let me go after her and I went.
Christine Dark
Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013
She didn’t know where she was going. Anywhere but the Island of Doctor Moron, she supposed. She would get to the surface and fly away. She’d almost made it to the mouth of the tunnel when he called out to her.
“Christine.”
She turned around. Mark had caught up with her. He was worried.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Just wanted to see if you were okay.”
“I haven’t been okay since I went to that stupid frat party I can’t even remember how many days ago.” I’m never going to be okay. “So what’s up? Did they send you to talk some sense into me?”
Mark shrugged. “Nobody sent me anywhere. And I don’t know if anything makes any sense.” He paused for a second or two. “I’m sorry your father’s crazier than a shithouse rat,” he finally said.
Christine actually laughed at that. “Yeah, Dad turned out to be a dud, didn’t he?”
“Dud you just make a pun?”
She started to laugh again, then sat down on the tunnel floor as the laughter turned into sobbing. He sat down by her side and she hugged him. He let her cry quietly on his shoulder. She could feel him crying too, just on the inside. Christine might have found her father was a whacko who had bred her to be his Seeing Eye Bitch, but Mark had lost the closest thing he’d had to a mother. So they just sat on the cavern floor for some time, two hurting people grieving together. Having someone to grieve with helped a little bit.
“Thank you,” she said after a while.
“Thank you,” he replied. She guessed it had been good for him, too. “Wish I was better at the pep talk shit. Ultimate wanted to come talk to you. He’s probably great at talking people off ledges and consoling the bereaved.”
“Heh.” John probably would have had a great spiel or three. She started to grin at the thought but suppressed it quickly when she caught a spike a pain from Mark. Oh, God. Things were getting complicated. Just the kind of thing she liked to read about sometimes, but which was no fun at all when it happened to you in the real world, or even in this effed up version of the real world.
They got to their feet. Christine looked at the exit. It was so tempting, to just take off and see how far she could fly. Timbuktu was probably nice this time of year. “Got any ideas, Mark? I’d love to go home. Maybe we can hunt down Porta Potty Man and see if he can get me there. Do you want to come along?” Christine tried to imagine introducing Mark to her friends and relatives. That would be a trip.
“I’ll back you up whatever you decide,” he said. “But people are still looking for you. People with enough muscle to use Ultimate the Invincible Man as a meat puppet, not to mention drag you from your home universe. The Lurker is nuts, and a dick, but he might be able to help us. Maybe all he wants to do is to use you. But we can use him, too.”
“I really don’t want to have anything to do with him,” Christine said, knowing even as she spoke that she was going back down the effing tunnel. “He is crazier than you know. Looking back, I think he murdered half the cheerleader squad in my school because they were mean to me. Thanks to him, I’m a complete mess and I’m probably going to die in some horrible, stomach-turning way.”
“Sure. But thanks to him, you are.”
“Am what?”
“Here. Existing and shit.”
“The saving grace of every father, eh? I fertilized some eggs with my man-juice, so you’ll have to forgive me for being an absentee insane murdering freak from another universe. Worst daddy issues ever.”
“My father got killed when I was seven,” Mark said, shocking her into silence. “He was a nice guy, from what I remember. Had a temper, but never raised a hand to me or my mother. His temper got him in a bar fight, though. Somebody punched him in the chest and he just keeled over. Dead before he hit the ground. Turned out he had a bad ticker and the punch hit him in just the right spot to stop it.”
“Oh, God, Mark. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know why I just told you that. Trading daddy stories, I guess. Or maybe I’m trying to say your father ain’t perfect, but he’s still alive, so there’s still a chance you two can work shit out. And maybe he’s not just using you. People aren’t that simple; they almost always have more than one reason for whatever the hell they do. So yeah, he was building himself a translator, but on the other hand he wouldn’t have killed those cheerleaders if he didn’t give a shit, right?”
“That’s just horrible.”
Mark shrugged. “Well, yeah, I didn’t say he wasn’t batshit crazy and probably should be institutionalized or even put down, just that he cared about you in his own batshit crazy way. Oh, Cassandra also said if we don’t make the right choices, the world is going to end. Does that count as a pep talk?”
Christine patted him on the shoulder. “It was good enough. Let’s go back down to the Lurker’s Lair and see what Dad Vader has in mind.”
Nothing good came to mind all too readily.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Invincible Man
Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013
Condor filled John in on the story behind Christine’s appearance and the events that had led them here. The fact that she came from another world, one where Neolympians did not exist, was fascinating. If given the chance, he wanted to hear more about this alternate Earth. Had the absence of Neos been a blessing or a curse? Many people believed only Neo intervention had prevented the triumph of Nazism and Communism: Christine could help confirm or deny those theories. Unfortunately, Condor hadn’t had much time to learn about her world. The girl had been hunted from the start. The main culprit appeared to be the Dominion of the Ukraine, a troublesome bit of news.
John had learned to distrust coincidences. Christine’s arrival, the attack on the Legion, the Dreamer’s attempted takeover of John’s mind, the hunt for the Lurker – all those things had happened within a few days of each other. If all or even some of those events were parts of the same puzzle…
“… and that’s when the Lurker came back with you and Christine in tow. We’d just heard from Face that the Russians killed Cassandra.” Condor shook his head sadly as he finished his story. “I’m going to miss her, even if we never spent all that much time together. She alwa
ys knew what she was talking about, and she was convinced Christine was important. She was also certain contacting the Legion would lead to disaster.”
“She was right. The Legion has been infiltrated,” John reluctantly agreed. The psychic had to be the same Cassandra John had met decades ago. Their encounter had been brief but memorable. She would be missed.
“When Cassandra told us to go look for the Lurker, it never occurred to me he could be Christine’s pater familias, although Christine actually thought about it. No offense, Lurker, but you never struck me as a family man.”
The Lurker did not respond. He had remained silent throughout, staring at the tunnel like a puppy waiting for his master to return. John could hear Christine and Face-Off talking near the tunnel’s entrance, but he had resisted the temptation to eavesdrop. The girl just needed to blow off some steam, that was all.
Sure enough, they came back after a while. Christine looked grim but determined. “Well, here I am,” she said. “What’s the plan, Dad?”
Instead of responding, the Lurker removed something from his pocket: a small cube made of some red material, covered with symbols similar to the ones decorating – or, more accurately, infesting – the chamber’s walls. “The last time I showed this to you, it didn’t work. I thought I had failed. I thought you’d live a normal life and never know about any of this. I tried to do things myself, and that didn’t work. But now you are here. Maybe I tried to show it to you before you were ready.”
“What is it?”
“A key and a test. I made it for you.”
“Never a straight answer,” Christine complained. “Would it kill you to just say what it is, maybe toss in a nice PowerPoint presentation? Fine, let’s see it.” She took the cube and looked it over. “So what happens next? Do I go invisible and start saying ‘Gollum, Goll…’” She trailed off. Her gaze was fixed on the cube.
John heard the faint thrumming emanating from the cube first, but it quickly grew in intensity until the very air seemed to vibrate along with it.
‘You okay?” Face-Off asked Christine. She didn’t answer. He turned to the Lurker. “Is she going to be okay?” The Lurker paid no attention to him, either.
The sound was getting louder, and it was changing in a way that suggested speech; it was as if a string instrument was trying to speak. Christine started to glow with a reddish light. Everybody but Christine and her father looked at each other. Nobody seemed to think the sound and light portended anything good, but nobody came forth with any ideas of what to do about it. John kept a close eye on Face-Off, just in case he tried to take the cube away from her. The vigilante seemed to accept this was what Christine was there to do, even though he didn’t look at all happy about it.
The thrumming and the light reached a crescendo and leveled off for several minutes. Christine didn’t move at all. The Lurker was swaying slightly back and forth, but otherwise remained as intent on Christine as she was on the cube.
To make things worse, the glowing symbols on the walls and ceilings came back into view. Either the Lurker had forgotten to keep hiding them, or the process affecting Christine had brought them back into sight. John concentrated on Christine and tried not to think about them. The girl’s expression never changed. She was in a trance.
John lost track of time. Eerie as the scene was, after a while it started to become tedious. John found himself wishing for something, anything to happen.
He should have known better.
A blast of cyan energy struck him from behind and flung him into the nearest wall. John felt a nasty burn on his back where he had been struck. As he turned to face his attackers, several glowing starry shapes spun towards him and hit his face and eyes. Those impacts hurt but did not pierce his defenses the way the first one had but dazzled and blinded him. A large figure smashed into John before he could recover. Clawed hands struck his chest and abdomen, ripping through his defenses as if they weren’t there, tearing into flesh and bone, overwhelming him. Pain like nothing he had ever endured paralyzed him.
Agony became darkness, became oblivion.
Christine Dark
Lake Michigan, Illinois, March 14, 2013
In the beginning, there could be only one. One thing that held everything. A Monoblock, which come to think of it would be a cool name for a band. Monoblock. It was the whole universe, every bit of space-time compressed into a single point so small and so dense the most massive black hole was like a butterfly fart by comparison, except things like small and dense meant nothing, because things like spatial dimensions did not apply to the Monoblock. It was all very Zen and Zany. She skipped over most of that part of the history lesson because, well, it looked like it might be kinda boring and, if she thought too hard about it her brain started skipping a beat or three.
Then came a big ‘Poof!’ moment, your basic Big Bang and rapid expansion thingy, cosmologists had gotten that right, but missed the part that in the beginning there had also been a Mono-Mind inside the Monoblock and it too had gone bang and fragmented. The other thing they had missed was that when the universe expanded, it stepped on some toes along the way. The universe expanded into something else, something completely different from anything within it, utterly alien.
That alien something – those alien some-things, actually, because they had identities – got smacked by the universe’s bubble as it expanded faster than the speed of light, and they didn’t like it one bit. A few got crushed, turned into cosmic road kill by the expanding universal bubble. Others packed up and headed off somewhere else, angrily shaking their figurative fists and vowing to come back. And still others got swept up by the new universe and hid in the more-or-less empty spaces between matter and energy, plotting their revenge.
She didn’t look very closely at those things, those Outsiders. Even thinking about them for too long hurt her mind and something else that she thought was her soul. A couple of sidelong glances at the Outsiders had shown her things that made Great Cthulhu look as threatening as a Hello Kitty doll. Just knowing they existed was bad enough: there was something Outside, something beyond the stuff of the universe.
Things settled down in the Cosmic Bubble. Stars were born, the hot gaseous ones, not the paparazzi magnet ones. Planets and other celestial bodies followed, you might as well cue in the Big Bang Theory theme song. Life was all over the place, if by all over you counted the tiny lumpy bits in the bubble that held most of the non-dark matter and energy. And each piece of life, from the smallest virus to the biggest space whale – okay, she didn’t see any space whales during her Cosmic PowerPoint Presentation, but there were some pretty big things floating around gas giants that she dubbed space whales, thanks for all the fish and all that – all life had a connection to the Mono-Mind.
Fast forward to the time when some of the living critters became self-aware and started learning the rules of the game, fun stuff like the Laws of Thermodynamics, algebra and the joys of cooking. Some eventually figured out even neater tricks like splitting the atom for fun and profit or how to milk anti-matter and bottle it for easy access. The smartest ones, the ones who learned not to blow themselves up or kill their biospheres or run out of gas before learning how to do without gas, they packed up, left their birth planets and headed for the center of their respective galaxies. That’s where the action was, where matter and energy and fun things like black holes and supernovas were concentrated and within easy reach.
And there’s the answer to Dr. Fermi’s question: all the smart aliens leave the dirtball planets and most of the galaxy to the rubes who are still figuring out that putting sharp pieces of flint at the end of a stick made it easier to kill buffalo, or that e was equal to m times c squared, you know, basic stuff like that. They go forth and join the big treehouse at the center of the galaxies.
The smart guys in said treehouses figured out how to read reality’s programming language and made their own cool apps; they folded space and tap-danced with time, and knew things that Christine couldn’t
even name, let alone understand, much like a caveman or a cheerleader couldn’t understand how a computer worked, or even what a computer was.
Knowledge that Stephen Hawking would have killed for flooded into her mind. Her brain, annoying nerdy thingy that it was, had not evolved enough for most of it, but as long as she was touching the cube, her ability to comprehend things had grown exponentially. She knew that the carvings on the cave and on the cube were symbols and referents in one: the words could create the things the words described. Say ‘Let there be light’ in that language and light there would be. Learning the words would take a long while and many sessions with the cube, but even the little bit she’d picked up in this lesson was enough to scare the bejesus out of her.
The worst part was, all that was just the tip of the iceberg.
The universe was at war.
The smart kids – let’s call them the Cosmic Nerds, Bill Gatii and Mark Zuckerbergers of the Universe – at the center of all galaxies were fighting the Outsiders that were trying to pop the Cosmic Bubble by expanding it until it grew too thin to hold reality down. And that war was the reason us puny Earthlings had been handed super powers and the magic writing of the gods. The Cosmic Nerds needed all the help they could get. They had started sending little starter kits out to the Lesser Races to give them a little push in the right direction. Unfortunately the Outsiders had caught on and were trying to sabotage the project. Which led to…
Lesson interruptus! Christine felt her brain being compressed down to its regular human size: the sudden loss of hyper-cognition was painful and humiliating and incredibly sad, a Flowers For Algernon moment that brought tears to her eyes as she desperately tried to retain ideas and concepts that slipped like oil from her mind and left her with pathetic generalities. Coming back to reality was like being made to sit back at the little kids table at Thanksgiving, times a million.
To make things worse, reality just happened to be sucking big time at the moment.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 37
