Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  TIME BANDITS

  “Impressionable”

  An AGE OF ABUNDANCE novel

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  THE PRAXIS TIMELINE

  ONE

  “Squeeze it out, honey. You can do it.”

  “Of course I can do it. I just don’t see the point.”

  “It’s a test, my little darling.”

  “You mean like the time you switched out the light bulbs to see if you could save on electricity without harming the plants?”

  “Exactly.”

  With a big dramatic sigh that Clyde was getting more than a little used to, Notchka lifted the barbell off the stand and did a perfect bench press, only, she did it too slowly. She had no sense of the seven hundred and fifty pounds she was lifting. Her cute nine-year-old face and body showed no sign of bearing any weight at all. Her smile could be conveying delight, but it was a bit ambiguous. Finally, she set the load back down on the stand. “You tricked me,” she said, bolting upright, her long blond hair catching where the bar contacted the grip. She yanked on the hair to set herself free, spinning the stainless steel rod, not damaging so much as a strand on her head. “My safety systems screamed, ‘Stop! You risk alerting others to the true nature of your status!’”

  “That’s why we have the gym to ourselves, Princess. I paid the man a lot of money to hang out the ‘closed for renovation’ sign and to make himself scarce.”

  “A middle aged man asking to be alone with a nine-year-old child? He should have known to call child welfare.”

  Clyde smiled warily. “I see different parts of you are aging at different speeds. We’re going to have to work on that.”

  “Whatever.” Notchka pursed her lips, conveying her sour attitude, and distracted herself by spinning one of the forty-five pound disks on the barbell with her index finger.

  “Now, I need you to do just one more rep, honey.”

  “I will not! You don’t have to listen to that voice in your head. It’s freaky.”

  “When you see what you can do next, you’ll forgive me.”

  “Better be happy birthday special, that’s all I can say.” She laid back down on the bench, and put her arms back on the bar.

  “Nope. No arms this time.”

  “You’re crazy. Do I need to run my civil engineering programs to alert you to just how daft you’re being? You cannot support a structure without…”

  “Ah, but you can. You’ll see.”

  Big dramatic sigh. Shake of head. Roll of eyes and farting of the lips. The full trifecta. She scrutinized the bar. “And just how am I supposed to move it without touching it?” She stared at the bar vacantly. “Oh, I see.”

  Clyde watched the barbell levitate off the stand and float around the room. “Now what?” she asked. “This is getting boring.”

  “Now we go out and kill some people.”

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “You remember when I said that the whole world is out of whack, and we have to do our part to set it right? Well, that’s just us doing our part.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you’re all there.”

  The fitness instructor who he’d paid to make himself scarce barged into the room. “Sorry, it’s just that…” He got an eyeful of the floating barbell and never finished his sentence.

  Big sigh. Roll of eyes. A shake of the head. Only this time, it was Clyde. “Why can’t people just do what you tell them?”

  “Because then they wouldn’t have free will, ninny. You taught me that when I was like three. Are you going senile ahead of schedule? If you like, I can swap out your brain with the one you made for me.”

  “No, precious. I was just being rhetorical. Now if you would please bash the kind man’s head in with the barbell, we can get going.”

  “Why?”

  “Why must you always ask why?”

  The fitness instructor, wet from peeing himself, regained enough composure to make a dash for the door. Maybe it was pure fight or flight response, no higher brain activity implied. The door shut ahead of him, courtesy of Notchka’s telepresence. “Please stay where you are until I can decide whether I’ve won this argument or not,” Notchka said. Her voiced was laced with emotions, just none of the appropriate ones.

  “Darling, we can’t have him telling people what you can do before you’ve had a chance to fulfill your mission.”

  “And what mission is that? My brain is filled with lists and lists of them.”

  “The overriding one to which all the others are subordinated, honey. The save-the-world-from-itself mission.”

  “Oh. That does sound important.” Without any further ado she exerted her psychic will on the barbell and bashed the poor lad’s brains in and continued battering the body until it was largely paste against the floor mats. Clyde could barely recall the twenty-something’s wiry build that communicated steely hardness even beneath the loose fitting sweat pants and top. The blue black hair was straight, right? Or was it curly? No straight, definitely straight. And the hazel eyes with the orange and yellow highlights rimming the irises in the center of all that green that lit a fire at the sight of them. The sweat that prickled on his skin the second he got an eyeful; it was as if lifting the weight of awareness of the levitating barbell was just too much for him, even in the fifty-degree room. The wall-to-wall mirrors caught his senseless panic from every angle like a determined film director determined to milk the scene.

  Clyde checked his own comportment in the mirror, straightening his tie and his back. Sure, his hair was silvery and scraggly and just past the shoulder, suggesting he hadn’t attended to his personal grooming in weeks. To say nothing of the stubble. He resembled a homeless man in a thrift store suit. But he still looked a damn sight better than Pasty Boy. As to Notchka, she reminded Clyde of an oversized doll, still dressing as if she were five years old in a frilly pale yellow dress and stockings and panties in one, and shiny black shoes. Giving her a distinct, age appropriate identity was proving difficult with, among other things, the many totally age inappropriate tasks he’d set for her. She required rationalizations that no child her age would require; that had been true at every stage. Still, some of her emotional responses were often very age appropriate, others were more than a little regressed. He wasn’t sure which was the bigger problem. Precocious Notchka, or relapsed Notchka.

  He took another glance at the pancaked man looking as if he’d gotten caught under a steamroller used for laying asphalt. He’d had the fairest white skin; that much Clyde remembered clearly. Only now, his blood was so well blended with the dermal tissue, he appeared as if he might have been Native American, what with the rosy tinge. Just moments ago, Clyde recalled he was also quite handsome. Now, his beauty held a distinctly more abstract quality. “That was good thinking, obscuring his identity. That’ll buy us some time. They’ll also wrongly assume it was a crime of passion, being as it’s so over the top.”

  “What do you want me to do with the security cameras?”

  Clyde noticed them all throughout the room for the first time, dotting the ceiling in nice neat rows, with those red domes over them, like the ones they used at Home Depot. “Ah, you moron!” He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “You see why I need you by my side, Precious?”

  “You might need more than me at the rate your mind is deteriorating.”

  “Very funny. Now, fry the circuitry in the cameras, erase the digital recordings, and let’s get going,” he said. Then, giving the matter a second thought, “Only, don’t do it right away.. I want to see if you can monitor this space from a distance, even with all the distractions I throw your way. Psychically erase the recordings only when the police go to look at the tape for the first time.”

  “You expe
ct a lot of me.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “And what if I can’t do it?”

  “I suppose we’ll have to kill everyone who ever sees the tape or comes into contact with the information.”

  “Oh. I see now why you’re not particularly concerned either way. Getting away with mass murder is a rather simple logistical problem, providing I remain connected to the grid and to the pertinent live camera feeds. Now I guess I understand the point of the psychic exercise. Maybe you’re not a total idiot, Clyde.”

  “Now, what did I tell you about using that four-digit IQ against me?”

  “Something about George Forman never climbing into a ring with a lightweight. It lacks dignity.”

  “That’s right. And if there’s one thing we’re all about?”

  “It’s safeguarding human dignity,” they said together.

  TWO

  Kendra entered the gym workout area and eyed the murder scene unemotionally. They were alone, save for the dead body, and the gym apparatuses standing indifferently about like cool sentinels who couldn’t be bothered to intercede to save the man’s life. The analogy wasn’t that farfetched, since each piece of exercise equipment was a shapeshifting droid meant to morph within the parameters of its assigned task to personalize the workout of the human inhabiting it. Kendra guessed, after today, their programming might be upgraded to intercede on brawls breaking out in the gymnasium. Before the door could close behind her on its hydraulic arm, she said, “What’s the verdict?”

  “You mean other than the fact that we’re dealing with a mad man?”

  Torin, kneeling over the body, looked up from the deceased and into Kendra’s eyes with a paradoxical grin, and those fathomless baby blues of his. The blue-black curly locks and his chiseled face always made her think of Michelangelo’s David. Somehow, he was an improvement, even when unclothed. Especially when unclothed. Michelangelo would have to have been every bit the choreographer of lovemaking that he was the sculptor and painter for it to be otherwise. “God, you’re so transparent,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You realize how inappropriate it is to be fantasizing about humping me over the dead body? Especially one in this state.”

  “I had the moral high ground for a second there, what with not being able to derive the least emotional response to the grizzly nature of the crime. Better than you looking positively excited by it. But you’re right; fantasizing about you, rolling amid the gore and guts without a care in the world, that’s a new low, even for me.”

  “You think we can coach each other back to some basic humanity?”

  “If we can’t, then there’s no sound logic to those AA meetings either. Who else would put up with us, and who else is nearly as qualified to call us on our shit?”

  “Fine then. Let me lead by example.” Torin’s face took on a more sober countenance on a dime. A professional actor couldn’t have morphed any faster. He stood up and regarded the body from the new perspective. He was dressed better for a Vogue photo shoot or a night at the opera. It was always that way with him. She imagined with all the stares he got, giving people an excuse when he caught them staring at him of admiring his exquisite attire was just another piece of kindness in addition to the free eye candy. “I think what we’re looking at is meant to appear like a crime of passion but…”

  “But? They certainly had me fooled.”

  “Maybe if they’d pulled up short of turning the guy into complete jelly on rye toast. No, this is just a little too perfect, a little too clinical, and a little too…”

  “Anal retentive?” He threw a nasty glance back at her. “Takes one to know one, I guess,” she said. “So what, our perp can’t be passionate and obsessive compulsive at the same time?”

  Torin just shook his head. “Something doesn’t feel right about that conclusion. Anyway, I don’t think we’re looking for a person, a robot maybe.”

  “Come again?”

  “Take a look at that bar bell,” he said, continuing to deliver each sentence in his customary fashion, with far too much energy and enthusiasm and upward inflection at the end. His eyes so lit she often had to look away for fear of being blinded by the bright soul projecting at her through them from the other side. “Charles Atlas couldn’t lift that thing, far less swing it like a baseball bat—and God knows how many times—to procure this effect. No, this is one of those robo-docs General Motors has been spitting out.”

  “Oh yeah, you can order them on line, tweaked to your specifications. My dad owns an auto repair shop, swears by his. Pete, he calls it. The damn thing has a name. Says he can lift the car off the ground for him if the hydraulic lift ever failed.”

  “They’re called robo-docs despite not being robotic doctors because they can be programmed to doctor any situation.” His hands gestured, moving along with the rest of him; he was like an antsy teen who couldn’t sit still; honestly, she could think of few teenagers who had this much energy.

  She regarded the barbell, smeared with blood and gore, with the latest revelation in mind. “So what we’re really looking for then is a deranged computer programmer who can rewire a robo-doc, set it to kill for him?”

  Torin was shaking his head again, still fixated on the body and the crime scene. “What now?” she asked.

  “Those things usually move on tracks, like a tank. You’d think there’d be some evidence of it on the mats.”

  For a coroner, he could be damn annoying. More savant than doctor, he was not beyond outclassing her in the detecting department; his mind took in things at a glance it’d take her numerous instant replays on the digicams to detect. “Not necessarily,” she said. “The mats are built for wear, and the thing’s roller belt could have been modified to not leave tracks.”

  “I’m not discounting the possibility; it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “You and your intuitions. That’s why I left you; it’s why everyone leaves you. Who can handle being married to a psychic in a Big Brother age? It’s bad enough there are cameras everywhere and NSA agents running supercomputers to decipher the meaning of our every move. It’s equally mortifying everyone else is inside my head trying to get over on me with the latest hustle and come-on in an age where everyone is selling to everyone else. But to come home, just when you need to shut the door on all that shit, only to have you get inside my head worse than all of them put together…”

  “I get it, I get it. Why do you think I didn’t contest the divorce? You think it’s any easier living inside my head? Maybe if you’d taken a moment to walk a mile in my shoes.”

  They glared at each other. “We’re being inappropriate again,” she said. “We’re letting our drama upstage his.”

  “Personally, I think he’s beyond caring. I, on the other hand…”

  “Can’t stop loving. I think you know it’s love when you can’t turn it off.”

  He seemed to soften on the remark, perhaps because he could read the emotions on her face, or worse, was looking inside her head without permission, as usual. Shifting his attention to the roomful of workout toys to buoy his spirits, he said, “These things are alive, you know? In a sense, anyway. Too bad they’re still too primitive to bear witness. They only awaken when in use. Still, might be worth checking out in case someone was using one at the time, one of the perps maybe.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, sounding as unenthusiastic, she realized, as he was over-enthusiastic.

  Torin stepped into the boxing unit and shadow boxed, with the machine shaping itself around him like a tailored exoskeleton. “This one’s designed for the geriatric crowd,” he said giddily, throwing some more punches, ducking, and jiving. “Gets the complete range of motion going even in an arthritic body, all while monitoring internal pain levels, and injecting the necessary hormones to free up the joints and dull the nerve receptors. Do you respond to verbal prompts, Big Guy?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boxing droid said. “If you become too fatigued to ta
lk, I can scan your brainwaves and just read your mind.”

  “Primitive, huh?” Kendra said, sour faced. She didn’t exactly have the same fondness for technology he did. If he was “boys with toys”, she was “back to basics girl”, down to her refusal to wear makeup and even wear a watch any more advanced than one with a sweeping second hand.

  Catching a glance of herself in the mirror didn’t help how she felt. Her black hair, kept neat and short, exposed her sleek neckline. The outfit exposed a lot of alabaster skin, all of it smooth and blemish-free enough for her to pass as an android. In that moment, with him strapped into one of the workout droids, it was as if they were both being taken over by the age in which they lived.

  “Give me some more resistance, Big Guy. Though you can keep injecting me with those natural highs. No complaint there.”

  “Torin, we aren’t at Coney Island. We’re at a murder scene. Try to show some respect.”

  He looked at her aghast that she could pick now to spoil all his fun. “Yeah, I did ask you to help me be more acceptable to the rest of the human race, didn’t I? Suppose it’s too late to take it back.”

  “Way too late.”

  He climbed out of the machine begrudgingly.

  “You finished collecting your samples?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Though I’m not expecting to learn anything more.” He picked up his samples kit. “Let’s hope your detective’s acumen is good for something beyond dulling your sensibilities.” He didn’t wait for the smart-alecky comeback; he just exited the door without so much as a second look at her.

  “Let’s hope,” she said to dead air that not even the whoosh created by the hydraulic limb closing the door could enliven. His hard shell had closed over the soft underbelly rather quickly. Choosing anger over vulnerability. Perhaps because of being shut down by her one too many times in quick succession. She couldn’t blame him. It was why she chose numbness over being raw nerves. The window of opportunity between them seldom lasted long before the defenses dropped back into place.