“Very well, lady,” Ali told the stranger. “You got me here. Time to explain yourself.”
“My name is Kiera Henderson. I took Dreamtime back in ‘71,” the woman explained. “I was fifteen, trying to be hip. I got off lightly; no major side effects, except for the occasional flashback, until forty years later, when I turned Neo. Late bloomer, that’s me. I guess I’m going to look fifty-five for the rest of my life.”
“You look a good fifteen years younger than that, if that’s any consolation,” Ali said.
“Thanks. Anyway, I’d been linked to Comatown all this time; basically the mental construct runs on the minds of everyone who ever took Dreamtime, and apparently their children as well. But when I got my powers I discovered I could interact with it; that’s my Neo power, the ability to communicate with a mental gestalt controlled by a handful of crazy hepsters. Truly awesome. Anyway, Jason’s mind just joined their little collective, and he was insistent I travel to Freedom Island, at my own expense no less, and get in touch with you.”
“I’ll be happy to reimburse you for your expenses,” Ali replied. “Is there any way I can talk directly to Jason?”
“He says I can let your mind enter Comatown, because you’ve been there before.” That had been one insane mind-trip, courtesy of a murderous Neo, during the rather eventful HeroiCon of 2010. Ali wasn’t eager to go back there, but this had to be important. She was sure Jason wasn’t doing all of this just so Ali would update his Facebook page for him.
“All right, let’s do it.”
“Very well. Just lay down and I’ll do the rest.”
Ali did as instructed and Kiera knelt behind her head. Her hands touched Ali’s temples, and she felt a slight tingling sensation; a few seconds later, she was elsewhere, or at least her mind was.
Jason was waiting for her in their old apartment in Legion Hall, back when they’d been a couple. The living room looked just like it had in the 1990s, cozy mismatched furniture and haphazard decorations – neither of them had been gifted with any skill at interior design. A Dizzy Gillespie poster on a wall clashed badly with a traditional Thai sculpture in front of it. Jason also looked the same, a tall slender man with a mop of unruly dirty-blonde hair over his head, his eyes hidden behind thick goggles designed to keep his telepathic probes from violating the minds of anyone he happened to look at. His grin when he saw her was also the same, and it elicited a wave of regret that made her eyes mist over.
“Hello, Sandy.” Jason had been the only person who called her Sandy instead of Ali or Alessandra.
“Jase. I’m so sorry.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s no time for that right now. The attack on the Island wasn’t what killed me, Sandy. I was murdered. My cochlear implants blew up; that’s what tore my head off. I know all of this because my disembodied soul got a good look at myself before I started to head towards the afterlife, or oblivion or whatever happens to us when we die. Luckily I remembered Comatown and barely managed to make it there. Mouse and his merry gang of hepsters weren’t thrilled to have me, even after all these years, but they let me stay. The point is…”
“Somebody booby-trapped your implants,” Ali finished for him. “And you can’t be the only one.”
“Sandy, I think everybody’s implants have bombs in them. Including yours, which is why I wanted to meet you discreetly. If whoever did this twigs that you’re onto him, your head will blow up too.”
“I don’t think they could have snuck up a large enough charge inside my head to kill me,” Ali replied.
“Do you want to find out the hard way?”
She shook her head. “It’s got to be Daedalus. I don’t remember who was in charge of the last cochlear implant upgrade, back in ‘03, but I’m sure it was either Daedalus or Doc Slaughter, and Doc Slaughter is…”
“Dead,” Jason said. “Kiera told me Doc’s head got torn off by John – but maybe it blew up instead.”
“Oh, my God. Daedalus killed Doc. Framed John. Must have behind the attack on Freedom Island. But why?”
“No idea. The smirking bastard must have his reasons, but do they even matter right now? We have to stop him.”
Ali finally had some answers. What she didn’t have was a clue of what to do next.
Chapter Four
The Great Escape
Staten Island, New York, March 28, 2013
“We are going to die soon,” the Lurker said. Kenneth Slaughter nodded in agreement.
They’d found it was easier to communicate with each other by creating a mental construct, in this case an illusionary combination of the Lurker’s old lair beneath Central Park and Kenneth’s workshop on Freedom Island. Bit and pieces of both locales mingled liberally inside the construct, providing an environment that was both familiar and oddly disturbing. Given their situation, ‘oddly disturbing’ might as well be a constant descriptor for their new normalcy.
“At least our Neolympian abilities seem to be resurfacing,” Kenneth said. As they slept, their shared body had fully recovered from its post-decanting weakened state. The body was still gaunt, but the consumption of several pounds of food would deal with that problem. Brunch would be served in twenty minutes, and they’d be able to start working on it.
“Our minds, however, are not improving,” Damon Trent replied. “I’ve started to ‘remember’ things that never happened to me. My father, for example, was never murdered over some mining dispute in South America. Nor did I win the Orteig Prize in 1925 by flying from New York to Paris; in 1925 I was in Asia. Having two sets of memories for the same stretch of time is maddening.”
“Yes, I am having the same problem,” Kenneth said. His new memories were far more troubling, however. The Lurker had been a stone-cold killer, very much unlike Kenneth, who had long labored to use non-lethal means to subdue evildoers. The delight with which Damon Trent had dispatched his targets was painful to experience, and they were becoming part of his own memories, inspiring feelings of guilt over things he’d never done. “Our minds may be melding into one.”
“I’m a fragment of a whole,” Damon mused. “Your mind, on the other hand, is complete. It will probably end up subsuming mine.” He laughed bitterly. “You’ll have precious little joy from my memories, I promise you that.”
“I don’t think either of our personalities will survive the merging intact. We’ll become something else. Somebody else,” Kenneth concluded. It appeared he hadn’t truly escaped death after all.
“We’ll see. It would have been nice to have a good night’s rest, but I trust the noise from the other guest bedroom bothered you as much as it did me.”
Kenneth nodded. “I never expected Condor to have such… extreme tastes.”
“The boy has a great deal of pent-up rage, and his woman is worse. Better they try to work it off in the bedroom than out on the streets. I wish they’d been quieter, though.”
“In any case, I hope they are up for this undertaking.”
“They will be. We all have to be. We have to assist my daughter and stop Daedalus Smith. The fool thinks he is saving the world, you know.”
“Yes. He committed all sorts of crimes out of the best of intentions. And now I will have to betray the Legion and put my trust in one of its deadliest enemies, and an unexpectedly perverted gang of vigilantes, for much the same reasons. What’s the difference, then, between us?”
“Intentions mean nothing, Man of Brass. In the end, only results matter.”
* * *
Brunch was prepared and served by a pair of robot servants. The automatons could pass for human at first glance, if one didn’t look closely at their rubber skins or engage them in conversation for more than minute or so; they subroutines were rather limited.
The Lurker-Slaughter clone glared at him from the other side of the table. Kyle dipped his head in silent apology. They had gotten much too loud last night; he and Melanie and Lady Shi. There’d been a bit too much violence in their sex, and even in the large h
ouse, the noises they’d made had probably bothered everyone else. Kyle should have insisted in spending the night back at his mansion in the Catskills, but in the end everyone had decided to stick together at one location, for security’s sake.
Neither Melanie nor Lady Shi looked at all apologetic. Everybody should count himself lucky to have only heard and not seen the things those two had done to each other, or the damage they’d inflicted on the guest room. Kyle was going to have to write a rather large check to replace the furniture they’d wrecked. He felt bad, but he’d been too wired after the long night of planning to do anything else. He’d needed to burn off the pent up energy.
In any case, nobody complained out loud about it. Instead, talk turned to more important things.
“I’ve been monitoring the Dominion’s military and security channels,” Hades 2.0 reported. “Several Border Guard detachments were sent to the Pripet Marshes over the last couple of days, but they have been reassigned to an unnamed facility on the outskirts of Kiev. They are being very circumspect, and their encryption is almost as good as they think it is, but I was able to crack it. They have captured someone of great importance, and are taking strong measures to keep said captive secure.”
“Christine and Face, and I guess Father Alex as well” Kyle said. “It’s got to be them.” Face-Off had been sending brief heavily-encrypted messages every day, reporting their progress. His last message had been well over twenty-four hours ago, claiming they were still wandering the Pripet Marshes. He’d been overdue for a new message, and Kyle had feared the worst. “The Dominion has them, then.”
“I believe so, yes,” Hades said. “Does this change anything?”
“Rescuing my daughter is essential,” the Lurker said through the other Hades’ lips. “But we will need help.”
“Which means breaking out Ultimate,” Kyle concluded. “This just makes getting him out soon all the more important.”
“Given that we have Doc Slaughter’s memories and knowledge of the Legion’s security dispositions, along with our collective capabilities, I’m confident we can save the Greatest American Hero,” Hades 2.0 said with a wry smile. “My progenitor must be rolling over in his grave at the very thought of my helping rescue his nemesis. I find that oddly comforting.”
“I have outlined a tentative plan,” Doc Slaughter said. “We can launch the breakout in twenty-four hours.” He went on to explain his plan. Kyle and Hades both had some useful suggestions, and by the time brunch was over they had a plan.
Soon they’d get to find how good it really was.
Christine Dark
Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27-March 28, 2014
There was an earth-shattering kaboom, and then things got really intense.
Christine was vaguely aware that Baba Yaga had been thrown off her lap and into the nearest wall. Her perspective shifted wildly; she was no longer strapped to a wheelchair in a lab. Even the massive burst of pain as the disruptor collar let her have it was something distant and unimportant. Her consciousness had stepped away from her body, and she was inside the Codex, a search engine whose database was the universe itself.
Holy crap, it’s full of stars!
Not just stars; the little dots of light swirling around her were galaxies, untold number of galaxies, and as she looked at them they changed and spiraled towards a central point as if someone had flushed a cosmic toilet bowl and finally coalesced into the Monoblock. She’d seen this before, the first time she’d held the Codex, but this time the movie was running backwards, and for one instant she was able to catch a glimpse of the moments before the Big Bang, and in it she saw – perceived, actually, as her eyes were simply not built to see that kind of thing – the Mono-Mind. God, one might say, although the term was woefully incomplete. There was a Word for She-He-They-It That Came Before, a Word that also meant She-He-They-It That Was Born At the End, and she realized that the Universal Timeline was not a straight line but a circle; the End begat the Beginning, and vice-freaking-versa. The sentient species of the universe became God, and God in return created the universe and all the sentient species within it.
The circle was seemingly foreordained and inevitable, but in reality was fragile and contingent. It could be cut; it could be derailed. The Outsiders were nibbling at it, like that big snake of Norse mythology gnawing at the roots of the World Tree. The circle could be broken, and everything within it could vanish like a popped bubble, never having existed.
It was too big, too much. She could spend lifetimes just examining the ramifications of what she had gleaned, and meanwhile things were going to hell in the real world, which might just be a miniscule part of the whole but in its own way just as important as the whole. All for one, one for all, a whole in one and don’t be an a-hole.
Last time she’d done the cosmic awareness thingy, she’d been so engrossed by it she’d missed a guy with a light saber about to chop her up. This time she was able to pull back. Out in the real world, several soldiers were hosing her down with disruptor streams, adding their power to the disruptor collar – and, to her shock, she was standing up to the punishment. Her shield was back, and it was keeping the disruptors at bay, even the one around her neck. They were like garden hoses trying to douse a five-alarm fire. In the immortal words of the sheriff dude in Jaws, they were going to need a bigger boat.
In her mind’s eye, she saw a search bar, and two buttons: Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky. She didn’t have a lot of time before they shut her down, so she typed one word:
POWER.
That turned out to be something of a mistake.
In the real world, that Google search produced 900 million results: that knowledge appeared in her mind, along with many, many other things. In the Codex, the first entry was the Word for Power. It was a vast concept that contained multitudes, too vast for her to grasp in the short time she had. A shock of pure meaning flooded into her mind, and it was like trying to have a drink by putting her mouth to an open fire hydrant; her connection with the Source became overwhelmed, and she had to shut it down before she drowned in it.
She snapped back to the real world. At some point her wheelchair had fallen on her side, and the pain as multiple disruptor streams finally broke through her defenses and hit her was overwhelming. It was worse than when she’d healed Mark.
Yes! She pushed through the pain, and after a horrible moment where she almost slipped and collapsed under the constant agony, Christine leaped away from reality once again. It was still there, the whole-body toothache hadn’t gone away completely, but it was distant, muted, and very much more bearable. She wasn’t in the lab room where the disruptors were burning every nerve ending in her body, she was in her old room at her mother’s house, the room with the Sailor Moon poster and the ancient desktop computer on her desk.
Mark was there as well.
His face was on.
It was the face of the sixteen year old kid whose Neo powers had manifested while being beaten to death. He looked young and vulnerable, but his eyes were older, worn with age and experience; his eyes hadn’t been sixteen for a long time. It was a beautiful face, but also sad, giving her a glimpse of the person he could have been if all the bad things in his life hadn’t happened. She fell in love with that face.
He glanced around with interest before sitting on the bed next to her. “Nice digs,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were partial to pajamas,” he added, and she realized she was wearing her Hello Kitty bedtime outfit yet again. Embarrassing.
“Not really,” she said. “Not anymore. I…” A new type of agony flared up, silencing her. She felt her right eye break, and the pain was like a spike driving through her head, and even in Dreamland, it was intense enough she screamed.
Mark was holding her. “Mark, I think, she, she put out my eye!” Out in the real world, blood and ot
her stuff was running down her cheek, where talons had torn into her face. She was being kicked and punched as well, but those aches were nothing compared to what’d happened to her eye.
“Guess it’s time to break out, then,” he said.
“Wait!” It was hard to think with the horrible pain in her eye, but she forced herself to do it. The beating had stopped; despite the waves of agony coursing through her, she forced herself to pay attention. Baba Yaga was arguing with the Mind; if she only could understand what they were saying…
The Codex in her hand twitched. “… stand aside or die beside her,” Baba Yaga said, and Christine understood the words perfectly. Good going, Codex.
“She has been subdued,” the Mind replied, only a slight wavering in his voice betraying how scared he was. “Our lord and master is on his way here. Do you think he will approve of your killing the girl now?”
“You told him? You little German cockroach, I should crush you where you stand!”
“I did my duty. You will do yours. The girl has been punished. We will double the guard detail and the number of disruptor restraints. Our instruments were able to capture some of the input from the Codex, and we’ve obtained an incredible amount of data. That alone made this experiment a worthwhile one.”
“She must die. She’s too dangerous, and unpredictable, and I want her to die. I want to finish ripping her face off.”
“I’m sure you’ll get your chance, my Lady. But it won’t be today.”
Christine pulled away and returned to Dreamland. Mark was holding her, and she could feel he was about ready to break free or die trying. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re not going to kill me. Not right now, at least. Baby Yaga just cut me a little and took out an eye. Guess my Armageddon Girl costume will need a matching eye-patch.” She tried to grin but couldn’t stifle a sob instead.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 5
