Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  “So if we’re talking about someone who’s enhanced…”

  “…he might just be looking to test out his abilities, discover their limits, in which case anonymous victims are just the ticket,” Torin suggested, already half way through his plate. “Less likely to be found out that way.”

  She shook her head.

  “What?”

  “It all just sounds too plausible and sane, even likely. Either I’m becoming a paranoid schizophrenic or my world is becoming indistinguishable from a nightmare reality.”

  “So long as we can retreat to havens like this, I’d say we’re the lucky ones,” Torin said, pouring them more wine.

  Having relaxed considerably more into the ambience of the place since she first got here, she said, “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “So, fine meal, exquisite atmosphere, and everyone finally entirely cleared out…”

  “Really? Our conversation hasn’t been that gross, past the… you know…” She did a double take to confirm he was right. So much for your investigative skills, Kendra. You have to stop letting him pull focus like that. His beauty is better than smoke and mirrors in a magician’s toolkit for assisting his sleight of hand. “Maybe anticipating us plotting and scheming how we’re going to squelch this guy did it. For this many corporate types, it’d be a bit too much like their day job.” She thought about it some more. “No, the obvious explanation is you had the waiters bribe the holdouts with free dinners for a week, no reservations needed.” She returned her attention to him. “So, what was the innuendo about earlier?”

  He sighed with exasperation. “So, are you going to have sex with me on the table, on the bar, in front of the maître d’, on the stainless steel chopping bench in front of the cook in the kitchen?”

  “God, you’re so inappropriate.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Lucky me. And we’re not even through the first bottle of expensive wine. You usually play harder to get.”

  “There are some loose ends in the case I still need to think through.”

  “And the tantric sex poses I’m going to bend you into will release the chi energy, taking you to that higher level of consciousness from which all the mysteries of the world can be fathomed.”

  She couldn’t contain her smile if she tried. “Something like that.”

  Moments later, they were carrying-on on top the bar. The bartender poured drinks for the ogling staff, and the customers wandering in, who were told the restaurant was booked for the night but wanted to stay for the floor show anyway. “I don’t know, I’ve seen better,” someone in the audience finally said.

  “I think they’re challenging me to take my game up a level,” Torin whispered in her ear.

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  He stood them up with her wrapped around his waist, and proceeded to show off his background in dance. The oohs and ahs followed predictably as he slid them into the splits, or went up on one leg and spun them around without losing his center of gravity, even with her heaving up and down and arching her back and writhing around him in unpredictable ways.

  When he started in with the aerial somersaults from one end of the bar to the other, and the cartwheels, all without losing his anchoring to her, he elicited a few claps of approval.

  “I still say I’ve seen better,” said the same heckler from earlier. He sounded old, as if he might be actually speaking from experience.

  “Where, in the circus?” Torin said, panting, with a note of exasperation.

  “As a matter of fact. Grew up in the circus.”

  Torin sighed. “Fine. Can someone rig us some ropes from the ceiling? A makeshift trapeze?”

  “Sure,” the old man said. “That was my job once upon a time.”

  Torin rolled his eyes. “Of course it was.”

  “I’ll need some folks to help me,” Geezer declared. “Anyone mechanically inclined, or with an engineering background?” A few hands went up in the audience.

  The next thing Kendra remembered—she was so high on her own adrenaline, she was starting to black out—was the acrobatics as part of the flying trapeze act. Torin fell a couple times. The “net” was the countless hands of the now rather expanded throng on the floor below them, who just ushered them back up to where they could give it another go.

  “Like you’re ever going to find someone to take my place,” Torin said before readying for his next dramatic leap with her still fastened to him.

  SEVEN

  SOME TIME EARLIER…

  Clyde was still holding hands with Notchka as they walked down the sidewalk, just a few blocks away from the gym now. The wind was gusting and colder; it kept putting a wall between them and where they were heading. He didn’t care for the subtle innuendo of the Godspeak. He believed in synchronicities. If God wanted him to hear what he had to say he timed events to coincide with his thoughts, as a gauge of their rightness or wrongness. Some would argue the thinking was unscientific. But a scientist pushing the envelope as he did, especially in quantum theory, had long since reconciled his thinking with ancient Buddhist and Sufi texts and scrolls, many of which proclaimed the same essential truths as were now being proposed in his fields. Science and spirituality came together not just in the quantum but the sub-quantum realm of string theory. Everything was vibrating strings, according to String Theory, as if God were merely playing the music on his harp to bring all creation into existence.

  And thoughts could and did affect everything around us. Notchka had proven as much herself back at the gym. Arguably, the effect was subtler for weaker minds, which only cumulatively could hope to achieve the kind of impact of one Notchka. As for God’s thoughts… well, how easy would it be for Him to time Clyde’s thoughts to coincide with an advertisement or line of spoken dialogue in a film on TV, or the words on a billboard such as the one he was passing under out here on the street? Thereby giving him the reassuring feedback he required, letting him know if he was on the right track or not. He had been thinking he needed to hurry and time was of the essence if he were to see his plans succeed when the winds picked up, slowing his progress. God could just as easily use the shifts in weather to speak to him, if He realized that Clyde was more attuned to the weather in that moment, and so more likely to hear the message. Of course, he could just be witnessing the echoes of his own paranoia. Negative, stinking thinking, had its own magnetism, drawing people, places, and events to it too. And part of him was maybe just a little afraid for usurping power and control over events that weren’t his to control.

  But he was beyond listening to those fears now. They all were.

  Like it or not man had evolved to the point where he had little choice but to take control of his own evolution; Mother Nature wasn’t up to the task; she could no longer correct for imbalances to the biosphere created by humankind, nor make people smarter fast enough so they stopped sowing the seeds of their own destruction. And God helps those who help themselves; life was a classroom, the students needed to master the lessons at each grade level, and at some point assume more responsibility for their fate. That was just in the nature of things.

  “Take me shopping,” Notchka said.

  “For what?”

  “A new daddy.”

  “Stop teasing. You could never find anyone to replace me, and you know it.”

  “You’re too focused on death and destruction.”

  “Destruction is part of creation, like day follows night.”

  “Maybe so, but your one track mind is going to limit my learning curve unnecessarily. Learning is more important to me than your silly vendettas.”

  Clyde took a deep breath. “I built you to question everything, including me. It’s as much my safeguard as it is yours. Though days like today, I wonder if I should have found a better way.”

  “Your body is crumbling under the weight of all your toxic thoughts and emotions. I can see the chemical reactions going on inside of you and it isn’t pretty.”

  “I molt like a spi
der, shed my skin like a snake. Destruction is part of creation, like I said. What kind of hypocrite would I be if I didn’t live up to my own credos?”

  “Hypocrite or not, you’re one smooth talker. Just so you know I know.”

  He smiled. “Earlier today you didn’t even know you had any psychic abilities. That part of you was dormant entirely. Now look what you can do with those abilities in such little time. Don’t get caught up in where you want to be so much that you lose track of how far you’ve come. That’s nothing but a formula for depression.

  “Show a little more appreciation, on the other hand, and you’ve got the formula for joy instead. And you invite more grace to befall you. The angels will clear the way to accelerated learning for you, facilitate it happening for you because you have shown such gratefulness for their earlier gifts.

  “It’s just how the universe works. These laws are so immutable, not even I can tamper with them. Pity ordinary scientists who take more mundane laws that are far subservient to these higher level rules and deem them immutable. This is where I shall prove them wrong and open their minds to celestial physics, uplifting them from mere cosmological physics.”

  “I’m not entirely comfortable with how science and spirituality come together in your mind. I’m not sure that’s the grand unified theory Earth’s great luminaries are looking for.”

  “You will be, soon enough.”

  “Still, you’re fairly profound for a complete psycho, which means you deserve a little more faith than I’ve been giving you. Maybe there’s something to this creative destruction idea of yours, after all.”

  “Now that we’re finally in sync on that point, all I have to do is decide how to get you to help with our next mission. Ah, that’s it.”

  They were about to cross the street and had taken a step off the sidewalk, when Clyde had to rush them back on to the curb thanks to a speeding motorist paying them no heed. Another synchronistic happening coming in tandem with his latest plan to push ahead. Another disconcerting sign, which he’d continue to interpret for now as triggered by his unconscious fears that seemed to be growing in their power to affect things as fast as Notchka’s abilities were increasing. Which didn’t make sense. According to the ancient Tibetan scrolls, negative thinking didn’t have the far reaching impact of positive thinking, only a fraction of the power. He hadn’t had time to prove that scientifically, but they’d been right about everything else so far. That being the case, he may well be choosing to ignore God’s warnings by misconstruing them as communiqués from his lesser self as opposed to his Higher Self, the part of him that was one with the Godhead.

  But the ego wasn’t beyond playing tricks with him either. It hated giving up power, to God, to celestial physics, to any authority outside itself. And wasn’t beyond playing the role of the lesser god in an effort to trick him into once again heeding its guidance over anyone else’s. Yes, now that he thought about it, that made far more sense. He was working with God’s laws, after all, one of the first scientists of his age to do that, meaning God would have little reason to thwart him and every reason to assist him.

  “For your next mission,” he said, “I want you to teleport us inside the CDC.”

  “What? You’re mad! I can’t teleport.”

  “A short while ago you couldn’t read minds either. How will you know if you don’t try?”

  “Why the CDC?”

  “One step at a time. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  She was silent as she walked beside him long enough for him to ask, “What? Cat got your tongue?”

  “I’m parsing through the quantum mechanical theories that support this dunderheaded idea of yours that teleportation is even possible.”

  “You shouldn’t be able to do that. You’re not a supercomputer.”

  “I don’t need to be, silly. I just have to be able to access them psychically, let them do the hard work for me.”

  “But that’s still a lot of information to digest. Your left brain is not that souped up. You’re genetically modified to be highly intuitive not… Let’s take this conversation off-line. Just in case we’re being monitored. I don’t want your secrets getting out. Just read my mind, please, and let me hear your reactions.”

  “Fine. You were saying?”

  “I’ve figured out how to keep your biological body infused with chi energy even without you having to spend hours doing yoga or tai chi or any of the traditional means for clearing the blockages in the physical body that impede the flow of chi. This means the seven chakras running up and down your spine that are the seven gates of heaven, the portals to other universes and dimensions, to divine knowing at the level of the crown chakra, and so much more are all within your reach, even if it will take some practice to know how to make the most of it.”

  “You’re right. I see it now. I was going about this the wrong way. Easier just to access the Akashic records through my crown chakra so I can do what I need to do without really understanding.”

  “Yes, the Akashic records are like God’s memory. The accumulated, stored knowledge of all lifeforms across the universe. The scientist Ervin Laszlo talks about it at some length in one of his books. So did Tesla, in an interview. Like a radio receiver, you can tune your mind to it, he said. He ascribed most of his best ideas as borrowed from aliens.”

  Notchka’s eyes remained unfocused as she continued to look within. “The multiverse is one big wish-machine. All that’s required is belief and being in touch with more than the physical body. The rest is for scientists to unravel. Though trying to understand the mind of God is a far more futile undertaking. They can only grasp at shadows of the truth, whereas I can align myself with the Godhead and enjoy all the same powers for the asking.”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “It’s all a bit mind-blowing, even for me.”

  “As communing with the Godhead should bloody well be. It will fry your mind if you aren’t more centered in your heart, if you don’t have all seven chakras aligned. Be careful.”

  “This is why you built me to do this and not yourself. Your heart is too poisoned.”

  He sighed. “Yes, this is true. I don’t deny it. But like Moses, I can still point the way to the Promised Land, if it is only you who can step onto it.”

  “We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  “The CDC.”

  “Now, be careful about sounding too grown up, like I told you. Sometimes you forget you’re a nine-year-old, at least to the outside world.”

  “I am ageless and sexless. As was Christ. The gnostic Christians had it right; the gospel of Thomas and Mary Magdalene that Constantin banned when crafting the Roman Bible with the cardinals of the day so as to align church and state in a way that would serve the state…”

  “This is what I mean. You must find a way to be true to your inner truth, to what you know to be true, even if most humans can’t comprehend either the information or how you accessed it, all while being a child to the outside world. If you can’t do that…”

  “I’m vulnerable. Fine. But this balancing act gets harder the more you expose me to.”

  “If enlightenment were easy, we’d all be doing it.”

  “Enlightenment is easy,” Notchka asserted. “It’s all the lies we tell ourselves and one another that is so damnably difficult to maintain and saps so much energy that it just takes us down into more and more self-ruinous hell worlds. So say your Tibetan scrolls you are forever trying to brainwash me with.”

  “Notchka! What did I say about getting lost down the rabbit hole of your mind?”

  “Fine. What are we doing here, anyway?”

  “We’re going to release a designer virus on the world that is just going to affect a small town, an out of the way rural community that’s as off-grid as possible. We’re going to make them like you, gifted. It will be our own Silicon Valley, only for intuitives. A power center.”

  “It would be better if this ‘power center’ wer
e situated on an actual power center, like shamans use to enhance their meditative powers. Aligning themselves with planetary power spots. These are the Earth’s chakras, and nadirs, where more than one energy vein crosses to create vortices of power of different calibrations, depending on how many lines intersect. Considering you designed me to be more in touch with my underlying energy body as much as Mother Nature’s, you’d think you’d want to capitalize on that fact more.”

  “As you will.”

  “Even if you succeed in pulling this off, they will not let you have a power center with such destructive potential that’s not answerable to the powers-that-be.”

  “You leave that part to me.”

  “No, I want to know now. I will not be goaded into misusing my abilities now that I understand karma so much better. That crown chakra is a real pip.”

  Once again Clyde sighed with frustration. “Then you should know by accessing it that it’s much harder to use psychic powers to do harm than to do good. This community will be the first step in de-centralizing power away from the one percent and putting it back in the hands of the ninety-nine percent. They will not be so easily toyed with or manipulated. And their positive influence across the planet will be that much more impossible to stop with them networking and supporting one another. The very same enzymatic properties that made Silicon Valley such a vehicle for global transformation will work for my intuitives just as it did for the left-brain dominant.”

  “Providing the powers that be don’t blow you off the map. Simple enough if you’re concentrated in one area.”

  “I don’t believe they’ll be able to. Not if you tweak the retrovirus for me as I want you to.”

  “Show me.”

  He highlighted just enough to get her started. “I’m afraid the science is beyond even me, Notchka. You will have to access one of the parallel universes in which this technology is already in place. Pull that information from there to here. Just imagine what it is you want the virus to do, and let your crown chakra act as a search beacon to find the answer for you.”